In the next month or so I will be purchasing my headers and x pipe do I need to do a tune after or can you go without one. PS I brought out my baby today it was like the first time all over again

 

IMHO yes you need a tune after installation.

 

Do you HAVE to,no.Should you YES!You will loose a significant amount of the benefit of going to headers with out one.Kind of like putting on track shoes and going for a walk.

 

Thanks for the input will do.

 

What constitutes a tune - can you do it yourself ?

 

Thats a good question, is a tune a Dyno tune or a different tune. In Calgary AB, they charge $650.00 for a tune that includes the program download. Do you need that tune ? someone explain that one please.

 

ug, 650? dam, that's a bit high

Is the shop that will do the tune doing your headers also?

If they are, then why not ask them to cut you a deal on the Dyno Tune?

I got my local speed shop to do a Dyno Tune for $150.00

A Dyno Tune can get you like 15 hp or so - maybe more.

Plus you can see where the car is at in Rear Wheel HP.

 

Yes you can, BUT you need a hand held tuner like Hypertech or whatever they call it now, which if you buy it new is like 350 to 400 bucks, these are not as good as a Dyno Tune.

 

I agree, the headers hf cats x-pipe and dyno tune got me 15 rwhp and 21 rwtq

 

Thanks for the info I will have to shop around.

 

If nothing else get a street tune. You won't be sorry.

 

As others have stated, you don't need a tune for the car to run fine. You will gain a lot, even without the tune. If you do get it tuned, you will gain more.
A street tune is basically fine for adding headers, adding a dyno tune might get you a little more, but it's not going to be much, especially if you tuner is very experienced.

That's just part of the story though. Depending on the header that you get, you may only have 2 bungs for your O2 sensors, or even if they have 4 bungs, you may not be able to use them all with your stock O2 sensors. I bought American Racing, and they have 4 bungs and work with stock length O2's. In the end, without all 4, your car will throw codes and the check engine light will come on. Even with all 4, I sometimes get codes that the cats aren't working effectively. I'll delete them, and then every once-in-a-while they'll keep coming back. Getting a tune lets the tuner permanently delete these codes so you'll never see a cat warning again.

Right now, I driving around with the intermittant CEL, with my wife screaming at me to get it tuned. But I was waiting for some other goodies to get installed before spending the money twice.

 

After I do the headers and xpipe and a new air intake the tune will come, can't wait to see what it will sound like with the BB Bullet exhaust.

 

I've installed several headers on C5s over the years without tuning afterwards and gotten great results. The PCM has a good amount of self-adjustment capability that goes a long way to setting proper fuel trims when a new intake or headers are added. In fact, I've seen a few tuners here suggesting that you hold off on a tune if it's just headers you're adding and you are planning on upgrading heads/cam or more in the future. This strategy has worked great for me. If you're stopping at headers, intake and exhaust with maybe a couple of other small upgrades, I would go ahead and get either a street tune, a dyno tune or both depending on how much time/money you are willing to spend to fine tune the PCM.

I have had a dyno tune done after a heads/cam job I did and it didn't do nearly as much to smooth out the drivability issues as a street tune I did with EFILive, a full scanning/tuning package you can buy and use to log massive amounts of data and use that to custom tune your engine. HPTuners is a similar package to accomplish the same tasks. I own my own tuning software and it's very sophisticated, taking several weeks to months to become competent in its use. It's very rewarding and allows you to make frequent changes or to tune for different environments (street vs. drag) but definitely requires commitment in time and money to acheive the results a visit to your tuner would buy you.

To properly do your own tuning also requires the installation of a wideband oxygen sensor in the exhaust stream just aft of the primaries to collect Air/Fuel (A/F) data for subsequent analysis and adjustment of the PCM paramaters. There is everything from injector pulse width and duty cycle to spark to deccelerator fuel cut off to idle tuning to transmission tuning (A4) and on and on. There is a lot more to tuning than wide-open-throttle (WOT) A/F ratio but, as I said, I have done without when doing headers alone with significant gains.

Here's a link to my WB O2 install to give you a taste of what you can do on your own.

http://redshift.homestead.com/WBO2.html

 

Thanks for the link, but to be honest I am not capable of doing that I would rather pay someone that knows what they are doing, just to make sure it was done right. So how did you like the power difference with the headers and x pipe.