A Ton of Respect for Those Who Understand It
There's so much that goes into it, and honestly, there are people out there who understand it because they've put in the time and effort to grasp the intricacies involved. The type of fuel used, the engine temperature, the geometry of the engine, and the RPM - all these factors come into play when trying to optimize performance.
RPM: A Crucial Factor
If you're at a very high RPM, there's not much time for that flame to expand, so you need to consider how to compensate. One approach is to advance the timing more, giving the flame more time to expand. However, this isn't entirely correct because as the piston moves faster up and down, the air becomes more turbulent, allowing the flame to travel quicker. This means that traditional point-to-point tuning methods can be limiting.
A More Complex Equation
To truly optimize performance, you need to consider every factor at every RPM. That means knowing your fuel type, engine temperature, geometry, RPM, and air-to-fuel ratio - all of these characteristics need to be taken into account at every single point in time. It's not just a matter of adjusting the spark plug timing; it's an equation that requires careful consideration.
The Dangers of Knock
Knock is essentially an irregular detonation where the flame front fires too early, causing a pocket of hot air and fuel to combust prematurely. This can lead to engine damage or, at the very least, reduced performance. To avoid knock, you need to find the optimal timing for your engine.
Using a Dyno to Optimize Performance
One effective way to optimize performance is to use a dyno to measure power output at any given RPM. Assuming your engine has electronic control of the spark plug, each coil can be adjusted independently, eliminating the need for a distributor. By advancing the timing as the piston moves down, you can watch horsepower increase and then back off when it begins to decrease.
Finding the Sweet Spot
The goal is to find the optimal timing that allows you to reach the peak horsepower curve without compromising engine reliability. However, if manufacturers prioritize power over reliability, they may use a factor of safety to ensure knock doesn't occur within a certain range of RPMs. This can result in more liberal tuning, allowing for greater horsepower gains at the expense of engine longevity.
Ignition Timing and Power Gains
For those interested in learning more about ignition timing and how it can be used to increase power, there's a video available in the description. In essence, independent control over each spark plug coil allows for precise timing adjustments that can optimize performance. By carefully considering every factor at every RPM, you can create an equation that produces maximum horsepower while minimizing the risk of engine damage.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to this week's video today we're going to be looking at ignition timing and how you can use ignition timing to increase horsepower now in my last video I talked about uh chip tuning and uh basically tuning the ECU so that you can create more power now this is a continuation of that video so if you haven't watched that yet that's a great place to start before getting into ignition timing now ignition timing there's a couple terms you probably want to know before getting right into it so advancing the ignition timing means firing the spark earlier than you would uh typically so for example here we have our cylinder and we've got our uh crankshaft here the connecting rod and the piston and it's going to be rotating the crankshaft's going to be rotating like this pushing this piston up and so as that piston is pushed up that's going to be top dead center when the Piston is at the very top of the cylinder so the angle that we've got here between what the crank shaft is pointed towards and the very top of the cylinder that's our angle that we're talking about here so advancing the timing for example would mean going from a 10° uh firing the spark 10° before top dead center to firing the spark 12° before top dead center so that's this line here so you move it back a little bit so you'd be firing the spark when the crank was here rather than here retarding the timing of an engine means you're firing the spark later so if you were firing at 10° uh before top dead center and you then altern it to 8° before top dead center that'd be retarding the timing so that's what I've got in green here and you'd be firing there rather than here firing this spark to ignite the air fuel mixture inside of the cylinder so when you're tuning this basically there's several things you want to keep in mind you want the spark to fire so that your maximum pressure is created after the crankshaft has has passed over and you've the you've reach top dead center and then your piston is coming back down that's when you want your maximum pressure to occur now that's pretty obvious I think because you want your maximum Force to occur pushing it down once it's in the proper stroke so actually moving down rather than moving up obviously you don't want to have a great force while it's moving up you're just going to be wasting power so that occurs basically between 10 to 30° before top dead center is when you're going to want to fire it so that your maximum pressure occurs at about 5 to 10° after top dead center now you're going to want the entire mixture to be burned almost completely by about 20° 15 to 20° after top Center so after that's already come down here and the Piston is on its way down now with this now 10 to 30 you're thinking okay that's a pretty big range what does that depend on well there's a ton of things that depends on and that's why ignition timing is so crazy to me it's it's uh it's incredible and I have a ton of respect for the people out there who understand it because honestly there's so much that goes into it uh the type of fuel you're using the engine temperature the