I agree, an SC seems like the best option. One thing that would bother me is the price. For 6 lbs of boost it should cost about $2K for everything, otherwise it wouldn't be worth it to me. I know that's not alot of money, then again it's not alot of boost. Also, the Jackson SCs aren't very cheap, about $2.5K each, they seem to be way overpriced IMHO.

D-san

 

Hey Canzoomer, are you planning on reselling, or providing any kind of products avaialble to your fellow RX-Comp8triates? With all the mapping and tuning work your doing, selling pre tuned, ready to drop-in parts would be interesting. I'd bite..

OverLOAD

 

Well, you get what you pay for..

The Jacksons are full kits. That adds up

Don't forget an intercooler is probably going to be necessary as well at 6 lbs..

I figure a full setup with blower, intercooler, plumbing, pulleys, cooling for the blower unit, and a boost controller will likely cost around $3,000

 

So would I.

 

Hell yes!

That IS the plan. We will be selling a bolt in fuel ( and maybe ignition, we will see) controller for the RX-8.
I expect to have them available by the end of October. I am not paying for all of this just for fun!
I have to get some money back on my investment.
Do you know what 100+ hours of dyno and tuning shop time costs??

The slowest item for our builds to come in are the connectors to allow you to just plug it in to your ECU's sockets.
We have to use matching male and female connectors to match the ECU, and then we run a harness out from that to the controller, which will be in an aluminum cast box.
Install will take about 15 minutes, as will removal.

We are targetting a fuel map setup like this to sell at around $1,000 and with ignition controller around $1500.
Late, we are contemplating a unit with multiple map capability for around $2,000 for the full kit.
If we manage to get enough numbers we could easily drop it down quite a bit, but for now I am basing numbers on 10 people buying it.
All prices stated are in Canadian dollars, so if you want US cost multiply by .75 ( $750, $1,125 and $1,500).
Taxes and freight extra. Shipping weight around 20 lbs.

With the multi-map setup we would provide at least 3 maps:
1) stock
2) NA tuned fuel and ignition.
3) boosted 6 lbs

Or something like this

We will also likely do a cat-back and mid pipe solution after that.

Feedback is welcome and definitely invited!

 

Awesome work, canzoomer!

About the car running within spec in 5 minutes: Why, do you think, would Mazda make the fuel maps that way for all temperatures and not do something simpler like having a "5 minutes from a cold start" map to warm up the cat and then go to a more conventional map?

I guess that there are other variables in the law that they need to also look at, but I'm just curious.


I'm also interested in your opinions on the car's behavior with the revised fuel and timing that you are optimizing. Things like part throttle behavior, traffic, around town driveability, etc.

This is really excellent work! I wish I was nearby and could help.

 

I don't know why Mazda did this, but then I suspect this ECU map was a bit of a work in haste. Frankly it is awful.

Response on the road runs i have done gives me behaviour very much like before the mods. I t simply has more torque, way more power, and also I noticed we did not get the rough idle like the stock setup.

The biggest noticeable difference is at around 6200rpm.
Stock setup just falls of at 6200 when the intake opens all the way. It seems to pick up a bit as revs climb past 7000, but it only barely gets back to where it was before 6200.

With the remap you get a noticeable strong surge at 6200, and a smaller one around 7400rpm, and it builds hard with rpm. At 8000 it starts to level off and reaches peak at 8200rpm.
You get peak power within 2HP from 8000 to redline and beyond.

 

canzoomer,
thanks for the awesome work. I had a couple questions and comments.

1) I believe I understand the changing of the fuel map setup through the ECU. What are the changes to the ignition controller?

2) I thought you had said something about potential increases in fuel economy. Have you looked at that or run enough miles to see any changes there?

I would guess more than 10 people would be interested in buying this. If that would help drop the price and you would take debit cards, I have a feeling you could get alot of $500 debit cards from people.

 

dyno sheet?

