Yeah, I started doing a little bit of digging and reading and watching videos yesterday, though there is plenty more to do. I have my WOT timing set reasonably conservative still at only 20 degrees at the very top end and 21 a bit before that. It certainly feels spunky enough, but after watching some old dyno videos and car show episodes dealing with the old 5.7s I'm thinking there might be quite a lot still in there. A bone stock engine out of a truck put down nearly 400 hp on one dyno, albeit with headers and no accessories running (electric water pump and no alternator). I wouldn't have thought manifolds and accessories would be worth 50 hp though, so kinda unsure on that one. It did have a FAST TBI system and an MSD ignition running the show, but I was never very impressed with the MSD setup back when I was running it. The way you tuned it with curves instead of a table seemed odd and less capable to me. It was basically like an old distributor in a way with a mechanical (RPM based) advance curve and a vacuum advance curve. Found someone else that managed nearly 400 whp with a cam and headers, which is basically what I'm running. The only time I ever had the car on a dyno though it only made around 270 whp, so ~300 crank maybe. I was running an MS2 setup for the fuel with the MSD for the spark at the time, but wasn't really trying to push anything as it was my first experience with tuning and it was just a dyno day thing, not a tuning session. Couldn't tell you what timing curves I might have had in it though, it was quite a while ago. Upgraded to an MS3x setup a while back so I could get all of the tuning in a single program and have started playing around with the other features like traction/launch control for fun as well. Had some issues getting the car to run on the highway with the original tables I put in it though. I made them based off of a computer dump someone did, but there is way more to the factory computer it seems as my car was just not happy with them. It would shake horribly in 6th gear and could barely maintain 70 mph. Ended up having to add quite a bit of timing to make it happy at cruise. I really like how it runs now as far as being smooth, but would still like to see if I can optimize with the knock sensors to get a little more performance and possibly economy as well.
That's what I gathered from the videos and reading I've done so far. Was hoping someone might have some values for the stock sensors I could use as a starting point, but even then I knew I'd have to take anything with a grain of salt and likely tweak and tune in the long run. I'm actually not even sure my stock sensors still work, they were just there when I bought the engine and I've left them installed, but never had anything to hook them up to until now. Looking forward to playing with them though once the module shows up. I think I hooked them up to my little pocket oscilloscope when I first did the wiring and thought I recall seeing some kind of signal out of them, but it's been long enough ago I really can't remember what if anything I saw.
