peadya100 wrote:I may have missed the tone of your email Ben but it came across as a bit aggressive to me. This may have been because my wife was pissing me off majorly last night and i had that tone in my head already before reading your post
I dont want to perpetuate this, but as for my high horse statement, i felt the below statement was a bit that way
bigBADbenny wrote:Some members simply lack the fundamental understanding to be involved at this level, and are clearly not willing to get up to speed..
But anyway, i get what youre saying, i just think you might underestimate what others are doing. Unfortunately we're not all lucky enough to have someone like Bruce to help teach us about such things. Lord knows if i knew someone like that id be very keen to learn.
I think a lot of people including myself put a lot of faith in our tuners... but i guess that is made better by this very helpful forum and learning which tuners are good, and which tuners to avoid. As you once said "MSR is a glamour tune" and for him to get such a reputation he must be good. For those like Bruce that have met MSR and been to his workshop... its anything but glamour. Hes a down to earth real mechanic and tuner that has built his reputation from outstanding work/results and through decades of rally wins in subarus. If i dont have the ability to touch up tunes myself (which i dont), then i feel more than comfortable trusting Michael to do it for me. I have taken my car back to Michael twice in the 2 months following my first tune, and both times he was happy to assist and check things for me free of charge... cant ask for more than that from a tuner
I agree with all you've said here. Unfortunately, for the guys down here, MSR is a 1100km drive. As I've said to people who ask for a tuner recommendation, once you get over the distance being a limiting factor the decision on which tuner to use is an easy one.
And you're also right in Michael being brilliant in his customer service and responds to queries etc promptly. If I lived in NSW I'd visit him more often. Infact he'd invited me back following the cam gear and OCV replacement to run the car up on his dyno to check the tune was fine.
I taught myself with a lot of help from anywhere I could get it, in the lead up to my MSR visit.
Sadly, in Victoria, the best tuned cars I've seen are self tuned. And those that know how to tune have spent countless hours perfecting their own cars, and won't touch another person's should anything happen. They do offer plenty of advice though and I've been a recipient of a lot this.
It's always disappointing when someone trusts a tuner and the following week a quick Learning View at a brekky meet shows the persons IAM has dropped significantly and his car has been knocking. This is on a freshly rebuilt motor too which suffered a head gasket failure running an MRT tune. If it wasn't for people like Ben this person wouldn't have known better and most likely a similar problem would've occurred down the track. Maybe the tune's fine and the rebuild has an issue? Who knows? But at least now and investigation has commenced.
I too feel a bit sad, to be honest, that a person would spend $5000+ on mods but not consider a Tactrix cable and a quick lesson in using Learning View or RR logger to keep an eye on things. When I owned my Lib, as well as other cars, weekly I'd check the oil level, coolant condition and a few other basic checks to ensure the car was fine. I simply added a fortnightly check via Learning View to the list of activities I undertook. It doesn't take long and I found a pre-emptive DTC which ultimately was a broken clip on a coil pack. Things like that are very good to know before things escalate.
I'm sure with your car if you "feel" something is amiss you simply visit MSR and he soughts you out.
The Kido tuned guys put in for a "tune tweak" when he's next down. Free as part of his service agreement.
When I felt something a miss with my Springy tune it cost me $300 for a tweak. I couldn't continue with too many of those visits.
