[Rich Z]

Today I was sitting in the den and turned to grab something behind me and accidentally knocked over the bottle of water sitting on my desk. The water spilled all over the two notebooks I had sitting there with all my tuning notes I took during that process. Notes from 03-27-2013 thru 06-26-2013. Damn, I was only doing that for 3 months? Seems like it was a WHOLE LOT longer than that, thinking back on it. Can't believe I learned as much as I did in that short period of time.

Edit: That's because it wasn't only 3 months. Evidently I left some blank pages in the notebook as I couldn't figure out how I could have done so much dinking around with the tuning in that short period of time and fanned through the notebook to find MORE pages of tuning notes. A LOT more. Up through 12-08-2013, as a matter of fact. Duh... You would think I would have looked through the notes in the EFILive log file... Yeah, spending nearly nine months with this sounds a whole lot more like what I remembered.

Anyway, getting back to the reason for this thread, the thought crossed my mind that I would sure hate to lose all those notes I took, even though I haven't the foggiest idea why I would need them. Just seems like a lot of work noted that I would not want to lose. Soooo, I figure the best thing to do might be to post those notes here. Which, unless I give up on this site, will be safe on my server, no matter what happens in my den.

Anyway, to put things down in this record, Mike Carnahan came down from Georgia on 05-28-2012 to do the tune on my car. From what I recall, he found some significant issues in the existing tune, and decided to wipe it and start anew, albeit with a tune he had done for someone else with a similar engine. Not sure if that tune involved turbos or not, but since we were working with a 2 bar map sensor, we were doing a custom operating system with EFILive so that the full range of that map sensor could be utilized in the tuning.

Details are kind of hazy, but Mike helped me with some long distance tuning. Meaning I run run the car and log data via EFILive, send him the log file(s), and he would then analyze that data and send me a modified tune to try. I believe I still had some mechanical issues during that time to deal with, so this went on till roughly 03-27-2013 when I decided that the best course for me at this point was to just dive in and learn this tuning stuff myself, rather than bugging Mike for all eternity with all the little changes here and there that were obviously going to be needed to be done trying to iron out the driveability issues. Apparently the tune Mike used as the base for my tune was significantly different in some important areas concerning throttle response, start-up, and other areas generally covered by the term "driveability issues".

So what I am going to do first is cut and paste the internal change log that EFILive maintains for the ongoing tuning process. Afterwards I will be posting the individual notes from my notebooks that should mostly coincide with the EFILive log.

Bear in mind that the way I did this tuning while I was learning is directly opposite of what most REAL tuners will recommend. They will all state that you really should only change one table at a time, and then do a test drive to log data and see what changes were made. Unfortunately, this just did not seem possible to do in my case. The reason, I believe, is because in most other aftermarket tunes being done, you are normally only tuning for a relatively minor change. Such as adding an aftermarket engine component or something of that nature. In such a case, the stock tune is going to be close enough, and all but a few tables really need to be addressed in a case like that. In my case, pretty much EVERYTHING had been changed from what was stock for a 2002 Corvette Z06. So limiting the changes to merely one table at a time, well, I'm pretty sure I would still be working on that tune right now. So I had to make a lot of changes at one time and hope that I wasn't getting myself into real hot water by doing it that way. Mike told me that my trying to learn tuning on my car was probably the worst example he could think of for that above mentioned reason. It was an extremely rough and rocky road for anyone to learn on, and would probably be more than just a little challenge for many experienced tuners.

But be that as it may, it is what it is. I make no claims that what I did and the way I did it was the best way, as I have nothing to compare it to. This is the first and only car I have ever played around with tuning on. And quite likely, I will keep it that way, if I can help it.

So anyway, I'll post the EFILive tuning log in the next post, and then as I find the time, I'll be posting the notes from my notebooks. Not sure if this will be of any interest to anyone else but me, but oh well. Not the first time that has happened to me.