Power Pack pinging/detonation poll

[accel]

Please do not give advices to switch from Power Pack to some non carb compliant tune. This thread is for those who either have to adopt to power packs or switch back to oem tune.

Anyways. Ways to check - roll driver window down, drive next to something like cincrete wall - freeway divider in heavy traffic will do, press accel. pedal for some acceleration and tell us if you hear
so called pinging. If you do not hear anything with windows up - this does not mean anything.

I do believe this is unhealthy detonation. This sound is very familiar to me. I used to live in a country where fuel availability used to be a big problem, so people would use whatever they could get rather than fuel their car was designed for. If octane rating was below expected you'd hear your engine making this sound. It was very common to hear around. I cannot say that most the cars would end up having piston damage. If you were careful and use lower gears to minimize impact you'd be good. If you neglected the sound and whip your car on a day to day basis, then you could get engine damage. It was common enough so that mechanics would have small museums of parts damaged due to detonation.

Personally - I installed power pack with octane adjust option on to begin with. I do have two oil catch cans. I am limited to 91. I filled close to empty tank with 91 before pp installation. I am still on the first tank.

First tank still has some 87 gas remains. I will empty tank as much as possible, fill with 91 again. If detonation does not stop I am rolling back to oem. Or maybe there will be som good advice here.

From my research it appears this is hit ot miss. Some do not have pinging on 91, but some have on 93.

Frpp response - do not worry about it - but I do not buy it. As mentioned above - destructive features of fuel detonation are well known, and just "do not worry about it" will not cut it for me.

If I have to rollback to oem - I will make all efforts to return it to ford racing.

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[Grimreaper]

Log it. The ford dongle lets you log now iirc. Should show at part throttle.

 

[accel]

Log it. The ford dongle lets you log now iirc. Should show at part throttle.

Is this Record tab? Will do....

 

[BlackandBlue]

If you have some e85 available put a 1.5 gal in there and fill the rest with 91.

These cars are e20 capable. 1.5gal will put you at e20 with 14.5 gal of 91. This will raise you octane by one point. I do it ever other fill up or so.

I will most likely get blasted for this.

Btw. High load low Rpm detonation is the hardest to get rid of. The car most likely is not detonating at high Rpm.

 

[AceS550]

If you have some e85 available put a 1.5 gal in there and fill the rest with 91.

These cars are e20 capable. 1.5gal will put you at e20 with 14.5 gal of 91. This will raise you octane by one point. I do it ever other fill up or so.

I will most likely get blasted for this.

Btw. High load low Rpm detonation is the hardest to get rid of. The car most likely is not detonating at high Rpm.

I agree, high load low RPM detonation is hard to get rid of. Even 2V’s on the stock tune have pinging (back when they were new, not the worn out ones out there now lolz). Ford released a PCM update addressing it but it was still there.

 

[accel]

If you have some e85 available put a 1.5 gal in there and fill the rest with 91.

These cars are e20 capable. 1.5gal will put you at e20 with 14.5 gal of 91. This will raise you octane by one point. I do it ever other fill up or so.

I will most likely get blasted for this.

Btw. High load low Rpm detonation is the hardest to get rid of. The car most likely is not detonating at high Rpm.

87-91 is all have. If I just drive easy - no pinging. If limit myself to no ping, then oem tune car is just faster no question.

But I do not need to floor to make it ping and it will be in low and in high rpms. High rpms detonation is not as strong, more like short bursts.

Going back to me living in the country with fuel crisis- knowledge base on detonation was pretty strong. You could modify your car to lower octane by reducing compression or electronic octane corrector that was changing ignition timing. Interesting fact was - these correctors were designed to work under 3000rpms. The reason - detonation was considered only below thatt engine speed. With pistons moving faster above 3000 it just shouldn't happen even on wrong fuel.

 

[CrashOverride]

I just wish we could be assured more positively by Ford that the extremely loud knock for low rpm/high load is actually fine as they say. I've never heard knock this bad before. This isn't "listen really hard and maybe hear it". This is your car illiterate co-worker going "what's that noise" when you're going up a hill at a high load with low RPM.

