I put on a new set of wheels and tires today and did a front end alignment in my basement. Went to town to the tire shop to get them to check my work, and had to leave when the front end man was unsure about what I meant by "negative camber"!!!!

Sesh, what has the world come to!!!!

 

Wooop!
I did this today. She held many secrets under her black mask. literally.

Before:



After:




My Grose jets should arrive any day now.

 

Wow, Redliner, that looks like a very gratifying task. The difference will be profound, as you're certain to do it up (or you wouldn't be bragging). I'll be happy to hear when it works.

 

Working on a lil graphics-art project at the moment. Sub-project of a sub-project, heh.

 

I want to get all the crap off (rust, gunk, and whatever else now call my carb home) so I think I'm going to have to soda blast it. Not sure if that's safe.
I will be buying more wire brushes thins weekend and have another go at it. She shall sparkle before her final colors.

 

Beck Arnley ***** joints came today. One is Three 5, made in Japan, and one is CTR, made in Korea. I am not happy about the later.

I should be picking up replacement strut housings for removing the coil overs soon. Once I do that, it's time to tear into the front end again and finally get it back on the road.

 

^damn, I have some completely OE S1 '79 strut housing/spindles, as well as some S2 ones from my '82

 

Kinda explains what I'm up to...



Inkjet printed transparency of the air cleaner lid logo, printed via a carefully hand-digitized CAD render of same.

 

Ah, so you're reproducing the Mazda logo...are you also reproducing the directive "Use the Element specified in the owner's manual" too? If so, the 3rd character of the Japanese word "element" (エレナント) is incorrect...should be ”メ", not "ナ". Otherwise you're writing the word "elenant".

And are you practicing Japanese too? Writing the word shiyou, (use) over and over?

fm

 

I soda blasted a carb and it worked great. Also the soda dissolves so its not a
problem if some gets in an orifice. I bought some 1/2 clear vinyl tubing, a big box
of baking soda, and used my compressor to drive it. Cheap and effective.

 

Id love see pics of that carb

 

Yep; working toward making accurate photoetched silkscreens of all three imprints on the air cleaners (logo, "Mazda Rotary Engine," and the snorkel instructions) so I can re-imprint them after refinishing the air cleaner.

I'll post pix of the original snorkel imprint & my draft reproduction tonight when I'm home; The original print on OEM parts is a little blurry - - they were stencil-printed and are quite small, so some strokes of the more complex characters run together.

I had to seek help from a Japanese-speaking friend to ID the unicode values for some of the characters, especially the ones that are neither hiragana nor katakana, but are actually borrowed from Chinese - some of the variations are REALLY tiny. Those are his notes as he tried to dissect one particularly-blurry character from the original part.

I'm looking to reproduce the original, though, not to spell-check the possibly-"Engrified" original.

For all I know, it might actually spell out "bite the wax tadpole." I just plan to faithfully reproduce it.

The nice side benefit of doing the digital gruntwork of re-creating them instead of just going with a bitmap scan is that I'll end up with high-accuracy vector files of all three, which means reproducing them at any desired scale or in any medium (machine-cut vinyl, or machine-stitched embroidery, for example) will be a piece of cake.

 

Divin', great idea. My wife is a graphic designer who also happens to be Japanese. I've seen her recreate logos in Illustrator for people who only had a low-res bitmap scan of it. Vector files are awesome!

The Japanese words beneath the "USE THE ELEMENT SPECIFIED IN THE OWNER'S MANUAL" actually translate to "Use a genuine Mazda filter (element)". Odd that they translated differently (although the feeling is the same).

fm

 

No - that was only on the '84-'85 RE-EGI setup.

 

I taught myself AutoCAD ages ago (like, DOS days; - yeah, I know, I'm old) & being an engineer by trade I have an affinity for dimensionless scalable models of things.

I'm toying with the idea of making a t-shirt or hat with only the Japanese version on it, to wear at meets. Geeky inside jokes, I do love them so.

 

Oh, good. Do I have to block any of the holes where bolts thread through or can I just go to town on it as it stands? The float bowls have crap down at the bottom that needs to be blasted out.

 

Well in my case I had the whole carb completely torn down. I don't think you want to
do this with it assembled.

 

Oh, no. The old girl is completely stripped down. If it can come off it's off.

I also got my Grose jets.

 

Inverted greyscale (for added contrast) bitmap of a scan of the original part:



My current interpretation:



The text font is not QUITE perfect yet (bit too wide) but it's very close at this point; at normal scale the trasparency overlays near-perfectly.

 

Yep, the Japanese is correct now. The word 純正" is a little elongated, but you're very close. Cool that someone's doing something like this.

fm

 

well today i dont own a fb, but tomorrow...you never know

 

Put a new starter and altanator get pulled over get acused of useing haorine lol .... Ticket before that hostorical plates....

 

All new coolant lines through the engine bay. Wiring work, and alternator upgrade planning. Now all i need is a dual pully and new wiring to the starter.

 

I'm getting started with the seats of my FB because de back has a lot of play on the hinges. My mate works in a machine shop and he wil make me a pair of new bushings and I have a couple of spare seats for some new rails. I wil post a picture when the bushings are ready

 

I went up and over a curb.... But on the bright side I'll hve a new Mazda OE control arem in a few days