How far we've come with tuning.

[wolverine724]

I have a degree in elecrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. I'm a current Ford Motor Company employee, having worked there for 29 years, most of it in Ford Powertrain Controls. I started off as an engineer in automatic transmission OBD2 calibration working for a few years under Mark Kovalsky. After that I switched to automatic transmission software writing software, mostly in the shift and converter clutch scheduling areas. I eventually got promoted to a management position as the technical expert for automatic transmission ratio controls. My final project in this position was helping develop the initial 10 speed shift scheduling software for Ford's current 10 speed autos. After that, I took the role of Model Based Design technical expert for all of powertrain controls, helping drive the process of designing control algorithms in Matlab/Simulink/Stateflow and then auto-coding them into C-code. After this, I took a short position as an engine controls engine/transmission interface technical expert. A year and a half ago when Ford did a major re-structuring, I took a position outside of Powertrain as a supervisor in a Driver Assistance Technology (DAT) feature group, working on semi-autonomous driver assistance features, where I still work today. I bought a Hydra chip not long ago and I will try to help contribute to the forum where I can, while trying to be careful to not share any privileged or confidential information.

I have experience in calibration and software on EEC-iV, EEC-V, Power-PC, Tri-Core, etc using various calibration tools like the RCON, ATI, ETAS, etc.

My reason for buying a PHP Hydra chip is that I have a 2002 Ford F-350 7.3L/4R100 with 260k that has remained bone stock for about the last 15 years, but in the past few months I've decided to do a bunch of mods to it. So far that includes:
180/30 FF stage 1.5 injectors
KC300x 63/73 turbo
Bellowed up pipes
EBPV Pedestal delete
My own custom built regulated return fuel system
Riff-Raff intercooler boots and plenum inserts
Full 4" exhaust and downpipe
6673 intake
Hydra chip with PHP tunes modified for single shot injectors

I just pulled out the transmission and I'm having a co-worker with a lot of transmission building experience help me rebuild and beef it up.
Ordered a DPC F4HLDLS - low stall triple plate converter.
I'll list my trans mods when we finish the trans.

I'm likely wanting to do my own transmission recalibration, so I'll have to decide what route I want to do in modifying the binary files.

Regards,
Phil Wiethe

[wolverine724]

I've enjoyed my time working at Ford. For the trans calibration, I was pretty happy with it completely stock. I still know a lot of the 4r100/5R110/6R140/10R140 trans calibrators so I also know who to gripe to! I'm just assuming with all the engine and trans hardware changes I'm doing I may want to end up tweaking some things. I have a co-worker in the aforementioned calibration area who ended up putting a Suncoast triple clutch converter in his 7.3 Excursion and said the lockup was really harsh. His locked to locked 3-4 shift was also bad enough he ended up calibrating out his 3rd gear lockup, which I'd rather not do since I tow a lot with my F-350. I can't remember which company's friction plates he went with, but I'm going with GPZ clutch plates and a DPC triple plate converter, so when I get it all put together in the next few weeks I'll see how good or bad it feels. I've seen some of your posts where it looks like you have quite a bit of tuning experience with current hardware. I may need to pick your brain, as my experience is limited to OEM hardware and calibration tools, which in this case - RCON/VDAS, J3-buffer boxes, are long gone! I do have some binaries, definition files, and a pretty good understanding of what things do what at least

[Power Hungry]

Originally Posted by wolverine724

I've enjoyed my time working at Ford. For the trans calibration, I was pretty happy with it completely stock. I still know a lot of the 4r100/5R110/6R140/10R140 trans calibrators so I also know who to gripe to! I'm just assuming with all the engine and trans hardware changes I'm doing I may want to end up tweaking some things. I have a co-worker in the aforementioned calibration area who ended up putting a Suncoast triple clutch converter in his 7.3 Excursion and said the lockup was really harsh. His locked to locked 3-4 shift was also bad enough he ended up calibrating out his 3rd gear lockup, which I'd rather not do since I tow a lot with my F-350. I can't remember which company's friction plates he went with, but I'm going with GPZ clutch plates and a DPC triple plate converter, so when I get it all put together in the next few weeks I'll see how good or bad it feels. I've seen some of your posts where it looks like you have quite a bit of tuning experience with current hardware. I may need to pick your brain, as my experience is limited to OEM hardware and calibration tools, which in this case - RCON/VDAS, J3-buffer boxes, are long gone! I do have some binaries, definition files, and a pretty good understanding of what things do what at least

Phil...

