I joked in one of my photos that this was a man's equivalent of a woman's spa day. Probably even…read morebetter. :-)
I can't explain the nuance of the dyno-tune service the way Doc's Performance can, but I'll try:
Whenever you change the intake or the exhaust on your Harley-Davidson, you throw off the built-in computer's settings for ignition and fuel injection. And everybody customizes their Harley. So just about every Harley owner needs to properly dyno-tune their bike if they want it to run at peak efficiency, but more than that, every owner risks damage to their engine if they don't properly tune their bike.
That's where Doc's Performance Tuning comes in. It's true that you can have this service performed at any Harley-Davidson dealership, but you won't get anywhere near the attention to detail and completeness of the tune you'll get at Doc's. This is a case where the matter is counter-intuitive -- the dealer has lesser information, and often lesser tools to do the job right.
Doc will take the time to explain everything he plans to do, and you can watch as he does it. This is not a fast process, and it's much slower here than at a dealership (where you can't watch it done!) because Doc does take the time to fully utilize the best tuner on the market, and take more readings to better adjust each cell (gear/rpm/throttle) for the proper fuel mixture and spark advance.
After making a significant change, or even a minor change, to the intake or exhaust on your bike, you have changed the airflow. That changes the fuel mixture going into the cylinders. The wrong mixture can damage your valve seals or overheat your engine or just blue up your pipes hideously.
And even if you never made changes, there are aspects to Harley-Davidson's original chip maps which are a bit limiting. For example, the rev-limiter probably kicks in earlier than you like, and earlier than needed to protect the bike. The map itself is done conservatively to run the bike across a range of riding styles, and the assumption is made that many riders ride, um, sub-optimally. :-) So there is compensation for that as well in the base factory map.
Doc can save you from this. He can get your fuel mixture at the proper richness for every point on the acceleration curve, and he can get your spark advance properly set for each of those same points.
The result is a bike with significantly more Torque (19 percent more in my case) and Horsepower (18 percent more in my case), and, just as importantly, the bike is far more smooth and powerful across the full range. There are no flat spots in acceleration.
On decel (throttle off, in gear) you'll not get the "valve pops" (minor backfires) for most setups because there is not leftover, unburned fuel in the exhaust. The Dynotune by Doc has made your bike much more efficient, burning all the fuel possible. It runs cooler and cleaner. It starts more readily, and runs more dependably.
The new chip-map even modifies your EITMS so that you no longer have Harley's dubious one-cylinder-off "parade mode" compromise that wastes fuel and runs the engine unbalanced. Now the engine runs cooler at idle to begin with, due to the tune, but will go into its own EITMS mode where it will skip every other spark in alternate cylinders, adding slightly more fuel when needed to cool the cylinders. It doesn't shake, it doesn't stress one cylinder as it lugs the other, and it is truly much cooler to sit over on a hot day.
For me, a big problem had been Harley setting way premature rev-limits at around 5200ish on my 110 SE and my 103. Well before a logical shift point, I was jerking forward as fuel cut out. Doc's tune fixed this allowing me to go closer to 6300. The advantage, he explained, was that, after a shift, I am ending up 2000 RPM lower. You want that speed to be right at the onset of the power band. Previously it had been at around 3000 or so, but now it's 4000.
The result is that my acceleration is so much smoother, and after each shift I find myself right where I want to be in the engine's power delivery -- just before peak Torque and Horsepower, so I can rev through that gear and snap it into the next to repeat the process.
So you end up with not merely extra torque and HP. You end up better using them when riding. You get a lot better speeds.
And anybody who rides a bike seriously knows speed is often needed to get out of the way of cars who don't bother to see you. They can't easily overlook you when you're out in front of them. :-)
There are other places you can get a dyno-tune, but I honestly don't believe you can find someone with the experience and knowledge that Doc has. You know you're with a professional when you walk in the door and see a shop so clean you could eat off of the toolbench.
As my grandfather used to say: "You judge a workman by the bench he keeps." That's entirely true of Doc's Performance Tuning. I got a meticulous job with superb results.
