Gadget
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2007
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For a good while now I have been getting reports from people that they are being contacted through emails and PMs from other venders on the forum. These contacts appear to be a sneak attack campaign with the purpose of speaking ill of myself, URD and URD products. In many cases what is being spread is just plain bogus info.
If any of you are contacted by email or PMs by another vender where they appear to spreading false and bogus info about us or our product line, be very suspicious of their motivation and forward it off to me so I can dispel the false info been spread. I have a growing collection of these now. It just fascinates me to understand this type of business model and in most cases the vender does not even offer a competing product. Maybe they are just filled with jealousy.
Here is one. I do know who it is from and it is a vender on this forum. He thinks he is the smartest guy in the room, but time and time again he is just plain wrong. Let me break it down.
Here is the message that was sent to a potential customer of URD unsolicited and he did represent himself as the agent of the company he represents in an attempt to give himself credibility.
"My personal opinion of the MAF problem, of course they are going to tell you buy MORE of their product to fix the original product you bought from them. I never liked the intakes URD made because of the fact of how much stuff they move around. Your MAF is placed in a specific location, why change what came from the factory? TRD didn't move it, AEM didn't, and so forth. But you have a Volant or URD?
And saying your truck is going to run rich is not realistic at all to me. Because your truck is equipped with HIGHLY accurate sensors to detect the amount of oxygen in the exhaust flow to determine how lean or rich it is. And depending on the stoichiometric ratio, it will correct itself to make 14.7, NO MATTER WHAT. So saying that an intake is going to affect that, sounds like a gimmick. I wouldn't touch the MAF, if you start messing with the AFR your asking for trouble, there is a reason why Toyota keeps their alogrithms secret, and spend millions of dollars in development with professional engineers to make your truck run right and last a lifetime. I wouldn't touch it, our trucks will run tits with a good intake and exhaust, and if you want more power, do the supercharger.
AND ANOTHER: I have heard mixed results about the MAF calibrator. Unless you really know what you are doing you risk leaning out your motor to the point of destroying it. Personally I would save your money, do your intake and exhaust work and leave it alone. Just my .02 though. I learned my lesson with that stuff."
Now let’s take it one piece at a time.
"My personal opinion of the MAF problem, of course they are going to tell you buy MORE of their product to fix the original product you bought from them. I never liked the intakes URD made because of the fact of how much stuff they move around. Your MAF is placed in a specific location, why change what came from the factory? TRD didn't move it, AEM didn't, and so forth. But you have a Volant or URD?"
This potential customer does not even have a URD True Cold Air Intake, he has a brand “V” intake and he is having issues with it. The issue is that the intake does not properly duplicate the MAF tube size and shape. The inner diameter of the MAF tube is very critical to the calibration of the MAF sensor. The slightest deviation in the diameter of the tube where the MAF tube sits will induce an error to the calibration of the MAF sensor. That will cause it to miss report the volume of air and its mass to the ECU. This will cause the ECU to inject the incorrect amount of fuel by mass and this can have a detrimental impact on fuel economy, drivability, and performance.
In this specific case the diameter of the MAF tube is smaller than the stock one. The result is that you have the same volume of air moving through a smaller tube. This causes the airflow to be accelerated and the MAF sensor miss reports the airflow and mass to the ECU and reports there is more air entering the engine than there is causing it to inject more fuel than needed. There are other intakes that have the tube size larger than stock causing the MAF to report less air entering the engine than there is so the ECU wants to inject to little fuel and you can have a very lean mixture as a result.
Every single brand “V” intake we have tested and tuned on a 1GR application made the engine run extremely rich in open loop mode, way richer than stock. This simply kills power and eats gas.
This concept of basic flow dynamics is very simple to understand, but it seems that some people just don’t get it.
When we were working on our own URD TCAI it took a lot of work to find the correct tubing supplier that had tubing that very closely replicated the inner diameter of the stock MAF tube. Then a lot of testing was done on the road, dyno, and flow bench to find just the right location for the MAF sensor. This is very important. The MAF needs a very stable and turbulent free stream of air to allow a proper reading of actual volume of air and its mass entering the engine. We tried several locations, but with the bends and so forth in the tubing we could not get a turbulent airstream near the stock location without using a restricting flow straightener. The one location that works perfectly is the location in the front section of the intake piping. The filter and its proper installation is also very critical proper and smooth airflow over the MAF sensor. So, that is why we chose that location.
