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Thread: Professional Tuners, do you Lock your tunes?

  1. #1
    Advanced Tuner
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    Professional Tuners, do you Lock your tunes?

    Im going to start offering my tuning services and was wondering if I should lock my tunes. I put a lot of time and effort into tuning and really dont want others to profit from it. The local tuners files I have read pretty much focus on WOT, raise the idle high to keep it running kinda crap. I want to set myself apart and actually offer a full tuning experience.

    I of course be up front about this and Im sure most would understand. I would also offer to reflash the pcm with an unlocked file if they wanted to go somewhere else.

    What are others thoughts? I know some are very pro and some are very against it.

  2. #2
    Tuner in Training
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    nah what happens when some client moves away or you no longer offer services. if your tunes are good they wont need to go elsewhere for someone to read the tune and will come back to you if they need a retune for new mods

  3. #3
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    I would reflash the pcm for them. Even if I have the best tune, what prevents a customer letting their tuner buddy read the file?

  4. #4
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    but people forget that they are locked out of there own car, yes you can reflash it if they remember but what if it is so heavily modified that it is not even safe to run on a stock tune then they have to trailer it somewhere. nothing can prevent them giving it to a tuner buddy im sure it happens but i dont think losing a few tunes is what will break your tuning business.

  5. #5
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    Depends on the circumstances, most the time its a no, if its something odd that you know yourself that is not the norm then yes i do, but i always explain this the customer that this will happen, offer return to stock for free, this does cost us sales, but when that happens we know that they were most likely going to copy it (remember nothings really locked iy can nearly always be pulled back out.
    Most the ones we had unlocked we find to be bad tunes not all but most.

  6. #6
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    I don’t lock my tunes —-they paid for it. Just don’t post it for every one too see .

  7. #7
    I don't lock my tunes. I don't feel I have the right to lock my tunes. We are working off a tune we stole from the manufacture already. So what gives us the right to steal from them, but someone else can't steal from us? And it's not like you can just plug in these tunes. Well you can, but it's not just that simple. I have had to deal with customers that are furious over shops when they come in for a tune. And I can't do anything for them. Their car is running lean, or whatever the case is, and I can't even write the PCM. And they had the car tuned at another shop over 500 miles away. So are they expected to just take a quick drive across the state and have the car returned to stock? So please, do not lock your tunes.

  8. #8
    I was typing this as I had to go through the long unmarry process from a trifecta tune. A tune that made less hp and ran super lean. But they sure as shit didn't want me seeing their tune.

  9. #9
    Senior Tuner mowton's Avatar
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    We do not lock our tunes either.....like they say, what do you have to hide :-) Besides, how many people have copied a tune "from a similar platform" to find out there are issues.....still have to be learned enough to be able to recognize the issue and develop a correction action....

    Ed M
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  10. #10
    Advanced Tuner ZeroBoostBuick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by scottie1134 View Post
    I was typing this as I had to go through the long unmarry process from a trifecta tune. A tune that made less hp and ran super lean. But they sure as shit didn't want me seeing their tune.
    I'm with you 100%

    I don't need to explain myself why. But it's not right to lock other folks property, regardless of what you did to it. Everyone's shit stinks regardless.

  11. #11
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    I unlock PCM's offer it as a service. Have for years.. In all that time never have I thought the tunes in locked computers looked even remotely OK. Imagine the roughest work you've seen uploaded to this board.. That is what your typical unlocked computer looks like.
    Tuner at PCMofnc.com
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  12. #12
    Tuner in Training
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    I had a customer come to me and we ended up having to put another pcm in the truck because the tuner would not unlock the pcm.. very frustrating and unprofessional.

  13. #13
    Advanced Tuner ZeroBoostBuick's Avatar
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    Before I got HPT, I had a tuner do my car and he locked the ecm. After his tune the car lost 0.2 seconds down the 1/4 mile.

    I bought a unlocked ecm and after I tuned it, it went 1 second faster than with his tune.

