DISCO3.CO.UK - View topic - Dastek Powerplug

pbhawkin

Member Since: 14 Dec 2006
Location: Mudgee
Posts: 377

2013 Discovery 4 3.0 SDV6 HSE Auto Loire Blue

Thank god for (little) differences, and competition it's what makes the world go around.
If we all had the same car with the same tune and (cap)abilities then it would be a boring old world wouldn't it? (might have to go and live in China with everything/one the same and all driving 'Ching-Wa' cars).
The ONLY way to solve this (and I don't for a minute believe it will happen) is for ALL the chip/box/tune guys to get together in one place at the same time with ONE car and driver and test the individual upgrades one after the other (without the driver aware of what is in the car at any time). regards
Peter
__________________________________________
Oct 2013 SDV6 3.0 HSE.
2007 TDV6 SE E-diff, adaptive lights sold 1/2014

18th May 2007 12:56 am

Gerry Gaffney

Member Since: 17 May 2007
Location: Fife
Posts: 8

A previous technical discussion ended the same way on RRsport http://www.rrsport.co.uk/forum/topic11-30.html I gave up as the guy ducked & dived better than Cassius Clay whilst still maintaining 'I am the greatest'

Peter the problem with straight forward driver time tests is that some unscrupulous companies will supply 'test special' tunes, which run much more power than they can safely release to the general public, therefore it needs logged with EGT's & AFR's to determine if the tune being tested is safe, however I agree a blind test on the same vehicle with the same driver is the only way.

I'll start the ball rolling:

Tuners (or resellers

) prepared to subject their equipment (ooh-err missus) to a blind scientific test:

1) Dastek UK Ltd.
2)
3)
.
.
.

Cheers,

Gerry

18th May 2007 1:11 am

DG
Site Moderator

Member Since: 12 Dec 2005
Location: The Gaff
Posts: 50952

OK Gerry I take it all back....you don't lie and never have. Me neither

But now that you've bounced your unfeasibly big boollocks around the site... gaining free publicity in the process ...why don't you put your money where your mouth is and become a site sponsor...then when you sell a few boxes, people can give their feedback that others can judge. For all of this argument I'm still none the wiser as to what your product offers in performance terms. You seem to be wanting to discredit one individual... but you know he isn't the only one to make a similar assessment of what the box does. What are we to believe? 21 year LR veteran > D2 GS 2003 > D3 S 2006 > D3 HSE 2009 > D4 HSE 2013 > D4 HSE 2015 > D5 HSE 2018 > DS HSE R-Dynamic P300e 2021

18th May 2007 1:23 am

Jamo

Member Since: 18 Jan 2006
Location: Esperance, Western Australia
Posts: 1170

In the words of Vinnie Barbarino "I'm sooo confused!" Have a nice day!
2010 Cayenne Diesel with PASM & Off Road Pkg
2005 HSE D3 (Sold)

18th May 2007 1:36 am

disco4x4au

Member Since: 19 Jan 2006
Location: Perth
Posts: 409

DG wrote:

Well I don't think we've have quite learnt what it's capable of ....but having looked back through all the relevant posts you are correct in stating that the various remapping tuners have repeatedly commented on 'plug in' boxes raising rail pressure ...are we saying that they are all wrong Are these boxes D3 specific?

DG - agreed, we haven't learnt what this particular box is capable of - but neither do we know _all_ that ECU remaps are capable of. My point is that, regardless of how many people state it, there seems no logic to the statement "plugin boxes ONLY raise rail pressures". Why should this be so? We are told that an ECU remap modifies turbo boost, timing AND rail pressures/pulse duration. For the ECU to accomplish that, it must surely receive signals from these components. Why then can a plugin box ONLY vary the signal from the rail-pressure sensor?? It makes no sense?!

I'm sure there are _some_ products in the marketplace that only take the "cheap" way out, but it doesn't follow that they ALL have to.

I don't think this should blow up into a "mine is better than yours" thread, and some of Gerry's last post seemed to be heading down that way. There's no need for him to denigrate other suppliers simply because they cannot (or will not) answer Gerry's demands. But then again, if it _is_ true that the plugin box does far more than just muck around with rail pressures, I can understand his frustration at all the comments made about his product.

