Is this something you can do yourself? Can any mechanic do it?
In: 13
Depends on the car/bike.
If the vehicle is fuel-injected, meaning a computer controls when fuel is sprayed into the cylinders and also how much air is let into them, it requires a special computer and connecter to talk to your vehicle’s computer, and that is expensive. However, you have one then you can tune it yourself.
If the vehicle is carburated, you can tune the engine yourself by adjusting how much fuel/air the carburetor mixes together before allowing it into the engine. This is cheap and (depending on the engine) can be easy to do.
In both cases, however, to really know how much power the vehicle is putting out, you need to use a dynamometer. That’s an instrument that measures the engine’s output by putting the vehicle up on some rollers, and then measuring how fast the rollers spin and accelerate. It’s a heavy piece of equipment and the vast majority of people would not have anywhere to put one nor the money to buy it. Without one, you’re basically just going by “feel” measuring if your tuning is actually changing the vehicle’s power; so technically you can tune a vehicle yourself, but practically you may not get good results without going to a shop that has a dyno.
Edit: What I wrote above applies to internal combustion engines. I suppose you could tune an electric vehicle by altering the programming to change how much current and voltage was sent to the motors based on the driver’s pedal inputs, but I don’t know if there’s any practical way to do this. Hypothetically you could calculate the power the motors are consuming using Ohm’s law (P=iv), but then you’d have to account for the motor’s efficiency, so it’d probably still be easier to use a dyno to determine the effect of your tuning.
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