I have a a4 z28 ls1. It has heads,cam,intake,3.73s,throttle body,maf,injectors,and a dry100 shot. Also during my build getting a full manual valve body in my transmission and a 3600 stall. I am a mechanic and do my own work. Is it worth it to self tune it or get it dyno tuned?

 

I'd say buy HP Tuners, especially if you're going to continue to modify the car....I don't really have anything done yet, but I'm going to buy it so i can tune myself every time I mod something. Why pay to have someone else tune it all the time?

 

I'm looking into tuning my car on my own as well with HPtuner. I was going back and forth with the idea of the dyno tune or self-tuning myself. i see more benefits with tuning it myself, i just gotta learn how to use HPtuner and purchase it haha. I hope more people chime in on this, as i would like to hear other peoples' input on HPtuner as well. But good luck with whatever you decide to do!

 

I bought HPTuners after my cam swap and before that I had absolutely no experience with tuning. I used this board, HPTuners board, and a lot of trial and error. I went from a mail order tune that was severely lacking, to the car driving almost stock. I get better gas mileage now, starts right up, settles to idle in just a few seconds, doesn't buck or surge, goes back to idle when I clutch in, doesn't dip or cut out. It pulls a lot stronger and doesn't stumble or stutter. This is all without a wideband.

Now, all this took MONTHS to get right. It requires a tremendous amount of time, learning, driving, and playing around. You'll read all these guides and posts and nothing will make any sense, but you do it and it works pretty well. As you start to understand what the tables and settings do, and how one thing affects another, it becomes much easier to adjust things. I still only know a fraction of what goes on in this car, and without a WB I'm leaving a lot on the table in terms of gas mileage and performance, but for daily driving, I'm very pleased with the car.

I battled back and forth for a week about buying HPT or paying someone, and no matter how good your tuner is, there is no way they have the ability to spend the time needed in various conditions to get the car tuned perfectly or to your liking. Plus, $500 up front is much better than $500-600 everytime you make a modification.

Go for it. There's a lot of support on the forums and you'll have the biggest sense of accomplishment when you change some values and start it up and the car runs better, or when you see all your fuel trims coming in to line and the car starts to run better and better.

 

i think the answer is both. i went through the same thing just turbo. buy hptuners and a wideband,tune your car and then confirm at dyno. some of the wot stuff is really hard to tune on the street.

 

get hptuners been tuning for a few years now with it. at first the learning curve was a bit steep, but once i got the scanner configed correctly for OL tuning everything worked out. learn to use the scanner first, record any changes you make and always keep a backups of your bin files. plenty of how toos out there, just not much in the way of a how to for setting up a correct config file. oh and get the pro version and a wb, pretty much useless without it unless you don't plan on doing any wot tuning, that and trim tuning takes forever to get spot on.

 

I wanna learn how to tune but i dont know a damn thing haha how hard is it to tune it for a dry shot on top of my mods?

 

I say it all depends on what your long term goals are, if your getting it tuned and then your done, pay someone. If you plan on upgrading your car more and more over the years I say buy HPT and start learning. Or you can always do both, pay to get it tuned and then keep tweaking that tune. If you buy HPT and take your time you should be able to in theory get it better than paying someone to tune it. Since its your car and you can spend hours a day for months tweaking and dialing it in 100% to your liking. It will take alot time and effort on your part since tuning has a steep learning curve but if you put in the time and effort you can learn it. You will also need a wideband to tune correctly. I would also get tuning down n/a before trying to tune for nitrous.

 

a good place to start. the one labeled "free ls1 tuning guide" is pretty spot on to get you started.
EDIT: they took out my link lol pm me if you need the link to the tuning guide.

 

If you plan on keeping the car and experimenting with various mods and their effects, then I think HPTuners is definitely worth the money. I never regretted buying mine. Yes it takes time to learn many of the programs capabilities, but it's worth it. I spent most of last summer dialing in the tune by taking the car out and trying to populate as many cells as possible and making adjustments accordingly. THEN I went to get the car dyno'd. Guess what, they tried changing A/F and a few other things to improve my HP output, but each time we reverted back to the tune I came in with. It showed me that as a novice, it can be done. I love using this program to tune but most importantly, to monitor what is going on with the engine. It is a fantastic diagnostic tool that will probably end up saving you money or help prevent an unfortunate event from occurring. And I speak from personal experience on that one.

 

this^^^^is awesome. no better testimonial. thing is you will have 100's of unpaid hours in tuning and research and it's worth every penny.

 

Man I'm in the same boat. I just had my car dyno tuned this week and I'm not 100% happy with it. The check engine light keeps coming on now and it doesn't like to idle, the cam is small 226/230.

I'm down about 30rwhp and haven't figured out why yet. I don't think it's all in the tune but if I end up changing something I don't want to trailer it again for three hours and spend several hundred dollars again. Between gas, a hotel room and the dyno it was an expensive *** trip.

I do all the work on my car except rebuilding the trans/rearend. It's painful for me to take my car to someone who I don't really know anything about and trust they are doing it right. Hell I don't even know what questions to ask to see if they really know what the hell they are doing.

I would love to learn how to tune a car I just don't know if I'm smart enough. LOL.

 

Let me tell you a quick little story and how having HPTuners literally saved my life. I got the car dyno'd on Monday before I was suppose to go to the track that Saturday after some of us rented it out for the day. After my dyno session, I too had a SES. Shop said it is the ABS because of the front wheels not moving and the back wheels turning like a ****. Drive it around a bit and it should go out. It did, but my software kept showing some codes that had something to do with the relucter gear and brakes. Took it back to shop and they put their code reader on OBDII port and it shows no codes. Drive car a couple of days BUT, my HPTUNERS said something is still wrong. So I thought a cable or wiring got pinched while car was strapped down. Look underneath and found rear end oil all over the place. Pinion gear leaking really bad. Took car to another shop to investigate. Get a call from the owner/mechanic. "You need to come down here and see this" (previous year had a l well known local speed shop beef up 10 bolt with Eaton posi, motive gears & Moser axles). Well, he found the ring gear nut finger tight. Pinion gear bolts were all loose like ready to fall out. Something was loose in the rear end which chipped the posi gears and broke off some internal clips. Said if I had taken it to the track and this thing let go while trucking down the quarter, it would have been really bad. So am I glad I monitor my vehicle with HPTuners to know what is going on. YOU BETCHA!

 

I bought HP Tuners, but I'm paying someone that knows what they're doing to tune it. Like mentioned above, I want to be able to check on everything if something goes wrong.

 

Great info!

 

Can you please send me the link to the LS1 tuning guide! Vjetfan@gmail.com

 

PM him once you are permitted to do so.

 

Click the link in my signature. That should help.

 

Be aware that you are very lucky these others guys jumped in to help you on such an old resurrected post. In order to continue having good luck finding info you need, check the dates on the posts. I have read many disappointed people asking questions of forum members who have not been here in 10+ years.

 

Do both sir!