Gotcha, I wasn't sure if there might be some issue with mixing the oil and E85. I hadn't even considered how much fuel you'd need to flow for that.

Rotaries really are their own world... I was chatting with an RX8 owner at an autocross meeting yesterday. He's worried about the 25-550 running out of steam for what seems to be a mild turbo build. He said the rotary in the RX8 is supposed to breath equivalent to a 3.6 or 3.9 L piston engine? I had no clue.

 

Yep i've seen that number a lot. They're measured as "1.3L" but in reality, it's more like 1.3L times 3 because all four strokes kind of happen at the same time due to the rotating nature of the combustion chamber. it's kind of weird to wrap ur head around when ur used to "thinking in piston". The 3.9L piston engine figure doesn't hold up very well in my opinion, because if you imagine a ~4L piston engine, you're probably gonna picture it having a pretty significant amount of torque and power output at an instant, where a rotary has to "ramp up" so to speak to make that same power. You might find peak power in a 4L piston engine at like 3-4k RPM, where on a rotary 3k is gonna be right at the bottom of the power band, and it'll keep making power up until like 7 or 8k kinda like a motorcycle.

Anyway i try not to get suckered into the comparison game, they're very different and it's not like im gonna be racing this car anyway, so i'm really just here to have a cool setup, not an "optimal" one for anything in particular. Tho i'll probably be taking this car to an autox or two when i think it's viable just to feel it out.

 

Playing with ROMs on my car for tuning makes me miss the Megasquirt days a bit. I mean lots and lots of things are easier using the OEM ECU and its strategies, but pulling to the side of the road and having to wait 2-3 minutes to make a 2% MAF table correction is annoying as heck haha.

 

Yeah, i'll be the first to admit i'll never return to MS. It could take 10 minutes to flash the rom and i'd still prefer it. There's technically no reason we couldn't have live tuning on the RX8 ECU, since we have the ability to patch the ROM, and a bit of space, it's viable to add new routines to replace things. I've talked to a few people about implementing this and im even pretty sure that some of the Versa type companies have it. the thing that keeps holding me up on it is if i actually wanted to tune this car, i'd probably just go haltech anyway.

 

Had a really weird code that read "brake pedal open circuit". I started with checking the pedal switch - assumed i just forgot to plug it in, or it wasn't adjusted right or something. everything looked okay but i gave it an adjustment anyway. didn't clear the code and this made me wonder if my bulbs even worked at all. i remember checking them early on in the swap, but wouldn't you know it none of them worked. AND i found there was a dead short. i guess that's what the code was talking about? very weird. anyway, i removed both bulbs, and the short went away but the code didn't, and the lights didn't work either. spent a lot of time crawling around under the dash and randomly tested the "noise filter". luckily i had another one in the endless box of parts. Replaced it and everything seems to be working again. Not really sure how/why this happened, or even when. Oh well. Got another code for the "combined sensor", haven't tested it yet but it liekly just needs a replacement.

 

Well, i finally went and picked up a 3d scanner. I got the Einstar 2. Don't even ask me why i picked it over others because the only real reason is i picked it on a whim at 1AM the other night. Have no real experience with this sort of thing, but it was fairly easy to do. just put little stickers all over the place and scanned away. My goal here is to design up a couple of brackets to seat the Rx8 cluster into the hole in the dash more firmly. right now the cluster can move around a little too much. The rx8 cluster was the first one i scanned, it came out good enough. the post processing is what really makes these models come out useful. i have a really fast PC and even that was struggling with the mondo meshes that you get straight out of a scan. I'm sure this is more art than science but i'm getting the hang of it.



NC cluster is less reflective, so it came out much cleaner looking. mind the ripples at the bottom, i didn't want to ruin my cluster, so i chopped off the "dust cover" thing in the software instead of on the real thing. healing those holes came out a little weird but it shouldn't really matter for brackets anyway. there's a fine line between "workable model" and "perfect recreation".



Took me a while to get used to it all, but here's a few screenies from Fusion showing the overall difference between both clusters. The NC one is by far more "compact" and simple design. No compound curves or other weird features. everything is mostly on the same planes



You can see just by the number of faces that the rx8 cluster is way more complex. Not to mention there are very few flat planar surfaces on it. I personally prefer the original Cluster, but what can you do when you have a completely different car under the hood.



