Hot take: I ditched my tuner after a shop owner chewed me out

Last year I was running a SCT tuner on my 2015 3.5L and thought I had it dialed in perfect. Then this old school Ford mechanic in Phoenix pulled me aside at a meet and asked if I liked replacing turbos every 30k miles. He showed me how my timing tables were way too aggressive for the stock intercooler and I was cooking the exhaust side constantly. Swapped to a conservative 5-star tune and dropped my boost 4 psi. Truck runs cooler now and honestly feels faster on the street. Anybody else get humbled by a mechanic who knew better?

2 comments

2 Comments

maryt6219d ago

Your experience doesn't prove tuners are bad, it just means that one shop had bad calibration skills. A good tuner with proper datalogging and an upgraded intercooler setup makes more power safely without melting parts. Sounds like you found a solution that works for you, but plenty of us run aggressive tunes without issues because we do our homework first.

grace_bailey19d ago

Agree with @maryt62 that it's more about the tuner than the tune itself. Idk, maybe it's just me but I've seen too many guys skip the intercooler and then blame the tune when things go wrong. You really gotta have the supporting mods first before pushing power.