[sperry]

Dean, I guess the argument I'm trying to make is not that tuning w/o the dyno isn't a viable tuning method, it's just that it's lower tech than the way your car was already tuned...

Think of it this way: you bring a length or steel to a professional to get its length measured. They used an expensive set of calipers to measure it accurately to the nano-meter. Then you bring it home and notice that it's 10 degrees hotter at your house. So you bust out your wooden ruler and decide to measure it yourself because you know the steel must have expanded due to temperature.

I'm not saying that the 1st measurment is totally exact after the temp change, and I'm not saying that the wooden ruler is necessarily going to give you an incorrect measurement. I'm just saying that it's going to be very hard to improve on the original measurement w/o the high-end tools.

People use the tools available to them. For years, people have been measuring their steel rods w/ wooden rulers, and it worked. But now that we've got the more accurate calipers, you're going to find it hard to improve on those results with the old tools.

Now, you could certainly take the caliper measured length, and do the math to figure out how much the length should change from a +10 deg temp difference, and estimate the new length, and I would bet that's a pretty accurate value. Similarily, you should be able to bump base timing or boost to help compensate for altitude, but I wouldn't try re-tuning the car, or re-measuring the steel rod.

Am I making sense? That analogy feels tortured.