I hope this is the proper place for this question. I recently purchased a GMC 1500 pick up with the 5.3, it runs great and has just under 97,000 on it. Should I buy a “dongle” to disable AFM? If so do you have any recommendations. We all seem to be knowledgeable here so I trust and appreciate any responses.
Personally, I delete/disable anything I get that has that crap on it, it's nothing but trouble, sooner or later. At 97k I'd call that "on borrowed time" and do it asap. A good place to find out what all the potential issues of it are is on the truck forums, but some are better than others, and I'm not a GM guy, so I dunno which ones are legit, and which ones just have a bunch of trolls looking to stir up drama/hear themselves talk.
ThomH123 with that low of miles you might be alright by just disabling the afm. The absolute best way to do it is to do a full delete with new cam and lifters and a tune. That can run you between $1500-2k for parts and a tune if you do it yourself. If you have a shop do it, labor can run ya anywhere between $1-3k on top of parts.
Few years ago my dad's 2013 gmc had a lifter go down, I ended up just replacing the cam and all the lifters with normal lifters Cam I replaced with the 4.8l cam of the same year, specs were close enough that wouldn't have to retune the calibration Used hp tuners to delete the cyl deactivation Last shop I worked at we just deleted it from the pcm without physically doing anything else, seemed to work
I have a 2008 Chevy Silverado with a 5.3. I disabled the AFM 9 or 10yrs ago with the module shown below. I don’t remember much about researching that brand or if they are still in business it it seems to have worked well for me.
This appears to be the one I went with. https://tunertools.com/products/diablosport-sprint-for-gm?srsltid=AfmBOoo1hJaJ43PoIgNc7UNRKKflkWjoN5AmyiwEQSRNjVMD_ZMs5cKA
Range makes a plug and play that shuts down the afm. I've had mine in several trucks now and it's always worked well
The truck has a 6 month 6000 mile powertrain warranty so for now I will just do a module. Come fall I will probably swap cam and lifters.
In GM’s defense, government bureaucrats at the EPA have forced vehicle and other manufacturers to go to dire straits. Look at what they did to something as simple as a fuel can.
Now if only you had a mechanical engineering degree Honestly, once you figure it out, mine was given to me by someone that didn't rtfm, they are pretty nice despite being way over engineered.
