Can going with a remote tune save significant money on a budget header install?

 

That probably depends greatly upon where you live. The remote tune guys I've seen are 50+% more than going to a local shop that has a dyno and good tuner. But there are several highly recommended places in the great Tampa Bay area, where I live.

 

Forgive my ignorance but aren’t there stored programs eg. LS3, CAI and Lt headers?

 

There are certainly some canned tunes out there. Some are pretty good.
Spend $5/600 on a canned tune. Or spend $600 for a dyno tune to get exactly what you want from your EXACT car. You can have a tuner squeeze out every single bit of HP. Or you can have a conservative, well balanced tune and increase fuel economy. A good tuner can do far far more than a remote or canned tune can do. Generally a dyno tune will include transmission as well. So you can get your car to shift how you want, when you want, etc.

 

Understood, ty. Dyno tune in NY is $1,000+.

 

Do you already have the device for tuning? If not, remote tuning can very easily be more than paying a good shop for tuning.

We'll use hp tuners for example, you need the MPVI ($400), 2 credits ($100), depending on who you use, a wideband o2 sensor might be needed too (highly recommended by most) that will be all over the place for prices, then you still have to pay for the tune.

I made a video a few years ago about this topic.

 

Well the real problem is that a 9/10 a dyno tune is just a full throttle tune. What about the other 95% of the tune!?

A remote/road tune should/can be better for the 95%.... depending.

Ideally you get someone that does both and better yet, they have a load bearing dyno and find MBT for every cell in the tune.

Does anyone do this? Sure, the OEM likely does. Aftermarket tuners... not so much, though some with fixed packages might get close with iterations over time across multiple installs.

Part throttle drivability is where its at. Tuning to MBT across the board is huge, but very difficult to do with OEM ECU (No live 2 way tuning)

 

Not sure where you've gotten your dyno tunes done, but go elsewhere. That place is horrible.
There is literally zero remote or canned tunes that can do what a good dyno tune can.

 

If you are talking about a C6 and you paid $5/600 for a remote tune with bolt ons, you didnt do your homework. That shouldnt be more than a couple hundred bucks.

I good remote tuner should be using his library of cars from years of experience that match your build. You should be exchanging several tunes and scans during the process, and he can customize the transmission and other aspects of the tune just as it sits in front of you. If you dont have a wideband attached to your tuning platform, then the tuner should be making the vehicle slightly richer and a little less timing than the sample vehicle he used for the tune to keep it safe.

If you dont have a tuner that does that with a remote tune, your car made a mistake.

With tuning platforms selling to the masses now days, and "tuners" "advertising" on facebook marketplace, it's easy to get ripped off and have a poor performing vehicle from an inexperience tuner. If your vehicle is a custom build that's forced induction, you'd be smart to have it tuned in real time because too much can happen to fast.

Phil

 

Tuning a driver isn't about squeezing every last hp. Its about tuning for reliability.

If you have a vehicle for racing purposes only and intent to trash the engine by the end of a race - like a Nascar event where everybody has the same level playing field. THEN you are tuning for every last HP and economical value at the expense of the engine lifespan.

I tune about 80 cars per year for 20 years, on and off, almost exclusively turbo. Most of them are not racing vehicles but rather daily drivers that see highway rolls and stoplight racing and occasional strip abuse. The goal for tuning these type of vehicles is to protect the owners investments by using the least amount of cylinder pressure and least amount of heating inside the engine internals as possible. This is a laundry list of details, consulting, lists, fabrication, etc... the tuning part is the smallest fraction and can be done almost without even using a dyno or even driving the vehicle when you have experience tuning the same engine types over and over for many years. I specialize in sr/rb/2j/ls engines and they all share similar combustion rate characteristics e.g. they utilize the same timing values for increments of 100/200/300/400% Volumetric efficiency with respect to power:displacement ratio heat accumulation in their chambers. That means I already know ideal reliability timing values by simply looking at the combination on paper and minor adjustments from a dynojet event while keeping the vehicle use, weight changes, environmental future impacts, gear ratio usage, etc... and the actual 'tuning' is merely lining up the airflow models and tables with reality as opposed to searching for some optimal values on a paper.

If you tune an engine to brink of its max power it will degrade rapidly whenever the load or temperature increases beyond wherever it was tuned. For example if you keep increasing timing on the dynojet which is a simulated roller mass and not actual street load, then take the vehicle to the actual street and load it in a numerically longer gear ratio, the engine combustion peak pressures will increase and the pistons and rod bearings will begin taking abuse. the same thing happens if the vehicle weight is increased beyond what the dynojet roller simulates at. You cannot push an engine to its max output for anything other than a pretty graph once on the dyno if you want it to live a long life, the pressures and heat must be turned down to their minimums for longevity.