Blackbear tune

mabynack wrote:
My personnel experience with tuners in general was pretty negative. I got better mileage and more power with a Hyper Max Econ tuner right up to the point that the engine failed. Any increase in power is a result of increased cylinder pressures. You can keep increasing power until you find the weakest link in the engine and drive train. My experience so far has cost me $15,000 in engine repairs.

When the Big Three put an engine in a bigger towing rig, they detune it to make the engine last. The extra power is nice, but may result in engine or transmission failure down the road.

While it is true that a tuner can potentially cause engine issues, I think that the LS based engines are fairly safe. NOT to say that other engines aren't or that mine won't grenade tomorrow, but I read an article from a Hotrod magazine that attempted to blow up an LS motor under high boost with a twin turbo setup and couldn't. They did over 60 dyno pulls with what they thought was a 5.3L with a stock bottom end, a high lift cam and ported heads and ran over 28lbs of boost on it. Never gave up the ghost. It put out over 1100HP! When they tore it down to check it out, they realized they had done all of that with a 4.8L engine. That is running an engine to the extreme. Most guys who run turbos on those only run about 8psi. You read about guys blowing stuff up all the time, but there are a lot of guys who don't know what they are doing and beat the **** out of their vehicles too.
With that being said, I'm fairly certain that a stock or slightly modified 6.0L can handle a tuner. Been there done that multiple times. The tuner, if they are good at what they do, and I've heard NOTHING but GOOD from Blackbear, won't tune the engine to dangerous and will keep the TM reasonable. Most guys don't want the harsh shifting and stuff with full TM removal, they just retime the shifting and TM to where it is a lot less noticeable of a power drop between shifts.
If you beat the living heck out of your trucks, then that is on you, I personally like mine tuned because I feel like I am in more control when I have the power I need on tap.
I have an EFI Live tuned Cummins right now. Tuned the transmission as well. I've got a lot of towing miles on it and the transmission is still going strong as is the engine. It's all how you treat it, that's just my opinion.