De-tuned memcal Q. (greenfoam!)

[Morton]

Jesus Christ, greenfoam. Your message box is full

I guess I'll pop the question in public then. Here's a direct quote from the message I just tried to send you

"Seeing as you're the man with the brains around here, I thought I'd throw you a curveball. I've been reading around a bit about chip burning etc, and seem to recall you (or someone else?) saying something about the possibility of running a leaner setup on the old commodore, to save fuel at the sacrifice of power.

As far as a daily driver goes, I'm not too fussed about 15kw here or there, so is it actually a realistic option to have a custom de-tuned chip that will provide real gains in fuel consumption? Perhaps an extra 100km per tank (i'm getting around 450km atm).

Perhaps you know of someone/where that can experiment and create such a chip for a price?"

Hope you or someone else can shed some light on this for me, or just tell me I'm dreaming so I can stop thinking about it.

[pandaman]

Problem with runnning too lean is that it will run hot and possibly ping, which on a v6 will cause it to pull timing. VR onwards (might have been late VP as well?) came with a lean cruise mode that leaned mixtures out under highway conditions where cooling is plentiful and the motor isn't working too hard. A couple of people have used a modified VR program (greenfoam included) with the lean cruise and a couple of other bits and pieces left enabled. Apparently it can give quite good results if you're doing a lot of highway k's. I'd be very careful about creating a fuel map that's intentionally lean across the board.

[greenfoam]

I've run lean maps before and got over 600ks from a tank with 80% highway driving so you can do it, but it's not a epa friendly thing to do because if you want to have lean mixtures everywhere all the time instead of only during a steady cruise with the vr map.

You need run the mixtures above 14.7 in a really big area which makes the cat converter not work and makes pollution :P in the old days that's how good cars were tuned but now they tune them to use 14.7:1 even though technically it should be 16-17:1. You make much less pollution at 14.7:1 than 17 thanks to the cat so they decided it's better to waste some fuel than make more pollution. Race cars are setup to run higher/leaner than 14.7:1 under light loads.

It doesn't cost you any power to do that since you still run the normal fuel in the areas where your foot is heavy.

Either way you are much better off with lpg

[Morton]

Cheers for the info panda and foam. It's food for thought... Perhaps running something similar to the vr economy map would be good, because half my ks are freeway transit to/from work. I'm assuming that if I ask around in the right places, someone would be able to create such a map on my chip (or even better, a fresh chip) for around $200-300? HoZy is selling a few memcals...

I'd like to look into a D.I.Y. chip burn, but I've read the guides, and I don't think I have the time to learn+practice it thoroughly enough.

[greenfoam]

Yeah, follow the smoke and rubber until you find a fast gold vp or ask dr bob as they are local (it might take a couple burns to make it smooooth on your car)

[xcop5l]

id say go for gas i get about 420kms out of an 80ltr tank on the highway and ive got a v8

[stocky]

Yeah, follow the smoke and rubber until you find a fast gold vp or ask dr bob as they are local (it might take a couple burns to make it smooooth on your car)

hahaha fast gold vp....i wonder who that is