Well Guys

I put up a post a while back, about tuning an IS220D, didn't get any feedback, I guess thats probably down to the fact that there aren't many people putting tuning boxes on their 220D's. So if anyone else is interested in trying one out I offer this post as a helping hand

I've just order a spider box from Diesel tuning yesterday (http://dieseltuning.co.uk/) for my 06 IS220D, I've had the IS for about 20Mths now and have had the fifth injector recall, and I've experienced a few major short-comings in the engine department, The engine is lazy beyond belief, It is dead below 1900rpm, it can cause you serious problems in the pants department if your pulling out into on-coming traffic or at roundabout becasue of the incredible lag, I've driven the old audi PD 140 2.0Ltr diesel and its the opposite end of the scalse all low end torque and out of steam in the upper revs. To be honest the IS220 has good power once you get it going but the whole lower end problem isnt helped by the terrible 1st gear ratio, I seem to have to rev to 4500rpm to get off the line with any urgency, or alternatively shift very early and hope second will beat the turbo lag quickly, however shifting from first to second isn't the easiest as the gearbox itself has quite a long throw and the 1st and 2nd gears are particularly notchy. I've also driven the 177bhp 320D and although the gear ratios are far better it still does have what seem to be the typicall common rail lower end lag,

As for fule economy I'm not fairing to well I'm always hovering around the high 30's to 40 mark, to be honest for the size of the car (shes a heavy old girl compared to a 320D) and the type of stop start and slow moving traffic I encounter daily its not terrible but mid 40's would be welcome,

So I've prised open the old wallet and forked out for the spider tuning box, I'm hoping to have it early next week and I'll post a follow up to compare the after story with the one above.

Esentially I'm hoping that it will give a slight improvement in mpg, but if it eliminates the need to shift down and increase revs to get the old girl moving it will have satisfied my needs, to be honest I've heard the pro's and con's to fitting the tuning boxes before, I'm aware that the box will rise the common rail pressure but knowing lexus this probalby won't be even close to their outer operating limits, to be honest given the nature of the IS220d's shortcommings the tuning box will probalby lower the strains I put on the engine from the constant down shiffiting and high reving. It would be an added bonus if the box manages to shift the torque down enough to make 6th gear even slightly usable.

how much?
what of the insurance premium?
are you fiiting yourself?

gooseygopher has one fitted but he never gave us a full appraisal,we need the feedback.

Was £349.43 to be exact, including delivery that was with a discount of £85.11 that they are curently offering for this week! I'm in ireland so expecting to get it some time next week, its comming by standard snail mail! I'll fit it myself, its got OME conections that simply plug into the common rail injector so should be simple enough, I might try and get a few pics up to show the fitting, hoping it will be esay enough! Read the previous thread on the tuning box but did'nt see any decent after fitting feed back, I'll do my best to put up so good feedback, very hard to find much on the net anywhere else that gives any info on an IS220D with boxes fitted. I guess were still the minority, "something different" choice. As for insurance I won't be telling, It'll be removed if there are any servicing or mechanical checks to be done, realistically an insuracne company will only try to knock a few extra quid out of you for any reason.

Hello !

Writing from France and happy to find someone interested in these tuning boxes.

I will be more confortable with money begining of 2009 and I was thinking of bying one of these : my choice SPIDER ou VENOM. In France it is about the double in price. So I was thinking to "import" from England.
Anyway, I will follow this post very carefully.

And I do this for the same reason : wonderfull car but horrible motor/gear box.
I also have a SEAT TOLEDO new model with the 2 liters 140CV from VW. Nothing compare !

So good luck L-Finesse with your installation.

Bye

PS : hope my english is understandable

looking forward to the progress report's,the price is attractive.

L-finesse, any news, how are you getting on as very interested

Lexus Tuning Box

Found this link on the Net, spoke to a guy who does vauxhall boxes and he said that d4d engine is a hard one to crack but this company claim to have done it...

Well Guys the little box of tricks arrived last night, despite the less then favourable weather conditions I set about fitting it

