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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I had my car dyno’d and tuned back in February. It has a naturally aspirated 3.5L V6. The tune bumped peak crank HP from 288 to 306 and torque from 254 lb-ft to 278, which is on par with the 3.7L variant of my engine.
    While the peaks only gained 6 and 9%, respectively, other areas saw even bigger gains. For example, below 4000 rpm most of the power band gained 15-20 lb-ft over stock. And above 4500 rpm, the torque continues to rise rather than plateau which I’ve noticed in hard accelerations.
    Another interesting thing is how much smoother the power band is compared to stock.
    This was a bit pricey, though, and I see why most people don’t do this often. All told, it was about $2500 to do: Pre-Dyno inspection, HP Tuners ECU, set of step colder spark plugs, putting it on the dyno, etc. Honestly, would do again and would like to do in the future.
















  • The graph is showing horsepower (green lines) and torque (blue lines) over the engine’s rpm range. The solid lines are the stock run while the dashed are the tuned run. I wasn’t expecting huge gains. And most car people I talked to said not to expect much; one friend thought I wouldn’t get more than 10 horsepower. So the gains I got were actually better than I expected. But not by much.

    The main reason I did this was because I couldn’t find any data on tuning this engine. Ford put these engines in a lot of cars (Taurus, F-150, Explorer, Flex, Edge, and all the Lincoln vehicles), so there are a lot of them out on the road.
    And I know I’m not the only person who’s thought of tuning this engine. So I figured I’d take one for the team, tune mine, then share it with the world so other people can decide if this is right for them.