I really don’t care what other companies do with their intakes, we wanted have one that gives you the coolest possible air and does not induce any MAF sensor errors. Using a straight tube with the filter inside the engine bay works well with the MAF in the stock location, but with bends to get at the real cool air we had to do something a little different.
I also want to make it clear, you do not need to use a URD MAF Sensor Calibrator with our intake. It is not needed, but you certainly will enjoy better performance from optimizing the open loop fuel mixture for best power.
"And saying your truck is going to run rich is not realistic at all to me. Because your truck is equipped with HIGHLY accurate sensors to detect the amount of oxygen in the exhaust flow to determine how lean or rich it is. And depending on the stoichiometric ratio, it will correct itself to make 14.7, NO MATTER WHAT. So saying that an intake is going to affect that, sounds like a gimmick. I wouldn't touch the MAF, if you start messing with the AFR your asking for trouble, there is a reason why Toyota keeps their alogrithms secret, and spend millions of dollars in development with professional engineers to make your truck run right and last a lifetime. I wouldn't touch it, our trucks will run tits with a good intake and exhaust, and if you want more power, do the supercharger."
Again in what the other vender is stating here is just plain wrong, well mostly wrong. It still amazes me how this whole closed loop and open loop mode thing can be so misunderstood.
You can download the U-Tune Guide and get a great explanation of open and closed loop modes, so I will just briefly touch on it here. Basically in closed loop mode the ECU is taking info in from the MAF sensor, the induction air temp sensor, RPM, throttle position, engine coolant temp and looks up this info on an internal look up table which tells it to inject a certain amount of fuel by mass for the given condition. It then injects that amount of fuel by mass to get the programmed fuel mixture. This should be correct, but sometimes is a little off. Then it looks at the Air/Fuel Ratio Sensors in the exhaust manifold to see what the actual fuel mixture is. When it is not where it is supposed to be it will make a slight adjustment to the injected fuel mass to get it to the programmed fuel mixture. This correction is called active fuel trimming.
Yes, the ECU has the capability to compensate for slight deviations from the norm, but to rely on this to correct for a poorly designed aftermarket intake is not the optimum way to do things. There is only a limited amount of control authority to do this and when it is used up, then the ECU looses command of the fuel mixture and sets a check engine light. The further away from neutral the internal fuel trims get the harder the ECU has to work to keep a correct fuel mixture. This can lead to delay to arrive at the commanded fuel mixture and during this delay you can have a mixture that not where it is supposed to be and this can result in drivability issues, poor performance, and poor fuel economy. These issues are normally reported by owners of brand “V” intakes.
Now when you increase the power from the engine to a given point the ECU switches from closed loop mode to open loop mode. This is where you want the most power from the engine you can get. In open loop mode the ECU does not look at the Air/Fuel Ratio Sensors in the manifold for feedback. The ECU just simply injects the predetermined amount of fuel by mass from the internal look up table. There is no feedback used from the Air/Fuel Ratio Sensors and the ECU has no idea what so ever if the amount fuel being injected is correct or not. You could have a fuel mixture so lean you cause serious damage to the engine and the catalytic converters, or so rich you can cause cylinder wall damage from fuel washing and an overheated exhaust as the fuel keeps burning on its way out of the engine. The ECU does not know what he fuel mixture really is and does not do anything to correct it if it is out of range of what is commanded. So, again the vender is just plain wrong and is really doing the customer a serious dis-service here. In the case of brand “V” intakes we have seen fuel mixtures richer than 9.0:1 AFR which is just killing power and wasting fuel. In most cases, the resulting power with brand “V” intakes untuned can be much less than the stock intake and certainly does not “run tits” without some help and recalibration.
Trust me when I say this, URD does not offer gimmicks. Our stuff is tested usually by myself and if I do not approve it we do not post to our site.
