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This little lathe needs a couple of modifications, like an easier way to change the angle on the compound and easier locks on a couple of the ways, but thanks to the power of the internet, I'm sure someone has already figured this out and posted a youtube video tutorial for me
www.Littlemachineshop.com Not the best prices, but everything you need for mini lathes and mills. I highly recommend the carriage lock, especially for parting off.
Squirted some black paint on the tube and somehow it cured in my 43° garage overnight. Flat black wasn't a perfect match, but it appears to have been close enough for what I'm doing
Now if it would just be not dark, wet and cold I might consider spinning some wrenches again. Or running the grinder. I still haven't decided what exactly I want to do for the front wheel clearance cuts.
Now Dear Readers, I am not a moron. Or at least, I claim not to be a moron. But the top hats haven't been off this suspension since they were installed by a Japanese robot in Hiroshima back in 1999 which means I've never taken apart a stock Miata shock assembly, so I have a solid excuse for the following. The pic above was taken approximately 20 seconds before I launched my M18 Fuel Impact directly into my groin with spring pressure from said assembly. It turns out that these are installed in compression, and blasting the nut off the top will cause it to explosively disassemble. Who knew? Certainly not this reporter.
Holy hell, that is truly frightening. And here I was thinking I could rig up something with a ratchet strap...
With the hole welded up in the crossover tube I can finally start getting the inlet side of the engine back together (I pulled off the JRSC dummy throttle body and IACV) and refill the cooling system. Remember, I haven't really tested the JRSC with any real load/RPM since I made the modifications to the mounting bracket. There's still a lot big question marks with regards to that setup. Energy Suspension put a bushing in the mail for me on Tuesday but didn't bother to tell me about it until yesterday when I probed them about it. It's scheduled to be delivered today via USPS, which means it'll either get here this evening or will somehow magically end up in Stockton. I am holding out hope that it'll actually get here today, which would be marvelous. I'd like nothing better than to get this thing on the ground right now. I need to start doing things like eyebanging the alignment into place to make sure the clearances I've already made are adequate.
Speaking of clearances, I think I'm going to start by cutting out the outer edge of that that seam in the rear of the front wheel well, then apply the brute force and ignorance we discussed previously. If Mr. Clarkson proves inadequate then I'll make a trip to the 'Rona Depot and buy him an older brother which will hopefully get the job done. If that doesn't do it then I suspect things will get messy very quickly. I'm pretty committed at this point, no going back now!
This is the incomplete AEM 30-4110 Wideband that showed up in @Brap-Brap 's random box of misfit parts. I plugged it in and it started up, so I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to put a wideband in the car.
$140 to Summit later and I got a replacement harness and new Bosch LSU4.9 oxygen sensor
Mmm... Borsch. Unfortunately I don't have a hole to mount it in, so I've contacted someone to make me a test pipe with a o2 sensor bung in it. I want to see exactly how bad the AFRs are with that JR RFPR in play.
Also from the same box of misfit parts, the highly optimistic Autometer boost gauge and mount.
I'm not sure what this plastic gauge mount was originally designed for, but it certainly wasn't an NA Googling the casting numbers in the plastic suggests its possibly made by Glowshift for a early 2000s Volkswagen? I can cut it up and make work, for sure. It'll take some pretty significant modifications to get it to match up to the A pillar but that's the least of my worries at the moment.
Since I had all the parts back it was time to throw it back together and refill the cooling system.
Mmmm... soup. I let it idle for long enough to allow the fans to cycle on and off a couple times, topped off the coolant. Eventually I'll flush the rust out. Eventually. Maybe.
and once again I realized that I pumped this tank dry some months ago. Still not sure how this thing is actually running. Clearly the NA6 fuel tank is magical.
Time for brute force and ignorance!
Step one is of course gratuitous PPE selfie.
