is there anyway to tune your cars air/fuel WITHOUT having to buy a wide band controller? maybe like having the dyno do it? or computer programs? thanks

 

HP TUNERS, but you still need a way to monitor what you've changed and that's where the wideband comes in. In short... no not really sorry

 

you have to have wideband if you have your car tuned??

 

hate to be a dick but thats the price u pay to play the game

 

Spend the extra $$$ and do it right or end up in the blown cobalts thread.

 

Yes, you need a wideband to tune the car correctly. Spend money on buying a LC-1/gauge and HPTuners Pro and go to town. You'll spend $1000. The LC-1/gauge is $289 and HPTuners Pro is $650.
LC-1
HPTuners

 

Pony up the funds yo. Gotta pay to play.
You can go as fast as you can afford to.

 

I won't touch a car that doesn't have a way to check the a/f. I'm actually thinking about just spending some extra cash to get another one that I can take around from car to car.

 

ok so i know nothing about wideband, it plugs into an O2 bung correct? if i get tuned it will be done by a proffessional. so that means 1 of the O2 sensors has to be deleted?

 

http://www.autotap.com/product_multi...ltiFamilyId=47

I just looked this up quickly, but this is only $150. Appears to have full obii interface. You might even be able to use hp tuners free software with it. I'm thinking, hp tuners GUI is fairly simple in structure, it shouldn't be hard to replicate it with the use of a cheaper interface and make the whole process way cheaper. I don't have the time to work on it, but I can't see why it wouldn't be possible.

 

Still need something with a wideband signal. This woudn't work with HPTuners.

 

to tune ANY CAR,u need some kinda of ecu controller/fuel controller...

 

a dyno shop should be able to tune with air/fuel...

 

with the gauge NO..they need some kind of wideband...HP Tuners,SAFC Neo,SAFC-2,anything that can controll fuel..they can tune it,but cant save it onto ur ecu,thats why when u have it tuned with a SAFC neo for example,if the neo gets stolen ur car goes back to the original tune,or ***** up the fuel mixtures..

 

what i ment was there are shops that will tune with HPtuners & a wideband

 

True, shops have the capability but its only a basic tweak, you can get better results by road tuning. You can also avoid those costly dyno and tuner fee's. I spent over 5 hours on the dyno, thankfully I only had to pay for 2, which was steep enough.

 

yeah shop by my house charges ~$100/hr for dyno tuning...

 

you do need a computer program to tune... and that's what you have to pay for. Unless you have access to dealerworld you can't go in to change your stock settings with stock software, so you have to have a method to interface with that with aftermarket. That's where hptuners, smt, safc, etc comes into play. They provide a way to interface with the stock programming. Just have to pay for it.

Now you can get the "interface" and tune all day... but you're tuning blindly. You need a way to monitor your a/f ratio. So that's where the wideband comes in. If you plan on having your tune done professionally at a shop... you don't really need to get one because most good shops will have their own. However if you make any changes then you're going to want one.

dynos are good if you're trying to pull every available hp out of a car. But the car isn't actually under load(not pulling any weight and there's no wind resistance) so the tune is never going to be dead nuts on. When I tune a car it's at the track. Usually I'll get the base stuff done on backroads and such to get the car running good and then go to the track to compare times with changes I've made to pull all the SPEED out of a car I can. Of course this doesn't work so well if you aren't a consistent driver.