That's a very good tool and like all tools takes a while to work out hoe to best use it. On teh street it's hard to use without a TPS and rpm readout. RMP alone is not enough. Great tool on the dyno where it's easier to see what is going on but our dyno guy has a great 6 gas analysis machine that lets us see A:F plus unburned fuel, CO, CO2 and O2 levels.ricksd wrote:Well, 'plug chops' are free, but time consuming and not too accurate. I'm planning to get something like this:
http://www.innovatemotorsports.com/products/lm2.php
Less expensive versions show up on Ebay regularly- any wide band O2 sensor will provide a very accurate picture of your fuel/air mixture, and can do it on the fly and in any conditions you want to test. I plan to buy a spare header and weld the bung into it for testing.
That way we can analyze how good or bad the combustion is. It's quite normal to see A:F looking good but high unburned HC and that tells us what's burning is fine, but it's not all burning. That helps us to fine tune the fuel slope.
And then we get to take it out on teh track and adjust it again to make it rideable. We have found that best on the dyno is not always best at the track or on the street- especially at part throttle. It's a good place to start though and we usually need results before teh race season adn it's too cold outside to do plug chops.
Vince has a pretty good handle of what he's doing - which is to use plug color as an indicator to back up what the bike is doing in terms of performance and in the final analysis that's all that counts - how well it works on the street.
