Originally posted by Ron Porter@Jul 2 2004, 11:29 AM
As you've just learned, "feels faster" does not always mean "faster". The butt-dyno is a very inaccurate way to determine anything.
Do you have a money-back guarantee on that chip? Might as well send it back, as it (not surprisingly) makes no difference. Ford designed in the shift delay on the AX4- tranny for a reason.....making it shift harder can dramatically shorten tranny life. SHO ATX guys learned this years ago with some of the chips out there.
IMHO, chips on basically stock cars aren't worth the money. Yeah, maybe you get the hard shift that "feels better", but there really isn't enough power (if any) to be gained. The only way to really tell is to do before-after dyno runs. The "93 octane" program is a crock.....DOHC central-plug engines do not need the kind of spark advance that the old wedge-head OHV engines did. Cranking the parameters on an 87 octane engine to think it needs 93 octane is a waste of time. 93 octane gas is a band-aid, and adds no power (and can even drop power in certain circumstances) to cars that don't need it. Some of the 500+ HP supercharged SHOs are tuned to run on 93 octane pump gas.....stock, normally aspirated V6 engines aren't near needing 93 to make more power.
This is innacurate. I am actually close friends with one of the ex-tranny calibrators at Ford. The reason it shifts the way it does is for a comfortable feel. Believe me, they have tried tomakeit more perforance-y on some cars and got huge complaints (see 98GT for example). So they always go back to the way it shifts now. Most car/truck buyers are actually happy with the way their transmission functions. They don't like to FEEL them shift, they like it soft. People that want a firmer shift are actually a small minority of customers. If Ford made their transmission shift the way you want, then most people would complain, and uin fact they did. Ford used to have a feedback program where when certain cars were programmed to shift in a performance manner, one of the test vehicles being the 98GT, again, they received a lot of complaints. This is why the 98 GT shifts firmer/better tyhan thenewer ones andthe older ones. Granted, you CAN do certain things to mess things up, but if you know waht you are doing and have not only a good understanding of tranny's but also of the complex electornic control system in the EEC, and most have access to but a fer parameters, wherae as have access to all 3000 parameters inteh EEC, weknow what each of them does, and we cahn change eachand every singleoneofthe....(I can't get into specifics w/o divulging trade secrets).
Companies like ours, and other, offer to you what Ford can't offer.The *right* changes will not only allow the tranny to perform "better," but will actually lenghten the life as you re-do the TC functions and the clutches last longer.
In addition, at least with OUR chips, we have back to back gains to show for ours...with dyno graph. Granted, not all tuners are created equal.
Although you are right, some engines as some of the DOHC are very efficient and do not benefit much from spark advance (but this is beyond a certain point, not always attained in the OEM calibration for variosu reasons,)
And as far as octane, it is not about "needing" 93 octane. The cars tuned for 87 fork the factory are caluibrated that way for cost reasosns for the end consumer..there ARE gains to be had by going to premium, and on some cars, these are great gains. On some cars these gains amount to only a few HP. We have gained 26ft/lbs down low on the Duratec and posted it, as we have gained 30ft/lbs down low on SHO's and posted it, both stock.
That being said, I have seen *other* chips by other tuners actually lose power on a stock car...
and we are very good on auto tranny programming.
