I know this question has been beaten to death but I am going to ask it anyway, and hopefully get more personal answers. I have an 04 ext. cab 250, there are only 35xxx miles on the engine but i am going to need to use it to haul hay and pull trailers quite a bit. I live in Northern Colorado and will be going all over the state with the truck. What are some things to look for in a chip or tuning system? I have looked at bullydog chips, but want more information. Is it even worth chipping? please any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

If your gonna be working the truck then I wouldn't really recommend tuning it especially with a bullydog or banks or anything tuner with canned tunes. Those can hurt your wallet and your truck more than do any good. Now if you just want a tuner to get a little more tower friendly out of it I'd go with some custom tunes like with a SCT x3 where the trans and engine are custom tuned to your needs.

 

Agree with above stay away from canned tunners. Bully dog, banks, edge ect... They will mess up the trans. Either go with sct or Spartan tunner. They do cutom tunes for these trucks

 

I'll take what they say a little further.

Right off the bat, rather or not I tuned the truck, I would get a good set of gauges to make sure vitals are within spec.

Then I would upgrade to a 4" exhaust system. I say 4" because unless you are going to go pretty big with your performance mods(injectors, turbo etc) you won't need to go higher to a 5"(or above obviously). Due to the fact you won't be flowing enough exhaust thru you'll actually lose low end power. About the only way to compensate for it at this stage is to really overfuel, something you don't want to do. In some instances, it might be slight and not noticeable using the "seat of the pants" dyno, but it's there.

Next would be the tuner. This is where I agree with the above posters. Only get a tuner that can do custom tunes. With regard specifically to our engine, if the tuner or chip says "shift on the fly" then that is mutually exclusive to actually tuning the vehicle and is not good with our engine specifically. People with the 7.3 could have gotten away with using those, but we cannot. Sucks, but it's the way it is. Oh and by the way, for what it's worth, this is coming from a former BullyDog owner and user.

Now this is a biggie with me. At this stage in the game, you don't not need an aftermarket intake. Majority of people that you'll talk to will say otherwise and you'll read ads that say otherwise, but here is what most of them don't stop and think about. Yes, the intakes do flow more then stock, but not until you hit 3700 rpm, peak hp and tq is at 3300 and 2000 rpm respectively. Those intakes don't flow more then stock until well outside the useable range of the engine. Now besure to take note if you are handed results that say otherwise, more then likely the test vehicle is a 7.3, that's no where near the same as a 6.0, you can't translate what works well with that engine to what works well with the 6.0. There are people that have 500hp+ and still runing stock intakes and they have alot more under the hood then just a tuner.

 

thanks for the info, i wasnt planning on doing intake anyway because of what i have read in previous threads, i had a 7.3 which was my bosses old rig which i used on the ranch, we put 293xxx miles on it. it had an edge chip which was bad. i am planning on doing exhaust as soon as work picks up. the reason i was interested in bullydog or edge was becuase of the built in gauges in their set ups such as the gt 3 tuner or the attitude. thanks again for all the input. i appreciate it.

 

Not to thread jack but i to was looking at the edge at one time due to all the reading it does and disspays. but i think the spartan phalanax or live wire from sct may be able to display readings to. I to would like to eliminate 5 guages and have all at one spot. This would also be nice for me to return to stock for any warranty issues. any info from the more informed guys on these two tuners would be great.

 

Well it wasn't mentioned that you were or weren't doing it and it seems to be a mod that most people do when they start talking about tuners.






It's a little to expensive to get their stuff if all your interested in is the OBD-II gauge monitor. SCT has one like that, but the LiveWire doesn't have that good of a track record of reliability. They do have a new device called the Touchscreen Xtreme(TSX), but that's a really new product and I haven't heard all that much response to it yet. Spartan does have a tuner that has built in gauges with custom tuning, what gets most people is the price, however, the price is relatively the same when you compare it to the PMT or the TSX(which are the closest competitor products out there).

Or you can just get an OBD-II monitor and running an X3 tuner, just make sure it has expansion abilities for things like Fuel PSI etc as that in particular(along with others) aren't covered in the truck's computers.