"AND ANOTHER: I have heard mixed results about the MAF calibrator. Unless you really know what you are doing you risk leaning out your motor to the point of destroying it. Personally I would save your money, do your intake and exhaust work and leave it alone. Just my .02 though. I learned my lesson with that stuff."
Yes, the vender is correct. You can improperly tune the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator if you really want to, but to date in all these years that has not happened yet.
The primary purpose of the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator is to correct for any induced calibration errors caused by improper designed intake systems and rezero the internal fuel trims for the best possible fuel control, drivability, and economy. The secondary use is to optimize the fuel mixture in open loop mode for better performance. On my 2005 XRunner completely stock I was able to get 15 RWHP gain by tuning with the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator. Certainly no gimmick there.
You can also use it for retuning for larger than stock fuel injectors. Another popular use is to retune for other performance modifications like headers and exhaust systems.
Remember, the stock ECU was calibrated by all those engineers to run a completely stock vehicle. When you go start adding intakes, exhaust mods and so on, that ECU calibration is no longer optimum and a little retuning will enhance the performance gains from your performance modifications. You can also retune each and every time you add a new performance modification even if you get it from the company the vender represents. Why he would not want you to get the best possible performance from a product his company offers is beyond me.
One thing the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator cannot do is to compensate for turbulence across the MAF sensor caused by an improperly designed intake system. The only way to fix that is to fix the intake and MAF sensor placement. The MAF Sensor does not work like an engine coolant temp sensor where it just has to be in contact with the coolant, it is a very precise measuring device that relies on a very carefully balanced flow dynamics across it. The reading from the MAF sensor is critical for numerous functions of engine control.
You will not find another ECU tuning product with this capability, this level of map table resolution in this price range anywhere. The URD MAF Sensor Calibrator is a very good performance value and it can have a dramatic improvement on the way your truck runs when properly installed and used.
Now when you get one of those secret PMs or emails from another vender on this forum speaking ill of URD or one of the products we offer be suspicious of their true motivation. In many cases their motivation is not genuine. Feel free to continue to forward them to me so I can debunk their claims and I can continue to add them to my collection. I have some real doozies… There is a reason they do this in the shadows, just keep that in mind.
Gadget
If any of you are contacted by email or PMs by another vender where they appear to spreading false and bogus info about us or our product line, be very suspicious of their motivation and forward it off to me so I can dispel the false info been spread. I have a growing collection of these now. It just fascinates me to understand this type of business model and in most cases the vender does not even offer a competing product. Maybe they are just filled with jealousy.
Here is one. I do know who it is from and it is a vender on this forum. He thinks he is the smartest guy in the room, but time and time again he is just plain wrong. Let me break it down.
Here is the message that was sent to a potential customer of URD unsolicited and he did represent himself as the agent of the company he represents in an attempt to give himself credibility.
"My personal opinion of the MAF problem, of course they are going to tell you buy MORE of their product to fix the original product you bought from them. I never liked the intakes URD made because of the fact of how much stuff they move around. Your MAF is placed in a specific location, why change what came from the factory? TRD didn't move it, AEM didn't, and so forth. But you have a Volant or URD?
And saying your truck is going to run rich is not realistic at all to me. Because your truck is equipped with HIGHLY accurate sensors to detect the amount of oxygen in the exhaust flow to determine how lean or rich it is. And depending on the stoichiometric ratio, it will correct itself to make 14.7, NO MATTER WHAT. So saying that an intake is going to affect that, sounds like a gimmick. I wouldn't touch the MAF, if you start messing with the AFR your asking for trouble, there is a reason why Toyota keeps their alogrithms secret, and spend millions of dollars in development with professional engineers to make your truck run right and last a lifetime. I wouldn't touch it, our trucks will run tits with a good intake and exhaust, and if you want more power, do the supercharger.
AND ANOTHER: I have heard mixed results about the MAF calibrator. Unless you really know what you are doing you risk leaning out your motor to the point of destroying it. Personally I would save your money, do your intake and exhaust work and leave it alone. Just my .02 though. I learned my lesson with that stuff."
Now let’s take it one piece at a time.
