QLD Dyno night

Hi Dave - interesting results esp re filters. Confirms my own experience in tuning my 2.8T in last few years. The biggest increases for my truck however did not come from K&N filter or bigbore, but from advancing injection pump timing and fuel delivery increase.

Mine on the Blackwood Motors dynotune here in CHCH (and the owner says it tests to within 1kw of factory spec for motors? - he tunes racing cars etc ) tested at 115.7hp (about 86kw) at rear wheels. Their rule of thumb was vehicles will lose 25% of the power measured at flywheel by time it gets to rear wheels. Sometimes 30%. So the 115.7 equates to motor producing 154hp at flywheel where power specs are generally recorded. This was before I put the K&N filter in which added a bit more.

The 2.8T nonintercooled produces 110hp at flywheel - so mine showed a 44hp increase, and torque also went up from 225nm standard to 330nm. I did the tuning in stages, so have a feel for gains at each stage, and my gut estimates for gains for each modification within the 44hp increase would be: advancing pump timing - about 10-15hp, fuel delivery increase about 13hp, and bigbore 8hp. This doesn't quite add up, but what happened was what Blackwoods called a compound effect. You put snorkle, advanced timing, extra fuel, bigbore etc together and there was a collective increase effect - all the mods working together was greater than just the individual mods alone. Have seen this before with race car tuning. Bloke also said the old 2.8T responds well to tuning. Unsure why - perhaps a fairly basic initial level of tune.

By comparison, he had tested a later model 3.0 Prado with electronic injection (I think that model is just under 150hp at flywheel) and it showed about 112hp at rear wheels on dyno. Met one on road and mine was a bit quicker so the stat was confirmed. He also said the Safari turbos can be tuned to huge hp ratings - as you found over there - though how long they would last is another matter. Trials tuning I quess.

Advancing pump timing at Turbo Technology CHCH took 30 minutes. Did some fuel increase with them and later some with Blackwoods on the dyno - again only half hours work. I noticed EGR was already off my truck.Truck has now done 60-70000ks with this tuning spec and runs well, though it is up around 200,000ks now so doesn't get pushed much anymore.

Most notable advantage of bigbore was altering the torque curve to allow motor/turbo to kick in hard from 1500rpm instead of 2000 as before - very useful on and off road.

Experience with K&N addition after above tuning was it gave perceptible power increase up in revs. It gave a 0 - 100kph acceleration improvement of 4%, but 80 - 110ks (passing zone when up in revs in 4th gear) improvement from 7.1 seconds to 6.4 seconds or about 10%. Three standardised runs as closely as possible for each parameter. So the K&N confirmed the kind of results you recorded on the dyno - a good filter.

One useful tip I have acted on from someone here is to wash performance filters regularly. I was doing it about every 20000ks but now do it every second oil change or 10000ks. Notice perceptible improvement in engine sharpness after doing service - probably about as much as the filter gave originally - so while k&ns do well, they do have to be kept clean to give their hp advantage.

Hope this might help somebody. Look forward to hearing more detail - prices, fitting etc re the intercoolers. Also heard in last few days of big hp gains by increasing fan size in turbo? Uncertain what process is here.

Mike.

Don't actually know Jimmy - haven't altered the turbo settings from original and have never measured boost. Mike.

The new pipe has made a big difference low down cost $300 when $'s permit will get rear section done $500

Dave