Hey, just a quick question because I haven't read of anyone advancing their timing as high as I have tried and i seem to never get detonation or any bad sounds... I put my edge up to 3.00deg and still nothing. I know what detonation sounds like, on older mechanic distributors i remember turning it too much and the engine runs like crap and marble sound to it.


any advice would be great, being cautious for now and put it back down to 2.00

by the way i am running it on level three with 92 octane.

thanks

 

I run +2.00 deg on 93 octane. If you aren't getting any detonation at higher advance then I supposed you are okay.

 

yeah thats what i was thinking, just kinda made me cautious.. i was trying to get it to detonate and then back off until its gone, thought 3 was the point to ask someone to make sure before keeping it there and trying higher.

 

I mean I don't want to tell you it's for sure okay but just use good judgement and you should be fine.

 

Double post

 

I believe there is a knock sensor on these engines. If that's the case, it might not matter how much you dial in as the computer might be pulling timing back as soon as it detects spark knock. Running higher octane fuel will allow you to run more ignition timing advance safely.

Is there a way on your tuner to measure actual timing real-time? I'm only guessing as to what might be happening here. I know that on my 88 Mustang GT, it was common to set base timing to 14* BTDC, where at the factory it was 10*. This also required you to run 91 octane fuel, IIRC, or it would knock badly. It did make a slight power improvement on an otherwise stock engine.

 

I do believe the Edge Evo will display actual timing FWIW but I could be wrong I haven't looked at what all the different displays are in a while.

 

There is spark advance comes up as spark* btdc. When truck is not running it reads "10" so i guess thats base what it should be... I have it at +0.5 right now till i get all the advice i need from people... At an idle it reads 12-18 jumps around constantly and if i rev it up in park it goes up to like 30 jumping around a bit... Not sure what all this means, any suggestions?

 

That would be real time spark advance. The more RPMs you turn, the more the advance. The fuel burns at generally the same rate for a given octane no matter the RPMs, but obviously there is much less time at the upper RPM limit to extract torque from that burning fuel because the piston is moving much faster. Thus, the ignition event has to start sooner or the fuel would still be burning during the exhaust stroke. That's why you see the ignition timing advance as the RPMs climb.

 

So by reading these numbers is there a way to see when i have gone too far or if you can even go to far?
Knock sensor idea you brought up earlier.