I'm a cheap bastard and often end up doing things myself for that reason. But I also like to end up with a quality end product, and like to know when it's a better use of time/money to just pay someone to do it. And I don't have a ton of free time at the moment to fuck around on cars.
I've never tuned a car, and don't presently own any of the equipment to do so. From what I can tell, my options for my obd1 civic are:
Cheapest-Crome free, freelog, chip burner, wideband, bumble around and hope to not grenade anything
Less Cheap- Crome Pro, ostrich, wideband, figure it out
Slightly less cheap- Neptune, wideband, figure it out: $500?
Expensive- Pay for a tune and a neptune license for $600 (Locash Racing in PHX)
Where I crux out is that if I just pay for a tune, I'll probably need a couple of them- one for cam swap, one for the turbo. Which will cost more than I paid for the car back in 2008. What would you
do?