tl; dr
Vit Tuned is a fantastic tuning service available for us in the PNW. Check them out, prepare to be pleasantly surprised.
Vit TUned is in Eugene. He lives in Albany.
He's super well known in the Honda /Acura scene which are cam phasing cars just like our twins.
here is his blog site, its pretty insightful and gives a great view into the murky world of tuning.
http://blog.vittuned.com/honda-tunin...-just-look-at/
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The story starts with me wanting to eek more out of our cars like everyone else on here.
I basically ended up driving 5 times to this reputed tuner in Portland, they had my car 3 times over night, still ran shitty. Guy didn't know what he was doing and shooting in the dark. Sampling from 3k RPM onwards, exhaust cam angles were untouched, timing was way off, MAF was terribly scaled, car ran shitty at the end of it. Heck, the guy didn't know what IAM was :P
At the invitation of the guy at a performance shop who wanted to see if my car was a one off factory freak , I drove up to this more estblished place that keeps getting recommended a bunch on here. The front man was very enterprising, did a baseline for free for me, and even offered a great deal on the tuning. After all the great things i have read about this place for a tune, after meeting the guy I still wasn't convinced that i'd get the best tune possible from them especially after having been burned once by Portland 'tooner'. I am glad I decided to look further.
During this time I have been doing a bunch of reading up on Vit Tuned, on honda forums, on acura forums, read his blog posts, sent him emails and questions and voiced my concerns about his relateive 'inexperience' on the platform. So I asked him to meet first face to face before going forward. Then drove to Albany and met with Vit and did some logging and drove his FR-S and basically ended up being schooled on tuning , a primer if you will for two hours. No bullshit, no sweet talking, straight up facts.
I was convinced at that point, I had found the guy who knew a thing or two about tuning cam phasing cars.
I told him what the more popular place had offered to do an ECUTek tune for and he straight up said he wouldn't be able to do that. The Indian in me at this point was fighting between, "oh everyone says that other place up north is the best, why do you want to shell out more on a guy no one has gotten a tune from for these cars" versus shelling out another 700 over the 360 i had already paid at the other place. But the objective/engineer part of me won over (hard facts/results win over lofty claims,embellishments and smiling faces) after what i had learned about Vit that the guy knew the science behind these kind of engines. I agreed and gave him the go ahead. Best decision I made.
Coupled with the fact the Vit Tuned dyna pack eliminates wheel slip, tie down differences, repeatability and granularity is ridiculously good as a result and straight up being far safer than roller dynos it was a no brainer at that point. He samples from way down in 1500RPM thanks to the ability of the dyne pack. No way you can do this on a roller dyne cause the car WILL stall.
Drove down to Eugene and got it tuned and couldn't be happier. The car just feels EFFORTLESS and HAPPY throughout the rev range. I even picked up 4MPG improvement in fuel economy on the highway!
At this point, I totaled up a week of my time spent (over the course of 6 weeks), over a 1000 miles of driving, 1100$ spent, several favors from the gf and friends and getting out of work early and weekends sacrificed to get a good tune on what is essentially a basic NA setup.
Was all that effort worth it? Fuck yeah! Cause now I know there will be no one else touching my cars ECU but
Vit Tuned here on.
Heck, I drove down a second time to get a touch up done when i went catless not he front pipe and he gained me some more power.
Make your own conclusions based on this, but I felt given the amount of effort and money I had put in at this point, I felt the need to make known what I have learned over this entire process.
My car as it stands:
Skunk2 EL header. The torque dip is attributed to this.
Skunk2 Intake
Ultimate Racing 2.75 inch overpipe/front pipe catless/resonated (replaced nameless 2.5 catted fp/op combo)
Perrin 2.5 inch resonated
Here are the maps in order,
baseline run with stock tune with all bolt ons on a DynoJet.
Vit Tune with nameless catted FP/OP. Baseline with same bolts on and stock tune. Then tuned by VitViper.
Ultimate racing 2.75 inch catless/resonated FP/OP