My fozzy was mapped by Neil at Slowboy and he and his mechanic spent time fitting new parts getting the car checked and ready for a road map. Cant fault their work.

My broken hatch is on its way to Engine Tuner next week for a full rebuild and mapping, which as shreksta has mentioned is all under one roof.

The only reason I did not use Duncan to map the forester is because the closest for me was SRR and they dont have garage services.

I have heard this about Duncan being at SRR as well.

 

Not all maps take an hour, i know some cars that have taken a day, yet the bill stays the same. It takes as long as it takes.

Thing is though i doubt the map you did is as refined or got as much potential out of the car (done safely) as a decent pro. (assuming a decent one of course haha). That's not meant as an insult, but someone doing it day in day out for years will build up an experience level you just don't have.

Typically experienced mappers come into their own when a car doesn't do what it should when its mapped and they have to fault find to sort it.

 

Do also remember that in a lot cases that £300 + will include the time being taken up on the dyno as most use someone else's

 

740's would a assume require more time to get running sweet,times money an all that...
I'm lucky enough to spend all day every day with my car so can take my time with the tune.
I wouldn't tune anyone else's car tbh.

100% I've only been mapping around 4 years and only my cars and only esl,I do have a fair bit longer to work on my car and get it running well.
As I've said,a pure road map take a fair while just to work on closed loop fueling let alone the rest of the map.
I'll get there one day lol

 

If anyone reads Dave Walker's articles in PPC, you'll be aware of the number of cars that turn up for mapping with serious faults that need to be resolved first. When it's a relatively stock car it's easy to give it a once over and establish a baseline pull to identify any issues that need to be resolved first. When the car has had a lot of mods and previous maps, less so.

A lot comes down to what people are prepared to pay also. If I want a dyno booked for a whole day and a mapper to spend 8 hours fine tuning it both on the dyno & road (and back on the dyno), I'd expect to pay £600+ for the privilege. If someone is only charging ~ £250 then they will no doubt have other customers booked in for that day and I'm only likely to get a couple of hours of their time, regardless of how much work is actually needed.

 

True,but even £150 for a map tweak on the road for less than an hour is a rip off,as most mods require a map tweak it soon adds up,hence my DIY.

 

Possibly. But it depends if using a mobile mapper. If it's a 3 hour round trip (including mapping) plus fuel then that £150 is less than £50 an hour. Who'd bother working for that?

It's a very competitive market which drives prices down but should you be choosing someone to **** about with your engine based upon the lowest quote?

 

It seems to me that the money isnt so much what people are objecting to. Its the conveyor belt approach that seems to happen these days, ironically I have had a read of some of the old threads related to this at the bottom circa 2005 and people are talking about days not hours for mapping etc!

 

Some place won't entertain doing it that way, have 1 maybe 2 cars booked in on a day or tell the customer to leave it with them for a few days so they have time to fault find any issues that crop up.

You get what you pay for imo, getting a map wrong can make your car drive like a sack of pish or even cost you your engine, for the sake of £100 or £200 is it really worth going cheap?

 

Absolutely not. Especially if you've invested thousands on a rebuild.

 

Funniest thing is i got called a clinic fanboy and told to shut up etc when i raised most these points on other threads lol

 

Exactly this ^^^
Far too little time is spent on mapping in a lot of cases,of course it's not all about the money but value for money and a quality job is what it's all about imo.

 

makes you wonder why certain mappers dont dare post on forums like this one and 22b etc,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

I know of one that used to post regular on here and 22b until he was found to be not the expert he was purporting to be...

As for the comments above re mapping conveyor belts. Sack that. If i knew that's how my car was going to be mapped, i'd look elsewhere. Andy Forrest was a 150 mile drive for me when mapping my RA on new injectors, FPR, turbo, FMIC and intake before. That was a risk running all that way but i'd rather that than whats been mentioned above.

 

Andy Forrest made me get a compression test done as he wasn't happy and yip ringland failure was the outcome
he didnt map it and just take my money and say next

 

I see it hasn't changed much around here then!!!!

 

My car took from 10am to 6.30pm to check over, map and road test. Total of 98 runs on the dyno. €450 all in and same with all the cars he maps. Very thorough and sound. He has mapped nearly all the subarus in Ireland and ISDC.ie

 

[QUOTE=. Total of 98 runs on the dyno.

smells funky to me .

