Hey Guys,

It's been a long time since I've been on here between college classes and prepping to get out of the army I haven't had a whole lot of time. Here's my issues.
Tonight while at a friends house, I was explaining the benefits of custom tunes vs. canned tunes to my buddy, and decided to do a bit of show and tell. When switching to a canned tune from my extreme street tune something happened and my truck is dead. The odometer reads --------, the wait to start light stays on, the wrench light stays on, and it will not turn over when I turn the key. When trying to upload tunes or return it to stock it says it does not recognize the vehicle, and when trying to look at the vehicle info it says cannot read strategy. I am pretty sure that I somehow wiped everything clean.
From what I have read on here before I am pretty sure I have to take it to Ford to have them reload the strategy unless someone knows a different way.
My questions are once I have it reloaded and running on a stock strategy will I be able to reload my tunes without sending this thing off to get it unlocked? I ask this because the tuner is still married to the truck with the stock tune previously stored on it and because i was not able to return my vehicle to stock before everything died this means that the truck will have something totally different from what the tuner knows. So will it keep me locked out? I guess this would be dependent on what information the tuner uses to lock to the vehicle.
This would be similar to having a tune loaded on your truck when you take it to the dealership and having a tech load a newer strategy that you didnt want. Would your tuner still be able to acess the truck without having it unlocked?
Tuner type and all mods are in the siggy. Thanks in advance.

 

Just speculating but they may go off of vin stored in the your vehicles computer. I say this because I had my truck flashed to new stratagey and it did not remove a use when I re-installed the tunes. I had however returned the truck to stock before new strat, but my sct was still married to it and did not see as a new vehicle. Your situation may be different though. You should give sct support a call before you take it into ford.

 

Thanks, yeah I plan on calling them monday. It makes no sense i have jumped between tunes before with no problems and for some reason this time it went through the entire tuning procedure and ended up all jacked up. It doesn't make much sense to me that it won't even go back to stock. Unfortunately my truck is down near Lake Charles now, which is two hours away, but I'm waking up bright and early in the morning to try to find a trailer wide enough to haul it back to my house. Another thing I think I'm gonna check is the fuzes to see if maybe one blew and its just not reading the thing, don't think I'll be that lucky though.

 

You're talking about something different. What you describe is to prevent the SCT from using the return to stock and then reloading a tune back onto the same truck from using one of the 5 Unlocks that the device comes with.

To the OP, you might be able to just try to load up a different tune, don't try to go back to stock and see if it'll let you. If it doesn't, then you might either have to use one of the unlocks, or send it back to SCT to unlock it for you if you don't have any left.

 

Well just got back from Lake Charles, truck is still dead. The tuner keeps giving me an error "1027 incorrect vehicle", but it's the same truck. It gave me that error for every tune i had in my arsenal to include custom and canned and even when I tried to return it to stock. I checked all the fuzes and disconnected the batteries for 20 minutes and tried them all again and it's still giving me the same error. I'm going to give SCT a call tomorrow, explain the situation and see if they can do something to the tuner remotely before I have it hauled to a dealership to get reflashed. If they try telling me that I have to pay for an unlocking fee and send it away, I may tell them to **** off because it is the same vehicle. I keep dreading the thought that maybe something was fried while I was tuning it, has anyone ever heard of an SCT SF3 frying components while tuning?

 

I wrote SCT last night and had an email from them first thing this morning requesting some info about the tuner from me. I just sent it to them at about 8:26PM central time and had a reply by 8:54PM central time. I thought that was some pretty bad a$$ customer service, especially considering that they are on the east coast and its an hour later there. They sent me some new software to download so I will try that tomorrow and report how it goes.