"My personal opinion of the MAF problem, of course they are going to tell you buy MORE of their product to fix the original product you bought from them. I never liked the intakes URD made because of the fact of how much stuff they move around. Your MAF is placed in a specific location, why change what came from the factory? TRD didn't move it, AEM didn't, and so forth. But you have a Volant or URD?"
This potential customer does not even have a URD True Cold Air Intake, he has a brand “V” intake and he is having issues with it. The issue is that the intake does not properly duplicate the MAF tube size and shape. The inner diameter of the MAF tube is very critical to the calibration of the MAF sensor. The slightest deviation in the diameter of the tube where the MAF tube sits will induce an error to the calibration of the MAF sensor. That will cause it to miss report the volume of air and its mass to the ECU. This will cause the ECU to inject the incorrect amount of fuel by mass and this can have a detrimental impact on fuel economy, drivability, and performance.
In this specific case the diameter of the MAF tube is smaller than the stock one. The result is that you have the same volume of air moving through a smaller tube. This causes the airflow to be accelerated and the MAF sensor miss reports the airflow and mass to the ECU and reports there is more air entering the engine than there is causing it to inject more fuel than needed. There are other intakes that have the tube size larger than stock causing the MAF to report less air entering the engine than there is so the ECU wants to inject to little fuel and you can have a very lean mixture as a result.
Every single brand “V” intake we have tested and tuned on a 1GR application made the engine run extremely rich in open loop mode, way richer than stock. This simply kills power and eats gas.
This concept of basic flow dynamics is very simple to understand, but it seems that some people just don’t get it.
When we were working on our own URD TCAI it took a lot of work to find the correct tubing supplier that had tubing that very closely replicated the inner diameter of the stock MAF tube. Then a lot of testing was done on the road, dyno, and flow bench to find just the right location for the MAF sensor. This is very important. The MAF needs a very stable and turbulent free stream of air to allow a proper reading of actual volume of air and its mass entering the engine. We tried several locations, but with the bends and so forth in the tubing we could not get a turbulent airstream near the stock location without using a restricting flow straightener. The one location that works perfectly is the location in the front section of the intake piping. The filter and its proper installation is also very critical proper and smooth airflow over the MAF sensor. So, that is why we chose that location.
I really don’t care what other companies do with their intakes, we wanted have one that gives you the coolest possible air and does not induce any MAF sensor errors. Using a straight tube with the filter inside the engine bay works well with the MAF in the stock location, but with bends to get at the real cool air we had to do something a little different.
I also want to make it clear, you do not need to use a URD MAF Sensor Calibrator with our intake. It is not needed, but you certainly will enjoy better performance from optimizing the open loop fuel mixture for best power.
"And saying your truck is going to run rich is not realistic at all to me. Because your truck is equipped with HIGHLY accurate sensors to detect the amount of oxygen in the exhaust flow to determine how lean or rich it is. And depending on the stoichiometric ratio, it will correct itself to make 14.7, NO MATTER WHAT. So saying that an intake is going to affect that, sounds like a gimmick. I wouldn't touch the MAF, if you start messing with the AFR your asking for trouble, there is a reason why Toyota keeps their alogrithms secret, and spend millions of dollars in development with professional engineers to make your truck run right and last a lifetime. I wouldn't touch it, our trucks will run tits with a good intake and exhaust, and if you want more power, do the supercharger."
Again in what the other vender is stating here is just plain wrong, well mostly wrong. It still amazes me how this whole closed loop and open loop mode thing can be so misunderstood.
You can download the U-Tune Guide and get a great explanation of open and closed loop modes, so I will just briefly touch on it here. Basically in closed loop mode the ECU is taking info in from the MAF sensor, the induction air temp sensor, RPM, throttle position, engine coolant temp and looks up this info on an internal look up table which tells it to inject a certain amount of fuel by mass for the given condition. It then injects that amount of fuel by mass to get the programmed fuel mixture. This should be correct, but sometimes is a little off. Then it looks at the Air/Fuel Ratio Sensors in the exhaust manifold to see what the actual fuel mixture is. When it is not where it is supposed to be it will make a slight adjustment to the injected fuel mass to get it to the programmed fuel mixture. This correction is called active fuel trimming.
