2009 Silverado 5.3 E38 and T42 Tuning Questions

[TuneCrazy53]

Hello Everyone,

Somewhat new to the gas tuning world (I do have some diesel tuning experience) and I have a couple questions on a friend’s truck I would like to tune. It’s a completely stock truck with roughly 42,000 miles on it. The biggest reason for tuning this truck is to eliminate the Active Fuel Management. If I’m in there to do that I thought I would try to get a little more out of the truck for him.

Question One. I have talked to a few people and most have said any time you tune one these trucks (08-15) you should disable the VATS as they can cause more headaches than what its worth. Is this true? If it is, would I also have to apply the VATS Patch as well?

Question Two. Being that the engine controller and trans controller are separate. Do I have to license the vehicle twice (2 vin licenses) for the engine and trans controller? Or once I upload either the engine or trans tune will that license both for that vehicle?

Question Three. I have tuned a 07 (Gen3) Silverado with 5.3 and with the trans tuning it was setup as normal and performance mode. I realize that is tow haul on and tow haul off. But with these newer trans controllers I see its setup into Normal, Shift Pattern A, HOT and Shift Pattern B. What do these correlate to?

Question Four. I understand I cannot make a huge difference in power with this truck, however what are some pointers I can try to get a little more out of it? My initial thoughts were to bump torque limiter (B2501). Increase torque limit per gear by 20% (B2517). Then for trans tuning increase shift times to .3000 in all gears. Then decrease the torque limiter (D1104 D2104 D3104) 10%. And increase upshift pressures in 1-4 gears 10%. Also was going to disable the brake torque management in (B2523) when traction control is turned off.

Thanks for the help and look forward to hearing from you guys!

[joecar]

one: IDK (I thought VATS was good to have).

two: each license has two slots, one for ECM and one for TCM.

three: IDK, you have to experiment with them to see which is which.

four: IDK.

[TuneCrazy53]

Thank you for the information. I suppose I will just have to give it a try and see what I come up with. Not sure on the vats either. The guys I have talked to have said after tuning it can throw the vehicle into a security mode and won't read the key. My biggest worry is uploading a tune and have something go wrong, like bricking controllers..

[joecar]

Some vehicles should have ECM flashed out-of-vehicle (i.e. bench flashed), the reason being that some of the many modules may/will interrupt the ECM while it is busy being flashed.

[TuneCrazy53]

Makes sense. Do you know if these trucks (08-09 e38 ecm) are one of those vehicles? I don't have the option right now to bench flash the controllers. Could I just try to flash it with vats as they are from factory and if it doesn't work reflash it with vats disabled? Or is it something that if it goes into a security mode I'm locked out of the ecu? Sorry for all the questions and thanks for the response!