Emerald Set Up

[Retro Pug 0 1 Cars]

Hopefully this is posted in the right place?

 

After a lot of reading on hear I've just spoken to Emerald who are going to email me a price for a Jenvey/ECU kit. Would I need anything else to get the car running? Apologies I'm a complete novice when it comes to this stuff!

 

 

They say it will come with a base map but I'll need someone hopefully a bit closer to me to map it properly, any ideas?

 

Thanks for any help

John.

Edited July 22, 2010 by Retro Pug

[large 33]

John, Give Tommi's a ring link. Its the place we went for the RR meet, I think I asked him about Emerald and he said he did map them but I know he did have a problem with the RR but that should have been sorted.

[Simes 248 2 Cars]

Hopefully this is posted in the right place?

 

After a lot of reading on hear I've just spoken to Emerald who are going to email me a price for a Jenvey/ECU kit. Would I need anything else to get the car running? Apologies I'm a complete novice when it comes to this stuff!

 

 

They say it will come with a base map but I'll need someone hopefully a bit closer to me to map it properly, any ideas?

 

Thanks for any help

John.

 

I suspect you may need:

 

Coilpack

HT leads

'some' sensors

[Cameron 16]

Torque of the Devil any day, Dave Walker is a waste of time unless he really likes your car. After my last session with him I got home feeling really disappointed, £360 out of pocket and with a car that would barely idle and kangarooed everywhere! I had a 2 hour session at TOTD a few weeks back and they managed to get it pretty much completely sorted!

[Simes 248 2 Cars]

Torque of the Devil any day, Dave Walker is a waste of time unless he really likes your car. After my last session with him I got home feeling really disappointed, £360 out of pocket and with a car that would barely idle and kangarooed everywhere! I had a 2 hour session at TOTD a few weeks back and they managed to get it pretty much completely sorted!

 

Nice one Did they compromise the map at all or just improve the things we'd spoken about in the past?

Edited July 22, 2010 by Simes

[All Praise The GTI 3]

cameron how much do totd charge? ive just booked a day at emerald as hes down the road think totd is abit far to drive on a base map. your cars awseome and a great standard of work. if dave didnt like it he wont be very impressed with mine

[Retro Pug 0 1 Cars]

cameron how much do totd charge? ive just booked a day at emerald as hes down the road think totd is abit far to drive on a base map. your cars awseome and a great standard of work. if dave didnt like it he wont be very impressed with mine

 

Thanks for the replies all.

 

Just what I was thinking! Its a four and a half hour trip for me, I would not want to leave without being 100% happy with the car... Torque of the Devil is also a fair distance but if they deliver the goods I'll arrange a trailer! I'll do as Huw suggested and try locally first and see what happens.

 

I recieved the price list and its looking around £1500 for what I'd need (I think). Do I need the shorter 90mm bodies? I'm using the shorter rad from the group buy a while back so hopefully I should not have too many clearance issues.

 

Cheers

John.

Edited July 22, 2010 by Retro Pug

[sideways danny 0]

Torque of the Devil any day, Dave Walker is a waste of time unless he really likes your car. After my last session with him I got home feeling really disappointed, £360 out of pocket and with a car that would barely idle and kangarooed everywhere! I had a 2 hour session at TOTD a few weeks back and they managed to get it pretty much completely sorted!

 

 

I'd happily take a car to TOTD, done a fair bit of work with Chris in the past, he's a good guy. wouldn't touch emerald though

 

First rule of standalone - Choose a mapper, then an ECU, not the other way round

 

K-tec though TBH, they're not just a renualt garage. Andy has done a fair number of pugs now, including at least one i know of for a well known pug tuner

Edited July 23, 2010 by sideways danny

[Cameron 16]

Yeah the boys at TOTD were saying Emerald isn't really all that, they seem to prefer Omex.

 

Simes - They sorted out the poor idling by opening the throttle slightly on the stop, so that it relied less on the ICV, and also reduced the overlap on the cams. Advancing the inlet by around 5 degrees made a 7.5bhp gain and really helped with the idle and low rev drivability.

 

They charged £200 for the 2 hour mapping session and about 1.5 hours of messing around with the throttle stop which had rounded off.

[Retro Pug 0 1 Cars]

Thanks for the replies all. I think I'm going to go with the emerald option as price is a big factor for me - £1500 is about a s much as I want to spend....

 

However as they advertise on the forum I've just asked for a quote from KMS... Any opinions here? Or could I get a better set up for my money?

 

More questions (sorry):

 

Is it better to use my existing loom or buy a new loom and sensors to suit?

Do I need a wideband lamdba display and controller?

 

Thanks again

John.

[Tom Fenton 1,526]

Dave Walker is a waste of time unless he really likes your car.

 

I will only partially agree with this. When I took the green turbo Mini to be mapped, as it was something completely different he was really keen. When we took our 205 Mi on bodies to be mapped he didn't seem that interested in it at all despite the work done by Phil making a really smart job of the airbox and filter etc. I can understand how you might feel disappointed after putting a lot of work into a car.

 

However the map on the Mi is very good, with a quick blip it will idle from cold straight away, it will take full throttle in 5th gear from any revs without stuttering, and it even gives decent economy on a run.

[CaptainK 11]

Thanks for the replies all. I think I'm going to go with the emerald option as price is a big factor for me - £1500 is about a s much as I want to spend....

