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No seriously, while frying my brain like an egg in the heat on Sunday swapping that water pump it occured to me that my turbo setup has been infinitely more reliable than this "circle of life" naturally aspirated bullshit.
I think I did 3-4 trackdays with the turbo and no failures. I've done 2 trackdays NA and both times I've had engine related challenges.
No seriously, while frying my brain like an egg in the heat on Sunday swapping that water pump it occured to me that my turbo setup has been infinitely more reliable than this "circle of life" naturally aspirated bullshit.
I think I did 3-4 trackdays with the turbo and no failures. I've done 2 trackdays NA and both times I've had engine related challenges.
Last weekend I was camping with frens so the Miata didn't feature. This weekend I spent Saturday doing infuriating truck things, and Sunday we went to visit out of town friends all day. Again, Miata didn't feature.
Pictured: infuriating truck things. Lol.
I need to change the body to bumper gap as it's waaaay too tight right now, and also order some additional mounting hardware that was missing from the install kit. Its cool as **** though, will be gr8 for intimidating Priuses when fighting for parking spaces at the mall.
Also it rained on Saturday. Like, seriously WTF. Not a ton, but at least it's something and it should help a little bit with current fire suppression. A 1/4" of rain isn't going to solve a year of drought. Its going to be 91° peak today climbing to 97° by the end of the week so we haven't hit fall quite yet, but we're getting there.
Back to Miata things, I'm working up a parts list of things to order for the 6D. Timing kit, crank bolt and key, cam and crank seals, and a bunch of gaskets, seals and a water pump to replace the parts I jacked from @afm to fix my shitshow. Like I said in the other thread I don't know if I trust any of the work done by the PO of this engine, and I think the timing wheel might be bent. Or worse, they put the crank key in upside down or backwards and now the harmonic balancer isn't running true. I tried throwing a dial indicator on the balancer but it's so damn rusty I couldn't get a good read. Crank seal is confirmed leaking anyway so might as well just pull the whole mess and do it right.
It'll help me sleep at night. Or something. Whatevs.
My intermittent starting thing is still an issue, even after replacing the starter with a known good one and polishing all the contacts for the electrical while swapping the motor. Swapping the battery seemed to provide temporary relief, as does keeping the battery on trickle, but that only seems to make the very first start reliable. After my 360° into the infield on the session one outlap at Thunderhill back in August, my "brown pants" moment wasn't the spin, but the frantic attempts to restart the car. Clearly I need to look deeper.
Enter: the keyswitch.
This is a known problem area in both the NA and the NB as the contacts in the switch tend to wear over time. If you start googling around there are videos on youtube, a billion threads about it on m.net, and more than a couple here on mt. Symptoms generally include intermitant accessory function, like stereo and windshield wipers. My intermittent starter activation is actually the only instance I've been able to find in my brief search, but its a reasonable assumption. This is an easily replaceable part, in fact Moss carries a "Genuine Mazda" replacement part for the 99-05 for about $50 so I'm sure you can get one for $40 elsewhere (Oh look, $41 from Priority Mazda) and probably $25 from MazdaComp. PN for the NB is N053-66-151 so its an easy one to find. The NA uses PN D001-66-151A
But I don't like easy, so I've chosen to attempt to fix it myself.
M.net would have you believe this is an incredibly difficult operation that requires disconnecting the battery, removing the airbag and taking off the goddamn steering wheel. That is, of course, the impossibly difficult way to do it. What you actually need is a 90° screwdriver, or a 1/4" wrench and a P2 screwdriver tip.
Start by removing the 3 screws from the column surround trim, rip that off, then unplug the big chonky white connector from the back of the keyswitch.
From there, 90° screwdriver on the top screw...
And then the switch kinda "unhooks" from the back of the key pack. Easy!
Mine is gross because its old enough to drink.
Next we move to the workbench
Using the various picks and things you can release the 3 clips that hold the body together. Please note, this little ****** is full of springs and small parts and IT WILL EXPLODE if you aren't careful. Take lots of pictures so you can see how it goes back together later.
