[ThAzKat]

mapping can be tricky, you make a change in the midrange and it will change bottom end or topend.

[TheSteve]

Not so much here, you can actually set where you want the AFR to be in a load vs RPM table and it adjusts that one cell separately. It's very easy to tune, I just am not certain where to set the targets.

[TheSteve]

Progress! The bike started up on its own with no assistance from a car battery every single time today! Hot starts, warm starts, and even cold starts with just a quick blip of the throttle while cranking! Finally. Hah.

So the CTS was JBwelded between cyl 3 and 4, but while it was drying it must have shifted slightly because I couldnt get the plug on. It rotated so the head's oil line was blocking access to the plug. I had to get to work, so I broke it off and wedged it below the starter motor for now. Seems to pick the temperature up well enough, but I do plan on reattaching it either tonight or tomorrow morning. Need to dremel off the excess jb weld though first. Even in this less than optimal spot, the CTS made all the difference in starting. Once fixed in place to the cooling fins it should be perfect. Just in time for school starting back up on monday.

[JMT.357]

Great thread

[TheSteve]

Well I've been riding it everywhere since sunday. I gave my brothers car back so if the Kat breaks down it looks like I'm walking. At first I was getting 32-33mpg, but after cooling off on the throttle a little bit (not much) I'm up to 39mpg. I got another good datalog and it looks like I'm running pretty rich in the cruise area. I'm about to install the new tune and see what the gas mileage does the next few days.

With the ignition advancer many of you use, does the mileage go up? I'd imagine it would, but does only a 5 degree difference make that much of a difference in MPG? Basically wondering if its worth the money in the long run.

As a sidenote, **** progressive insurance. Apparently its their policy to allow you to sign up for liability only, but then a month later they decide "Well, he probably meant to have un/underinsured on there too" and jack the rates up. Without consent. I just received an email from them notifying me of the upcoming payment, and it jumped from $22 to $72 a month. WTF? I immediately check the policy info online and sure enough, someone went ahead and activated un and underinsured coverage on my policy. I sent an email to them and they reply "Sorry we sent you a confirmation in the mail. If you didn't want it you should've indicated that in the letter and sent it back." What the ****? This isn't how thats supposed to work. Never even got the letter. I signed up for X coverage, agreed to a price, and provided my signature. If I don't want coverage, I don't ****ing want it, do NOT change my policy without permission/authorization/signature. **** progressive. Rant mode off.

[Rok_Stars_Bars]

With the ignition advancer many of you use, does the mileage go up? I'd imagine it would, but does only a 5 degree difference make that much of a difference in MPG? Basically wondering if its worth the money in the long run.

As a sidenote, **** progressive insurance. Apparently its their policy to allow you to sign up for liability only, but then a month later they decide "Well, he probably meant to have un/underinsured on there too" and jack the rates up. Without consent. I just received an email from them notifying me of the upcoming payment, and it jumped from $22 to $72 a month. WTF? I immediately check the policy info online and sure enough, someone went ahead and activated un and underinsured coverage on my policy. I sent an email to them and they reply "Sorry we sent you a confirmation in the mail. If you didn't want it you should've indicated that in the letter and sent it back." What the ****? This isn't how thats supposed to work. Never even got the letter. I signed up for X coverage, agreed to a price, and provided my signature. If I don't want coverage, I don't ****ing want it, do NOT change my policy without permission/authorization/signature. **** progressive. Rant mode off.

I didn't notice a drop in MPG with my 5 degree. My current gas MPG is 48-58 MPG depend on Throttle position LOL. I have my days. 48MPG is mostly city driving and lots of see how fast I can get 10 mph over the speed limit. And the 58mpg was pure hwy driving

And the Progressive thing since I have a loan on my bike I have to have full coverage. My insurance payment was $107 per month. Then I had a spending ticket finally come off and now it is $88 so I was happy to see the drop. But Im 22 and married so age might play a part.

[SnowBandit]

Have you seen this yet.. Kinda interesting.

http://lcdash.wikispaces.com/

[Contrldkaos]

Well, I've got the sensor mounted, the JB weld is drying right now. CP tells me that the sensor he sells also comes in a variety of different temperature ranges as well as different pin configurations. That's probably what I'm going to do. No worries of cutting corners with the sensor mounted to the motor and no worries of ground biasing due to the one wire sensor. This may actually end up working great!

Also, I edited the first several posts to reflect the new HEI info in case someone starts buying stuff before reading the entire thread. Old info is still there for reference.

you ran your sensor to the mega squirt correct? any suggestions on how to run a fin sensor to a gauge? i dont really like not knowing where my bike is at temp wise and would like to remedy that. so much damage can be avoided if you know when your beginning to overheat.

[TheSteve]

That LCDash is kinda cool. Not sure I would pay the $400 asking price for it, because it wouldn't really be that safe to use on the bike anyway. That and for other applications you could easily fit a laptop in for testing and logging. It is neat, but not something I would buy. If I really needed a compact solution I'd use a palm pilot.

The sensor is run straight to the MS, yes. To monitor the actual oil temperature I'd actually go with the oil pan mounted sensor as thats immersed in the oil. I didn't need the accuracy to do startup condition monitoring so I didn't bother. You can't T one sensor off to two gauges though. The split signal will alter the voltage causing neither unit to work right.

[Contrldkaos]

The sensor is run straight to the MS, yes. To monitor the actual oil temperature I'd actually go with the oil pan mounted sensor as thats immersed in the oil. I didn't need the accuracy to do startup condition monitoring so I didn't bother. You can't T one sensor off to two gauges though. The split signal will alter the voltage causing neither unit to work right.

so an oilpan insert will work ok then. sounds good thanks a ton.

