You can find specials - Mike Norris in Orlando is less than $500 for simple tunes, such as bolt-on's only. Mike is an expert and a good guy. Take a look in the SouthEast section if you are interested. Other guys will even fly in and do group specials. The forced induction tunes are harder and take a lot more time (including sometimes road driving, not just dyno) so you seldom see those for less. One reason the pros can do it fast is because once you've spent the time and done a lot of tunes of various combinations, you can just start with a proven tune from a similar car and tweak from there. You are paying them for that experience in that case. Like the A/C guy who turns the screw and fixes it for $90 - you're paying him $89 for knowing what screw to turn!

Also, look at it this way - if you go to a shop for a tune, the incremental software cost alone for HP Tuners is $200 per LS2 car, and the dyno time is about $100/hr if you rent it, so you're at $300 right there. Their time and experience is worth something like any professional. If you own the tunershop version of the software (it costs thousands) with unlimited tunes and you own the dyno (40k plus facility costs?), you can obviously use volume to your advantage to spread the fixed costs, but there are only so many work hours in the day so you need to get something to do this tuning.

You can buy the software and learn it yourself - if you split it with a buddy it's $250 each. It takes hours and hours to learn and you won't have the experience of the pros to draw from (except some pros on the internet will give you some limited free help on the forums). I've spent hours of my personal time learning it but that's because I enjoy it.

 

Joe G....thank you very much for the very thorough explaination of things! Very informative and totally appreciated!

Reid

 

Sure thing! If you've got the time and interest to learn, I'd encourage folks to buy the software and learn it yourself. The logging software alone is worth the money to me, I get so much data from my drag strip runs.

Turns out my 0-60 times are 3.4 seconds when I get a good 1.7 60 foot! You can see it right on the graphs. Was happy to see that figure. Of course that's with drag radials on a track, but it did impress my buddy with the new Jag convertible when I took him for a ride and showed him what that power feels like.