,
Before turning up the boost, we needed to make sure the spark wouldn’t be blowing out. The NGK Iridium spark plugs we got from Sparkplugs.com were gapped to a tight 0.018-in gap. Believe it or not, the car idles just fine.
There’s MKC tuner and owner Chad Charlton, putting in the final tweaks. Chad’s also the tuner of our AEM Infinity on Project E46 M3, and he has a plethora of experience tuning with a variety of tuning stand-alone computers.
Here are some of the parameters being monitored on the AEM Infinity software while on the dyno.
Here's a log of a dyno run. With AEM’s new Infinity tuning software update just released November of 2014, known as version 2.96, we’ve got better feedback of a logged run. On the bottom you can see the blue boost line, which stays nice and flat throughout the run, even though this is on an inertial dynojet. Off the dyno, with the car physically pushing against the air, the boost pressure should be sustained even flatter. The purple outlines around each cell highlights the cells that Chad just made changes to. The red number in the upper left reads 290 for MAP (manifold air pressure) kPa, which equates to about 27 PSI at that point.
Here’s a shot of the boost control. Looks like he’s got the wastegate duty cycle at around 44-50% to hit around 300 kPa, or about 29 PSI. Notice the green graph on the right, which we’ll have to tune for later. But, depending on the amount of ethanol in the fuel system, you can tune boost pressure up or down, and you can tune by gear as well!
So what did 29 PSI net us? Find out on the next page!