To start off, I will say that it's quite interesting to see someone with your experience and pedigree in this setting. I've dealt with many Ford calibration engineers in the nearly 24 years I've been tuning, and most of them have had a great disdain for what we do and wouldn't be caught dead near anyone that does aftermarket tuning. Of course, I've also dealt with some really cool folks and they have been able to contribute time and knowledge to helping people like us to provide the best product possible to our customers. (Without resorting to anything that would be considered unethical, I might add... )

At one point in time, I had RCON/VDAS5 and a J3 Buffer board. I still have copies of the software and pics of the J3 Buffer board (photo), although the device has long since been lost to history.

When I started working at Superchips in early 1997, we were using Racelogic emulators with modified chips (photo) and some very clunky, HEX based tuning software. When those emulators dried up, we switched to the Romulator emulators, still using the same modified chips. Tuning software evolved from standard HEX editors into full 2D/3D Mapping software, which we now sell as Minotaur. It's sort of like ATI Vision in some sense, only the GUI is more refined. Over the years, I've acquired a number of VRF files (old RCON stuff) from which I was able to extract the mapping of the RAM and ROM parameters and was able to turn those into some pretty solid definitions. This is what we still use for tuning today.

Emulators have changed considerably, and now we sell a chip-style emulator (manufactured by Moates Technologies) that integrates with our Minotaur software and allows for live tuning of the vehicle, much like the old RCON/VDAS setups. Using other tools, we can map and datalog RAM data directly (MUCH faster than calling PIDS for data), and includes data that is not accessible via PID (like Start of Injection) and a few other useful values.

As I've said, I've been tuning Fords for nearly 24 years and have a specific focus on the Power Stroke Diesel. I love this platform and really enjoy being an active part of the 7.3L Diesel community. Of course, I've also worked with the EEC-IV, Power-PC (MPC-555/556), and Tri-Core stuff as well, but I still love the simplicity and flexibility of the EEC-V. The live emulation is also a bonus. I do also have a full Dev PCM for the 6.0L Black Oak (photo) series using the ATI hardware and Vision software, but don't get it out of the box much. Of course, the old VRF files gave way to Vision A2L files, and this is what all the newer stuff is based on, but we still like to use Minotaur for the basic tuning so we now convert these over to our definition format.

We completely understand your limitations and certainly don't want for you to put yourself in any position that would be deemed questionable. As a technology company, we also understand the need to keep things confidential. With that said, we have an exceptional understanding of the workings of the EEC-V PCM, at least as how it applies to the Power Stroke, and I think we would be able to have some really good conversations in regards to tuning without putting you in a compromising position. I definitely have suggestions on how to address the excessively harsh 3-4 shift w/converter lock as my Excursion has a heavily modified transmission with aggressive friction clutches (I can't remember the brand, but similar to what's used in the 6R140 if I'm not mistaken) and I've dealt with those issues.

Anyway, it's good to have you with us and I hope that you'll find us to be not only knowledgeable, but personable and friendly as well.

From one engineer to another, welcome to our humble forum.

Merry Christmas!

[wolverine724]

Hey Bill,

Thanks for sharing some of your background. The OEM's definitely don't have a monopoly on smart people doing some really impressive work in powertrain electronics and tuning. I was always impressed by what some of the chip companies were able to do in reverse engineering the controls and calibration, though some of us suspected there may have been some help by the way of leaked files. Kudos to you and your team for putting out some very solid products, from what I've seen so far your products are right up there with the current OEM tools like the ATI emulators and ATI Vision software. It's impressive how much people have been able to tune these engines without the help of a "strategy" book or calibration guide. The "strategy book" our calibrators would use is basically a representation of the entire engine and transmission software. In the days of writing the software in assembly code, the strategy book was a C-code-ish representation of the assembly code, since no one could really read machine code. Once we moved to Power-PC, and we started coding directly in C, the strategy books became a big compilation of the actual C-code. When we started doing graphical algorithms in Matlab/Simulink/Stateflow and then autocoding into C-code, the strategy book was put out in two flavors - a book of all the models, and a book of all the resulting C-code. Many of the old school calibrators hate reading the models and also hate reading the autogenerated C-code, which can be hard to read because of it's creation of random variable names and re-use of those unintelligible variable names in trying to optimize ram/rom usage. Powertrain strategies and the number of "tunable" calibration parameters have exploded from when I started working to now. Most of this is driven by fuel economy and emissions regulations. The largest single piece of software in our current powertrain controls is the Diesel aftertreatment software. I laugh when people say "if the car companies wanted to, they could be making 100MPH cars no problem." If they only saw the amount of engineering, time, and money the OEM's spend to eek out tenths of MPG increases

The aftermarket tuning seems to have come a long way. I remember many years ago one of my calibration co-workers figured out a way to do a calibration dump of an aftermarket chip for a Mustang application and he was thoroughly unimpressed at the calibration changes. He told me something like "all they did was increase the WOT engine RPM based shift points by a few hundred RPM, calibrate out the VS based speed limiter, and add something to a global spark adder!" It seems like things have come a long way since then. When I got my truck engine mods done (see first post), before I yanked the trans, I went out and put some miles on it being careful not to stress things too much. I "tried" to keep boost under 30 lol, but it still felt like I was driving a completely different vehicle. I thought it drove as good or better than a new 6.7. It was quiet, smooth, powerful, didn't smoke... This was running on the hydra tunes modifed for my single shot injectors with the lowest level of HP increase over stock. Hugely impressive. Can't wait to get the trans back in when I can run it hard and not worry about it!

