w00t! Looking forward to aux-in goodness. Not even my daily driver Civic has aux in. I noticed that pop sound myself and wondered about it. The cure is to just leave the radio on and never turn it off.

Today I got up early and decided to address my sagging driver's door. I bought a set of second-hand hinges of eBay ages ago and have been lagging on installing them. Today, I got the door off:





And then removed the hinges:



I was afraid I was going to have to take off the fender, as I'd read somewhere that this was standard procedure for taking the door off. I was happy to find that this wasn't necessary at all. Just take the door off the hinge, then take the hinges off the car. It required a couple of different sockets and wrenches to accomplish. The upper bolt on the top hinge had be taken off with an open end wrench. Others required my ratcheting closed end wrenches, and the others I was able to take off using a socket wrench. It took about 30 minutes to get the door off, if even that. Very pleased at how easy this was, even doing it alone.

I need to put the new brackets on, which I'll probably do tonight.



Later this morning, I bought a set of Magnacore plug wires to use in my MSD 6A upgrade.

fm

 

eeek

psss I have no shame being a hoarder

 

I extracted a few exhaust studs from some dead 12A housings. I got four good ones.
I'm going to build a couple of 12As to have some on hand. You know why.

 

OMG just counted in my head we have 9 - 12A's ... good lord ...


.... Hello everyone my name is Ray and I have a problem

LMAO

 

Hey Jeff I got her running! Lookin good too. It's been a mad struggle but it's going good. Today I buttoned most of it up but I think the carb is dirty now since I've had it without a filter for a bit now and I ran it out of gas. Otherwise things are looking up to get her to the track for my novice class.

 

Wooh 9 is alot im at 3 now engine is now stuck in the hatch of my fb ... 300 pounds is a pain

 

I had 11 on the shelf once.


And more on the floor. But most were cores with something wrong with them.


They've all since been torn down. I'd like to get back to the clean look of just having engines on the shelf. Really classed up the place.

Here is where the dead parts went.

 

Damn lol

 

Wow .... That's alot

 

Jeff, I'm going to show my wife those pictures so she stops hassling me about ONE 13b on an engine stand in the garage and some misc EFI parts on the shelves. I think your lawn caterpillar would probably shake her up the most.

I did have five 12As (that had been driven hard on cooking oil for pre-mix) and a 13B at one time. She wouldn't even go out into the garage...smelled like something in between an engine bay and a fast food joint in there.

fm

 

This evening, I put the door back on the car. I ended up having to loosen up most of the fender so I could adjust the hinges on the car. No more sagging driver's door ftw!

fm

 

Nice, I have the same shelves but only 2 disassembled 12As and some nikki stuff.

 

Doing a rats nest removal on a buddy's new car..

We got the nikki stripped as well and every vac port on the manifold and carb have been blocked and checked over 10 times in the past 2 days but we still can't figure out why when it starts it revs itself to ~4000rpm then just dies in seconds. The throttle isn't engaged at all but if you press it the car bogs until it just about dies or does die.

I followed Vipernicus' tutorial and removed the choke and all that junk but I still can't figure this out

 

I'd suspect a bad vaccuum leak

 

See, I thought that so I tore off everything and went over it top to bottom. I even have a spare manifold that I looked at for sources of leaks.

I sprayed brake cleaner all over and didn't see any idle changes either (not that I could get it to idle long at all)

If it makes a difference, we took off the old exhaust and it's just the stock header and downpipe with a possible exhaust leak at the gasket (the gasket looked pretty shitty, getting new one soon).

 

the ports on the base gasket?

hose that went down to the cat convertor?

 

I swapped in a MOOG idler arm.

 

I'm hoping you meant "carb cleaner."

Brake cleaner being primarily acetone & heptane... you're lucky you still have a car, not a smoldering crater.

 

Yeah I meant Carb lol.

Anyways I tore the carb apart again today and used hot water, simple green, and a stiff brush to clean it this time. Top to bottom and stripped the rest of the **** off of it. Might go mech secondaries on it, still deciding about the electric plungers (probably will come off in the future).

Anyways it idles at 1200 now. Just gotta get it running properly.

Pics:

 

Wouldn't that be an awesome lawn art piece? Giant rotary caterpillar feeding on a piston engine. I want one. Hey, I'd like to grab a dead housing from someone so I can get it cleaned up, painted and added to my rotor clock so it has a proper frame.

 

Installed my brand new Racing Beat muffler. No more weed eater!! It now has a front to back Racing Beat exhaust system. Now I can tackle small thing here and there...

-New weather channel strips for the door frame and window glass
-Miata cup holder
-Stainless brake and clutch lines
-Stainless oil cooler lines
-New idler arm
-Window tint

 

A police came next to me and thought i was mowing my lawn.... Getting a muffler here soo i hope lol

 

Today I AAA towed her home. I think I have some serious electrical issues and a vacuum leak from hell. Oh well, life in the fast lane! I still love her

 

Today I found the co2 system leak, pulled the tank for refill tomorrow.

Spent a few hours poring over factory service manuals and diagrams, planning 1) integrating the haltech, wideband o2, and rpm switch system into the factory ecu loom and 2) an upcoming wire tuck.

The EFI book I'm reading made a great point about grounding all ECU-related electronics to the same place so as to avoid ground loop noise interfering with the sensor signals. This made so much sense, and I realized I shouldn't just be tapping into wires randomly and grounding wherever. I also want to draw all signals and power from the same source as well.

Which got me thinking - the term "proper ground" is thrown around a lot - but I have a strong feeling that the truly proper way, in an electrical engineering sense, is not to just pick the closest chassis bolt and call it good. Does anyone have any insider tips? Should everything be grounded back through the harness? What is the proper way to merge multiple ground lines?

I'm ready to do final routing and pull the haltech loom slack back through the firewall. I got my throttle position sensor in finally, with a shiney custom bracket. Thanks Robert! Now all that's mechanically left to do is figure out how to hook up the OMP. I'm going to get creative with some bicycle brake cable.

I might even be so bold as to add in a cold start vacuum advance solenoid system. I'm curious to see how these eBay special brass solenoids do.

 

i've just been rewiring my FC with an FD engine, and i've had the FC and REW harnesses apart, to make something that plugs into the car AND the engine.

so Mazda does a couple of things that seem easy and reasonable.

1. the sensors, knock, CAS, o2, AFM, are shielded, and the shields are all grounded together, this happens to be the wire bolted next to the ECU.

2. the S5 harness has a tinfoil hat. the shield ground has a small branch to a piece of foil, and this foil is wrapped around the harness between the ecu and firewall. the FD isn't, the S5 isn't.

3. the sensors are grounded together. there is a wire from the ECU for the sensor ground, and then it branches.

4. the odd bit, the ground wires are actually all connected to each other, so they basically all branch off of each other, so basically its all one wire anyways. they DO make sure that it grounds on the body, engine, etc, but its really just one wire.

so there are like 3 ground wires in the whole car, and they all connect to each other anyways.