Thanks Wiz,

Nothing like personal experience to report on.

Did Zippers make good on the 2?

Al

 

Zippers made good on everything. Swell bunch of guys. Very good product. Just follow their rules for warranty and the sun will continue shine.

 

Ok I'm confused but I'll throw this out there anyways. Can I effectively have the bike tuned (with the TTS Mastertuner)with the oem header with the cat still intact? or a complete waste of time?

Have the Supertrapp SE slipons that are designed specifically for the header with a cat and I'm wanting to complete the Stage 1 with a SE or Big Sucker A/C. Or save my time and $$ and just do the HD download

Thanks in advance

 

not only yes but hell yes you can. I did it and my bike ran extremely well mine like yours had cat, se air cleaner and same slipons mine is 2011 103 and it takes time to vtune it but when you get it done it is well worth it. My bikes runs smooth, accellerates hard, and gets great mpg. Cat is not going to have much effect unless you start getting into a build that is 90 + hp. stage 1 96 or 103's are well under that.

 

Experience here is that, even with a stock bike, a large improvement in riding satisfaction can be had by using the TTS kit. Although some bikes run really well from the factory, a TTS Vtune seems to liven them all up. Most name brand products will also do this for a near stock bike. My bike started near stock, tuning it provided a dramatic improvement. Adding low restriction pipes and AF later turned out to be more style than function in comparison (above 4500 rpm excepted).

With the TTS kit in your tool box, however, you can relatively easily change the bike tune to best take advantage of any modifications you decide to make... as well compare effectiveness of mods if you have the time. It is not until you get into wild cams, head work, and/or 120+ displacements that the DIYer may begin to need professional help…. and most professionals worth their salt prefer the TTS tool for programming and data logging anyway.

There are several ways to skin the cat, but you can't go wrong with the TTS tool kit.

 

Let me ask this...if I decide to have the bike tuned with a TTS and with the cat in place and a stock a/c

1) Totally worthless?

2) Won't the o2 sensors adjust the ecm back and change any of the settings that the tuner makes to the ecm? I ask this because isn't the job of the o2 sensors to get the afr to 14.7 or in the case of my bike the lambda to .981?

Learning as I go so hopefully not dumb questions

 

The only dumb questions are the ones not asked. We all had to start somewhere and learn the system.

1. NOT totally worthless.

2. When you tune you change the VE tables using the 02 sensors. The VE tables will be changed to reflect the way your motor breaths. The VE is a calculation based to change the multiplier for the AFR or Lambda so your ECM will know how much raw fuel to add to your throttle body or how long your injectors open to spew this raw fuel. You do this NOT to richen up or fatten or add gas... you do this to make your motor run more efficiently. Many times you will see your VE table value decrease which removes some fuel. When you tune you reflash the ECM which overwrites the old program. There is no way, after flashing the new tune file, that your 02 sensors can go back to stock VE's.

 

Another way to look at it is that couple things happen when you tune with the TTS. At the risk of over simplification:

It takes much ECU effort to make adjustments to fuel delivery to hit the programmed AFR targets, larger adjustments are more work. One thing effects another and there is just so much the ECU can do. The ECU is not happy operating outside its comfort zone. If the VE and other tables are set up such that the adjustments are small, if at all, the bike feels more responsive, runs better, and the dyno curves look better. I dunno if we need to understand why, it just works that way. The TTS tool helps you do this. There is enough variance in stock components from one bike to another that modifying the OEM compromise to values based on the specific bike makes a noticeable difference in riding satisfaction.

There are a bunch of tables internal to the ECU that control timing (both fuel and ignition), fuel delivery, based on sensor inputs and events. There are table values that just seem to work a little better than the OEM provided ones. These tables get replaced by the TTS calibrations and get some fine tuning when you run the cam event calculator and then VTune. There is much going on behind the scenes that are beyond my limited understanding, but the results you get on the street seem to be that the TTS programmers have done a pretty good job figuring it out… and even stock bikes run a lot better.

Certainly not a must as you can just ride miles and miles and be completely satisfied with the stock tune. My stock bike had an annoying surge, and eventually migrated to TTS to solve it. Otherwise I may have left well enough alone, and I would have not known how much better a bike can run.

 

How would you like to tune this bike?

http://www.tokyomango.com/tokyo_mang.../09/motor.html

 

I called the shop that would be doing the tuning for me and asked the question if they would/could tune my bike with the stock a/c and header with cat with only add ons being the Supertrapp SE slip ons that are designed for bikes with cats in the header. He said yes they would do it but said it would not be an ideal tune as the cat is not really designed to be accepting that richer amount of fuel that would be there due to the tune. He also agreed that a gutted head pipe is not a good alternative either.

So I guess the question looms and it does seem valid......how does the cat accommodate the richer mapping and still function properly? If tuning is intended to cool the bike down but the cat needs to be at a certain temp to work correctly............

Just wondering how it all comes together.....