Review: A premier tuner in the PNW, VIT TUNED!!

[sachu]

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

[Jmonty]

Cleaned this thread up fast

[Tromatic]

Get it done now before your helpful government makes it illegal!

[sachu]

Toned down the language so as to keep from butthurting some folks.

[RobertPaulson]

i guess that EL header doesn't clear up the torque dip very well.

also, did you get 185 whp on a stock car and then 181ish bolted and vit tuned?

[johan]

Originally Posted by Jmonty

Cleaned this thread up fast

Not fast enough

Originally Posted by sachu

Toned down the language so as to keep from butthurting some folks.

I'm glad you did, but it's a little late for that.

[sachu]

Originally Posted by RobertPaulson

i guess that EL header doesn't clear up the torque dip very well.

also, did you get 185 whp on a stock car and then 181ish bolted and vit tuned?

yeah, but got to take into account the torque gained before and after the dip and basically everywhere. The dip is also narrower.

On the PDX dyno it was 184 peak all stock with stock tune. (haven't posted this dyno sheet). The bolt ons showed the same number too on the stock tune here.

185 peak on the dynojet with bolt ons but on stock tune. That's the dyno i posted.

180~181ish peak with bolt ons and Vit Tuned on his Dyna Pack system.
The dashed line at 167 peak is the same as the 185HP run on the dynojet. Same bolt ons, stock tune.

[Andrew025]

Originally Posted by RobertPaulson

i guess that EL header doesn't clear up the torque dip very well.

also, did you get 185 whp on a stock car and then 181ish bolted and vit tuned?

Seems like most EL don't get rid of the dip.
My Ptuning had the dip but once you get out of it, it was great.

[RobertPaulson]

Originally Posted by Andrew025

Seems like most EL don't get rid of the dip.
My Ptuning had the dip but once you get out of it, it was great.

i've seen the dip tuned out of the HKS EL header, but that might of been because of some drift offices magic.

[stockysnail]

Twin screw cures the dip.

[BRZPDX]

just fucking turbo the damn thing and call it good. Who really cares about 3 whp difference and the torque dip curve changing +~10wtq in a 1000rpm rev range.

Sorry to sound like a d ick, but 10 hours of driving around, spending $1k, another $1k on bolt ons, frustrations, wasting time and money, doesn't seem efficient to me.

Its like all this effort for the smoothness of the torque band and +5 whp? I started with bolt ons, and re-tune after re-tune every time I got a new part in, I realized it was such a waste of money and time, knowing I'm getting parts to get more power out of it. So I just turbo'd the fucking thing, and my torque dip was gone.

[sachu]

Originally Posted by RobertPaulson

i've seen the dip tuned out of the HKS EL header, but that might of been because of some drift offices magic.

Sound logic reasoning

[sachu]

Originally Posted by BRZPDX

just fucking turbo the damn thing and call it good. Who really cares about 3 whp difference and the torque dip curve changing +~10wtq in a 1000rpm rev range.

Sorry to sound like a d ick, but 10 hours of driving around, spending $1k, another $1k on bolt ons, frustrations, wasting time and money, doesn't seem efficient to me.

Its like all this effort for the smoothness of the torque band and +5 whp? I started with bolt ons, and re-tune after re-tune every time I got a new part in, I realized it was such a waste of money and time, knowing I'm getting parts to get more power out of it. So I just turbo'd the fucking thing, and my torque dip was gone.

Makes perfect sense.

An option I carefully considered and deliberated on.

Reasons were many, from having just got it, wanting to get to know the car, wanting to learn to drive better before adding twice the power, not wanting to drop 5k+ on FI all at once just after getting the car. Also, haven't come across a FI setup I like yet. I did want to enjoy it to the max till then.

I don't necessarily consider it a total waste, now I have a go to professional tuner for all my tuning needs. Especially, when I do go forced induction which will happen before the year is out.

This is sounding promising from what has been shared so far. I will go boost with Vit Tuned soon enough!

Clink on the image below for the FB post.

[Andrew025]

Originally Posted by BRZPDX

just fucking turbo the damn thing and call it good. Who really cares about 3 whp difference and the torque dip curve changing +~10wtq in a 1000rpm rev range.

Sorry to sound like a d ick, but 10 hours of driving around, spending $1k, another $1k on bolt ons, frustrations, wasting time and money, doesn't seem efficient to me.

Its like all this effort for the smoothness of the torque band and +5 whp? I started with bolt ons, and re-tune after re-tune every time I got a new part in, I realized it was such a waste of money and time, knowing I'm getting parts to get more power out of it. So I just turbo'd the fucking thing, and my torque dip was gone.

Oh don't worry, I'm (un)patiently waiting for my JRSC kit to ship so I don't have to deal with any of that anymore...