 

However as they advertise on the forum I've just asked for a quote from KMS... Any opinions here? Or could I get a better set up for my money?

The best piece of advice as to what ECU to use was given to me when I had the same dilemma a year and a bit ago : You find a decent mapper in your area thats going to create the MAP for your car. You then ask them what ECU they prefer to work with and can get the best out of. This is what I did as I chose Sandy Brown to map mien for me, and he likes the DTAs. So I got a DTA S40 Pro in a Group Buy this club did early last year.

 

From my research at the time, the Emerald is a very very good system with lots of options. The KMS is good too, but I was told that its much harder to MAP using it. I can't back that claim up obviously as its all magic to me.

[gtmotorsport 0]

I cannot strongly recommend talking to the person you wish to maot the p the car, I know from a friend recently that you will get a better job if it is an ECU they have experience of. The same friend has had his impreza mapped by 3 different companies now and has only just got the car how he wants it, but it has come at the cost of a new ECU and loom into the final cost.

 

Before you go mad I would have a chat with Sandy Brown as he may well be able to help you out with a setup and recommend a mapper near you that will achieve a good result for you.

[Sandy 189]

I've got quite alot of customers from Wales (my own and JRE engined). I'm actively discouraging people from using KMS now I'm afraid to say. I used to recommend it, I've happily mapped many cars on it and have several exisiting customers happily running it, but whenver we've had problems (and they are usually very odd problems, such as random settings suddenly changing), the support has been merely ok and invariably leads to a new unit at a discount etc, which may seem ok/ fair enough, but the problems never seem to get truly resolved and the feedback seems to go nowhere (I guess mostly a function of the indirect supply). The vast majority of the work I do these days is serious work for other engine builders and on DTA and OMEX, Emerald a close third. I'm quite happy using those three, but DTA is frankly the easiest to optimise and refine, let alone trouble shoot and those issues will not be apparent to most customers. I'm so determined to keep my ECU preference honest and pure, that I don't have an account with any of the ECU suppliers and have no axe to grind other than what I believe to be the best for the user.

 

If you're a bit keen and want to get involved in it yourself, the Emerald has the distinct advantage of Dave's writing behind it, which is how I got started. I only went DTA myself originally because John Read was the best of my local mappers (as is now ironically my biggest customer, for mapping!)

 

It might be best to speak to some mappers/suppliers and see who you best get on with.

[sideways danny 0]

I think Sandys post above is a perfect example of why you should choose a mapper first. Very clearly a technical preference for DTA software so the results will be better. I've spent a lot of time getting to grips with DTA software and it's frustrating to me as i'm comfortable with Omex, and it's a lot easier to not need to think about where a function is in a menu. Emerald software isn't complicated (although i pesonally hate it) but the ECU's do a lot less than their immediate rivals so it's simplified somewhat. I've been starting to work with Canems recently and again it's a simplified ECU (with some excellent functions), but very intuitive

[sideways danny 0]

Oh Sandy, has Laine contacted you about mapping his VEMS yet?

[Cameron 16]

I will only partially agree with this. When I took the green turbo Mini to be mapped, as it was something completely different he was really keen. When we took our 205 Mi on bodies to be mapped he didn't seem that interested in it at all despite the work done by Phil making a really smart job of the airbox and filter etc. I can understand how you might feel disappointed after putting a lot of work into a car.

 

However the map on the Mi is very good, with a quick blip it will idle from cold straight away, it will take full throttle in 5th gear from any revs without stuttering, and it even gives decent economy on a run.

 

That's exactly how I felt - disappointed. All the work I've put in to that car and Dave turns his nose up at it, probably because the bodywork looks so tatty. I think if mine had been a straightforward map session first time around then (like with you) he may not have been enthusiastic but he would probably have done a decent job. It's only because I had 2 mapping sessions cut short due to a series of problems (wrong cams, then cam pulley vibrating loose) that he clearly couldn't be bothered to do a decent job, and instead did the quickest job he could and went "that'll do".

 

I had spoken to Dave about how unhappy I was with the job he'd done and how the car was virtually undriveable, and he had offered to give me a discounted session to fix the problems. But from his attitude towards my car I think the more I go there the more he will resent me and my car, and just put less and less effort in each time. Hence why I moved over to TOTD, they saw past the tatty bodyshell and saw the car that was underneath, and they did a bloody good job too!

[Retro Pug 0 1 Cars]

Thanks all, really appreciate your thoughts and suggestions.

 

Ok the way forward is to find a mapper. I've asked locally and come up with nothing! TOTD is about 2.5hrs away from me which sounds ok, I'll give them a call tomorrow to discuss I think. Hopefully I can still come in around budget....

 

Another quick question sorry!

 

How safe is it to drive on a base map?

 

Cheers again

John.

[Matt Holley 11]

How safe is it to drive on a base map?

 

Cheers again

John.

 

I fitted a lambda gauge and kept an eye on it, I had a 150 mile drive to Sandy and luckly he could check it out while he was at a race day to see it was safe before hand, you get to know if its running lean or rich by the sound of it after a while.

[Cameron 16]

It's not too bad, just don't go revving the nuts off it or applying full throttle. I took a laptop with me on my first journey to Emerald and trimmed the fuelling as necessary to get a good motorway cruising speed.