 

[QUOTE=lockheed;12050008][QUOTE=. Total of 98 runs on the dyno.

smells funky to me .[/QUOTE]

100 euro of the €450 bill goes towards fuel

 

Your completely right mapping a car for 30 mins and taking 350 to 400 quid is an absolute **** take if you work it out these blokes are earning solicitor and barrister money

 

I'm struggling to see the issue... are you annoyed that mappers map too quickly or because they charge a certain amount.

A **** mapper could take an entire day to do what Blamir could do in less than an hour, but they would charge the same. Just because someone spends plenty of time tapping away at a lap top doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a good job.

 

I wouldn't have thought even the best subaru tuner in the world could remap a car to it's full potential in an hour.
Do it once do it right.

 

Really depends, experienced mappers tend to have a library of Map files for cars with various mods, aka base files. If a base file is very near it may not need much change. But that is the exception not the rule, you can have two bags with same mods, similar milage and the map from one wont work on the other.

 

This is exactly how even the mapping God, JGM, mapped my two cars. Basically, he'd ask what had been done to the car mechanics-wise, and then find a ROM he'd done on a previous car that was similar, and use that as a base. The blob he mapped about 6 times in total, and it got better and better each time (I kept changing specs and fuel). He really was great, and is missed by many

I'm now using someone else who at least for now seems to be on "my level" when I speak to him (in terms of entertaining, or talking me out of, my crazy/idiotic ideas), so I am hopeful good things will come from that relationship too.

On the subject of base maps, building up a library takes time and effort. The mappers didn't just download a load of maps from Ecutek and upload that to a customer's car unmodified. I have no gripe paying for a modified basemap myself, even if it only takes an hour to do (having said that, none of my maps have been an hour - shortest was 1.5 hours for a fuel change / timing adjustment), because the result is usually better than if they had to start from scratch every time.

Also good technical people cost money to hire - if they're great at technical stuff, they could probably earn decent money doing something else, so as a consumer, you have to compete with this too. Someone who can make (i don't know if this is true), say 50k as a permie a year doing something isn't going to do mapping for 150 pounds a day (or however much people want to pay for mapping), because it's not going to pay anywhere near the same, considering that they wont be able to do mapping full time, there's travel time, threads like this where their name gets dragged through the mud etc. They are not charities, and they have families to feed too, the same as everyone else.

Even though the comment earlier about "it's just adjusting some parameters and anyone should be able to do it" (paraphrasing) is technically correct, in my experience working in a technical field, there is a _massive_ difference between how good people are, and the solutions they build. There are always many ways to solve a problem, but some of the solutions are better than others, and having seen some of the abominations that "work", I would rather have the one that "works elegantly". Whilst the correlation between my field and mapping may not be complete in this respect, there is surely some correlation at the very least.

 

Mappers have families to feed What aload of ****e
Poor ol mappers
god love them
can never catch a break
living on the breadline

 

I don't think anyone's arsed at how much it costs for a remap,worth every penny and more when done right,not when it's a rushed/p1ss poor job and ultimately end up with problems.
You either end up chasing the tuner for map tweak/s,taking it to another tuner or living with a cr@p driving car which can be 'explosive' at times!

 

Your paying for their expertise, it takes years to learn to do it propperly, as above to collect the correct files to start the mapping from.

some people just dont get it, they want everything for nothing, then when it goes wrong blame the person who they got on the cheap

and from dealing with customers in the car trade there just down right liars. they never tell you the truth.

 

Not saying they live on the breadline, but why should they be? They have skills (some of them at least...) that are in high demand.

 

ya

what lies owe would you tell your mapper exactly ?

 

I’m afraid most of you chaps are missing the point. Assume you take your car to one of these clowns for a remap. It has a couple of mods but still on the standard map. They are supposed to copy that map onto their laptop and then get on mapping your car, charging you an arm and a leg in the process. So far, so good.
Then you go away and find that yout car is pretty much undriveable, stuttering, jerking and cutting out.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to answer your attempts to contact them and if they can’t fix their mess, to at least flash your original map back and refund you?
Also on the subject of the map ROM library, you can always “dump” the current ROM on any Ecutek map on your ECU and with a bit of help unlock it and use it as your own. So, no it doesn’t take much effort or time at all to create a map library