Starlet_Sam
Moderator, Regional Area Reps Supervisor & Gay Car
I finally went out today in the worlds most awesome MX5 (mine) after a project that has been too long in the making. It was the most satisfying day in the project as not only was I driving it, but I was also mapping it, something which I have never done before. The map that was on the ECU had been done 6 months ago by a "professional" company (they have a great reputation but I have no idea how). My car would jerk all over the place, not hold boost very well and everything was bit erratic, and it had cost me £325 for the pleasure. I hated driving it and took the opportunity to once again take the car off the road and do more work to it. Anyway, I was determined not to have it happen again so I spent £25 on tuning software and off I went. The car now drives like it did before any mods and I have only spent 2 hours on the fuel map, no jerking and behaves really nicely. I will spend another day or so on the fuel map, to perfect it then I will make a start on the ECU controlled boost control to up it from 0.7bar to a more manly 1bar (still standard N/A internals remember) and once that's stable I will start on the spark map. The spark map is seriously safe right now, I could gain around 15bhp easily by changing it now but I will wait until the fuel is spot on.
Moral of the story, put in the work and the satisfaction is immense! These tuners do nothing special and they will never put in the care that you will. They will give you a map that allows you to take your car up to high revs safely but they don't really care about cruise and pottering around town, even though they took it for a test drive they did nothing about the jerkiness. Oh, and I was trailering it as it was taxless and MOTless at the time so I didn't get to experience the crap map for some time afterwards.
Oh and I seriously recomment MegaSquirt, so easy to use and map, anyone can do it.
Moral of the story, put in the work and the satisfaction is immense! These tuners do nothing special and they will never put in the care that you will. They will give you a map that allows you to take your car up to high revs safely but they don't really care about cruise and pottering around town, even though they took it for a test drive they did nothing about the jerkiness. Oh, and I was trailering it as it was taxless and MOTless at the time so I didn't get to experience the crap map for some time afterwards.
Oh and I seriously recomment MegaSquirt, so easy to use and map, anyone can do it.