Is It SAFE To Tune Your Outboard?

James Richards, what is your opinion on of aftermarket tuning

ECU flashes like Nizpro Yamaha. I have an F-1-15 and would like a little bit better

would like a little better performance, but do not want to sacrifice reliability

So that F-1-15 platform is a super reliable and bulletproof engine. I'm not really sure what you guys are trying to get performance-wise

out of these engines when you're talking about. um, 115s and 90 horsepower

So if you do a NISPro flash on the computer for that F-115

I don't think that you have to change anything. I don't think there's any kind of intake change or injector change or anything like that

that has to happen. It's just basically tuning. You might get, I don't know what

I don't know what exactly that tune does. Maybe you get like 140 or 150 out of the engine

something. Uh, not 100%. I'm not really familiar with. all the different tunings that they have

But as far as reliability is concerned, I don't really think you're going to lose any reliability

because of how reliable that block and platform already is. Even when you are changing the tuning to squeeze a little bit more horsepower

out of the engine, you might have to change your prop based on what you trying to do But I don think you going to sacrifice reliability I don think you going to you know lose performance

You're definitely going to gain performance, but downside is you probably will have to buy a propeller

in order to get that performance out of the application that you're trying to go with

You know, if you're doing this kind of stuff on, like, larger horsepower

like you're trying to take a 300 and make it like a 425, then, you know, okay, yeah, you are going to be sacrificing reliability

because you're trying to take smaller engines and have them do a lot bigger things than, you know, they were built for

So you're taking a small engine and trying to make it do a big engine thing

If you're adding supercharges and changing intakes and changing out the injectors

and then ramping up the tuning and the mapping of the PCM, um, all of those things, changing the prop

all those things are going to put more stress, more strain on the outboard

A lot of times you're raising the RPM and you're putting more load on the engine

Being in the sense of with this extra power, you're going to put more strain and more stress on the lower unit

And then with more speed out of the boat, are you now running it harder

You're running, you know, you're coming out of the water. You probably unloading and loading the propeller because you got that extra speed and now you know you pushing the boat out of the water depending on the chop depending on how you running the engine or running your boat that where you going to start losing reliability

and, you know, you're just maximizing performance when you start adding all that extra stuff

But if all you do is change the computer and change the tuning a little bit where you're just

messing with timing, you're not changing, you know, you're not supercharging it, you're not, you're not changing out all these other components, you're just changing the mapping of the computer

You're not putting that much more stress on the outboard in order to make it unreliable or, you know

shorten the lifespan of the engine. So I guess it's just be thinking about that and what you're trying to do

Taking a 90 to a 115 to a 15, taking a, you know, 75 to a 90, taking a 115 to a 140, or taking a 250 to a 300

those are like smaller changes. You're only changing 20, 30, 40, 50 horsepower

It's whenever you try and change all this other stuff and really squeeze every bit of performance

that you can out of the engine, that you lose the reliability and you, you know, shorten the lifespan of that engine

It's the same thing of like, you don buy a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or a Bugatti or any of these half a million million dollar sports car and think that they reliable They not built to be reliable They not built for you to get on the interstate and run back and forth between your

job and use it as a daily commuter. It's built as a performance vehicle, whereas like a Toyota Corolla is built for you to put

500,000 miles on that car and just be able to run it all the time

It's two different things. If you want performance and you want, you know, speed and you want all this stuff, you want the supercar

then you're not going to get reliability and you're not going to get fuel economy and performance in that aspect

You're getting what you're getting. You're getting a high performance super vehicle

Same thing relates to boats, outboards and what you are trying to get out of them

You know, you're not taking a boat that's doing 125 miles and hours

hour on the water and using that as your sandbar boat. I mean, that's not what the boat is built for

It's built for speed. Same thing for a lot of these racing engines. I mean, you take a racing engine that's producing a thousand horsepower and you're trying

to use that as your daily driver. It's, you're taking performance that's meant for like super performance and trying to make

it a daily driver. It's the same concept. So if you like this clip, you can watch the full podcast over here, or you can

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