I’ve seen it a million times now. You start to tune your car, and you fight knock retard issues, part throttle, wide open throttle, even at idle! You’re just trying to find out if it's real or false, so you pull timing, add fuel, isolate noises, and spend days and weeks diagnosing this issue. If you’re like me, you don’t have much more hair to lose over this deal. So, let’s talk about the easy way out.

The Plex Knock Monitor V2 is an amazing device that, yes, may cost you money, but will pay itself off in no time, especially if you tune a lot of Heads/Cams and Forced Induction vehicles. This device has many great features and has saved me from switching fuels or doing huge diagnostics in the middle of a tune.

The Plex Knock Monitor has a built-in, Real-Time Knock graph. So besides just listening, it will graph knock spikes in real time on the 2.3in display screen. I was skeptical of this still, "How does it set itself up and work so good?" Well, there are settings for you to choose Bore size and frequency, so you get the best readings possible every time, on all vehicles.

The audio filtering on this unit made my job simple: it filtered any unneeded noise and told me the truth. I have ran into issues (with Supercharged cars with big cams) that just have Knock retard all the time. My own shop car had this. But, in no time, we had this unit on, set up with the Bright LED Warning function to tell me we had (or did not have) knock. Above all the cool features, the built-in Per Cylinder Detection was simple to set up and it told me which cylinders did and did not have knock, thus, isolating my issues even more. 

Being that I tune a lot of Dodge and GM stuff, I am able to put in 8 common configurations I use right into this device, saving me time in setup each time I use it. It's pretty much plug in and go now! Which leads me into this question, "How often do I use this?" And the answer turns out to be: every car, every time. If it takes 5 minutes to get me going with it, why not? In the end, I think this has saved me HOURS on the dyno.

One of my favorite parts is the CAN option, meaning I can send this data over a CAN line to certain ECUs and Dynos, centralizing all my data and making my efficiency rise once again. I’ll be honest here: I don’t use the PLEX PC-based software enough. I simply use the unit and roll. Yet lately, using the software has given me the views I need. Laying knock counts out just like I would see in my OEM tuning softwares, such as HP Tuners. A quick look at the software and I know where my issue lies. 

To finish off, I cannot count the amount of times my Knock Sensors on the car I was tuning went crazy no matter what I did. So, I set this PLEX on the car and I actually had zero knock. The amount of time I used to spend trying to fix a problem, that actually was not a problem to begin with, is ridiculous! So save yourself the time, make yourself the money, and keep the hair on your head. Buy the Plex.