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I have a Van Aaken smartbox for a 2003 Ducato 2.8JTD, £150:00 if you want it, only used it for 2 days, power increase was phenomenal.
Saw our dream van on the journey home from Van Aaken workshop to Stoke-On-Trent & bought it on the spot, sods law that we didn't see our new van on the journey down, could have saved myself a few quid.
I have been contemplating having one fitted myself, and I am still looking at the pros and cons of prices etc.
The best advice I can give at the moment is enquire locally, with garages that do car tuning etc. if they deal in them, or know of dealers locally.
The best deal I have found so far is from a small garage about 5 miles from where I live who tune cars, he will supply and fit (showing me how it is fitted and removed) with a 3 year guarantee for £239, the smart box is manufactured in Germany. (his comment on the 2.8jtd engine is that these boxes respond very well to this particular engine)
The only thing stopping me going ahead with it is, I would like to find out a bit more about the box he deals in, whether you can ever compare like for like is debatable.
Hope this helps
I bought a tandem tuning box off ebay, been on a couple of years now. Main reason for purchase was we lost a bit of momentum on hills when towing the car on the "A" frame. With the tandem box it performs better with the car on the back than it did without it before fitting. When not towing the drivability of the motorhome is improved across the whole rev range, especially between 2000-3000 RPM, minimising downshifts from 5th gear. The box can be fitted in 15 minutes from taking out of the bag to driving away.
Colin
I still wonder why anybody still chooses to fit a plug in box over a proper professional remap, the benefits of a remap is firstly nothing has to be fitted to the vehicle, therefore nothing to go wrong, also plug in boxes work only with 1 parameter of the engine basically fuel, they achieve the result by simply increasing the amount of fuel into the engine, with a proper remap you are working with all the parameters eg injection at part load, injection at full load, turbo boost pressure, torque limiter and smoke limiter. With a proper remap you will not get plumes of black smoke when accelerating which is very common with plug in boxes, also with a remap it is tailored to the vehicle and driver of that vehicle and can be adjusted to suit not the case with a box, you are stuck with what is programmed in the box. I hope this explains a few of the benefits of a proper remap and as you can see the difference is a mini and Rolls Royce. My company removes loads of these boxes in the course of a year in order to carry out proper remaps and the difference is unbelievable. The price difference if you have your vehicle remapped at a motor home show is very comparable and also because we attend most of the shows should you require a tweak to suit your driving style we can do this on site at the shows with no extra cost to yourself. If anybody would like any further advice or information please do not hesitate to contact me
Regards
Alex
Useful information re engine re-mapping.I am presently going down this route and having my Fiat 2.8 jtd upgraded.The choice is either have the ecu overwritten as Alex has described above-ie nothing fitted to the engine or fit a smart box type booster,which is a 'plug and play' module.
For anyone considering this I suggest reading DAB's excellent post which gives the pros and cons of both tuneing methods,
Quote:
While I stand by my earlier post as "big hand, small map" advice on this question, there are further subtleties MHF potential purchasers might like to ponder.
It is true that more factors can potentially be adjusted through re-mapping than through the use of a smart box; any and all of the information inside the ECU can potentially be changed with a re-map. This does not necessaily mean better power and torque gains, however, as the factors that are usefully adjusted inside the ECU to give these gains are the same factors that are adjusted by the smart box - the fuelling and sometimes the injection timing. Most of the factors inside the ECU that can be potentially adjusted are of no benefit to the power, torque or reliability of the vehicle; it's just a question of whether the changes are made inside or outside the ECU.
A re-map is not completely undetectable. Many modern vehicle ECUs now store a log of when they have been flashed, how many times they have been flashed and what file they have been flashed with. Vehicle dealers and manufacturers are more than capable of telling that an ECU has been overwritten simply by connecting the vehicle to their diagnostic equipment.
In addition the software that is stored on a vehicle ECU is as prone to bugs and glitches as any complex software and vehicle manufacturers do sometimes make updates to correct problems. These updates will be flashed to your ECU during servicing and can overwrite your tuned map. Once this is done there is no way for you to recover your tuned map; you would need to go and have the ECU re-flashed again in order to recover your lost power. You may have to pay again for this privilege, and is a point I encourage MHF re-mapping purchasers to check explicitly. This loss of data is obviously not possible with a smart box.
It would be a rare occurrence for a smart box to cause a fault code and most fault codes that can be set by the smart box illuminate a warning light on your dashboard so you would be well aware that a problem had occurred before you went to the dealer. There are codes known as "soft codes" that can be stored in the ECU without illuminating the warning light but these tend to be for very minor faults that do not relate to the running of the vehicle so will not point to or be caused by aftermarket enhancements.
All fault codes can be triggered in numerous ways and there are no codes that will immediately point to an upgrade being fitted. It is also common practice for dealerships to clear fault codes and retest the vehicle to see whether they re-occur before investigating further.Dave
I suggest to compare that info with boosters post before making the decision which way to go.
Steve
______________________________________________________________ cheers Steve
I agree to disagree with some of the comments in DAB, S post, firstly the software we use for remapping which incidentally we have the uk licence for therefore nobody else in the uk is using it, when the ecu is reflashed the original manufacturers tag is rewritten and no extra tag is attached to the file, also the flash counter is reset to the original before reading. Therefore everything looks original. I agree other companies who use different software when rewriting the ecu it leaves a tag of date etc when reflashed. As for other parameters inside the ecu we tailor maps specifically for individuals use, ie bringing in torque earlier for towing etc,this cannot be achieved with a box, you are stuck with the parameters programmed in the box, sometimes on some boxes slight adjustment can be made, as for most cheap boxes they work simply by plugging into the pressure sensor at the fuel rail and upping the pressure to physically push more fuel into the engine, not good when you already have a high pressure system and extra load on fuel pump. As for the more sophisticated boxes that plug into the injectors to work with injection timing, all they are doing is opening the injector for a longer period therefore pushing more fuel into the engine. My company also sells the steinbauer tuning box, which we really only use if a proper remap cannot be carried out i.e. jap vehicles etc.The total improvement on a power box is between 15-20% bhp and torque where as a remap is 30-35% and still leaving all the safety parameters intact. Lots of power boxes produce black smoke when under load; this is not the case with a remap because the smoke limiters can be adjusted. Also dead spots in the power curve cannot be removed they are just pushed further along the power band due to the overfueling,where as remapping using our s/w completely removed dead spots resulting in a perfect power curve. Also the issue of the dealer discovering the vehicle has been modified, the only way a dealer would suspect a remap is by road testing and seeing the difference in performance or running on a rolling road to see output of vehicle. The main issue with power boxes i have come across is that the vehicle is involved in an accident and recovered to repair garage, the owner has not notified insurance of modification and the insurance assessor spots the box fitted, then you have problems with your insurance.
Regards
Alex
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