 

First canzoomer.....Awesome work.
I would definately pay for your Fuel and ignition controller.
Some wish lists would be...
1)Easy install removal (sounds like you have that covered).
2)A way to switch between stock, stock ign + Fuel mapping, and Modded Ign + Fuel mapping.
3)A way to upgrade the Proms (I have access to Prom Programmers) or Flash, in case you find bugs that could cause severe problems (Pinging etc), especially for any of us early adopters.

My goals are probably not as radical as yours. I want to extract any SAFE extra performance without going to the point of needing to run race gas (92 octane pump). I don't polan to change intake or exhaust, I just want optimal performance.


Now a question:
Do you think that Mazda is running lean in the midrange to help produce better fuel milage for hiway cruising? (Is this a stupid question?)
Also, do expect MPG to suffer with your fuel mapping changes? Do you plan to do any MPG tests ?

Thanks for the work. Again I would gladly pay for all of your hard work. I would love to hear your 1/4 mile times soon to shut up the 350Z crowd that keep ragging on the RX.

Rick.

 

Nice work! I'd buy one today if you were ready to sell it.

 

I would be interested in buying too, once proven safe.

 

What octane gas are you running when your doing this testing? Will you be making a map that will be safe with California **** (91 octane)

-Chris

 

Would the AT see proportional results?

 

Another customer here if someone reliable in Wash. D.C. area to install & maintain -- may be simple, but not for me.

 

On the Sevenstock forum on this board, there is a topic about the comments by Mazda about dynoing the RX-8 and it showing less output and they talked to Mazda engineers at Sevenstock and I found this very interesting post by "jsotelo" straight from Sevenstock, which I will quote here:

So this explains a lot of things and it actually makes sense. It is obvious that the mixtures are really rich. We've seen that. We've also seen how cars running on 100 octane gas break into the 14's and post similar performance numbers as the "press" cars, but others don't.

Interesting about the fuel starvation at the track. I'm glad they are working on a fix.

It doesn't explain anything about the ECU behaving differently on a dyno. I think that part is simply made up. No one has been able to find evidence of this. All I see is that if you want to make "advertised power" you have to pump up the octane a lot.

All of this also makes me think that we should not be surprised if Mazda remaps the ECU to improve performance once they have more time to test different settings vs. exhaust temp and cat longevity. Like canzoomer said, I think that these fuel maps were done in haste. They had everything set and they got caught with some federal emission law problem and gave it a quick and dirty fix.

Like I said earlier, they seem to have done the same thing with the Mazdaspeed Protege, but the car was showing hesitation problems and so many people complained that they provided a "fix" in the form of a reflash and the reflashed cars show much better A/F ratios.

 

ok fine. start up a new thread, please. we lost the old one (have NO idea where it went), so let's make a new one.

until later.
(turbo are t3h winnar)

 

Canzoomer,

First, great work! Second, how do your dyno plots look on the top end compared to stock? The torque curve probably doesn't drop like the stock one does, but I was wondering if it looks much smoother than the 'choppy' HP curve on the stock fuel map dynos. If yours does look much better than to me, it thoroughly convinces me that the stock powerloss was all in the fuel maps and that the Mazda explanation about the ECU cutting power due to load, etc was pure bull.

And you will make a lot of money selling your mod!

 

Back when they first reported the lowered HP for the car, they said that the performance of the car did not change. Time slips were shown with these cars running mid 14's 1/4 mile. So, all these cars they were testing for performance are running 100 octane with Japanese ECU's? How deceitful.

 

Shell Optimax 91 Octane.

 

This will NOT apply to the AT. We are doing our tuning on an MT GT model. To do an AT we would have to:
1) Have one to tune on.
2) Have sufficient demand to make it worth it.
We are at about 100 man-hours in this now, It all takes time.
I am lucky that a friend who has a pro tuning shop was interested enough in the project to donate his time and dyno time for this.

Replaced my coil packs tonight, and all is well. No harm done to the car.

Will be resuming early next week. I have "Stuff To Do" that has been neglected, like finishing taping my basement renovation..

 

OK, the suspicions about the top end raggedness being due to the rich mixture are true.

