Is a chip really that good?

[Jengel]

Maybe you have a point there Dan! Diesel timing is very critical but I don't have much experience on it. By the way, I rediscovered my old name and password tonight and will tansfer all my data from J&L to Jengel.

[scottsr20]

I agree with you when you say diesel tuning is midway. It is very much remenicent of the early days of turbo four cylinder petrols in the early 90s . We used basic tuning tools ( pots diodes to adjust signals from sensors to fool the computer to allow more airflow etc.) and all the theories of what size exhaust and how big an intercooler should be are now obselete.
An internally standard SR20 turbo or 2JZ can easily sustain 300% power increases because the resolution of the tuning is so high we can tune them so finely. The computing power of even a Power FC is greater than the factory computer, let alone a Motec etc. I believe 200% plus power increases are just around the corner when people start throwing on larger intercoolers, bigger aftermarket turbos etc. At the risk of sounding old I'm personally just not after that much power in my truck- I can already turn all four 33s to smoke in the rocks and I can overtake traffic with my 1.5 tonne trailer on with the chip and no other mods like exhaust etc. From here on in my engine mods will be chasing a potentially broader spread of power and more economy if either are possible.

[Jengel]

Never too old to learn. As apprentice I built electronic ignitions and sold 'em off like sweet cake for an extra income. We went as far to do dual ignition with blocking diodes and dual points in those days. Renault Gordini's, Nissan SSS and Skylines ha-ha!
I'm always open for some good techincal reasoning and real results like dyno's etc. To climb in a car with mods and to clearly say it's better does not always cut the cake for me. I'm too much of a practical person for that.
The other question of course is how much reserve is built in an engine before it goes boom? In the old days there was always a substantial margin but with computing power now those margin have shrinked as it is costly. I suppose the Chip suppliers have better knowledge of this?
Johan

[danmcccc]

scottsr20, wait til you put a decent exhaust on! you wont know what to do with the extra low end torque!

[VMN]

I would not normally join in on a thread where brands are compared because some would say I have a vested interest.

Helmut, I agree wih you and here come my argument. Chip IT acknowledge they alter the rail and boost presssure but have protection in place well within the parameters. VMN say No, they don't.

I'm not sure that is really what I said. I think my comments in relation to a third chip brand may have been taken out of context and applied v's another forum sponsor who use totally different chip technology. The VMN chip manufacturer says that the manufacturers limits are respected. How we as lay people can judge that, I am not sure as only Toyota knows what the limits are.

From this page on my web site I quote the manufacturer.
http://www.vehiclemods.net.au/vmn-diese ... -and-prado

Furthermore, as the manufacturers' specified operating tolerances are never exceeded, you can be assured that our Performance Chip Tuning Kit will perform brilliantly and within the engines capabilities.

I think the fuel rail pressure path is probably a lot cheaper to follow eg.1 connector instead of 4 just for starters. The chip manufacturers are getting smarter about how they do stuff but personally I have not been keen on playing with fuel pressure. Checking the fuel pressure with an OBDII diagnostics reader around town shows 156,000 kpa and beyond in my truck with chip disabled.

When pushed for info on chips, the VMN manufacturer has suggested higher power ratings need to be accompanied with additional mods such as a free flowing exhaust, high flow air filter, an intercooler. A few of you guys have this right, the chip changes just one side of the equation. Once you add more fuel, you run the risk of unburnt fuel pushing up exhaust temps, so ideally you need to add more air to adjust this. Just be aware however, that the commonly available K&N high flow air filter is not rated for offroad use.

I'd love to offer you guys a boost cut defeater we identified two years ago that allows the boost to be increased without exceeding the limits of the engine and the Toyota VN turbo, but because it is not from the same manufacturer as the VMN chip, I have been reluctant to bring it in. This is a more sophisticated unit that it is a lot smarter than just manipulating the values from another sensor like MAF. It intercepts the signals between the ECU and the factory boost cut circuit. By default the boost cut defeater circuit limits boost to about 14.5 psi (but gauges may show a tad more than that in the real world). From memory, it will let boost get up to about 18-20 psi before shutting the turbo down. There are other cheaper units that have no link to the ECU and can't see when to shut it down which means that boost can get up around 25 psi which is well beyond safe levels.