 

[thelostotter]

Former PP2 owner here - I always had some slight pinging with 91 octane right after flashing the tune or when the battery was disconnected. I was bothered by it at first, swapping between the octane adjust option and the standard timing profile and it was pinging on both. Fast forward a few hundred miles and the pinging was gone. I think the tune adapts to the fuel quality.

I drove with this tune for around 10k miles and a couple track days, no issues. Only reason I got rid of it was because I added long tube headers and wanted to make sure the car was tuned right, even though it still ran great with the PP2 tune. I miss the refinement and drivability of it for sure. I had to swap back to the stock throttle body with the new tune because the drivability with the GT350 TB was terrible.

 

[accel]

I just wish we could be assured more positively by Ford that the extremely loud knock for low rpm/high load is actually fine as they say. I've never heard knock this bad before. This isn't "listen really hard and maybe hear it". This is your car illiterate co-worker going "what's that noise" when you're going up a hill at a high load with low RPM.

For how many miles since installation does your car ping?

 

[accel]

Former PP2 owner here - I always had some slight pinging with 91 octane right after flashing the tune or when the battery was disconnected. I was bothered by it at first, swapping between the octane adjust option and the standard timing profile and it was pinging on both. Fast forward a few hundred miles and the pinging was gone. I think the tune adapts to the fuel quality.

I drove with this tune for around 10k miles and a couple track days, no issues. Only reason I got rid of it was because I added long tube headers and wanted to make sure the car was tuned right, even though it still ran great with the PP2 tune. I miss the refinement and drivability of it for sure. I had to swap back to the stock throttle body with the new tune because the drivability with the GT350 TB was terrible.

I have reset trip counter and will give it some time.

 

[CrashOverride]

For how many miles since installation does your car ping?

I helped my buddy install it on his GT, but it pinged immediately after we installed it. Ultimately he ended up getting a tuner to pull timing out of the maps. The octane adjustment wasn't good enough. He didn't want to go back to stock because he sold the stock throttle body, and the stock program wouldn't work right with the larger throttle body.

It's hard to tell if he has any extra power because the tuner had to pull out so much timing in the low rpm area.

 

[CrashOverride]

Former PP2 owner here - I always had some slight pinging with 91 octane right after flashing the tune or when the battery was disconnected. I was bothered by it at first, swapping between the octane adjust option and the standard timing profile and it was pinging on both. Fast forward a few hundred miles and the pinging was gone. I think the tune adapts to the fuel quality.

I drove with this tune for around 10k miles and a couple track days, no issues. Only reason I got rid of it was because I added long tube headers and wanted to make sure the car was tuned right, even though it still ran great with the PP2 tune. I miss the refinement and drivability of it for sure. I had to swap back to the stock throttle body with the new tune because the drivability with the GT350 TB was terrible.

How bad was your pinging? My buddy's was crazy loud.

 

[Grimreaper]

The adaptive octane learn takes time and repeated events for the ecu to store a set amount of KR for a given load/ rpm. Seems to be supported by what you guys are saying with a reflash as well (which i believe wipes the KAM where these things are usually stored). the process starts over again. see the attached photo, from a 2015 PP2 tune, adaptive knock settings are the same compared to a stock tune. but those are the parameters the ecu is working with.

i have not been able to compare the 2 versions of the ford pp2 tunes but plan to once i get to that point this upcoming year.

 

[thelostotter]

How bad was your pinging? My buddy's was crazy loud.

Loud enough that it was immediately noticeable on the first drive after loading the. I wouldn't say crazy loud. Was most noticeable with windows down when accelerating next to a concrete barrier.

 

[Grimreaper]

heres a random timing map from the PP2 tune, look at the highlighted cell on the left vs the right, the left table is a borderline spark table, as in borderline for knock given a known octane, in this case it should be 91 octane. this is higher load/low rpm area. you can see why these motors come alive or give the responsiveness they do with higher octane at low rpm ranges, (think e85). there is a lot of timing left to be had for MBT to be reached.

ideally you would want MBT to be the only region the engine is in for power output at all loads/rpm. its just not possible though.

second photo is with a stock gt tune map on the left. even lower than the pp2 tune but i believe this is 87 octane optimization.

the best resolution as others have pointed out seems to be getting the motor more octane , how ever that may be. not a direct response to the OP post but at least you can see the nuts and bolts of what the pp2 is trying to do and why octane matters.

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