lengthen or shorten engine life? What chip is better for a daily driven application? 2000 lightning btw. I think there are only 3 chips right? Diablo superchip and Autologic? GIve me some opinions please.

 

Anything you do to increase your engine's power will shorten it's life. Be careful about adding a chip.

 

Is a chip a bad thing to add?

 

No it is not. You just have to make sure it is tuned properly for a safe A/F ratio and you will be fine.

Good luck!

 

its not the brand, its the tuner. i prefere autologic because you can switch programs on the fly. but i here you can also do this with the new diablos

 

no, a chip is not a bad thing. But as is with any vehicle, when you modify it to run outside what is was built to do by the factory, you run the chance of problems. Thats not to say that if you install a chip, you are going to have problems. There are more people here with chipped trucks and no problems than the other way around.

If you do get a chip, do yourself a favor and buy a new one. I have been fighting problems which I think were all being caused by a used chip I bought ....

 

How you treat the machine has more effect on it than simply adding a chip. Of course Ford frowns upon it.

 

It's tough to argue with that...

 

very. i think it would only shorten your life if you were running a bad tune at an insane amount of rod kicking power

 

i think if you dyno tune your engine would probably last even longer with a chip. That would seem to make sense to me. The ford program is the same across the board for the trucks sent out but each engine is just a little bit different from eachother. I'm not sure but thats just what i would suspect.

Whatever the case, i think if you do chip, but you dont add extra boost, change your oil and other fluids regularily, your truck will last you a very long time.

 

As great as this board is (it is the best) I don't think you'll find an easy answer to that. Virtually all are biased and end up bickering about who/what is better. There are good comments above, but also I don't see anybody rushing to recomend a paticular one. I say this cause I don't have one and so can't recommend one. I'd do searches for different information. That is a good comment about ther are more running fine than not. But you only hear gripes and complaints from the bad cases. Usually those are one off problems, that get resolved. To help you get started abou paticular vendors/sellers (with no affliations); There are chip makers and chip tuners. The makers I know of are Diablo and SuperChips. These have tunes (programs) for the L also. Then there are other tuners, ie JLP, JDM, PSP to name only a few. They take a chip and reprogram it to their specification. Most you can discuss your paticular engine situation (current mods) and tune to be cautious or aggressive. (As noted above aggressive is less safe IMHO.) Then there are reprogramers like HyperTech (sp) that let you (or tuner) plug in to plug under dash and reprogram without adding a chip. I haven't seen much about these. It's usually a little harder to get your truck to a tuner to tune for current mods than it is to mail in the chip and discuss over the phone. You can also tune while at some dyno's. They can monitor your A/F ratio and adjust approapiately (sp).

Sorry for the long post. And note, there are as many flame-protectant statments in there as I could put.

For futher information, check out the tuners individual sites. Most have forums for discussion also. Another big forum (Tied for 1st IMO) is NLOC. Check them out too.