AEM ECU Install…
I’ll never see Milton Keynes in the same way again. The home of the concrete cow is also the home of Advance Motorsport Engineering (AME) (www.advancedme.co.uk) namely Dan Turner. A product of Cosworth’s F1 apprentiship scheme he certainly knows a thing or two about tuning cars.
“…you have what I believe to be the best available ECU for your K series engine.” - Dan Turner, AME.
My initial thought when I received my AEM ECU (1070U with wide-band O2 sensor) was, “I can plumb this puppy in and load in the standard map”. My advise, don’t do it! The standard maps supplied with the unit could be better I believe and you risk the car running lean - which generates too much heat and can cause engine failure.
So, I decided to find a suitable professional to tune the car for me. After a few phone calls to various Honda’ry tuning types, I was put in touch with Dan Turner at AME. He seemed like a pleasant bloke who was interested in my project so we arranged a meet. He deals heavily with AEM and has possibly more experience with these excellent ECUs than anyone else in the UK.
Before I left for Milton Keynes I was need to prepare (as usual) for the fitting, I didn’t want to waste any dyno time fiddling with making brackets and routing wires.
First off, disconnect the battery - always a good idea, it doesn’t cost anything, takes 5 minutes and could save your ECU from blowing up. For the mounting bracket I used a sheet of aluminium plate. I bolted this to the left hand wheel arch inside the boot. Stick on the supplied Velcro and mount the ECU. Next, check to see if this thing works. Plug the ECU, connect up the battery and switch the ignition on. Don’t try and start the car as you’ll have no map loaded and kill your engine. Plug a laptop into it and make sure you can connect ok. If all is ok, battery off again and swap back to your original ECU.
Ok a quick trip down to Milton Keynes (about 4.5 hrs from Chester - ouch). Not the best of journey’s down there as the weather was pretty appalling.
Once the car was strapped in place, its time to pull a quick dyno run to see what the JDM ECU produces. The car with the JDM ECU fitted is pretty quick and really pulls around the 7k mark. So - this is when I discover the car dyno world is a noisy one - a very noisy one. Looking at the grin on Dan’s face its obvious that he loves his job (and noise).
Results: 211 BHP for the JDM - not bad, a lot more than I was expecting to be honest. I had a figure of 190 BHP in my head (for some reason). Don’t forget the JDM ECU not matched to the cam profile of the UK engine. OK lets get mapping!! (let Dan get mapping I mean, but I’m very excited at this point). Bear in mind at this stage the VTEC cuts in quite late and I wanted to lower this to take advantage of the engine’s available torque lower down the rev range. I did notice on track that if the corner didn’t fit the rev range well it would feel a little sluggish as apposed to insane in other corners.
Spanners out time. If you have a wide-band sensor, now is the time to fit it. Battery off (again), swap the ECUs out, battery on.. (you get the message).
OK! Dan hits a few keys on the keyboard and uploads one of his base maps. Time to start her up. Yep! as expected a little lumping. Now the magic starts.
Dan fits some knock sensors, which are in this case microphones, to the engine. He plumbs these into his headset and selector switch and tunes the car from the drivers seat using his laptop.
Noise, noise and more noise. Yep this is a loud job indeed (take ear plugs).
So after a few runs he’s happy with the fueling and ignition timing he starts to map in the VTEC, as the number of Dyno runs increases to does the BHP and Nm of torque.
Finally we have a map very similar to the JDM ECU. Dan seems a little disappointed but he wasn’t going to let the stock ECU get the better of him. So he beavers away for a further hour or so. OK, looks like we have a REAL result here.
Have a look at the final dyno below:
The thick lines represents the AEM ecu and the narrow lines indicate the stock JDM ECU. As you can see there isn’t a massive hike in overall BHP, just 5 BHP or so which on the face of it may seem a little disappointing. But, check out the torque curve, 200+ Nm at 6000 rpm then torque stays pretty level and constant up to the gear change point. I could hardly wait to get in and try it. Luckily Dan has managed to empty the tank, so off to fill up on the ‘V’ power.
On the road it doesn’t disappoint, it feels like a different car again. I no longer need to stir the porridge as much, I now have oodles of torque lower down the range - ooooohhh baby!
In summary:
Was its worth it? Yes, I believe it was. The mapping process is fascinating and you can clearly see that these dyno guys really earn their money.
Advanced Motorsport Engineering, worth a visit? Without a doubt, Dan is has god-like powers and it really comes over how much he enjoys his work. He has plenty of experience with AEM ECUs and Honda Engine. As with many enthusiasts who turn pro, its not enough to do the job, it has to be correct - he wouldn’t let me take the car until he was happy - unusually I found someone with a greater happiness threshold than me. But, the great thing is, I get the long-term benefit - and it feels good - very good!
Could you map it yourself? No, in my humble opinion this is a job for the pros. If you have a rolling road and associated tools then go for it, if not you stand a good chance of blowing your engine.
Q & A with Dan:
Stock JDM ECUs and UK Engines, good or bad? - “Always interested to see the power curves when stock engines are mismatched such as yours. I.e. Euro engine with JDM ECU or JDM engine with Euro ECU. I dyno’d the latter the week before you and got an average result on a stock EP3 civic 202bhp but with lower than stock torque throughout the low to mid range. Your car and combination showed that the JDM ECU map is a pretty aggressive one and I was impressed with the power and torque it made out of the box.”
Do you feel the stock Elise exhaust with the SunSpeed 4-1 manifold & cat is a good combo? - ”The combination of 4-1 exhaust manifold with stock Elise back box made it difficult to achieve the low to mid torque gains I usually get on the Euro engine as hard as I tried it was difficult to improve massively over what we had to start with. I also feel that the manifold and back box were causing a restriction at high flow/rpm so I’d be confident there will be more power to come if this was changed to a more free flowing system. With the right company it wouldn’t even have to be much noisier.”
How do you think the engine faired during the Dyno runs? - “As with all stock Honda engines the engine took all of the sustained dyno mapping in its stride not missing a beat once. Due to the Euro engines relatively low compression ratio detonation was never a problem (Also helped by the V Power fuel). Only thing to remark on was that the cylinder head temperatures (CHTs) were between 15-20degs hotter than what the coolant display in the car was reading. Redline water wetter will help this but I think there maybe a bit of a short circuit routing in the coolant system perhaps.”
In summary what are your thoughts? - “The final power tuning showed just how good the JDM ECU was as I certainly couldn’t increase the torque over what the JDM ECU made at 5,000rpm. But increases everywhere else left me happy that you’d feel the difference on the road. All in all was a pleasure mapping the car, wasn’t as easy as a stock civic car with straight exhaust and std 4-2-1 exhaust manifold which I do many of but was certainly interesting to see the differences that your induction and exhaust systems give. I’d say if you could live with more noise you would gain 5-10% more torque almost the whole way through the rev range. But now you have an AEM ECU your options are wide open. Supercharging, turbo charging, Nitrous all of these can now be safely applied as you have what I believe to be the best available ECU for your K series engine.”
Live mapping on your PC:
The AEM ECU can be live mapped, once plugged in to a PC, with the AEM software loaded the engine behaviour can be altered with the tap of a few keys.
The image above shows the live map with the engine running, this can be altered by highlighting your selection and using the +/- keys.
Being able to alter some basic function yourself is very useful. I have altered the idle speed and shifted the radiator fan thresholds to be more acceptable.
Also, in the future I plan to use the ECU to drive some shift lights - it really doesn’t look that difficult to do. The AEM software allows you to set conditions on the spare logic outputs, so a rev light setup is an obvious one.
Videos - should be available once compressed.