Scaxx

I think it's time to bring some good news into this thread again.

The engine got finished today and I picked it up. My buddy came over after work and helped me put it together, we were missing the epl for the head studs so we couldn't get the top end on but the bottom end is pretty much finished and we should finish the top end tomorrow, the heads are already assembled so that should speed that up. If things go alright it should be in the car and hopefully running on Saturday. Or at least that's the idea.

As for what went into the engine, arp rod bolts, Mahle forged pistons (10.2:1, lower than I had hoped but it is what it is), arp head studs, new dual valve springs+ti retainers, new cam, new hardened pushrods, new lifters, new oil pump. More machine work went into it than I initially thought. My buddy is pretty positive that the owner gave me a discount cause apparently I had a quite a bit more work done to my engine than another similar build that came in and mine was only a few hundred dollars more. So that's pretty cool, it was still expensive as **** though haha. Overall I'm happy now, Rob knows his ****, I think he's just bad at being somewhat transparent on time. I'm happy my buddy works there cause I'm pretty sure Rob might have forgotten to call me to tell me the engine was done. So everyone cross their fingers that things go well this weekend.

Pile of parts on the ground:





Progress for the night:

Scaxx

Engine is back in the car, finished assembling the engine and then attached trans and suspension before sliding it all under. Worked from 4 pm to 5am yesterday but I made good progress. I'll let the pictures do most the talking, also made a set up so I can hopefully build oil pressure before start up, kinda like the melling set up but $200 less.

Scaxx

Well after 24 hours of work it runs. We primed the oil pump with my setup and then unplugged the injectors before running it. After a little bit of cranking the oil pressure shot up to 50 psi and we went ahead and started the engine. Oil pressure stayed around 50 cold and went to about 40 hot. Having some problems getting the air out of the cooling system but I'm hoping to solve them tomorrow. I have to run the farmer's market tomorrow so I'll get a late start. I'll leave you with some videos to enjoy, needs some work on the tune cause it won't idle worth a ****, but man, it sounds so amazing.

aidandj

iTrader: (5)

4strings

iTrader: (1)

Magic freaking funnel! So worth it!

OGRacing

iTrader: (1)

lol i use my old accusump to prime the engine. a bit overkill but i got it kicking around so why not use it.

Scaxx

Didn't actually get to work on the car yesterday so I came home and decided the first thing I needed to do was test to make sure the numbskull behind the counter at oriellys gave me the right sensor. He told me he wanted a miata and that was gonna turbo it, he also informed me the 1.6 engine is superior cause it revs faster. I didn't realize people actually thought that was true, I didn't even try to tell him he was an idiot, I just wanted to get away from him. Anyway, I dipped it in some boiling water to check if it was right and it was a couple degrees off but nothing crazy.

I also forgot that I bought an airlift bleeder about a year ago, yeah, I ain't too bright. So I drained the coolant out of the radiator, hooked up the vacuum bleeder and let her rip. It sucked in an additional gallon and a half from what was in it before lol, might have had some air in the system. Then I lifted the front and ran the car, took in a touch more after the thermostat opened up but the temperatures actually made sense and it started cooling down when I turned on the fans. Basically it ran like a normal car.

Started messing with the idle cause it's non-existant right now. Raised the idle to about 950 hot. Still doesn't wanna get down there yet though, I'm supposed to get the IAC to be at about 2-4% at idle but it still jumps around too much when I drop the throttle to under .5%. Need to do more reading, making progress though, the other day it didn't want to run anywhere under 1400rpm. Right now it'll hold steady around 1100 but anything under that and it's not too happy. The weather is supposed to be absolute **** this week but I think friday might be not wet so I think I'm just gonna have it run at around 1200rpm but that way I can put some more miles on it.

Also cleaned it for the first time in two years, it was a very soft wash, need to get a clay bar and some other stuff, this is when working in a detail shop still would be nice. Still a ways to go in terms of cleaning it, but at least it doesn't have a bunch of **** on it now!

Scaxx

Since I get out of school early on these days I decided to go ahead and try to drive the car with my buddy on his lunch break. Pushed the car outside, and it starts raining. Push it back inside and the sun comes out. He gets here so we push it back out and fire it up, then I noticed the clutch pedal doesn't have full travel. It starts pouring down rain so we push the car back in. He heads back to work while I fix the pedal travel, the sun comes back out. So I start the car, pull it to the end of the driveway, ******* downpour. I closed the laptop and drive it back into the garage.