This is the real reason i got the scanner tho. Gonna take a few more tries to get it right, but i really want a halfway decent scan of the engine bay to design brackets and such for all the mess of wiring and sensors and whatever hanging around, especially on the ABS side of the bay. I read that you can fill a spray bottle with alcohol and baby power and it makes a decent spray on texture that you can just wash off. Which as you can see is true, and maybe you can tell i got impatient waiting for the alcohol to evaporate and kept spraying it anyway. coated my entire engine bay and a pretty good portion of my driveway with baby powder lol.



All that work and the scan didn't even come out that good, but decent for a first test anyway.




Gonna give it another go pretty soon now that i've practiced a bit more i think i can do a way better job. It also will help to be in the garage. i foolishly thought that sun light would help but it turns out the glare from the sun is too much and the camera has to work really hard to track in that situation. i think i'll probably remove a lot of the wiring and things like that so i can get the details i need without wasting time scanning stuff that doesn't matter. Really wish i had the motivation to take everything out of the engine bay to do this. that would be a really useful scan but oh well. maybe some day.


In other news, i had an alignment this morning and finally got to take the car for a decently long drive and really feel it out. The alignment techs were of course extremely confused about what the hell i brought them and had to answer all the standard questions like "who built it" "why did you do this" etc. but after chatting for a bit we decided to go for a mostly "miata" spec. Cant remember the numbers off the top of my head, but trust me they thought long and hard about it before committing to them. They set the ride height, or at least tried to. the rear is at max height currently while the front can't come down anymore. I'm not completely sure what caused this to happen specifically, but i know im basically getting screwed by my really cheap coilovers. I think i'll probably get a set of those "long travel" ones as an upgrade in the future.

Before and After. you can see that on the passengers wheel in the first photo, it almost looks like i have positive camber lol.




While im really happy with how it is now, i still know it could be better. I know most of my complaints are about these coilovers. idk what i was thinking when i bought them. They just ride so bad. oh well, just more stuff to add to the list. Anyway, the car is really fun to drive now. I took it outside of town and ran it hard thru all the gears just to feel it out and im happy to report that it literally just feels like a smaller, lighter rx8 which is exactly what i was going for. Still a lot of incremental improvements coming but as the "core" im so happy with it. I'll probably spend the next couple weeks driving it around town and making a list of everything that drives me nuts about it. Im certain there are things that require attention sooner rather than later, but for now i don't have much else. Might finally go give it a wash later.

 

Serious question... Any interest in selling those cluster files so I can host them on my website?

Nice work on the first few scans. There's definitely a learning curve to it all.

 

Really cool stuff man, glad you are getting to enjoy the car more finally. Have you had rotarys before? What's your thoughts on the renesis in that chassis? Really seems like a sweet spot. The renesis gets too much hate, imo, even in the 8 it's a cool package. Of course it has it's flaws but rotary cars just have so much character.

 

Im not sure these are good enough quality scans to do that much with, but i'll upload em here anyway. if you sell em, at least put my name on the page

NC Cluster

RX8 Cluster

Yeah i have a long past with them, have owned a number of FBs, FCs and Rx8s. If i remember correctly, my second car was an rx8 when i was like 19 or 20 maybe, and i loved that thing. When i later got into miatas, i decided i *NEEDED* to have the rx8 engine in there. Dont get me wrong, i love the older 13b for the "retro" thing, but i don't think they make a great option for the NA or NB specifically because of how much work is required. Lots of fabrication, standalone almost certainly required, outdated emissions tech etc. So the next best thing is the NC given how close it was to the rx8. Anyway i really believe Mazda should have just sold this car as i've built it from factory. i think a proper sports car is where the rotary needs to live, and they could have maybe made a special "trim" or "edition" or something with this setup. i get that it probably didn't make sense financially back then. anyway all that is to say i think it's the perfect NC to me. Agreed on the too much hate, but on the other hand it's easy to hate when mazda did kinda whiff the execution pretty bad. imo they brought it back by the S2 but you know how reputations stick