[Jengel]

Talking about intercooler . . . I have been watching the intake air temperature and was amazed to see the temperature difference between ambient and intake air seldom exceeded 1 degree C. That means the standard intercooler cope well with the cooling of the compressed air. It must be noted that measurements of pressures do have a bit of a overread if it increase rapidly before the protection system step in a reduce them to safe levels. Rod, I'm trying to probe what the next level of enhancemnt is. There are the basics that we are aware of and there are the unknown that the manuufacturers only know. Yet, where is the next level of performance and can a chip exploit information and step the performance to such a level? Scott has reminded me about the basics that we tend to forget sometimes and just expect a Chip will overcome. Is the Steinbauer technology so much different to have more gains that others yet operate well within the normal bounds of a standard pressures? I doubt this.

[jogal]

After owning two D4D's and now i have the V6, I believe the question should be:
"Is the D4D really that good?"

I might be a little off thread but after spending a shit load trying to find the perfect performance for my diesels: different brands of exhaust,different chips and air filters i found reliability was always compromised! most cases resulting in limp mode issues.

For someone that travels on country roads a lot and does a lot of k's a week for work i for one am pretty disappointed with the D4D. As someone mentioned earlier! i have been caught out a few times trying to overtake and bang limp mode. Very scarey.

I believe if you keep the D4d stock including tyres, minimal bar work the diesel is a good option! but once you start adding weight and larger tyres, performance is affected! so many of us try to find better performance at the expense of the motor. The V6 on the other hand has that extra power on tap, and in my case it is only 3-4l/100 more on fuel usage .

That is why i think " Is the D4D really that good"

[VMN]

Talking about intercooler . . . I have been watching the intake air temperature and was amazed to see the temperature difference between ambient and intake air seldom exceeded 1 degree C. That means the standard intercooler cope well with the cooling of the compressed air. It must be noted that measurements of pressures do have a bit of a overread if it increase rapidly before the protection system step in a reduce them to safe levels. Rod, I'm trying to probe what the next level of enhancemnt is. There are the basics that we are aware of and there are the unknown that the manuufacturers only know. Yet, where is the next level of performance and can a chip exploit information and step the performance to such a level? Scott has reminded me about the basics that we tend to forget sometimes and just expect a Chip will overcome. Is the Steinbauer technology so much different to have more gains that others yet operate well within the normal bounds of a standard pressures? I doubt this.

So much smoke and mirrors but you have missed the point of a water to air intercooler. The purpose is to cool the air below ambient so it is more dense so you get more air into the engine to combine with the fuel you are adding. Personally I think this sort of performance development won't really get going until the ECU data is opened up by mandated standards so that there is more data to read by third parties. Why can't a chip plug into the OBDII bus and read the engine paramaters the manufacturers hide in proprietory standards. A case in point is Transmission temperature. This would be an incredibly useful parameter to read. There is a second ECU (well TCU actually) that politely says "Hello I am here" but when you ask it "What data can you give me? It answers "Bugger off nothing as I don't have to". Yet there is no doubt the tranny temp is monitored by the system.

[Jengel]

The water to air intercooler as described is actually a heat exchange using the cooling from the air conditioning system. However, you use engine power to cool the air down. This is the only way you can get temperatures below ambient. You do get air-water-air where the coolant is water passed through a radiator and then through the heat exchanger cooling the intake air temperature. However ambiet is the lowest you can get.
Then, if you can read values from the OBDII port (which is actually CAN-Bus), you should be able to use that. You won't be able to write to it. The problem with this port is that not all information is made available as it is suppose to be a service port. I have a Scangauge 2 but have to upgrade it to read more values. Is it possible to interface a display to a Chip and have some data streamed like a recorder? This would really catch my attention ha-ha!

[VMN]

Maybe you are right about ambient, I am no expert but I think you may find the inlet temp is monitored pre turbo and the intercooler will get temps down a lot lower post turbo as it counters significantly the heating affect of compressing the air by the turbo on its way into the pistons.

CAN is just one of many communications protocols that can be found on the OBDII bus. Its a bit like TCP/IP and SNMP living on the same ethernet cable in your network. Toyota play some ducks and drakes here somewhere according to my diagnostics gear. The ADR's say CAN must be supported (from about Jan 2008 from memory) but when I put my diagnostics on a 2010 truck with the check engine light displayed, the protocol found was not CAN but the same protocol as used on my earlier 2007 build AND the check engine error condition was NOT reported. My diagnostics chip is smart enough to work its way through the many possible protocols starting from the fastest (eg CAN which is close to ethernet speeds) down and picks a much slower protocol. However internally, CAN is used to allow the TCU and the ECU to do their job according to the Toyota documentation.

