Wow I'm so far out of touch. What do you mean by base timing? Last week I set the timing to zero. Back in the day with the factory ECU present I set a 7.5 degrees

what rock have I been living under????

what road coarse track???

where?

when?

road coarse is my racing of choice and I have not heard of a successful barter to build a track in the Peoria area

See here: http://www.i39rpm.com/

It's not a definite....but it's the closest chance we got!

I always set my timing at about 8 degrees BTDC. I concluded that this was a happy medium between the stock 5 and the burning-valves 10 I had used before. Then again, you know I always tuned at the opposite end of safe in the past.

My new set-up will probably still only run a 5-6 degree base timing. Timing does equal power and quicker throttle response but I've not heard of anyone getting big numbers with huge timing. There are obvious limits to timing since you are setting the point at which spark is fired and the more advanced it is set the earlier it will fire before the piston reaches TDC. I would think at some point it would get counter productive or useless to fire the spark without the gas being compressed and the piston trying to move up the cylinder.

I'd be interested to hear if this is possible though.

No sarcasm here. Its just that we don't have a true base timing unless its zero degrees which doesn't add much information to this thread.

Now total timing at boost level X is more meaningful.

We tune for race gas only these days. Our motor has not been hurt from too much timing yet. On the old red car we saw 25-27 degrees total timing at 27-28psi. This was on 110 octane turbo blue. All race gases are not created equal. Some allow/require more timing than others.

We did find that a richer setup allowed some increased timing and power gains. We did not have a wide band at the time so we were kind of guessing.

As awd4Kicks indicated advancing too far would become counter-productive ( detonation by igniting before TDC). Optimally you want the flame front to push the piston down just after TDC. Firing too early would cause the flame front to collide with the rising piston resulting in some serious knock. My beleif is crank up the boost, level out the AFR, increase timing until it knocks, then back it off. Of course watching EGTs during this process is advisable.

99Spyder's tuning process sounds very similar to my own. I leave my base timing set at 5 deg BTDC because that is what the ECU is expecting. The only way I would ever change my base timing is if I had an aem or dsmlink which could be configured to recognize a different base timing or in which timing can be tweaked throughout the RPM range.

DSMlink = $565
AEM ~= $1600

Pretty much, from what I've seen and read. Don't take my word though, check it out for yourself.

http://www.dsmlink.com/

http://www.aempower.com/product_ems.asp

hey, thanks for the link..... sounds good, I hope it accually passes and gets built.... I will show up there for sure!!!!!!!