The Fitting:
The box came with brief fitting instructions, four pictures in total, but to be fair its childs play fitting it, I took a pliers, small spanner 8mm and a couple of tie-wraps. First I lifted off the engine cover, this Is quite simple, just pull up the cover from either side and it’ll lift straight off, once off you can easily get to the common rail, its located at the front right corner of the engine, the photos provided with the box are quite useful for locating this! The plug top at the end of the rail is a little difficult to get too, but persistence got my hands in at it and it unplugged easily, the box itself comes with the correct OEM connectors so you simply plug in one side of the harness into the socket you’ve exposed and the other side into the plug you’ve removed, you can’t really mess this up as you only have one male and one female to play with. Once the harness is plugged in you next have to connect the boxes power supply, these are simply two spade connectors, I loosened the nut on the battery connections and slipped the spade connectors on, red to + and black to – terminal. When I was doing this I used a pliers to hold the battery terminals clamp shut just to maintain the connection, it’s probably not necessary, but sometimes if you completely disconnect the battery it can cause problems for the central locking systems or even blow a fuse if it makes a poor connection while your fiddling around. Anyway that’s pretty much the whole process over, I used a tie wrap to route the cable away from the engine and placed the box in the plastic cover that is supplied with it, I then placed it to the right of the battery where there is a bit of free space, and it sits perfectly.

The First Drive:
Once fitted I left the car running on the drive way for about 2-3minutes to let the unit calibrate, this is what is suggested in the instructions! After that I hit the open road. Initially I wasn’t sure if the box was working, however the instructions do say that it takes up to 50mile before the unit is fully functioning, as it determines your driving style. I only took a brief drive last night at low speed and towards the end found that I had a little less turbo lag, the real test came this morning however when I did my usual commute to work, a mix of solid moving traffic, and some slow urban stop start driving. I have to say that when I purchased the box I wasn’t looking for blistering performance, I was quite happy with what the engine did between 2,000- 3500 rpm my issue was more with the performance below this. This morning the box did exactly what I had hoped for, if you buy this box (Spider Adaptive scan) I think you’ll be disappointed if your expecting manic wheel spinning punchy performance, instead this box proved to be far better then I had thought, it’s a little more sophisticated then that, the best description I can give is that its as if the engine took a trip to Munich (BMW) or Inglostad (Audi). Its doesn’t have the major long turbo lag and a gulp of torque any more, it pulls from roughly 1,600 rpm and you can feel the response in the throttle, prior to fitting I would always drop a gear if I was around 1500-1600rpm to get into the magical 2000-3000 rpm range, now the car smoothly pulls over a far wider range, its far more progressive power, I tested it in fifth this morning sitting behind traffic at 50mph, I pulled out revs at 1600rpm and she just pulled straight from the off, hit 75mph in no time without dropping gear to get into the power band. Its not a manic shove in the back but more akin to the new BMW or Audi common rails that seem to rev a little quicker, The engine overall is far smoother, no major peaks just linear power delivery, that’s not to say that there is no turbo lag at all, but its is significantly better and on par with the best common rails I’ve driven, I also found myself cursing at ease around 1,600 rpm and staying with changes in traffic speed with ease. For me its made the car easier to drive and given it that little edge that puts it in the league where it should have been BMW/Audi territory. To be honest given that I no longer need to rev the nuts out of the car to get it going I imagine it will actually cause less strain on the engine, In terms of economy its hard to tell yet, however if I have to rev less and can comfortably cruise at even 1,700 rpm I will probably see a drop in my MPG, currently I returning 7.0-7.3 Ltr/100km (38 – 40mpg). In general I’m delighted with the results, if you offered me a engine transplant for a BMW 2.0Ltr diesel for €400 odd euro I would have taken it, and that’s pretty much what I got.

I'll report back in about a week on the MPG drops if any!

has the spider improved usability of sixth gear,excellent write up btw.

Tried sticking it in sixth this morning doing about 55-60mph pretty much still the same, to be honest the gearing on sixth seems that long that unless you had a serious amount of torque at very low revs its going to make the engine feel underpowered, and give those terrible shudders, I guess the box works best in fifth and downwards as it really only does its work when your under load, In sixth your pretty much trying to maintian speed so the box is having no influence as such, in fifth for instance the car could always happly cruise along around 1600 - 2000 rpm mark without the shuddering, where the box does its magic is when you want to speed up you don't have to endure what was from my point of view terrible turbo lag and the unresponsive throttle, where you had to plant your foot for easily two seconds before you felt your input, or as I was doing drop it a cog and rev the nuts out of the engine just to speed up 10-20mph.

have you been on the dyno before application and will you go after?
will you go also to the emmission test?

no offence, but these plug-in boxes work in a way that they change the instructions coming from original ECU to the injection system (they cheat on the injection) => this causes the emmissions to rise rapidly, eventual problems with the catalysators (more pollution => more dirt in the cat) and also it may put the engine in a state, where the engine is not constructed to be in (eg burn the piston)

Modern Ecu is very complicated, it is full of different maps which are used to according different conditions coming from sensors. When somebody tunes an engine, it has to go to dyno, to measure the exhaust gasses and power delivery curve etc, it is very difficult and expensive process.