 

hey this problem happened to me. it with the new stategy from ford. u hav to talk to sct to get them to recover ur stock file then upload it, then u hav to hav them send u new custom tunes due to the new ford stategy and the custom tunes. i guess what they told me was that there was a bug or something in the custom tunes for the new stategy for custom tunes. but they hav it fixed

 

This is kind of strange to me and I don’t know what to do next if anything. I will also be sending parts of this paragraph to the SCT techs to let them try to figure it out.
I downloaded the updated SCT Device Updater and tried to download the updated firmware and Device Tune Revision software through the automatic update button like the technical support told me to. I kept getting an error at the end, but the tuner read that the software was updated so I moved on to the next step and tried to return the truck to stock but received an error 1016 program failure.
So I called the tech back like he told me to and he remoted into my computer and found that my stock file had been completely wiped out and told me that I would have to go to Ford and get flashed because he had nothing to build a stock file out of. Now that I think about it, it probably got wiped out when I loaded software so he probably should have remoted in and found it before telling me to load new software. Anyway he also gave me an RMA number to send the tuner in and get it unlocked for free if they found it was equipment failure. So I called Ford and made an appt for tomorrow at 0800 to get it flashed.
I decided to keep tinkering with the tuner to try to expand my knowledge of how it works. So I downloaded all of the software and reinstalled it individually instead of through the automatic update and it went successfully, then I looked at the custom tune loader and saw it was blank so I installed my tunes.
After that I figured I would try messing with the truck again to see where I could get with it. I tried returning to stock and got a “program failure” again, so I tried the canned tunes and got “ECU unsupportable” then when I tried my custom tunes every one of them was able to be loaded successfully and the truck started and ran great with each one.
The kicker is my tuner does not say it’s locked or married under device info or anywhere for that matter. I don’t know if it’s a change in the software or if I accidently hit a glitch and have an unmarried tuner.
Now I have to decide if there is any reason at all I should go get it flashed for a stock file which I never use anyway. I don’t know if the tuner will store the stock flash and retune again if I take it in. I also don’t know if I should send the tuner in to SCT or not. I’ve got my three custom tunes in good working order and the truck is running again. Part of me wants to say screw it, but the other part thinks it will catch up with me in the end.

 

Hey I'm just wondering if ur truck has the lastest ford stategy if it does its probaly due to the canned tunes weren't updated to be able use with the new stategy. Because I had the same problem with my 06 when I had it did the exact same thing but when loading my custom tunes.it was due to a programming problem from sct when they sent the updates to the custome tuner guys that caused the tune to not be able to load up, but it sucks that sct wasn't able to recover your stock file. They where able to do it with mine but when it happened I didn't try and update the programmer I just called sct the nexted day and sat on the phone with them for awhile while they recovered the stock file on my programmer

 

I had the VXCF9N4 stock strategy on my truck, but when I bought my custom tunes Innovative did not tune for that strategy and they sent me tunes with the VXCF7N3v strategy which have been working great for the last nine months until this past weekend when I tried to flip between the custom tunes and the canned tunes. From what I read on the other forums you should always go back to stock before switching from custom to canned tunes or else the problem I had arises. UsuallySCT is able to rebuild a stock file for you if they can find one on your tuner but mine had been completely wiped.

 

I had not heard that. I had always gotten the devices that were only for custom, didn't come with canned tunes so I never really had a reason to "flip flop" like that. That's good to know though.

 

I talked to an SCT tech today and told him everything that had happened and the way I understood it was that the canned tunes use certain perameters of the stock file and perameters that are on the truck already that is why the canned tunes file strategy must be compatable with the stock strategy or you will get a ECU unsupported code.

Custom tunes are completely self contained so that is why I was able use them to start the vehicle after the stock file had been wiped, it also explains why I was able to run VXCF7 strategy custom tunes when my stock strategy was VXCF9.

I guess the problem was that when you try to switch from a custom tune with one strategy to a canned tune with another the tuner allows it so you get a mess of incompatabilities to the point where the tuner will not recognize the vehicle and it throws a 1027 code. The code was fixed by downloading the new software which allowed me access to reload the custom tunes and use them.

I ended up sending my tuner in to SCT today to get unlocked (for free)because I learned from the tech that because I have a custom tune loaded to the truck and have no way to return it to stock, if the truck was reflashed for any reason the tuner would end up locking me out. So that is why you should always return to stock before you take it to the Ford garage, because even if you are out of warranty and don't care if they know you tune; they might reflash without your consent and cause you to be locked out.

 

now I am afraid to use my SCT .. to think ,, I was flippin thru tunes on my way from AZ to Oregon and back .. I would have been screwed ,, I keep my stock file on my computer also ,, I think I might send it to a flash drive as a redundant back up ?