Yes, the ECU has the capability to compensate for slight deviations from the norm, but to rely on this to correct for a poorly designed aftermarket intake is not the optimum way to do things. There is only a limited amount of control authority to do this and when it is used up, then the ECU looses command of the fuel mixture and sets a check engine light. The further away from neutral the internal fuel trims get the harder the ECU has to work to keep a correct fuel mixture. This can lead to delay to arrive at the commanded fuel mixture and during this delay you can have a mixture that not where it is supposed to be and this can result in drivability issues, poor performance, and poor fuel economy. These issues are normally reported by owners of brand “V” intakes.
Now when you increase the power from the engine to a given point the ECU switches from closed loop mode to open loop mode. This is where you want the most power from the engine you can get. In open loop mode the ECU does not look at the Air/Fuel Ratio Sensors in the manifold for feedback. The ECU just simply injects the predetermined amount of fuel by mass from the internal look up table. There is no feedback used from the Air/Fuel Ratio Sensors and the ECU has no idea what so ever if the amount fuel being injected is correct or not. You could have a fuel mixture so lean you cause serious damage to the engine and the catalytic converters, or so rich you can cause cylinder wall damage from fuel washing and an overheated exhaust as the fuel keeps burning on its way out of the engine. The ECU does not know what he fuel mixture really is and does not do anything to correct it if it is out of range of what is commanded. So, again the vender is just plain wrong and is really doing the customer a serious dis-service here. In the case of brand “V” intakes we have seen fuel mixtures richer than 9.0:1 AFR which is just killing power and wasting fuel. In most cases, the resulting power with brand “V” intakes untuned can be much less than the stock intake and certainly does not “run tits” without some help and recalibration.
Trust me when I say this, URD does not offer gimmicks. Our stuff is tested usually by myself and if I do not approve it we do not post to our site.
"AND ANOTHER: I have heard mixed results about the MAF calibrator. Unless you really know what you are doing you risk leaning out your motor to the point of destroying it. Personally I would save your money, do your intake and exhaust work and leave it alone. Just my .02 though. I learned my lesson with that stuff."
Yes, the vender is correct. You can improperly tune the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator if you really want to, but to date in all these years that has not happened yet.
The primary purpose of the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator is to correct for any induced calibration errors caused by improper designed intake systems and rezero the internal fuel trims for the best possible fuel control, drivability, and economy. The secondary use is to optimize the fuel mixture in open loop mode for better performance. On my 2005 XRunner completely stock I was able to get 15 RWHP gain by tuning with the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator. Certainly no gimmick there.
You can also use it for retuning for larger than stock fuel injectors. Another popular use is to retune for other performance modifications like headers and exhaust systems.
Remember, the stock ECU was calibrated by all those engineers to run a completely stock vehicle. When you go start adding intakes, exhaust mods and so on, that ECU calibration is no longer optimum and a little retuning will enhance the performance gains from your performance modifications. You can also retune each and every time you add a new performance modification even if you get it from the company the vender represents. Why he would not want you to get the best possible performance from a product his company offers is beyond me.
One thing the URD MAF Sensor Calibrator cannot do is to compensate for turbulence across the MAF sensor caused by an improperly designed intake system. The only way to fix that is to fix the intake and MAF sensor placement. The MAF Sensor does not work like an engine coolant temp sensor where it just has to be in contact with the coolant, it is a very precise measuring device that relies on a very carefully balanced flow dynamics across it. The reading from the MAF sensor is critical for numerous functions of engine control.
You will not find another ECU tuning product with this capability, this level of map table resolution in this price range anywhere. The URD MAF Sensor Calibrator is a very good performance value and it can have a dramatic improvement on the way your truck runs when properly installed and used.
Now when you get one of those secret PMs or emails from another vender on this forum speaking ill of URD or one of the products we offer be suspicious of their true motivation. In many cases their motivation is not genuine. Feel free to continue to forward them to me so I can debunk their claims and I can continue to add them to my collection. I have some real doozies… There is a reason they do this in the shadows, just keep that in mind.
Gadget
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