    Mind you it took me a few months to figure things out. And luckily that was with a 3.8 L V6 auto4 and the ecm is very simple compared to cars today.
    Last edited by ZeroBoostBuick; 07-07-2018 at 10:54 AM.

  14. #14
    Tuner in Training
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    Pros, If you are going to lock your tunes, tell your customer openly that you are going to do it and why. If you loose a customer because of it, deal with it. If you think you are the only tuner that can tune a car, think again. Maybe you lock your tunes because you're embarrassed as to have bad it is. If your tune is good, your customers will keep coming back to you. I know personally I will never take my car to a tuner again that locks their tunes every again.

    A friend of mine had his LS1 tuned while he was interstate, came home and found that the tune was not as good as expected. He went to a local tuner and found the ECU was lock and took 17 hours with a key finder to unlock it.

    And a final word to anyone out there getting a tune done. Don't trust the dyno figures your tuner gives you. If they don't calibrate there dyno regularly, the figures mean nothing unless you have before and after figures on the same dyno. Take the car to a second dyno and see how good it is. My LS1 has seen rwkw ranging from 225 to 250 at different dynos. The guy that tuned my LS1 tune did a run before and got 160rwkw. After it was 227rwkw. A 67kw increase. This way you can get a better idea of engine power. At 160rwkw for an engine that make 220kw (Factory specs) means that 227rwkw is making 312kw at the engine and because I have the baseline to work with, I can say that with confidence. I could just boast the 250rwkw figure I got from one dyno, but that means nothing without a baseline. I've had people say my 227 figures seem a bit low, but I know the baseline it came from and the car does do 0-100 in 4.9 seconds.

    I come from a background in electronics and when the "Arduino" came out as open source, where everyone shared their knowledge for free, it made it one of the most powerful platforms in the world. I just wonder where engine tuning would be today if we had the same open policy where everyone share tunes and gave much greater details on why they do things.
    Last edited by mayhem2408; 07-08-2018 at 02:59 PM.

  15. #15
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    Dealing with this right now with a truck tuned at XP Racing in OKC. Tune locked.

  16. #16
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    One pro told me that they lock there tunes because they have spend a lot of time and money developing them. I argued that at $800 for their tune, I'm paying for their time to develop it. I told them, thanks but no thanks and went ahead and ordered my own MPVI2. Can't wait to get my hands on it.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by scottie1134 View Post
    I don't lock my tunes. I don't feel I have the right to lock my tunes. We are working off a tune we stole from the manufacture already. So what gives us the right to steal from them, but someone else can't steal from us? And it's not like you can just plug in these tunes. Well you can, but it's not just that simple. I have had to deal with customers that are furious over shops when they come in for a tune. And I can't do anything for them. Their car is running lean, or whatever the case is, and I can't even write the PCM. And they had the car tuned at another shop over 500 miles away. So are they expected to just take a quick drive across the state and have the car returned to stock? So please, do not lock your tunes.
    I 100% agree, couldn't have said it any better

  18. #18
    So i bought an engine with a tuned pcm from another guy a couple states away....the engine was the factory engine for the car but had upgrades with a tune. I bought the enginefor a swap and go to start it....bam runs for a couple seconds and quits....i think to myself...no problem, i'll just hook up my handy mpv12 and take out the vats....guess what....yep jackass tuner who i don't know or can get ahold of has rendered my engine useless at this point. I bought and paid for everything and can't even use it now because they locked it with the vats enabled so you can guess what i think of tuners who lock their tunes.

  19. #19
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    if you can guarantee your availability whenever the customer wants to get his car returned to stock then you could lock it, and the customer needs to be informed before locking the ecu.

  20. #20
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    One of my clients bought a supercharged mustang from a dealer, the car came with no hand held of any type, the tranny lock up is acting weird, and he is stuck with it, it seems to be locked so whenever i try to read it it gives me a checksum error and wont open and since theres no hand held of any type i cant give it a "return to stock" to work on it, have you guys found any workaround to this kind of stuff?

    OP i think that having good customer care will protect your business better than locking your tunes
    Last edited by mJolnir; 07-21-2018 at 06:42 PM.