Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high tech,
I thought I had brought my wagon home and all that was left to do was let it self-tune. However, it turned out that Greg at Orinda Motors hadn't gotten back to the FAST distributor Richard Nedbal with key piece of information: the current state of the tuning program.
At least the Sportsman (and perhaps the entire FAST XFI line,) are truly hybrid systems. Unlike traditional EFI systems that have no self-tuning, they will improve the tune over time on their own. But completely different from automatically self-tuning systems, you can access the state of the tune as a set tables and manually adjust them.
Just before sending my wagon home, the guys at Orinda Motors took my wagon for a long drive and enabled a feature of software that comes with the Sportsman: Logging. Those logs provide information on what the engine is actually doing and suggest modifications to the tune. Orinda Motors sent the log data to Rich, but not the current state of the tuning program. Since the Sportsman is self-tuning, without the current state of the tune, the logs were meaningless.
Well, I had two choices. I could have brought my wagon back to Orinda Motors to download that tune program or I could have tried to get myself. For most guys, it would be easy, but I'm one of those hard-core Mac guys since 1988 and the FAST software is of course for Windows. Nonetheless, I really am a hard-core Mac guy, so with a little extra work, I managed to get the FAST software to run on a Mac. The gory details are on this post on the FAST technical support forum:
http://www.cpgnation.com/forum/threads/running-fast-software-on-a-mac-using-crossover.25909/If you just want to see the proof of concept here is a YouTube video showing my MacBook launching the FAST Sportsman software using a environment called Crossover:
https://youtu.be/9QvPSRSMdb0With this advance, I was able to download the tune program myself and send it over to Rich myself. The next morning, he sent me a revised program with a few adjustments given what he observed in the logs. Now it was time to see if I could upload a tune program to my electronic fuel injection system - and the answer is . . . .
https://youtu.be/EflXYoDUVKkYES!
Now I started up the engine and I took this quick video of my engine idling while connected to the Mac:
https://youtu.be/PmgN0JfDBKYOnce all this software stuff was done, I got my wagon on the road and . . . . .
WOW!!! There is such an improvement in control that it feels almost like a new engine. There is more power than I can ever handle, but when I need to make a precise control, the car moves at my command. There was another revelation. The engine is even quieter than it was on Thursday when I brought her home. As the tune gets more precise, the engine only gets the fuel it needs for the job. As a result it is quieter and saves gas!
The FAST line of electronic fuel injection systems really allow you to have your cake and eat it too. You don't have to have your car towed to a chassis dynamometer to get a great tune. A FAST dealer like Rich can send you a startup tune program that is good enough to get the engine started and then you can follow the instructions to get the car working well enough that you can drive it. After that, you can use the logging feature to collect precise data on how your engine is running to send back to someone like Rich. Then the FAST dealer can remotely adjust the tune until the car is really running like a top.
So this is a completely new scheme for electronic fuel injection. It greatly lowers the cost of getting a quality tune and doesn't leave you at the mercy of self-tuning. If it doesn't work as you want, log the problem area and send the tune back to be adjusted.
There is always a concern about how well high-tech and classic cars will mix. But in this case, it is absolutely a spectacular success!!
Cheers, Edouard