Im taking the dive into tuning my car in the next week or two hopefully and wanted to get a couple things cleared up. Ive messed with my PCM very briefly before i took the car off the road for a bit. The extent of the "tune" was copying the Performance shift values into the regular shift tables, and changing my speed governer [which my roomate who has the software thought would be hilarious to cap at 55 ]
The mod list is minimal, but i will throw them out there anyways
Open Cone filter
SLP Loud mouth 3" cat back
.... yup thats about it for the time being. I am using HPTuners latest beta for software, as well as there Pro interface, although the interface lives in my roomates corvette so i dont get to have the data logging ability for daily driving, although i am looking into getting my own setup, but for the moment using his for free beats 500$+ for my own.
So the couple questions i have at this particular moment in time are.....
1) on the stock narrow band what reading is considered safe? and which side is lean/rich [from my research over the last couple weaks it lookes like high is lean and low is rich]
2)what should i be looking at tuning/modding to make the most of a stock N/A 3800?
3)Is there anything else to do with the trans at the moment?
4)is there anything i should not touch? an oddball setting that when changed makes the motor go kaboom, any sort of power limiting stuff, etc. etc.
From my browsing on the web information on tuning 3800s seems to be kinda scattered, the tuners notebook wiki appears to be plagues with redirects and spam so the only central place ive found is kinda kaputs for the moment.
I have gleaned that torque mangement is bad and should be disabled, and the method for doing that. I have also seen that maf tuning seems to be more important that SD/VE tuning, granted ive also seen reports of people taking out the maf and running purely on VE tables, but [maybe im wrong] i feel like pure VE tables would hurt mileage.
As for my goals for tuning im not expecting any miracles here, theres only so much these motors can do without some bigger lungs, but i want to open up the taps on whats avaible, within reason. This car is a daily driver, i take road trips in it, i goto work, i haul people around, it gets a work out no doubt. but having riden in other N/A 3800 cars im confident there is more to be gained. I also feel like i can gain some more MPG's which is ALWAYS a good thing the way gas prices are going these days. So in short i want a tune thats gets better gas mileage with more pep then stock, this doesnt seem out of the question by any means.
FYI i have a decent amount of tuning experience, ive helped tune a few VW's, a pair of 240sx's and a LT1 swapped 280z, as well as my roomates 2001 Z06. so i grasp the Basic concepts, but havent been able to dig up much info specific to the L26's so anything that you all can divulge would be outstanding!