[TheSteve]

So I've been riding the bike for a couple weeks now tuning mainly for economy. Yesterday I started working on the high load area of the table, also known as the fun part. I've had the Kat up to about 95 at this point, but I haven't gunned it lately. With the trusty laptop in tow I hopped on the freeway and started tuning for hard acceleration. I slammed the throttle open and the bike promptly started choking and smoking up a storm. I let off and slowly reapplied the throttle and got the same effect. I did this a few more times just to ensure I got numerous datalogs of it and turned back.

Looking at the logs, I noticed something that I've been crossing my fingers and hoping to not have to deal with: At higher speeds (60+) while cruising, my MAP reading is 92kpa (atmosphere is 100 at sea level, usually 94 at my elevation). This shouldn't be, as I'd suspect I'm at 30% throttle while cruising at 60mph. In other words, there should be plenty of vacuum registering. When I peg the throttle, as expected, I rise to 94kpa. This is a strange concept to me at least, but I'll try to explain it. The engine is a 600, so it should be trying to pull 600ccs of air in every cycle. Running at 50% throttle it'd get 300ccs of air, but in trying to pull more a vacuum would be created. This is the vacuum MS uses to calculate load. At 100% throttle there should be no vacuum and the engine should get its desired 600ccs of air each cycle. Right now between half and full throttle (300 vs 600ccs, in this example) there is only a 2kpa difference. It should be at least 30 to 40kpa. So even though the throttles are holding back air from entering the engine, no real vacuum is being created. Seems that even though air FLOW is being regulated, PRESSURE is not. Very strange to me, especially at these rpms (5000-8000). Above that it seems to behave normally, I think.

So what might be causing this? I have a couple ideas. If you look back at the pics, the vacuum nipples are very close to the throttle plates. Maybe they're too close to where the throttle is cracked open, and are in a natural high pressure zone. Perhaps if they were on the sidewall where the linkage comes through it would be in a less turblent area and get true pressure. Maybe at cruising speed/load there is so little vacuum signal that its stealing air from an adjacent cylinder and screwing up the pressure signal. Id say the throttles flow too well, but even still if there was no vacuum the engine would think you're at full throttle which is untrue. If I open up the throttle theres plenty more power on tap until I hit a certain point when flow increases but pressure does not.

Watching the log, the pressure does behave as it should at lower speeds and while cruising at 45-50. It's not till slightly higher loads where it appears to be at WOT all the time. I've heard this can happen with ITBs because of their flow rate and small vacuum chamber. I could try running the MAP sensor to a single cylinder and seeing if it improves things. Idle will suffer though.

MS also has another tuning algorithum: Alpha-N. Alpha-N is different in that instead of using the MAP sensor, it relies solely on RPM vs throttle position. It's designed for engines with giant lopey cams where theres near zero vacuum at idle because of cam overlap. Also works wonders on ITBs so I hear. Drivability can suffer as its harder to tune for varying loads (towing for cars, riding 2 up for bikes) and effective WOT (what throttle position shows atmospheric pressure for a given RPM) is hard to find. There is a hybrid mode, but I'm not familiar with it yet.

Lastly, I could try running restrictors in the vacuum lines going to the MAP sensor. It would be the same way the carbtune does it. Without the restrictors I'd figure the slides in the carbtune would bounce all the way up then all the way down without dampening. With the restrictors it averages out the high vs low pressures and stays pretty calm. I could try this, but at high RPM dampening shouldn't be needed. Might be worth a shot, otherwise it's looking like Hybrid Alpha-N might be the way to go if I ever find any documentation on it.

[ATOMonkey]

Vacuum line restrictors are there to keep the carb tune from showing 0-1-0-1-0 type of vacuum signal.

Couldn't hurt.

[ericej2344]

From what i've been reading the restrictors would be a good place to start. You might be getting the right vacuum, but not the right reading because of the bouncing effect.

[TheSteve]

Eh, after a nights worth of research I'm not gonna bother with the restrictors. The MAP signal isn't really bouncing around, it just isn't there in the first place. This is common with ITBs. I'll be running the Extra code's Hybrid Alpha-N mode. It basically uses the Alpha-N tuning table and divides the final value by KPA/100. So instead of being throttle dependent without regard to load, this uses a bit of everything.*

So you might be asking yourself why I didn't notice this before. If you recall, the last time I actually went for a full power run was with the HEI in 8 cylinder mode. It still coughed a bit, but made decent power. Much more than now at least. I have a feeling that it was still messed up the same way, but in trying to rough tune the map (as opposed to now where it's just fine tuning) the wideband had almost FULL control over the final pulsewidth. So it choked out, recalculated, and instantly richened it up by a large margin. Now its adjusting in much finer increments, for a more stable ride.

I might try some alpha-n tuning tomorrow. I'm working 6 days a week now and going to school Mon thru Fri so free time is at a premium. And most of the time I'm too exhausted to do anything but sleep.

Is anyone interested in seeing the datalogs from these runs? I can post them if anyone wants to actually SEE what I'm rambling about.

I am curious how any of the modern fuel injected bikes handle this. I know some have two sets of throttle plates (GSXR) while others have computerized drive-by-wire throttles (R6 I think). I think these are only to overcome accel enrichment issues though. I know that the GSXR has a MAP sensor, so it is for sure using one of the same modes MS is. Not alpha-n though, as it wouldn't need the MAP sensor in the first place. Probably a hybrid of the two. Do any of the EFI bikes run MAF type sensors to measure air flow instead of pressure?

*The MS2 Extra code (only available with the MS2 cpu) has a mode that is FULL Speed Density based at low load and either full or hybrid Alpha-N based at high load. This would be ideal. You may want to take that into consideration when ordering your MS kit.

[Newbie2it]

My k4 GSX-R runs Map as far as I am aware of.