I have not been able to get the idle solenoid to behave like I want it to. It runs the RPM up to the target cold idle for 8 seconds and then drops off to the normal idle target, at which point the engine would die, and require a restart. Sometimes twice. The third time was usually the charm. I studied the manual, and the various parameters don't make sense to me in terms of what changing them does, so I went looking for other ways to improve the cold start drivability. And, they are there.

The first is the "Cold Advance" table under the "Extended" tab in the tool bar. This gives you a temp biased table you can tailor any way you wish to add up to ten degrees of timing at any temp you wish. I added ten degrees of timing at the cold temps, and feathered it out to 0 at the hot temps. This made a huge difference in cold start drivability. Once started, the idle did not drop below 1000 regardless of what the IAS solenoid did. The added timing kept the RPM up in the needed range to keep it running. AS it warms up, of course, the timing drops down to the table specs, and the rpm comes down to the 850 spec. You must be reasonable and not drive your car hard when cold, or you will get into preignition with this table set up like this. But what slanter would do that?

The other two related tables ares the "ASE percent" and "ASE Taper" tables. ASE means After Start Enrichment. This delivers a small amount of extra fuel after the car starts up to keep it running until things get stabilized. On the old MSI 254 was the highest number of ignition cycles you could select for this, which was just not enough for the slant. With MSII you can extend ASE up to 1000 ignition cycles on a custom tailored curve of various engine temps. And you can select how much after start enrichment you wish to employ, again tailored by amount and temp. So I went in and pushed the ASE percent up on the colder temps, and extended the time all the way to 1000 for the colder temps, tapered down to 500 for hot starts. The default values were 500 across the board. Now that this is done the engine really is starting to behave more like an OEM one. This is huge. It is starting to behave like a real car now. It was an excellent day.

Does anybody know if there is a way to get the ECT to show up on the gauge set? I do not need, or at least not now, the Ignition Timing 2 gauge, and would like to be able to monitor the ECT more accurately. In the old MSI there was an active graph called real time monitoring or some such thing that had engine coolant temp as one of the reported values. I found that useful.

Sam

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You should be able to swap gauges by right clicking on them and selecting a new gauge.

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"Mad Scientist" Matt Cramer
'66 Dart - turbocharged 225
My blog - Mad Scientist Matt's Lair

Thanks Man.

Sam

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It works. Here is the drill: Hover your mouse over the gauge you wish to switch, right click to bring up a menu of choices that are not gauge inputs at this point; move the pointer to "input 1" this will pop up a menu of gauge choices. Then while still holding down the right mouse button, move the pointer to the input required, and while this choice is highlighted, release the button. The gauge will switch to that choice. I changed AF ratio to batt voltage, and the injection timing 2 was changed to ECT. The AF ratio simply parrots what my dash gauge says, and my voltage meter is small, and not easy to read.

This is all in Tuner Studio. Matt recommended this, and I have been happy with the switch from Megatune.

Sam

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