The M18 Fuel Grinder is one badass ****, loaded with Harbor Freight cut off wheels its an even scarier ****. If I had a face shield I'd use one, but thanks to COVID you basically can't get one for love or money, so the safety glasses will have to do. I'll just hold my head out of the way. </sarc> But in all seriousness, don't **** around with your lungs, eyes, and hearing. Heavy canvas shirt, gloves, boots etc. Don't be that guy with the fragments of the cutoff wheel stuck in the top of foot thanks to the "safety flip-flops"
Started with the passenger side
4 part sheetmetal lamination was kind of a bitch, but the grinder made it happen. Snip snip.
With the spring and bumpstop removed, wheel was mounted and shock compressed to its full extent. This represents a condition that should never exist in reality, but I want to make sure I have extra clearance even in the worst possible scenario.
Blue sharpie shows the outside edge of the tire at full lock.
And of course shock hit FUCA. Seriously. What the FUCA?! Pulled the arm off and "clearanced" the hole in the arm with a hammer.
That seems a lot better. I think now the LBJ or UBJ is binding at full droop. Which sucks. Not sure how I feel about this, but I'll definitely look at carrying spares of both when it becomes critical
Mount tire, jack up a pump, spin tire while turning through range of motion, mark, jack another pump, spin tire while turning through range of motion, mark, remove tire, hammer the **** out of everything. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat again. Repeat again. Your neighbors hate you. Repeat again.
Once I had about 1/2" of clearance everywhere, it all got a squirt of matte black paint. This was purely to act as an indicator of contact points after the first test drive.
This is that lamination I was talking about previously. It's not terrible, I think it might be weldable. Well, not my me. I'm sure my paint will help that as well.
The Energy Suspension bushing showed up in the mail at about 2:30 on Saturday, so I was able to finally finish putting the drivers side FLCA back together and get started on the drivers side. While wrestling with the FUCA crossbolt I decided to re-mount the power steering cooling tuber thinger. It was zip tied to the hood latch and otherwise free floating. Or rather, free vibrating. Against everything. A couple of bolts back into the factory mounts and it as good to go. Surprisingly, the steel cooler tube is REALLY bound in there, almost totally rigid. It took a lot of shoving and pulling to get it back into place.
Which was apparently too much from the 1994 vintage rubber PS return hoses
Drippy drip of sadness :(
Thanks to some shoving and swearing, we can see the leak in-situ. Gosh I love modern phones.
These hoses have gone incredibly rigid over the past ~25 years and that lack of flexibility plus a bit of dry rot means that when I started shoving the cooler loop around, the rubber split. I'm just glad this went while it was up on jackstands, rather than driving and spraying power steering fluid (ATF?) on the exhaust. Good news is that I was able to access them from the bottom of the car. These are unfortunately 10mm ID power steering/hydraulic hose, and probably molded from the factory. Unfortunately I don't live in the glorious metric future, so 3/8"~9.5mm ID power steering return hose was as best as I could do on short notice. And of course in the mid 40° weather, there's just no hope that its going to work. Fuckit. Ordered some random $9 10mm ID molded power steering return hoses from Amazon that I can cut some 90° sections out of to fix this issue. So test drive will have to wait.
Drivers side, now reassembled, was abused in the same way as the passenger side. This time I left the welds in while hammering, and ground it all down after. Results were... slightly better? I was able to grind out more material from the seam without it opening up, so there will be less ridge there to cause problems. I like! Once this gets a bead from the metal hot snot gun, I'll smash it with a hammer and get it really flat.
But for now, rear tires are finally back on the ground.
Don't get too excited about that ride height just yet, its not properly set and the suspension isn't settled in. It also looks like it still has a bit of negative camber, despite my best efforts.
I'm horribly disappointed in the rupturing of the power steering return hose, but hey, this is this **** you gotta expect when messing with older cars. I'm right on the edge of removing the OE steel cooling loop and putting an scavenging a legit power steering fluid cooler core off something from the junkyard, like an early 2000s F250 or something. I'm putting a little more load on the pump that its probably used to so I'd like to give it at least some chance of survival. I'll have to keep my eyes out for a useable cooler core the next time I'm over there. So until the replacement 10mm ID 90° power steering return hose sections get here, this is where I'm stuck:
Cardboard to catch the drips of PS fluid that is now all over the subframe and steering rack. I suspect Mr. Pressure Washer is going to get another go here.
