7.3L Performance Shop / Turbo Upgrade Question
A scanguage will keep tabs on EOT and TFT, otherwise a stand-alone EGT gauge as mentioned is necessary, I try not to go over 1200.
A tuner will be your best bet for gaining HP, which for most is plenty before reaching that threshold on stock injectors, unless you’re building a racer or show truck. You can get into throwing ridiculous amounts of cash at it when you reach that point, not to mention the prospect of piping in an inter cooler, which I’m not sure is the best bang for buck, you have to essentially reconfigure, relocate and custom fab almost everything in the engine bay. Someone on here is doing that....
I’d say make sure everything you’ve got is in tip top shape, including the turbo, if it needs a refresh, get a bearing rebuild kit if all other components are good and call it a day.
Check your turbo up pipes, if leaking, most likely they are, get the international bellowed up pipes, or to save a little, Doorman makes a decent knockoff set.
Run a bigger exhaust
Throw in a larger trans cooler, I went with a tru-cool, many put in the 6.0 cooler
Mag-hytec trans pan, helps keep it cool, larger capacity
I’ve had, along with many others here, a DP tuner. I can say we’re not all thrilled with it after some real world use. While it definitely woke the thing up, several that I’ve spoken to are experiencing the same symptoms of throttle input surging, which would be the converter locking/unlocking, causing more stress on components and premature wear, higher than expected EGT’s and higher than expected black smoke(rolling coal), essentially deeming the tuner useless for tow tunes and everyday use, even though they were specifically written for the vans! Jody claimed he hadn’t heard of that happening to anyone else.
I just had a John Woods transmission installed(picking back up today!) John used to use Jody’s (DP tuner) tuner for use with his transmissions, ran into the same issues we’re having and Jody was unwilling to work to change the tunes. John has been using PHP (power hungry performance) hydra chip with great success with none of the issues. John sent me a PHP chip along with his trans, looking forward to trying it out, I’ll report back after spending some time with it. Same deal, you can load various tunes, comes with a button selector to change tunes on the fly.
As far as diesel shops in the Denver/Boulder area, I had a hard time finding one that specializes and I tend to stay away from places that have a huge showroom with high overhead, trying to sell me everything they have on the shelf kind of place. The shop up in Loveland was ok, I used them for something, didn’t really get into performance stuff, I may recall they didn’t instill a bunch of my confidence. I’d stay well away from Lucky’s in Longmont, diesel specialists, talked a big game, had lots of trucks and several other SMB’s on the lot, crooks!
Diesel Services of northern Colorado in Johnstown got me back on the road fast, they deal mostly with fleet and I think big rigs, but were very accommodating.
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'03 Ford E350 7.3L Diesel
(de)SMB'd Custom RB-50
Quigley 4X4 w/Deavers & Agile Offroad's R.I.P. package
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