geometry of the engine the RPM so think about this all right RPM if you're at a very high RPM you don't have a lot of time for that flame to expand so you're thinking okay well then maybe you have to advance the timing more so that it has more time to expand well it's kind of not even correct in that sense because uh as that piston is moving so much faster up and down the air is going to be so much more turbulent and that will allow the flame to travel quicker so there's all kinds of factors that you kind of don't even think about uh which Engineers who are coming up with these tuning methods are having to consider and all of it is going to be on a basically an equation rather than just a pointto point method because you have to factor in at any RPM what's your fuel type what's your engine temperature what's your geometry what's your RPM what's your air to fuel ratio every one of these characteristics you have to know at every single point time based on I mean think about that like how much you have your uh gas pedal pressed in and it's going to have different maps for when that spark is going to fire it's absolutely incredible but one thing you do want to make sure though is that you're not firing too early so that the engine knocks so knock is basically an irregular detonation where you you fired your spark and your flame front has started but there's a pocket somewhere else that's heated up enough where the temperature of the air fuel mixture is hot enough for for it to combust so what it does is you've got these two flame fronts and they're kind of battling each other and and it's it's not going to have an ideal combustion and so basically you could you could ruin your engine uh among it could be a slight problem and nothing major and you'll just hear kind of a pinging noise and you're not creating that much power or it could cause some serious damage so you don't want that to happen now how would you tune this to create the most amount of power well a good way of doing it you hook your engine up to a Dyno so you know at any moment how much power you're producing then um assuming that this engine has electronic uh control of the spark plug so each spark plug is going to have its own coil you're not using a distributor where you've got uh set timing basically for each spark plug um if you don't understand what I'm talking about there I've got a video on ignition timing I'll tou that in the description but basically you're going to want to have uh independent control of the timing for each of these so what you're going to do then is you're going to advance the timing so fire the spark plug earlier as the Pistons lower down um and watch the horsepower increase and then once the horsepower begins to decrease you know that okay well I need to I need to the timing a bit I need to back off and I can increase the horsepower so basically what you're going to have is is this curve where you've got uh horsepower here on the left you've got timing on the bottom and what you want to do is is uh change the timing so that you reach the peak of this curve um where you have the maximum horsepower and uh it's based on timing now what kind of uh can create some problems here is knock so if you're going to knock at say say this right here this point right here is uh 15° before top dead center and you know you're going to knock there well even though uh maximum horsepower may occur at minus at 20 degrees uh before top dead center then you can't get there because you're going to knock at 15 so you might set it at 14 or 13° before top dead center that way you're getting the maximum horsepower you can but you're not going to ruin your engine so you're thinking okay well why don't manufacturers increase horsepower well you're kind of going to want to have a factor of safety when you've got these warranties out there for these engines lasting 30,000 miles 40,000 miles 50,000 miles whatever so manufacturers are going to have a certain factor of safety so that they ensure that knock is not going to happen and if you're tuning your engine purely for power and you're not concerned about reliability and how long this thing is going to last then you may be uh a little more liberal with where you place uh your your timing so that you can have a bit more horsepower so that's on uh ignition timing and how you can increase horsepower if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome to this week's video today we're going to be looking at ignition timing and how you can use ignition timing to increase horsepower now in my last video I talked about uh chip tuning and uh basically tuning the ECU so that you can create more power now this is a continuation of that video so if you haven't watched that yet that's a great place to start before getting into ignition timing now ignition timing there's a couple terms you probably want to know before getting right into it so advancing the ignition timing means firing the spark earlier than you would uh typically so for example here we have our cylinder and we've got our uh crankshaft here the connecting rod and the piston and it's going to be rotating the crankshaft's going to be rotating like this pushing this piston up and so as that piston is pushed up that's going to be top dead center when the Piston is at the very top of the cylinder so the angle that we've got here between what the crank shaft is pointed towards and the very top of the cylinder that's our angle that we're talking about here so advancing the timing for example would mean going from a 10° uh firing the spark 10° before top dead center to firing the spark 12° before top dead center so that's this line here so you move it back a little bit so you'd be firing the spark when the crank was here rather than here retarding the timing of an engine means you're firing the spark later so if you were firing at 10° uh before top dead center and you then altern it to 8° before top dead center that'd be