While you have the PS system drained, maybe think about a real PS cooler or something to prevent the PS from boiling over? I boil mine on track, I'm sure the massive tires are going to put some serious stress on the system lol.
In another thread, I documented the saga by which I intend to terminate our company's relationship with a fire protection company that, based upon the events of the past 72 hours, I can only conclude is either incompetent or engaged in graft. I didn't use any of those words specifically, merely asked a question which I cannot foresee a way to answer without admitting one of the two.
But... yeah. There are many things in this world which scare the hell out of me on account of the sheer amount of potential mechanical anger which they contain. Most of them are electrical in nature (eg: if you touch this, you won't even know that you have died by the time it has killed you), but some of them are of the "This machine contains sharp things, with considerable mass, rotating at a high velocity. And one of them is badly unbalanced, which is probably the reason you have removed this cover and are presently looking at it" variety.
Clutch explosions fall into that latter realm. Kind of the same basic neighborhood as "I am sitting on top of a V-twin engine which I am revving to well beyond the manufacturer's suggested redline, and hoping that an engineer in Hamamatsu in 1986 was unusually generous in his tolerance-specs."
You guys are hilarious, I thought I was the only one drunk-posting in this thread
Thanks @sonofthehill that clutch is absolutely the stuff of nightmares.
@Joe Perez I suspect your 1980s Japanese engineer knew exactly what they were doing and the tolerances were well on the generous side. In fact, I'd almost be more comfortable doing that on something Japanese that was designed in the 80's without the "benefits" of Finite Element Analysis and "Value Engineering" ...assuming the rest of the parts were up to snuff as well.
@Brap-Brap Power steering cooler was discussed at the end of my post, its definitely something I'll be looking into.
I'm honestly surprised I didn't have to say "inb4deletepowersteering" Good to know we are all on the same page.
In other news, I ordered a couple of these guys yesterday:
seem to indicate that its actually 10mm ID, though there aren't enough other dimensions listed to determine if I can get both sections out of one part. For under $4.50/ea from RA I'm happy to order 2 and see what happens. They "should" get here by the end of the week and "should" be the parts I need to fix the power steering leak.
Mazda OE part number on these molded hoses (and they are the same PN) is NA02-32-682. They aren't expensive by any means (usually around ~$10) but of all the Mazda parts dealers I checked online, nobody had a shipping estimate that would get them to me in reasonable time, and by reasonable I mean before the weekend. Which, I'm happy to have discovered today, is a 3 day weekend. That gives me lots of time for shenanigans. I'll have to do a tape measure alignment to get it close, but very much looking forward to actually driving this mess.
You guys think the Les Schwab will touch the alignment on this with a 10' pole?
@Joe Perez I suspect your 1980s Japanese engineer knew exactly what they were doing and the tolerances were well on the generous side. In fact, I'd almost be more comfortable doing that on something Japanese that was designed in the 80's without the "benefits" of Finite Element Analysis and "Value Engineering" ...assuming the rest of the parts were up to snuff as well.
In my experience, Japanese engine design is wildly inconsistent. Not in terms of quality, but rather in specification of parts and materials relative to their design requirement.
Toyota, in the 1970s, appears to have sent all of its mechanical engineers to study at the Alexander Mozhaysky college of Military Engineering in Moscow, with an emphasis on tank design. Honda, at the same time, was apparently sending its engineers out to apprentice with master watchmakers in Austria and Switzerland.
Both get the job done. The Honda engine produces twice the power with half the fuel consumption. The Toyota engine, by comparison, will keep on running after you've drained the coolant, filled the crankcase with sand, submerged it in the ocean for a year, then dried it out and filled the fuel tank with bunker oil which was rejected by the QC department at a power plant in Uganda.
01-07-2021, 09:53 AM
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Sorry, nevermind, carry on.
Good to know we are all on the same page.