Yes it is quite easy to talk to the BUS yourself. All you need is a terminal client (Windows Hyperterm does the job) and a diagnostics interface connected to the PC b a USB port or Bluetooth. You watch the interface report in and connect to the network and it will report the protocol being used. From this point, you would normally query the interface to find out what PIDS are supported and then you can read the data for those PIDS. Everything is reported in Hexadecimal codes (#00-#FF) and the interfaces are nice enough to convert these binary values to human readable two byte codes.

On a CAN system, it is possible to monitor the traffic and there is lots of it. I have had a play with this myself. The documentation for my OBDII interface gave an example of sniffing around while winding the windows up and down and picking up the codes used to control the power windows. Armed with this info, they could raise and lower the windows from the terminal console by sending the appropriate codes. So yes, with a good understanding of serial communications, it would be fairly simple to write a few lines of code to read the data on the BUS in real time and log it to a file. If I did this, I would also add a GPS to the system so the location was stored with the read data.

The single most useful parameter for a diesel engine is exhaust temp but it is not monitored on the BUS which is a great shame. Some chip manufacturers offer a fairly crude system where an EGT gauge that allows an alarm setpoint to trigger a built in relay that tells the chip to do something and the action is programmed to swap in another power curve. So people are happily hacking holes in their interior to mount this sucker which also has an optional case that supports a surface mount which is much easier. Now on the face of it, you would think that is pretty smart gear but the price is set at what I think is an exorbitant margin for the gauge in question. I reckon you might as well just buy the gauge elsewhere at a much cheaper price and add a $2 buzzer from Jaycar to the relay output and lift the foot when the setpoint is triggered. If they had spent a few dollars more, they could have bought the other gauge in the same family that also sets a voltage in the range of 0-5 volts that represents the temperature. This is designed to be interfaced with digital equipment via an Analog to digital (A/D) converter ( If they are using something like an Atmel AVR CPU to drive their chip, this is already natively supported as it contains a number of 0-5 volt A/D conveters on the CPU pins). Now if they measured the temp in real time and continuously varied the tune accordingly, I would be impressed! I've got one of these smart gauges in my truck. I was going to do some EGT logging back to my Car PC but it was just not worth it as once you drive with these things for a while, you get your head around what the chip is doing as it also has a memory that stores the highest temp read since the memory was last reset. So I just do the lift your foot thing when the buzzer goes off once every few months.

Anyway, I think I've said enough and will bow out at this point.

[scottsr20]

Firstly, I'd just like to say that I hope this doesn't feel like us verses you Jengel,( reading back through this tread it comes across like you are having to defend your point against all comers) . This has developed into quite an informative thread on some of the possibilities, even if it is speculative on some fronts.
On the topic of water to air intercoolers- it is possible to go below ambient. On a toyota MR2 we logged temps 5-6 degrees below ambient with a custom water to air intercooler set up. I don't know the exact physics of it ( something to do with the latent heat of vapourisation ? ) but a simple example is the old canvas water bag the bushies would hang on the bullbar while driving around out west. The water will start at ambient temp but the small amount of water that leaches through the canvas evapourates as you drive drawing more heat from the contents of the bag and will lower the internal temp by a surprising amount ( highly quantitative that ). The biggest problem we had was heat soaking the water when the car is static. As it has a top mount, like the hilux, the heat from the engine would rise into the intercooler while parked, stopped at the lights etc and while water has a great capacity to absorb heat from the surrounding materials, in this case aluminium, the same property means it doesn't dissapate that heat particularly well so the first run after being parked you could feel the performance rise as the water temps dropped ( which we could see on a multi probe temp guage)
I think this is the main problem with water to air in a hilux - low speed crawl work means low air flow through the evaporiitive core and therefore a declining performance as the water heat soaks.
Matty from Monster Rides has a water to air set up on his truck, though I don't know how much crawling he does.