retarding the timing so that's what I've got in green here and you'd be firing there rather than here firing this spark to ignite the air fuel mixture inside of the cylinder so when you're tuning this basically there's several things you want to keep in mind you want the spark to fire so that your maximum pressure is created after the crankshaft has has passed over and you've the you've reach top dead center and then your piston is coming back down that's when you want your maximum pressure to occur now that's pretty obvious I think because you want your maximum Force to occur pushing it down once it's in the proper stroke so actually moving down rather than moving up obviously you don't want to have a great force while it's moving up you're just going to be wasting power so that occurs basically between 10 to 30° before top dead center is when you're going to want to fire it so that your maximum pressure occurs at about 5 to 10° after top dead center now you're going to want the entire mixture to be burned almost completely by about 20° 15 to 20° after top Center so after that's already come down here and the Piston is on its way down now with this now 10 to 30 you're thinking okay that's a pretty big range what does that depend on well there's a ton of things that depends on and that's why ignition timing is so crazy to me it's it's uh it's incredible and I have a ton of respect for the people out there who understand it because honestly there's so much that goes into it uh the type of fuel you're using the engine temperature the geometry of the engine the RPM so think about this all right RPM if you're at a very high RPM you don't have a lot of time for that flame to expand so you're thinking okay well then maybe you have to advance the timing more so that it has more time to expand well it's kind of not even correct in that sense because uh as that piston is moving so much faster up and down the air is going to be so much more turbulent and that will allow the flame to travel quicker so there's all kinds of factors that you kind of don't even think about uh which Engineers who are coming up with these tuning methods are having to consider and all of it is going to be on a basically an equation rather than just a pointto point method because you have to factor in at any RPM what's your fuel type what's your engine temperature what's your geometry what's your RPM what's your air to fuel ratio every one of these characteristics you have to know at every single point time based on I mean think about that like how much you have your uh gas pedal pressed in and it's going to have different maps for when that spark is going to fire it's absolutely incredible but one thing you do want to make sure though is that you're not firing too early so that the engine knocks so knock is basically an irregular detonation where you you fired your spark and your flame front has started but there's a pocket somewhere else that's heated up enough where the temperature of the air fuel mixture is hot enough for for it to combust so what it does is you've got these two flame fronts and they're kind of battling each other and and it's it's not going to have an ideal combustion and so basically you could you could ruin your engine uh among it could be a slight problem and nothing major and you'll just hear kind of a pinging noise and you're not creating that much power or it could cause some serious damage so you don't want that to happen now how would you tune this to create the most amount of power well a good way of doing it you hook your engine up to a Dyno so you know at any moment how much power you're producing then um assuming that this engine has electronic uh control of the spark plug so each spark plug is going to have its own coil you're not using a distributor where you've got uh set timing basically for each spark plug um if you don't understand what I'm talking about there I've got a video on ignition timing I'll tou that in the description but basically you're going to want to have uh independent control of the timing for each of these so what you're going to do then is you're going to advance the timing so fire the spark plug earlier as the Pistons lower down um and watch the horsepower increase and then once the horsepower begins to decrease you know that okay well I need to I need to the timing a bit I need to back off and I can increase the horsepower so basically what you're going to have is is this curve where you've got uh horsepower here on the left you've got timing on the bottom and what you want to do is is uh change the timing so that you reach the peak of this curve um where you have the maximum horsepower and uh it's based on timing now what kind of uh can create some problems here is knock so if you're going to knock at say say this right here this point right here is uh 15° before top dead center and you know you're going to knock there well even though uh maximum horsepower may occur at minus at 20 degrees uh before top dead center then you can't get there because you're going to knock at 15 so you might set it at 14 or 13° before top dead center that way you're getting the maximum horsepower you can but you're not going to ruin your engine so you're thinking okay well why don't manufacturers increase horsepower well you're kind of going to want to have a factor of safety when you've got these warranties out there for these engines lasting 30,000 miles 40,000 miles 50,000 miles whatever so manufacturers are going to have a certain factor of safety so that they ensure that knock is not going to happen and if you're tuning your engine purely for power and you're not concerned about reliability and how long this thing is going to last then you may be uh a little more liberal with where you place uh your your timing so that you can have a bit more horsepower so that's on uh ignition timing and how you can increase horsepower if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"