I'm interested in the plugin box solution. Unlike our UK brothers, it's not an easy (or quick) task to get an ECU remapped over here - and then have to get it remapped again when it gets overridden by some over-zealous mechanic-come-laptop-operator.

Cheers,

Gordon ex - 2006 D3 TDV6 SE, silver, with lots of stuff - R.I.P.
ex - 2009 D3 TDV6 SE, silver, had lots of stuff too!
Now - 2010 RRS 3.0 TDV6, rimini red, 18" rims + Cooper LTZ, rear eLocker, Spider tuning box, GOE protection plates and rock sliders, GOE 3way shortened rods.

18th May 2007 6:08 am

Gerry Gaffney

Member Since: 17 May 2007
Location: Fife
Posts: 8

Morning all,

DG I've never said I've never lied, but I've grown up now

& learned the hard way that lies bite you on the bum, so I don't lie anymore, quite a simple philosophy on life really, but it does wonders for ones sleep, health & wealth

I'm not looking to discredit nor pick on anyone, but let me ask you this, would you not feel agrieved if someone spouted a lot of tosh in a public forum about you or your product? If any other tuning company wishes to challenge me on the matters I've brought to light, then please feel free to do so. The sooner an educated discussion takes place on the merit & capabalities of different techniques of tunig take place, the greater the likelyhood of flushing out the charlatans.

I will PM you some info on the system & what it's capabilities are, so I am not taking advantage of the free publicity, this thread is generating.

Chorlton - I'd say consumer choice, maybe they get better mark-up, who knows? Let's face it there really isn't much in the way of hardware costs, just simply downloading some code, got to be plenty profit in that? One thing I can tell you is that Mitsubishi, Isuzu, & Nissan between them purchased over 10,000 of our 'plug-in' units last year, maybe they might know something about engines?

Gordon - You are right, I've haven't really told too much about what we can do with our unit, but that was not the point of my initial post, it was purely to correct the false statement made by TFC, I don't intend to cover the ins & outs of it, as it appears to some that I am just touting for business (but I will look in to becoming a sponsor, just so at least I can offer an alternative view, & hopefully put to an end some of the lies that unfortunately turn in to internet truths)

Whilst the majority of plug in boxes purely raise the rail pressure, with no reference to engine load nor engine speed, as pointed out previously ours is not one of them, & there are a few others on the market that have similar capabilities to our unit also (a couple in fact originating form Oz)

I'm sorry if it appears like I am trying a mines is bigger than yours post, this is not the case, but I do get a tad annoyed when someone passes themselves of as some tuning oracle, & as such have tried to get him to enter into debate, as to why his system is superior to any other system or method. On reflection I will go back and amend my post so that it is less of a personal attack.

I'll probably not be around for a few days as we have a queue of Rally cars awaiting mapping for the Jim Clark rally.

Cheers,

Gerry

18th May 2007 8:54 am

NoDo$h

Member Since: 02 May 2006
Location: Finding new and exciting ways to milk badgers.
Posts: 19689

I have no technical background in diesel engines, but I did run an Alfa 156 2.4 JTD (136ps, 5 cyl common rail) for 4 years and 90,000 miles with a PSI Powerchip from East Coast Racing installed. Roughly a 40ps increase. A friend had a slightly newer 150ps version of the same car and had his engine remapped to 195ps. Side by side he had the edge on acceleration (pretty obvious why with 20% more horses) while I had marginally better economy. The in-gear acceleration of both was neck-snapping in both cars.

At no stage did I ever have any problems with reliability, excessive smoking or emissions caused by the tuning box. In addition, at the two MOTs the car went through, the garage commented on how low the emissions were. The garage in question had serviced the car from day one and knew it was chipped. They used to argue over who was going to roadtest it after each service 8)

My mates car was similarly squeaky clean and faultless and was serviced at the same independent Alfa specialist as mine. They loved his too (until some twunt in an MPV rear-ended it on the M27)

So regardless of the voodoo, magic, shamanic chanting or software involved in these two tuning methods, both drivers were happy with the end result.

I've driven an L200 with the tuning box referred to in this thread and it made a big difference to power delivery, but we opted to stick with the standard setup for our L200 as we couldn't see the benefit from the unit in the kind of short-journey use the truck is put to. Certainly we've never felt it was underpowered for the sort of vehicle it is.