Speaking of P/T calibration mods, I can't officially endorse anyone breaking EPA or state laws in modifying any of their powertrain controls for on-road use. Everyone here is doing this for race-track and off-roading only, right!?!?
There's a bit more leeway on the old 7.3...it didn't really have any emissions control devices, and it certified emissions on an engine dyno - just ran at various speed/load points.

Also, I'll just go with the premise that people here modding their vehicles are doing it outside of warranty or not brining them in for warranty claims when the blow something up. In my early days of being in trans controls, when chips were coming out to modify 7.3's and people were realizing you could get a lot more torque by adding more fuel, not realizing the trans couldn't take it, resulting in smoking their 4R100's and bringing them in for warranty claims, some of the people in our software group were tasked with coming up with a way to detect a "chipped" vehicle without adding any additional hardware costs or sensors to the vehicle - software only. They came up with a pretty clever algorithm that used the torque converter when open (clutch not locked) as a torque measuring device. Knowing the K-factor curve and slip across the converter, you could infer engine torque, and it would then set an "over-torque" stored DTC code if it detected torque way above stock torque levels. Ultimately that logic never went into production - the Ford lawyers decided they didn't want to deal with pissing matches and lawsuits from customers who may have had a legitimate claim vs a non-legitimate claim.

Anyway, it's cool to see people still enjoying and making such big improvements in these old dinosaurs!

[Power Hungry]

I'm going to start this thread and them copy some posts from elsewhere so people can get a really good idea on just how this industry has progressed. At least from the perspective of where it was when I started in 1997. The copied posts will appear above this post, so it may appear a little anachronistic.

This is an open discussion and we would enjoy input, comments, or examples from anyone that has worked in the OEM or aftermarket tuning industry... What platforms you've worked on, what software you've used, etc. I think it would be fun for people to see just how hard it was for us in the early days of the industry versus what we have available to us now.

Anyway, enjoy!

[Power Hungry]

Originally Posted by wolverine724

Speaking of P/T calibration mods, I can't officially endorse anyone breaking EPA or state laws in modifying any of their powertrain controls for on-road use. Everyone here is doing this for race-track and off-roading only, right!?!?

There's a bit more leeway on the old 7.3...it didn't really have any emissions control devices, and it certified emissions on an engine dyno - just ran at various speed/load points.

I can't speak for other companies, but we only work with 7.3L, 6.0L, and the F-150s up to 2011. All the tuning I've done has, at some point, been CARB certified, but this was when the tunes were written for other companies (Superchips and Edge, to be specific). We are working on our CARB certification, but being that we haven't really changed much except for the trans tuning, I don't see emissions being a problem. We specifically don't do the later platforms because it's not worth the legal hassles and I get sick and tired of people complaining as to why we won't do delete tuning.

Originally Posted by wolverine724

Also, I'll just go with the premise that people here modding their vehicles are doing it outside of warranty or not bringing them in for warranty claims when the blow something up.

Again, since 7.3L and 6.0L have been out of production/warranty since 2003 and 2007 respectively, those concerns are no longer an issue. I'm fully aware of the efforts Ford was making in regards to tracking modifications in regards to warranty concerns, and even though it wasn't implemented it still didn't stop dealerships from arbitrarily denying warranty claims for other reasons or suspicions. However, like you had said... Ford generally didn't want a fight or any bad publicity so if claims were denied at the dealer level, if the customer was insistent and pushed it up to corporate, they usually got taken care of.

It's ridiculous the things I've seen for which warranties were being refused. Gauges, exhausts, tires, lift kits and even stupid things like brush guards because they implied off-roading and stressing the vehicle. Even worse is when you have dealerships that PRE-INSTALL these things on vehicles, and then a warranty gets denied from another dealership. It was crazy.

Anyway, I think I'm going to generate a sort of historical timeline with some REALLY cool examples of just how far this industry has progressed. I may have some time tonight to start posting some things up, starting with pics of the Racelogic and MAP6 tuning software we used to use. I also still have my original "Tuning Guide" that I assembled when working at Superchips. You're going to laugh when you see this thing.

I hope y'all have a good afternoon.

[Longshot270]