I give up, I ******* hate Seattle sometimes lol

Edit: Oh BTW, it's ******* sunny now but weather report calls for thunderstorms any minute now

Scaxx

So one thing that's always bugged me is how much the t56 weighs. At around 130lb it's a bit of a pig of a transmission. Other than the fact it adds weight to the car, every time I moved the damn thing I just about kill myself. The recent development with kmiata got me thinking about trans options again so I figured why not see if there's a similar option for LS motors. I found one company located in Europe and some mentions of them on some mkIV supra forums but not a whole lot of actual experience. It looks like it could be a valid option for a trackday car, really only a valid option for a trackday car. Looks like cruising speed would be about 2700 rpm (yikes!) and the clutch they use for the conversion is a tilton 7.5" unit. But top speed (this is all with a 3.23 and the e30 5sp ratios from kmiata's page) would come in around 180 which might actually be much better than the t56's useless final gear on track. As for whether the rest of the gearing would be better for some tracks, I don't know.

I don't think it's an option for me right now because this car is still going to be getting driven on the street and the gearing just wouldn't be good.

But Johnny, maybe something you might wanna look into. T56's go for stupid ******* prices, at least around here, like $2000 with the bellhousing so that would definitely offset some of the cost. Going with a 5sp you'd save about 53 lb and with a 6 speed it's about 34, that's a pretty ******* huge weight drop either way. Even more weight dropped awith the Tilton clutch since our clutch set up's should weigh about the same which is right around 40 lb.

Just me putting thoughts down, it may be a better option one day, just not right now

RalliartRsX

You are not finding a V160 for less than 6-8k or a V161 Unicorn jizz for less than 9-10K..........

There is a reason people do not go with those.

Scaxx

I think you misunderstood, people on supra forums were talking about switching to e30/e36 transmissions like the one that kmiata just announced a kit for. I was referencing there wasn't a whole lot of people who had experience with the company that makes an adapter for LSx to e30/e36 trans (they're out of latvia).

I'm guessing the high price of the v160/161 is why they were talking other options

Scaxx

Well ****, the weather said it was gonna be nice from 5-8. No, I don't learn my lesson quick lol. Anyway my buddy came over with another guy from the machine shop to see it run and drive it after work. He had some tuning experience with his jeep that he turbo'd and put an MS3 in so I told him if he wanted to take a look at the tune he could feel free. So he just kinda went to town for an hour or so and now it idles well. Really awesome cause this kinda gives me a platform to work off of so that I can start slowly learning to tune it. Of course it started pouring rain after about 10 minutes so we put our canopy/tent thing out over the car while he was messing with the tune.

Also the neighbors that moved in don't understand cars and they're not quite as nice as the former ones. The former ones just kept to themselves, probably cause one of the dude deals but how he makes his money don't ******* matter if it ain't affecting anyone. The only time they ever asked me to quiet things down was when I was running a pulse jet at 10pm in highschool (pretty valid reason). Anyway, we thought the dude was asking if it was almost road worthy (aka interested) but then he starts accusing me of running a car repair shop because of all the cars in the driveway. Told him multiple times they're all either mine or my parents but he didn't ******* get it. Maybe it was a language barrier but either way, he can **** off. My family's been living in this house since my mom was born in the 50's, they got here a couple months ago. It's honestly not even that loud, it's about 90dB next to the fence seperating our driveway and their sideyard, inside our house it's noticeable but it's just kind of a low droning, it's not like we're sitting out there revving it to 5k. Anyway, it annoyed me that he moves in and then starts accusing us of ****, the newest car in our fleet is the blue miata and I bought that this summer so it's not like I have cars moving in and out of our driveway constantly.

Here's it idling, this was before he changed some more stuff around so I think this is it idling a touch higher than it was in the end.


Peasant vertical video crew, sorry

Scaxx

Just weighed my piston and pin from the stock ls3 to compare to the weights the shop took, piston weighed in at 494g which is consistent with the 495 that I've seen on the internet. Pin was 145g which was consistent as well. Piston and pin from Mahle came in at 577.2g, a total loss of 62.8g! Yay for lower inertia!

RalliartRsX

Aha! I see what you are saying now.

