SD2 vs Extender ship with Gen II Translator - goods / bads?

[BuickMike]

I have the TT extender G chip and Gen II translator with a LS1 MAF. It has been working out great for the most part, but the ability to do more fine tuning, especially in the electronic boost control department appeals to me as far as the SD2 setup goes. My turbo is pretty small for my setup, but my car feels like a big block on the street due to the stupid fast spool and I really like that. That being said, being able to control it under part throttle would be a huge bonus. Yes I know I could go get a boost controller, but I want to un-gimmick this car and ditching the translator and MAF, plus not having to add another component sounds good.

So, what are the benefits and disadvantages of the SD2 chip? How is it for drivability? Any major changes in fuel consumption?

It seems like a lot of people are going this route, however I came across a couple people that said that they never got their cars running well with it. Of course if I had a nickel for every person who ditched the MAFT Pro or Gen II because they could not get it to work.........I guess you just gotta know what you're doing

 

[BuickMike]

Nobody who's gone SD2 has any feedback?

 

[TurboBuRick]

BuickMike,

The SD2 chip has no problem with drivability. You can set the afr target for 3 different conditions. Idle, cruise and wot. So fuel consumption is not compromised.

I was able to smooth out some idle issues by switching from GenII to sd2. The car was much more desirable to drive and easier to tune.

I say go for it!

RL

 

[TurboDave]

Rich made some good points. Your questions are kind of open ended. But as Rick said, there's actually several ways to set up the tuning. You can specify via three cells what air fuel ratio you want it to track from your wideband (idle, cruise, wot) OR, you can set those cells to a value that tells the system to run closed loop and track the air fuel ratios in the systems large AFR target table, and like all speed density systems it has a correspondingly large VE table that can be used for fine tuning the system to reduce the amount of correction needed to track the AFR table.

The system has another feature that I especially like and that is what's called narrowband tracking. By setting one of the option flags, you can tell the system to track the narrowband O2 sensor during CRUISE. This is especially nice for cruise fuel mileage, because as we all know, nothing can track 14.7 afr any better or faster than the narrowband.

As far as those who couldn't get their car to run right with the SD2, it's like any speed density system, the car can be tuned to run better that it ever did when new, but requires time, effort and above all some patience!!! There's only two reasons I can think of for not ending up with a perfect running car and those are:
1. Not enough patience or effort put forth.
2. Other issues/problems with the car that are hurting tuning efforts.

And there are plenty of us that are willing to help. Help with guidance, or pointers, but not to do it for the owner.
I think it's pretty sad that someone would go to the trouble and expense to get a Speed Density system (of any kind) installed and then have someone else do all their tuning for them!? What if that expertise disappears? Then they're stuck with a car they can't tune and don't know where to start to do so. Just saying.

Any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.

BTW, In looking at your sig I see that your car is running exactly the same time and mph that I was running when I was racing!! I however, had to do it with 28# of boost and race gas simply because my engine was/is bone stock except for the turbo, injectors and intercooler and a little 200 cam.

 

[BuickMike]

Thanks for the replies! I'm thinking of eventually going SD2, maybe a modified PowerStroke front mount, and a bigger turbo. Not that I need any of this, but I think I may start with a SD2 chip so I can dial in the car and control the boost a bit.

 

[TurboDave]

I like how well the boost control works. Takes a little fiddling though because it's open loop and is set by %DC, and not PSI.

 

[STF420@comcast.]

Are you able to control boost with the stock solenoid?

Thanks, Mike

 

[TurboDave]

YES! Although I run a pair of stock solenoids for even tighter control. And higher boost than a single solenoid can deliver, when needed.


Sent from my iPhone 6+ using Tapatalk.

 

[STF420@comcast.]

Will it track and adjust automatically?
Or do you set it manually with the duty cycle?

 

[TurboDave]

It's an open loop control system, so you set it with %DC adjustments as mentioned in my post #6 above.

 

[BuickMike]

My plan is to use a Syclone Typhoon 3 port unit for better control. You need less WGDC with that. I have swapped my WRX's to that style with great success.