[VMN]

Ah, the water bag. what a great day it was when the 5 gallon one that hung on our verandah was replaced with a Daddy Cool water bottle and a 5 litre block of ice from our new 240 volt freezer. It was an even greater day when the 32 volt generator was made obsolete by 240 volt rural power! Who can forget the sweet taste of cool rainwater intermingled with the taint of fresh jute! Anyway I digress.

I think you will find the Raptor intercooler MR has has a front mounted heat exchange radiator and fan. You could probably borrow some waterbag technology and spray water on the exchanger when a set point was triggered. The type of gauge I have would support this very easily as you can establish setpoints for a turn on temp and a turn off temp (below the turn on temp).

In my experience, I don't think Offroad conditions puts any stress on the engine which rarely gets to a situation of lugging sufficiently long enough to send exhaust temps high. In my case I've only had an over temp alarm trigger once offroad. That was on a very long hill climb at Coffs Harbour. Some members will know Morbid Hill as we drove it on a forum meetup a couple of years ago. On that occasion, the alarm was not triggered.

There is no doubt that a water to air intercooler can make an enormous difference to exhaust temps. A member in our 4WD club has a heavilly modified Patrol with aftermarket turbo. He reckoned it was getting a bit hot going up the Toowoomba Range with his (heavy) Camprite campervan in tow at the start of his annual touring excursion. He fitted a water to air intercooler and exhaust temps fell by about 200 degrees on his next drive up the mountain. (From 600 to 400 degrees C). How that converts to the HIlux, I don't know but it seems an impressive impact. Temps would reduce because denser air introduced more oxygen which consumed the unburnt fuel thus reducing the latent? heat in the exhaust gasses.

[helmut79]

Agree with Scottsr20, this is a really informative thread. Some really good info.

My 2c on the water to air intercooler, this is where a small fan mounted to the intercooler would help with the low speed crawl to help reduce heat soak. You would have to switch it from the cab, so turned on when crawling and turn off when back up over 30 - 40 km.

I’m very interested in doing something like this myself.

[Jengel]

Hi Guys, no, for me its about the learning I'm gaining. I can help myself quite a lot but detail tech know how is only found when it is drawn from the experts in the field. Regarding the EGT, Jaycar has an EGT kit with digital display and an alarm. I fitted a comercial K type probe in the exhaust manifold just before the turbo and read the direct exhaust temperature going into the turbo. I have seen a turbo diesel on a testbench and a turbo disintegrating when the tempeature reached 1050 deg C!
OK, you are right regarding the canvas water bag but will it apply to a sealed circuit like an air to water to air intercooler system. Just can't get my mind past that. They call the system "Evaporative cooling".
I agree with the fan on the intercooler but remember the turbo is not working and does not heat the air at idle speed. However the heat is because the system is already hot and the intake air does heat up.

[desmondv52]

yes, it is really good,hi im from malaysia. i bought a pieces from thailand, the chip is call Powerlab FPC-2 it cost about MYR2100. its to add more fuel pressure to your engine, this chip is a 2 in 1 chip, it add more fuel pressure, and it also have a boost cut. with this chip it can gain 30 to 40% of your hp on wheels, currently im driving a 2.5 hilux and now my hp on wheel is 108+ with boosting 20psi. this is the first chip, the another chip from powerlab is call DMS-Sport. it is a piggyback ecu to fine tune your air fuel. with that chip on and combine with the fpc-2, u gain 95% hp on the wheel, which mean, u got 180hp on the wheel with this 2 combination. oh ya the DMS-SPORT cost MYR3000 so both chip cost MYR5100. cheers

[finucs]

I take it adding this chip voids warranty?

[Hellbound]

bump... more discussion needed here!

[onall4]

Would you guys think it's too late to introduce a Chip to an engine which has 95000k's on the clock? Being a diesel, 95000k's is probably considered a pup. I just want to make sure it'd be ok...opinions welcome.

Thanks

Mick

[dirtyharry]

Just put a chit-it chip with egt controller on mine with close to 80,000 on it. Wish I had done it sooner but still very happy I've finally done it. More torque when cruising (auto transmission) leading to lower revs and doesn't need to slip back a gear as much to get up a rise. Yet to tow since chipped though, that will be the real test for me.

[Rocket55]

I put a chip, 3" exhaust and sprint booster onto mine at about 265,000km. Done 10,000km like this so far without any form of issue and would not go back. The lux is now an enjoyable drive.