No question there are chips out there
but unless the engine has accompanying ign and intake/exhaust mods the gains will be minimal at best.
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Is it possible to turn a distributer to an electric system?
In my opinion, our low comp (8.13:1) engines are NEVER going to be efficient. Period.
With hi compression ( 9.35:1) pistons, and a tornado chip with a new EFI cam and lifters, port matching and a free flowing exhaust will be about the best you can achieve. This is relevant to 3.5, 3.9, 4.6 etc etc fitted with 14CUX .
JC
All the above is why a piggyback chip is a good solution for a V8 with 14CUX.
The piggybacks available such as Unichip and Haltech have an ignition mapping section which takes over the vacuum advance and could takeover the centrifugal advance if any seller/dyno was keen enough.
The problem of course is how much dyno time is acceptable for you to pay for. However if you use someone experienced in tuning the V8 you get some of the benefit of their experience tuning other V8s.
The Australian 14CUX low comp is termed"rest of the World" and was tuned to run on AFAIK 89 octane or less and there are big gains to be made with advance.
Mine now has 50% more "Tractive effort" with a Thor, head mods, exhaust etc, but even only with the chip there was a 15-20% improvement below and above 3000RPM where there was only 5%. AND it is REALLY noticable eg mine would not climb the hill north from the harbour bridge at constant speed without kicking down. After the piggyback it flew up.
So to me a piggyback ECU is well worth it and achieves in practice most of the gains of a new chip with the exception that the upper limit on injector duty cannot be changed so if you fit a big capacity motor you need a Powerchip or similar.
Regards Philip A
I note the original poster was referring to a D2.
These all have Motronic which is a completely different proposition.
AFAIK Motronic stays at 14.7:1 the whole time for emission compliance, even at WOT.
The Motronic has an extensive timing map tailored to the market it is for ( or the fuel available), however the Australian cars are again "rest of World" so there could be gains to be had from more advance. There seems to be very few Motronic tuners in Australia and Mark Adams in the UK seems to be the most respected for Rover V8.
I hear there are not great gains to be had like on a 14CUX but there are some and 8% is the sort of figure I recall, but I may be wrong. This is using a chip or flash tune.
Trouble is that for Motronic on say a BMW M3 which I have seen chipped, all the gains are at 5500RPM up.
Regards Philip A
Doh
I am sure that was a joke wherever you found it. I didn't feel like looking up teh Rpi site.
Regards Philip
AAh, what I meant to say was TORNADO chip or similar,. There is another Mark Adams chip that Rpi also sells called Optimax.
Anyone have any experience with this offering
Welcome to Syntek
"These are not simply an add-in chip but a complete retune of the fuel maps and ignition timing (where applicable) for maximum efficiency using modern fuels and real world conditions."
Seems they do 3.9 and TD5 but not sure about D2.
Syntek are from Briizzy and have been offering 3.5/3.9 L or 13/14CUX V8 chips for about 2 years now. Their prices are on par with Mark Adams/Tornado. They also do a complete ECU board swap out that will also do away with mechanical advance as Traco mentions. Interestingly their ECU board can take MAP inputs instead of MAF. I have not heard of any feedback.