Is AA (Andrew Aurther) tuning still in business? Been trying to reach him for a few weeks with no response?

 

He is, but we had to part ways due to lack of service for our customers.

 

What method(s) have you been using in attempt to contact him?
I have never had any issue in getting responses from him.

 

Sorry to hear that, who's tuning are you offering now if I might ask? Unless I'm hijacking, if so disregard.

 

Back to GearHead. Sent a request for tuning for a customer late one night and had the calibrations in my inbox early the next morning.

 

Damn, can't crash and burn down that road again.

 

Agreed. GH is a joke to deal with. (Especially if you have an e99) I have had revisions from AA in under 12 minutes from request to having the file. He is a great guy to deal with. Best way to communicate with him is via email.
He is one busy guy, between working on trucks and engines in his shop and then doing tuning, then being Dad and spending time with his kiddos. Neat to see him turn his passion into a full time successful business.

 

GH is tried and true and Matt has always been a great communicator. We had too many customer complaints with AA unfortunately.

 

@cjfarm11 , perhaps post what email address you have been trying to reach AA at so the FTE'rs that have worked with him in the past can verify it or offer an alternative.

Knowing nothing about his schedule, I would assume that he has been a very busy man during the season due to several reasons. Some personal and some professional.

Good luck to you going forward.

 

Cjfarm11 AA is somewhat difficult to get a hold of, at least in my experience. As stated earlier he is a very busy guy but usually will get back to you at some point. It can be rather frustrating waiting on him but in my opinion well worth the wait, I've had him tune a couple of trucks of mine and once they are dialed in they have run much better than any other tunes I have used. I think one of the things that has jammed him up is offering lifetime revisions at no charge ( if he is still doing that). I do hope that he figures out a way to be more responsive on his tunes as he is a super nice guy. Hopefully he will get back to you, maybe try sending a polite email as a reminder

 

Seems to me that the market is prime for someone to jump in and start selling custom tuning. The list of available and/or recommended tuners gets smaller each year.

 

There are reasons fewer people do it. I would have to say the biggest problems these days are, in no particular order, as follows:

1. Inconsistent injector building standards. I have had good luck with the three I have used in the past. I have used one exclusively for the last 7 years so I don't know what's out there anymore. However, one guy's xxx/xx% injector will not be the same as anyone else offers in that "size". They're like jeans. One pair of 30-inch waist jeans will cut a guy in half while another brand in the same 30" size requires a belt to keep a guy from looking like a gangsta.

2. Forums and "social media". Reading testimonials from people having perfect manners from their 643K-mile, 250/173.66% injector-equipped dually that gets 34 MPG causes others to expect miracles from a nearly 30 year old platform. None of these trucks are anywhere near new and I suspect that if we were to take a mileage average, just in this subforum with currently-active members, the mileage of these things would probably approach 250-275K. This injection system was terribly inconsistent when these engines rolled off of the assembly line so to expect it to be better (or not worse) after 25+ years is insanity. Again, tuning from one truck's acceptable operation and throwing the same tuning on another and hoping for the same result is a recipe for frustration.

3. Customers who won't pay for live tuning. I am definitely not accusing anyone here of being cheap nor am I saying that live tuning is the end-all solution to driveability problems. Think a minute about how tunes are created. There has to be an initial setup used before any calibrations can be written, a benchmark so-to-speak. A guy calls with a set of 238/100% injectors and wants some tunes. However, the tune-writing person has personally tuned a 160/80% and maybe something a little smaller or bigger in the AA/hybrid arena. There's nothing in the tuning software or PCM that allows a guy to select flow rates and the software just makes **** up that works. Until a baseline tune for a set of injectors is saved and used to build from, it's a wild goose chase to modify a tune for a 160/80% and make it a tune for a 238/100% that runs well. It'll run but it will not run good......then the customer is pissed that the tune needs revisions and the calibration engineer is frustrated because in some cases he's throwing **** at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Without customer trucks coming to the tuner, it's an exercise in futility to try to tune for anything than stock injectors or for injectors in the guy's personal fleet (if he has more than one or two) or find a few guys in his town with stuff installed that he can play with for a while. Personally buying and installing injectors in different trucks and then playing musical chairs with them in the different model years (for different PCM families) really gets old. Over the years I've bounced a dozen sets of injectors from 95 to 97CA, to E99, to 99.5-01, then to 02-03 because the tuning for them is all different for the same injector. The copy/paste trick gets values moved from one to the next but the PCMs don't calculate the values the same between hardware families......so one really has to write tuning for each and every one. Then there's the manual transmission varieties that require different low load/idle stuff to play nice.

4. ROI. It's not cheap to start tuning ANYTHING. The hardware and software are out there but can a guy realistically make a living just tuning? Sure....if tuning is all he does.....on a multitude of vehicle platforms....with a chassis dyno on hand that takes most of the danger out of road-testing a vehicle that belongs to someone else. I've mentioned it before but tuning is a tedious task. Nothing beats staring at a computer screen for hours at a time - especially when perfection is expected but pretty much unobtainable from a thousand miles away on a vehicle with unknown health problems or condition - on the first of many tries.

Truthfully, it would also be easier if injector builders stuck with a maximum of three available injector sizes and quit reinventing the wheel looking for the next best mousetrap

 

Having to write calibrations for the junk injectors out there would be horrible.

 

Agreed

what would your top 3 size choices be?

 

Just building injectors that don't leak oil and fuel would be a giant step forward for the injector community.