Now that its apart we can see the horrible, terrible, no good very bad schmoo. We're going to remove that so we can see what we are working with here. A quick spritz with the WD-40 helps loosen this stuff up and then it wipes away using an old cloth. WD-40 is great for this kind of thing, and generally safe on automotive stuff. I like to use it to help thin out of goop, then use something like CRC QD Electronic Cleaner or CRC Lectra-Motive as a final rinse. As I had neither of those chemicals at hand, I opted for CRC Mass Air Flow Sensor Cleaner. I figured it was probably also electrical component and plastic friendly.
As you can see, there is some uneven wear on the contacts (notice the partial polish) and there is some discoloration on others, indicating a bit of tarnish.
Dielectric grease inside the contact section is clearly past is prime. I'll need to clean that up as well, so the copper contacts need to be carefully lifted out of the switch body. CAUTION! HERE THERE BE SPRINGS!
Goop wiped off and we can see some tarnish and even a big ol' divot in a couple locations.
A little trip to the red/maroon Scotchbrite pad and we can polish this right up. These contacts are pure copper and very nicely made, those Japanese sure know how to make nice stuff.
Tarnish was easily removed, the divot was a bit harder. I went back and abused it a bit more with the Scotchbrite after this and it smoothed it out a bit, but its far from perfect.
Second contact in-situ. Also SPRANGS!
There are SIX SPRINGS in here. Thankfully, they are all the same length and diameter so no worries about mixing them up. Springs removed the switch body cleaned up as well.
Gross schmoo is gross.
Tarnish on this one too, and also an ENORMOUS divot for this one.
I polished them up as best I could but that divot is YUGE. Not sure this is something that can be fixed, unless you wanted to try to flow some solder in there and get all Clickspring with it. I don't have that level of patience so clean and polish will have to do for now.
As the Brits say "assembly is the reverse of disassembly" and as far as grease goes, I'll be using my super awesome Dow Corning #4 Electrical Insulating Compound. This **** is the bees knees. This should add some lubricity but more importantly, it'll prevent future corrosion.
I polished the contacts on the black section and then packed it all with grease, and reassembled. It just pops back together, no drama.
Following the theme, I also used the red Scotchbrite to polish out the contacts for the harness
And slathered with #4 to prevent future corrosion.
Here we can see the 1/4" drive P2 and wrench I used to reinstall the screw. Super simple.
So, did it help?
Maybe? I haven't had much of a chance to test it but it seems to have improved. First crank had a 1/2 second delay from where I expected it to kick over, subsequent starts were perfect. I'm cautiously optimistic but we'll see. After all, its a $41 part.
The elephant in the room is of course this shitshow:
If I'm reading the wiring diagram correctly, WHT/BLK is the starter trigger wire and this ******* shitshow is the result of a Circuit City alarm hackjob that some PO of the vehicle had installed, then removed. I need to find a NB in the junkyard so I can crib some wire off the harness and eliminate a couple of these crimps. They feel like they are PROBABLY fine, but this is the kind of **** that keeps me awake at night.
Wiring harness hackery is inexcusable. If you can't do it right then don't ******* do it. Anyway, I'm not sure its actually contributing to my issue but its sure can't be helping. I'll get it sorted eventually.
I don't like that little fragment of red wire hanging off of the starter wire, hopefully you wrapped that up in some good electrical tape to keep that from shorting out.
I don't like that little fragment of red wire hanging off of the starter wire, hopefully you wrapped that up in some good electrical tape to keep that from shorting out.
It was removed with very pointy long nosed wire cutters, but yes. Usually this is wrapped in electrical tape and hidden like an unplanned 1950's teenage pregnancy.
watching the process of cleaning that switch was soothing.
Haha! Well thanks! I guess we've all got a little @Jeffbucc in us from time to time
If I can find an NB in the junkyard it should be super easy to de-pin that plug, and then snip about 8"-10" of wire off then harness. From there I can put a single, proper splice in this and never worry about it again.
If anyone has access to a junkyard with a wrecked NB, holla atcha boi
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