Wow! That's a lot of vitriol thrown Aaron's way.
I should have explained our goals and constraints. The car is my 21 year old's DD and all it needs to do is provide him fun, entertaining transportation until he graduates college. If it blows up and burns to the ground the second he receives his diploma then it has served its purpose.
It will never be raced but we don't want it so neutered as to simulate a soulless but infinitely reliable Corolla. Since we rebuilt the PoS Tii we got from TigerJapanese 3 years ago the car has run nicely at stock boost with an SAFC to fatten up the top end of the range.
Then in Oct'10 the turbo died and I had BNR rebuild it and had him do a Stage1 since it was just a bit more money.
Then in July'11 the SAFC died so I got the RTek 2 upgrade (from a 1.8) installed as it was cheaper than buying another SAFC and had more tuning headroom.
Over the winter I took the HKS EVC out of my 17 year olds MR2turbo and just ran it off the Tial's 12# spring since he doesnt need any more than that much boost. I believe that the FC's boost solenoid was lame because we were only seeing about 4.5 lbs of boost and when the ignition was on that solenoid would often buzz. So we put the HKS in the FC a couple of weeks ago and just this weekend turned it on and did a little street tuning; starting fat and leaning it slowly.
So we are not looking to tune it within an inch of its life, not looking to drag race it, not looking to spend any money, not looking to search for a pro tuner who knows rotaries and is willing to touch an RTek. Just want to find a reasonably reliable, reasonably fuel efficient, reasonably performant DIY street tune that will get him to and from school and will pass TX emissions and inspections.
Given that the stock turbo is frequently taken to 12psi I figured we'd set Mode A to 10PSI for daily driving and Mode B to 14psi as Brian@BNR said the Stage 1 was good to 1Bar.
On the RTek we are using the default Fuel Correction Map configuration. I have neither the skill to mess with rotary ignition timing nor the interest in learning. It is hard enough to find rules of thumb like Aaron's AFR and I have never seen a HowTo for tuning a rotary with EGTs and timing. And unfortunately the price of being a little tiny bit wrong is a blown engine with destroyed rotor housings.
So my take-aways from the replies are:
- Aaron's AFRs are conservatively rich but no one has an alternative recommendation (except for buying EGT gear)
- We are running richer than Aaron's already rich #s and that will impede our ability to boost
- That richness may be why we max out at 10psi whether at 50% or 75% on the HKS.
Cool. We'll lean it out some more and see if that removes the 10psi ceiling.
Thanks,
Jim