Simply said, I don't believe in the miracle boxes - toyota spends bilions in engines and ecu's development and some LTD company can make it better?


PS: for the IS220d engine - my car has no problems with acceleration at 1500rpm till the 4th, 5th is OK from 1600rpm, 6th from 1800rpm. Everything is original. What is your mileage? The similar behaviour of your engine I had when it was new till about 15.000kms.
However the lag is noticable, especially in the low revs, as you described.
The quite steep power curve is normal, when talking about strong diesel engines, which is understandable when you think how they achieve this power, so yes, a less powered engine always feels more refined.

No wont be putting it on a dyno, there are none in my area, the car has done 60,000Km and had the fifth injector recall, I've driven the new 320d and common rail peugeots, i can't claim to agree with your comment that less powered engines always feel more refined! in that case surely the tuning box would not have made the engine unrefined, as for the power delivery the new audi and BMW common rails engines are far more refined then the 220d, they have far better power delivery and are far more linear yet they have similiar power outputs, they still have turbo lag, and thats understandable as the only true solution for that is a twin turbo arrangment, In terms of the power gains from the box, I can't claim that they are hugly noticable, the changes are more around the delivery, I've also noticed that the comsumption indicator drops away quite rapidly after I've maintained my speed I'm putting this down to the fact that the box switches to a economy map when not under load, With reference to lexus spending millions and then a small ltd company coming along an improving on their attempts, this is not uncommon in the car industry, smaller companies have been developing methods for improving car engines for years and with very good and reliable results, alpina, Ruf, Rousche, ect... In terms of the emmissions change if I was to carry your argument thru then a small company would not be capable of creating a device that lowers emmissions, increases power, and reduces MPG, however a recent article I read seems to disprove this, link attached, http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/autoexpr...g_boosters.html

Its also true that car manufactures produce cars for mass markets, in doing so they also create engines that have huge tolerances built in, I work as an engineer and have come across these swl (safe working load) and life cycle evaluations in many cases, and specifically in cars these are extremely conservative, also in terms of the development lexus/toyota put into the IS220d engine it is also known that they actually spent very little in the way of time or development when it came to creating the 2.2, they simply lifted it from the avensis,(engine was develped originally in 150bhp form) made some minor tweaks, and droped it into the IS, they didn't even allocate a budget to create an automatic gearbox, claiming that the requirement for it in a car that was only to be sold in europe was prohibitive, yet they spent a small fortune creating a ground-breaking auto box with a 100% mechanical lock-up for the IS-F which will probably only shift a small precentage of the units that the IS220D will!

I'm not completely disagreeing with you in terms of the potential for the tuning box to perhaps damage that engine, however I've done my research, and given my driving style with is primiliary a lazy morning commute and a evening stop start I'm not going to stress the engine from excesive hard driving, My intention was alway to improve the driving pleasure, which was severly lacking before, I love the cars design, interior and quality, but the engine was a huge disappointment, now I've rectified this and I'm delighted with the whole package.

Also as a caveat Diesel tuning give a engine warranty when you purchase, not sure what its worth or how it would stand up should a problem occur, put it does indicate that they have some confidence in there product not causing engine damage

Well Guys I've left it a couple of weeks to come back on the fuel consumption so that I'd have a good idea of what difference it was making, Before fitting the box I was getting 7.2 -7.0 L/100Km and now I'm around the 7.0 - 6.8 L/100Km mark, not a huge difference to be fair, but then again the car is now putting out circa 216 BHP and around 480MN (not dyno tested, just manufacturers claims, but does feel fast), I have'nt altered my driving style much nor have I made any real effort to drive efficiently so pehaps this can be bettered, but from my own point of view the car is now so much better to drive that I would have setteled for no change in economy anyway.

yesterday i took delivery of my spider tuning box from diesel tuner systems limited £349.43,i have been sitting on the fence with this dilema of buy or not and after a few glass's of wine the plunge was taken.l-finesse has said it all in his posts with which i agree fully.last night i followed a 325d bmw,at each turn he was putting a little more power down with me following right behind.next thing we are on the slip road to the dual carriageway when we both floored and our cars and the bmw driver could not put any distance between us.correct me if i am wrong ,the bmw is a 3.0ltr with 197 horses current model on a 2008 plate.this is proof enough that the spider does give a decent power boost.definately worth the money.


blackbeauty;i noticed that you were interested in the venom unit,the venom is actually manufactured by diesel tuner systems ltd.visit their website and click on news where all is explained.

happy days.

Thank you for the suggestion !
I didn't take yet my decision. Yes or no, and if yes, which one ?
I'll give news later when decided

Best regards