Diesel Tuner's Blog

We left off with our last article on the Raptor upgrade story with putting a new set of upgraded turbos on our truck to get even more performance than the +140hp tune that  we made was able to provide us with. Our raptor was sitting at 538hp the last time we talked about it. Now that we have the upgraded to 46mm turbos on the Raptor we need to tune the truck again and see if there are any other limiting factors when it comes to our goal of making the 610hp to beat the TRX. After a new tune was written for new turbos the truck was put back on the dyno and we were able to make the just over 550 horsepower before the engine  was automatically throttled back by the ECM trying to combat the rising intake air temps. This tells us that the truck, while capable of more power, still needs improvements before it will be able to perform as well as the TRX for a sustained amount of time. Below is a graph showing the intake air temp during a road pull in the raptor. The Orange line represents Intake air temp and you can see it spike under sustained load up until the throttle is let off. 

Here's what we had on the truck before we started testing:

• Upgraded 46mm turbos 
• Fuel Injector Clinic 1000cc injectors. 
• Custom Tune By Calibrated Power Solutions 

Too often trucks come into our shop experincing high EGT's, turbo lag, excessive smoke output, and bad fuel mileage which are all symptoms of a boost leak. It is so common to develop a boost leak that we now require all trucks to have a leak down test done prior to strapping them down on the dyno. What's funny is, most truck owners that we do identify boost leaks on never even knew they had one. The reality is that even if you can hit peak boost, you may have a leak, especially if you have a variable vane turbo. Variable vane turbos will change vane position and other operations to try to compensate for the reduced level of boost pressure in the intake system. Leaving you driving around without an idea that your turbo efficiency has taken a hit.