Once leaned down it pulls properly to the top, and is much smoother. Interesting note in this is that we see that we are getting HP peak at just over 8,000, NOT 8500. At 8200 it flattens off. I suspect that with better gas we may see that keep rising a bit more. Also, bear in mind we are tuning at 735 meters altitude ( 2400 feet). That may also be taking a bit off our top end.
I think that most of the power loss is in the fuel maps.
We feel we are getting at least the original claimed power now.
Hard to say for sure, as we are not dynoing the engine. We are running the car, driveline loss and all.
I do know that with emissions legal fuel mapping, and some headroom left on it so there is no risk of detonation we pull an increase of about 30 wheel HP. We can go a bit higher, but I feel that to do so would put limitations on the fuel you can use.
We are working on the basis that what we do needs to be safe to run on at least mid grade gas (89 octane).

With the ignition there is also room for improvement. Until we smoked my coil packs we were gaining about 11HP at fairly conservative timing settings.

The next bunch of runs we have to do it to finish the ignition tuning tests, but before we do that we have to confirm our theories on what overheated the ignition coils.
We will be doing a bunch of scope testing to confirm that the ignition signals on our controller properly match the signal from the ECU before we can do much more with that. I can't afford a $400 set of coils too often!

Once that is done the next step is to dial in combinations of the fuel and ignition maps to see what balance of fuel and ignition give the best results.

We probably have about 30 to 40 hours of test time in the shop using the dyno left to do, and some good road runs before I will be satisfied.
I am hoping the weather holds out for that to go smoothly.
Up here it could turn to winter any day now. We almost always have snow on the ground by Halloween.

As for the money, I hope we can make some.
I think there are a lot of us who would like it, but of course there are certainly others doing the same thing, but not talking about it.
I have heard that Technosquare are doing tests, but their approach is to try and reprogram things on the original ECU. From what I hear they are having difficulties as the ECU seems to "correct" for mods you insert in the code. That is rumour, so may be totally false, so please don't flame me if i turn out to be wrong in this.

Fuel and ignition controllers are not a new thing, so it is not like we are inventing any new technologies!
We are also not really interested in reaching maximum theoretical power. We want to end up with a result that is reliable, and will not break cars.
I will grant that what we are doing will possibly shorten the lifespan of the cats, if they are left on.
Still, we are tuning to richness levels that are common on other cars, so I doubt the negative effects will be appreciable.
We are also temperature monitoring the cats now, so we make sure they don't get too warm.

Overall, if we can get about 10HP higher than the original 247 figures i will be quite satisfied.
I know ther are some that would prefer to reach more extreme levels, but as we are doing this on my car, and i don't want to smoke it, I am being a bit shy..

 

You are doing some very interesting work here canzoomer. What I don't get is why Mazda made such sloppy maps for its flagship car. At any rate, I am pleased that it was the mixture all along that was causing the power loss and not somthing more sinister like some of the more vocal bashers were saying initially.

The real question is, if you can do this, why hasn't Mazda? I realise that this renders the 8 non compliant in Cali due to the 15 minute warm up time, Mazda could have released a federal version and a Cali version, thus saving themselves a PILE of bad publicity and returns of 6% of pre-ordered RX-8s.

What I'm really interesting in seeing is what the gas mileage does. Right now the average seems to be poorer than my 12A powered 4bbl carbed RX-7 does, and that is just plain wrong.

 

I think Mazda can do it, and did originally, but had to reprogram in something at the last minute at port for emissions and cat durability. And when the cars were all sitting in port and costing money everyday they didn't get to the dealers, Mazda had to come up with something very fast, without much consideration to negative affects on performance. So who knows, their engineers could have just quickly used numbers that they knew would get the cars out of port quickly or maybe they even used the Euro fuel maps. Now they can't give the orginal maps back to you even if they want to. The aftermarket can do whatever they want to though since they are not the manufacturer.

 

That's not a valid point. There are new RX-8s being shipped to the US every day. Mazda is still manufacturing them in Hiroshima. There is ample time to test and develop new maps for the cars coming off the assembly line and to reflash the cars that have already been sold. If canzoomer can tune the 8 and still maintain 48 state emissions compliance, then there is no reason why Mazda's engineers can't give the maps a tweak themselves.