I'm tired of replacing shitty transducers. I haven't had an oil pressure sender on my car that's lasted longer than 2 years -- sure it's non-criticial, but I just want it to work.

--Ian

 

1/4"NPT is easy. I've been using a Wells PS421 in Rover for oil pressure for years, ~$40 at any Autozone. It's OEM for some GM vehicle, and Vette guys use them as a replacement for the shoddy Vette sensor. What I really need is a ~$40 1/8" NPT version for fuel pressure regulators. All I can find are Autometer senders at $120 or eBay senders at $13.

 

Honeywell PX3 series run ~$40.

This part:
- Ratiometric
- 100psi (absolute P, not gage; no problem with 2-point cal)
- 1/8NPT
- Metri-pack 150 connector

PX3AN2BS100PAAAX Honeywell Sensing and Productivity Solutions | Sensors, Transducers | DigiKey

 

And there you go.

 

In other news:




Yay, no lame machining.

--Ian

 

Every ******* wells sensor under the moon

http://www.wellsve.com/showall_ds_oil.php

Ps46

 

PS46 is an on/off, I needed exactly what afm posted (0-5v, 1/8" NPT)

 

Those are the blueprinted ones from FM? <runs off to internet> Jesus christ! $200 for a hub with no ARP studs?

I mean, I guess its worth $400 to keep the wheels from falling off, but dang dude...

 

Yeah, pricy. OTOH, FM has them on the shelf and when I call them up and ask "do your hubs have the problem documented in the so-and-so thread on mt.net", they can go look and tell me that they are definitively OK. Track day in 2 weeks, I don't really have time to play roulette with the aftermarket ones, hoping to get ones that aren't stupid. The alternative was to buy them from Mazda and that's not really any cheaper than FM, plus they then need to be repacked.

Convenience and customer service cost money, and in this case I needed them.

--Ian

 

So the ducts are now plumbed to the fog light holes. I should have taken pictures of it before I put all the parts together, but oh well. Basically it's a 3.25" to 3" silicone size adapter from siliconeintakes.com, with one of their 3" aluminum straight pipes cut into 3 inch sections to make 2 couplers. The flared end goes into the silicone adapter, and the cut-off end goes into the 3" brake ducting. Getting the ducting over the pipe was tricky -- required grinding a bevel onto the aluminum pipe, some lube, and a bunch of effort. A couple hose clamps & zip ties, then OD of the 3.25" end of the adapter fits almost perfectly inside the NB1 fog light holes. I reused my Home Depot Racing spacers (but not the PVC bits) and it looks good:



I ran out of hose clamps that fit, had to use zip ties. There's no real pressure in it, though.





​​​​​​​
Will it work? Going to Thunderhill on Friday, so we'll see. It's not as heavy on brakes as Laguna is, but...

--Ian

 

Not to speak ill of previous efforts, but those look MUCH better than the old ones

AIDAN. PUT ME ON YOUR MAILING LIST.

 

You didn't like my Home Depot Racing inlets?

We'll see if these ones WORK better. Thunderhill on Friday!

--Ian

 

You mean this little thing.




It definitely needs some work. Richard did not center the duct on the flange lol.

 

Dude the duct doesn't need to be exactly centered. It will be fine. Thanks for printing it.

Edit: iirc the mounting holes are not exactly centered compared to the fog light opening, which is why I did it the way I did it. Had I centered it, the actual duct would then end up not lining up properly with the actual opening in the bumper.

Edit 2. Obviously I based the flange on the fog light dimensions, I just went out and looked at the fog light again. The flange on the fog light is actually a fraction smaller than the glass diameter of the lens on the top and bottom. I put more material on the "bottom" of the flange to give it more strength but left the top as the fog light is. I'll mount these and check things and put the hoses on them and hork on them a bit and see if they seem strong enough to survive.

 

It just sits out funny. I'll show you when I bring it over.

Small adjustments to wall thickness at the bottom will help it print cleaner and then it will be good to go.

 

Argh, took the car out to bed the track pads before Thunderhill on Friday and it's acting up. While cruising down the freeway on the way to my favorite brake pad bedding road, it cut out at 65 mph, a straight hard cut. Rev the throttle, nothing, take it out of gear and RPM drops to zero, put it back, still nothing. It coasted down to 35 or so while I fiddled with it, then I cycled the key and it started right back up like nothing was wrong. So I kept on going to the brake pad bedding road and it seemed fine.

Did 3 or 4 bedding stops (whee, sparks EVERYWHERE, DTC-60s are really dramatic), then it started cutting out under boost. Acting like a sync loss error here, brief drop in power, then it's back. Did a few more stops that way and finally it died completely again. Coasted to the side of the road accompanied by several LOUD bangs out the tailpipe (I guess it was still injecting some fuel?), keyed off, engaged starter and it came back like nothing was wrong. Decided not to push my luck any further and drove it home on surface streets without further incident.

So I'd call it another sync error, but there's no CEL turning on. OTOH, I may have turned that off when I was trying to use the CEL for AFR safety, and now I can't find the menu entry to check to see if it's on or not. Anyone know where it is?

I wasn't data logging on the laptop, but I do have the SD card logging enabled. Pulled up the log file, I'm not saving sync error data to it, unfortunately, but there's a few clues in there. The PW goes from normal cruising to zero all of a sudden, followed shortly by timing going from 22.something to 10.0. MAT starts to drop even though MAP is constant at 78 kpa and TPS hasn't changed, suggesting that the turbo isn't doing any compression any more. So yeah, this looks a whole lot like the MS3 lost sync.

Need to go see if I can find my spare cam sensor and throw that in. Maybe it's simple? Applying my usual rule of thumb that it's whatever I changed last doesn't make any sense here -- all I did was put in brake ducts, change the pads, rotors, and tires, and rewire the enable switch for the data logger. I guess I could have jostled the cam/crank sensor wires in the megasquirt harness, but...



--Ian

 

Oh, the other bizarre thing is that RPM drops to zero, then jumps back up to 150 and stays at 150 for a while. WTF? How does RPM stay at 150? Maybe some kind of bizarro sync error behaviour? Or maybe the engine has died and I've got it in neutral but the friction in the oil is enough to spin the engine anyway? I know it'll spin the wheels slowly if you idle it in neutral with the back tires off the ground...

--Ian

 

The 0-150-0-150 issue is a by-product of the software filtering on the crank/cam sensors. Disable it and it will go away.

 

I dug through the logs a bunch more last night, and am convinced it is a sync error. I found the config window and yes, I had turned off the CEL for that when I was playing with AFR safety and never turned it back on. It appears, though, that it re-establishes sync (at least, the RPM reading comes back and it says "run: Y" in MLV), but still wasn't actually running the engine. I need to go stare at the code and see if it gives up in confusion at some point after a certain number of failures.

So I cancelled my Thunderhill track day, I just don't have time to diagnose this before then. :( Ah well, at least I managed to get my money back (event had a wait list, so they were happy to refund and give my spot to someone else) and it was early enough to cancel the hotel reservation without penalty. Would have sucked to tow the car up there, take it out on track, and THEN find out that it was running like crap.

In other news, the UOA report from Blackstone arrived on the post-Laguna sample. This oil had the 2 days at MRLS, 1 previous half-day at Laguna, and some street miles on it. Bearing metals are pretty high -- think that's my 270F oil temps? Or something else going on? It was RedLine 10w40, which I know is not the standard mt.net-recommended oil. The three previous samples are all from before the current rebuild, the one sample I got on this motor from a year ago got lost in shipping somehow and was never analyzed.



--Ian

 

uh oh...