Originally Posted by Tuner@SSA

The issue I have with Jeff is that his agreement with Cobb as I was told is that they handed over the RX8 platform to him in return he is supposed to uphold the same level of tech support standards as Cobb would..

Originally Posted by MazdaManiac

Uh, no.

That said, I held your hand on this tune as best as I could, but teaching your the basics of flash tuning was a bit beyond the scope of "tech support".

Originally Posted by Tuner@SSA

I'd like to get some details straight here. We never promised that we could tune the car, I explained that I had tuned several rotaries in the past but that they were all on standalones and I didn't have any experience with the access port on the RX8 ECU. I said I don't mind giving it a shot as with most unfamiliar software I can usually find my way around pretty well and get the job done.

Lets start from the beginning.. The car was brought with a used turbo kit from a company that was pretty much out of business. We install the kit with basically no instructions. We pretty much had no information to start with so we started searching and figuring out what we could from other peoples installs on the internet plus a little common since.

Once we had everything sorted out as best as we could I got the car up and running and I started to work with the Accessport and tried to tune the car.
I have friends that work at Cobb so I called them and they told me that they no longer support the RX8 and that I'd have to talk to Mazda Maniac "Jeff Abrams" or "MM" for short, for any support issues I may have with the Accessport. I decided to go ahead and see how far I could get by myself, that way I'd know what questions I'd need to ask when I talked to Mr. Abrams. So started trying to dial in the car and was having 2 major issues. The first issue, is that every time i'd go into boost the load would max out, the other issues is that no matter what I did when it would stage to the secondary injectors everything would go lean.. I finally got ahold of MM and sent him what I had so far for a map. I explained to him what I had done so far and what I was having issues with and asked if he could point me in the right direction as far as how this particular stock ECU functions. He replied with some answers that made since so I made the changes and went back to trying to tune the car. Well the load issue was fixed but the leaning out issue wasn't. Turns out in the software the 2nd and 3rd stage injectors are opposite of how they are laid out on the motor, hence why I was having lean issues.
After a couple emails back and fourth with MM we discovered the error and I changed it per his suggestions and started to make good progress on getting the car to pull through.

During this time the turbo was constantly smoking and we finally decide to pull it off and send it out to have it checked out. Turns out the turbo was missing parts from the CHRA and basically shot. Needless to say the customer ended up having to replace the turbo.

After making about 300HP @ 14 psi with it on the rich side and conservative ignition, I sent MM the current calibration and he responded saying that I had a lot of stuff wrong and that the MAF looks completely wrong and such and so fourth. After some back and fourth emails and us finally getting ahold of the guy who made the kit, we found out that the current way the kit was setup was designed to be used with the Haltech Interceptor and would not work properly with the stock ECU. Basically the MAF was in the wrong place and in the wrong size piping, which explained why my MAF curve ended up being so weird to get the tune where it needed to be. So we rebuilt parts of the kit how MM had suggested in an email and got everything back together. I emailed MM and let him know we were ready to do this one last time and hopefully everything would go smooth now. Jan 28, 29, 30, Feb 1, I don't hear back from him, basically internet silence. So the owner contacts him directly and MM gives him pricing and this and that to tune the car over the internet. Meanwhile I have already gone ahead and tuned the car to the extent that I can with the information I have. WOT was good, the car made good power and I was on the conservative side due to the fact that I wasn't 100% sure on the ECU stuff, but everything seemed to be working well EXCEPT, for some reason when in closed loop the ECU would struggle to trim and you could feel the roughness while driving. We did some research and from what we found supposedly those MAFs are super sensitive and a lot of people add air straighteners inline to help smooth out the signal. We've done this before on other MAF cars so it wasn't big deal. We installed the air straightener and it helped quite a bit but it still wasn't perfect. At this point MM had basically stopped helping us and decided that we needed to pay him to tune the car. I already had the car running reasonably well and the owner decided to take it as it was rather than pay MM to touch up what was left that I couldn't seem to get sorted out.

I went way out of my way to try and make this happen for the customer even with all the odds against him from buying a used turbo kit that was out of production to the blown turbo, to the lack of information about the kit, to the unfamiliarity of the intricacies of the RX8 ECU. He drove the car for several months at the boost level I tuned it too and the motor ran fine. I know some people on here said that the map should have been scaled out for boost spikes and what not, well the fact of the matter is I originally had it like that and MM told me that it was wrong and to only scale it out to the max airflow that we will be using. Being that he was the expert I did as he said, so at this point I don't feel that I have done anything wrong. Like I said in the beginning, I warned the customer that I hadn't tuned a stock ECU RX8 before and that all prior rotary experience was on stand alones and he agreed to have me give it my best shot and thats what we did in EVERY aspect of his build. I cannot be held responsible for any damage that happened from running the car under conditions it wasn't tuned for (IE more boost)..

Originally Posted by MarkAngelo

I'll give them a call. I just want some background on the setup of the car. So I know the potential. I guess all I really need to know are the specs of the Precision Turbo that's inside it. Also, needed to know if they tapped the oil or just used the oil drain plug for the return line.

Originally Posted by MarkAngelo

Gave SS a call and no one answered. Might try again another day. I just want to know the specs of the turbo.