stevinwayne said:
i see what everyone is saying about self-tune vs pro-tune, and i know some of you may not live in area where i do that there is 3 performance shops walking distance from my house and over a dozen in the area (dallas)... i actually know the tuners personally and hang out with the workers of dallas mustang, and lonestar performance. so i'm sort of at an advantage there because i know both of the tuners there know their stuff and since i talk to them frequently they wont screw me over and if a problem ever comes up they will fix it... if i lived out in the middle of nowhere and didn't have a shop 100 miles away i'd go the tweecer rout but eh... to each his own.
You have the most important point covered if you're gonna get a Pro Tune.
Know that your guy has had success with other 94-95 Stangs and he will stand behind his work if your not satisfied.
IMHO, these tuning threads seem to always to try and paint a picture that shows tuning your Stang is either .................. BLACK or WHITE.
Here is a few things I've seen over the years from when this tuning stuff really started to take off and up to where we are at this time.
I live between Fort Worth & Dallas so I also have Pro Tuners around me but I'm just the kind of guy that doesn't want anyone to work on my Stang but me.
I went the self tuning route cause I wanted to be in control of my tune just like I want to be in control of the quality of build up on my combo. I'm picky about how things should be done so ...... I just do em myself.
Earlier in this thread Dennis said you could get a Dyno tune and a few days later the adaptive strategy in the pcm could change things to the point that drivability issues may return. I agree, that could happen ...... not saying it will mind you ...... but it could.
I went the Tweecer route for the datalogging mostly. The price was not as important to me as the ability to have the hard data to confirm my tuning tweecs. The dlogs do tell you if you went the right direction with a change. I can tell you, everything in that little silver box doesn't always work like you think and I have on more than one occasion, went the wrong way with a tuning change, lol. To me, hard data is way more accurate than the seat of the pants meter.
Pro Tune or Self Tune is gonna be just as good as the guy who is doing the work.
How good can your tune be?
If talkin wot ...... that is cake compared to drivability
Most of us have street cars so we need BOTH conditions to be right
On a scale of 1 to 10...you can get a 10...if you work with it...Pro or Self
The question you gotta ask yourself is this..............
Is the tuner gonna work with it to the point that the tune is right, AND most importantly, is the tune STABLE after the adaptive strategy has done its thing.
I don't know everything about tuning our Stangs and I don't claim to know as much as some of the Pro Tuners that are out there. I do try to be very careful when trying to help the members here and with the info I share with everybody in these kinds of threads.
Having said that here is some info based on what things I have seen happen with my Stang.
With a focus on drivability issues, I have come to see that in some situations, if you get pretty close with your tune ...... the adaptive strategy can and will make up for the small bit of difference.
however
In other situations, I've seen the tune deteriorate and to make it right, I had to go back in there and get things closer for a stable tune.
If that happens..................
a self tuner can just make the change
a chip is gonna need to be reburned again
Thats why some can get things to be fairly stable with mechanical tuning methods and some can't. It all depends on how close things are to begin with.
Again, I don't understand it all and I do continue to learn.
Just trying to say I don't see all of this tuning stuff as Black or White.
For me .................................. I see it in shades of GRAY
Grady