Now I've met TFC and like the fellow and I don't doubt I would like his product, but I also pretty confident I'd be perfectly happy with Gerry's product based on my experience of a half-decent tuning box. What puts me off both, no, all remaps/tuning at the moment is all the claim and counter claim that takes place.

You really can't get away with selling a sub-standard product in this age of litigation and blame. I'm sure the different approaches on offer will provide subtly different benefits but until some kind of empirical data is provided from back-to-back testing to show a clear advantage to a particular product I may as well throw darts at a list of the products on offer for all the difference I might detect in the finished product.

If anyone can hear a cranking noise it's me winding my neck back in......

I know it's not considered "kind" to say no these days, but no. Just no, ok? And if it's not ok, still no.

18th May 2007 10:29 am

bkehoe

Member Since: 25 Feb 2006
Location: Wexford
Posts: 1481

2005 Discovery 3 TDV6 HSE Auto Zambezi Silver

Chorlton, don't suppose you know a guy called Chris, or George Orwell by any chance

IE - 05 D3 TDV6 HSE - Zambezi Silver
SA - 07 VW Golf TDI - White - Sold!

18th May 2007 10:44 am

Gerry Gaffney

Member Since: 17 May 2007
Location: Fife
Posts: 8

Hi Chorlton,

As we are Dastek UK (partly owned by Dastek ZA), I would have thought the answer is obvious? If it's not, then yes it uses the Unichip as it's control unit & then we have specific OE connector interfaces.

There is no need for rebranding, we are proud of our product & it's capabilities, so unlike other companies there is no need to pass it off as another product.

Hi NoDo$h,

Thanks for the input, I'd like to point out that I'm not stating that our product is any going to give any better results than anyone else's, as the end of the day there s only so much boost & fuel & only one correct point of injection (for a given load & speed) that an engine can take, so in theory all units should yeild the same power if tuned accurately (& of course are capable of doing what is required) My point all along is to combat some of the crap that is passed of as gospel & in the process reduce the number of charlatans misleading people.

Hope that answers your question.

Gerry

18th May 2007 10:51 am

10forcash

Member Since: 09 Jun 2005
Location: Ubique
Posts: 16534

2007 Discovery 3 TDV6 HSE Manual Zermatt Silver

Gerry, you've been a busy boy!!
Firstly,

Quote:
but then in the second message you say that an increase in rail pressure or injector pulse width will both result in an increase in soot & hence clogging up, however given that there are only 2 methods of increasing the quantity of fuel into the engine

Ha! nice subtle rewording there

If you re-read my post, the word I used was and... Where I feel a remap scores is that the improvement in toque & power is done by much more than just tweaking the fuel amount & timing - you are aware that LR use different injectors on the 07MY TDV6 to cope with the factory increased fuel rail pressure aren't you?

Which leads me on to the second point....

You say

Quote:
Whilst the majority of plug in boxes purely raise the rail pressure, with no reference to engine load nor engine speed, as pointed out previously ours is not one of them

Without talking directly to the ECU I'm puzzled as to how you can measure this as the load is calculated from various sensors and I/O's and not directly measured on the TDV6, it is however broadcast on the high-speed CAN - are you interfacing to this?

And as for 'blind testing'

you make the comment that remappers could produce a 'one-shot' tune to 'win' the test.... well I'm sure you could too

as much as I'd like to expend time and effort, it's a pretty pointless exercise without any form of benchmark

As I've pointed out previously, 'Torq-Tune' not only provides real world torque and power increases but has had a lot of time spent on it improving 'driveability' and 'feel'. I'm sure you'll agree these factors are as important as raw numbers but are difficult to put into tangible measures.

One final point on EGT - My products EGT is comfortably inside the design limits, is yours?

18th May 2007 11:48 am

Gerry Gaffney

Member Since: 17 May 2007
Location: Fife
Posts: 8

Goodness, more waffle with no back-up, please there surely is only so much dancing around the subject before people ask questions of what you can really do (or know), where is the proof, where are the research or white papers, where is the huge archive of internet data?

Please explain to the good people here why LR vary the rail pressure as standard based on load & speed? If you are not increasing the pressure than you are increasing the pulsewidth, it's that simple or is it? Maybe it's the secret method that you'll not tell anyone about becaue it is so technically advanced that no-one here will understand

If you are increasing the injector on-time, then you increase the EGT - simple.