The company is called ABC and they make a full swap kit (flywheel, tilton clutch 7.25" twin or triple plate, etc) for adapting BMW gearboxes to 2J/1JZs. Not "terribly" expensive, but I think they are made to order and can take some time to arrive and judging by customs, has the chance to become a fairly expensive endeavor. The only thing I would be concerned about is replacement disks. But I guess as long as you have the titlon part numbers, disks can be replaced by the US distributor and they should be relatively cheap.

Scaxx

Yep that's the one! Didn't think about the shipping, you're right, that'll definitely add to the cost. Still not an option for me right now cause of gearing but possibly in the future, that's a nice chunk of weight to drop in the front-ish end of the car.

Scaxx

About to drive the car when my buddy gets off work, pretty nervous in all honesty. It's supposed to rain for the next week though so this is really my only chance. Also I graduate in two weeks! That's a scary thought!

Mobius

iTrader: (2)

Good luck!

Scaxx

Drive went well! Did 15 miles today! 12 with my buddy and 3 with my dad, he really enjoyed it! I'll give more details in the morning but so far so good!

ridethecliche

iTrader: (2)

I know that feel. The first time I drove my car on megasquirt was about a week or so ago. I was terrified to leave my street because I thought I'd get stranded ahhahha.

Good luck!

Scaxx

Yesterday went well for the most part. Started out with more clutch line problems. For some reason the copper washers on the banjo bolt weren't actually sealing so they were dumping hydraulic fluid which was really ******* annoying. So I annealed a couple and then they sealed up. Then the speed bleeder started leaking, kinda annoyed with the whole speed bleeder thing cause it seems to have problems sealing the bleeder end so I really had to torque it down, way more than I'd like to. Hopefully I won't have to do any clutch bleeding soon.

After that run around the car finally went into gear and came out of gear so we decided to roll it out. Took it around the block twice and brought it back in to check everything. Everything seemed fine, couldn't see any leaks or anything so we took it back out for a couple miles before bringing it back in. Same thing so we took it out a little further, did some short pulls on some non-residential roads and found an underpass to make some noise under. Man I can't wait to get it in some of the Seattle tunnels. Brought it back home after about 12 miles and called it good until my dad asked to go out for a short run. We went a few miles, he absolutely loved the car, at one point we saw a yellow light about 200 feet out, so I just rolled onto the throttle and we went flying through it before it turned red, he enjoyed that. Did a couple small pulls and then we brought it back home.

All in all the day went well, the tune definitely needs some work and I have a lot of reading to do. It was definitely learning though, when I started to drive the car it was backfiring a ton and by the end, it was much less. The throttle seems to be sticking slightly at like 2% or the car likes to hold at around 1700 rpm for a sec before coming back down to idle. Oil pressure was good the whole time, seems to hover around 27-28 at hot idle, coolant temperature stayed in a good range, although I can tell the car is gonna overheat on track. Or at least I'm 90% sure. Also glad I put the pedal stop at 70% this time, it's still fast as hell, but I feel like it was a good idea. That way I can put the engine under some load but it's not WOT.

So far the most impressive thing is the smoothness of the ride, I expected the power, I didn't expect it to ride that nicely. Seriously, my ******* daily is a rougher ride. The spring rates are definitely too high for the car right now because I had planned on having stickier tires and downforce when I bought the xidas, so it's a bit over sprung . But a couple of the roads I had to drive on were pretty rough and yet it didn't break my spine or throw me around much at all. One thing to note is I don't have the sway bars in it right now which may be affecting things but overall I was really impressed. Can't wait to finally get it on track and really enjoy the car.

Also noticed one of my valve gover gaskets decided to blow out, must not have been seated correctly but that's like 5 bolts on top of the engine and it luckily didn't spill much oil out. Overall it was a pretty good shakedown run. I have a week of rain to take some time to re-flare a couple of the brake fittings as well as seal up the firewall with some grommets/plugs I bought. (Aidan I'll let you know if the ones I bought seal that square hole, I may have an extra one if you still don't have yours sealed.) Also need to put the harddog rollbar from the blue miata in so I can actually take it to the drag strip/on track. The current plan is to sell the rollbar and pick up the correct size tubing bender die to build a cage once I'm done with the rollbar.

The younger guy in the passenger seat is the one who sent me down this path, or at least him and his dad kinda did. The other one is obviously my pops.