Quote:
Originally Posted by FaDuck
I most certainly have. I spoke with LJ, and hes thinking headgasket as well 
Even though I was a little reluctant, he asked to see the log I recorded when the hose blew. People in the same line of work be it, a doctor or a mechanic, or in this case a tuner, are all going to have their own way of doing things, and even disagree on certain things.
LJ saw 18psi and 31.5 degrees of timing, which is a lot more timing than he would use. So thats what hes blaming it on. He said if I didnt have a built motor there would be a rod through the block.
Zach told me its normal to see that kind of timing on E85, thats the beauty of using E85. |
Everyone will have their own opinion, tuners will have their own tuning tactics and not necessarily one is wrong or the other.. Now, I'm not a tuner, I'm not bashing on any tuner, but I do have a lot of experience with the platform and learned the basics of tuning from James Martin, HRI tuning himself live while he tuned my car and he let me fine tune some things on it myself with his guidance.
Although the beauty of running E85 definitely is that you can add almost limitless timing because it's so extremely knock resistance it virtually won't knock, there are still some limits that need to be followed regarding knock and E85 because there is a specific value of timing that should not be crossed because it's harmful to the engine (max brake torque timing). I'm trying to put this on the simplest terms possible. Tuning on pumpgas you will never reach this timing value because the engine will knock before getting there, so you need to dial down the tune based on knock. On E85 since it won't knock, you keep adding timing on the dyno until you see adding time does not produce anymore power and then you dial it back a bit for safety.
Now, obviously a lot of tunes out there are not on the dyno so the tuner uses their vast experience and knowledge to establish that timing limit and that is not a wrong approach, but there are cases where the value that worked for X car does not work for Y car exactly the same. Again please, I'm not knocking any tuner or strategy at all, I'm just offering it from my limited point of view. I honestly don't remember if 31 is a "high value" compared to my tune, I would need to go back and look at logs and see what mine was set at. I will add that I consider both LJ and Zach experts on the platform that have been working on it basically from that start and have vast experience on it.
Don't get too hung up on this, the damage is already done and now what you should be looking at is on fixing it. My personal opinion is growing stronger on headgasket.