You state that your improvement is done with much more than just fuel & timing, please can you clear up what 'things' you are actually changing, as far as I was concerned, a diesel engine requires the correct amount of fuel in realtion to the air consumed (air consumed of course can vary by boost pressure, baro pressure, air temp, but lets assume these are fixed - with excpetion of the boost of course, which we can happily vary) & the fuel injected at the correct time, so I'm sure if you have some amazing way of doing this better, you'd like to shout it from the roof tops (& you'd be entitled to do so both on the amazing advancements in powertrain technoloy, as well as the fact your are an authorised trader here)

We can interface, manipulate & write back in real time the CAN data, but in this instance have no need to, we derive load from MAP, MAF & TPS & an RPM multiplier. RPM we measure & manipulate direct from the crank position sensor.

The blind test can be carried out with an EGT probe & AFR meter connected & logged for each & every test, this way if someones EGT is 100C higher than others then it's easy to see the 'test special' I'm up for it are you. Maybe for the benefit of the wider audiance we could have an Q&A session, & demonstrate what access we have to the ECU & how we can modify things & what the effects are, I'm sure the guys here would like that?

I'm not for one minute saying that you don't get great results with your product, lots of happy customers I'm sure will testify to that, all I am doing is showing up your lack of understanding of engine management programming & that fact that you have clearly made incorrect comments.

I'm happy with my EGT never going beyond 780C, but then I can give you an answer, because lets face it, anyone can go out plug our unit in, drill and tap a 1/8 npt fitting & screw in a thermocouple & measure it up a decent hill, so why try & hide it as some kind of trade secret. I could do that with yours very easily, I could then let you know what it is

Must go more cars to map

Gerry

18th May 2007 12:54 pm

DG
Site Moderator

Member Since: 12 Dec 2005
Location: The Gaff
Posts: 50952

Gerry, I must say that your similar arguments made interesting reading on the RRSport site sometime ago.....can you give us a rough idea how many guys went on to purchase? 21 year LR veteran > D2 GS 2003 > D3 S 2006 > D3 HSE 2009 > D4 HSE 2013 > D4 HSE 2015 > D5 HSE 2018 > DS HSE R-Dynamic P300e 2021

Last edited by DG on 18th May 2007 1:20 pm. Edited 1 time in total

18th May 2007 1:02 pm

Dom Harvey
Lord of the Four Fingers

Member Since: 15 Apr 2005
Location: Dorset
Posts: 7454

2012 Discovery 4 3.0 SDV6 GS Auto Orkney Grey

2004 Discovery 3 - gone
2006 Discovery 3 - gone
2008 Discovery 3 GS - gone
2011 Freelander LE Special Edition - gone
2007 Discovery 3 XS - gone
2012 Discovery 4 GS - current

18th May 2007 1:05 pm

10forcash

Member Since: 09 Jun 2005
Location: Ubique
Posts: 16534

Gerry Gaffney wrote:
Goodness, more waffle with no back-up

Think the 'back up' is answered by this:-

Gerry Gaffney wrote:
lots of happy customers

And despite your earlier comment,

Gerry Gaffney wrote:
I'm not looking to pick a bun fight here

you seem to be rapidly heading that way... maybe why your debate on RRS faded into internet oblivion

I could quote (as you can) lots of facts, figures acronyms and thread sizes

but to be honest, I really can't be @rsed I do find it interesting however that as a relatively small entity in the world of engine tuning, so many of the 'big guns' have such an active and vociferous interest in my activities....

Thanks!

18th May 2007 1:12 pm

bkehoe

Member Since: 25 Feb 2006
Location: Wexford
Posts: 1481

I don't see why people have a problem with Gerry bringing facts to the debate by raising the issue of whether he's a sponsor or not - there's been too much of "My tune is better than XX because..." claims with no facts and if his presence brings out the true facts here then it can only be a good thing can't it?

Either that or ban all of the tuning companies from directly interacting with end users here. TC and JE have always had a commendable attitude towards interaction on the forums in my opinion. This recent stuff is starting to get tiring

IE - 05 D3 TDV6 HSE - Zambezi Silver
SA - 07 VW Golf TDI - White - Sold!

18th May 2007 1:15 pm