As you guys may well know, I've completely and totally removed the EFI system on my SE and am running a sweet little dellorto sidedraft. I think the fuel tuning is pretty close to being on the money, but I'm having some ignition woes.

Primarily, the battery is simply not charging. Since it was working fine before, I have to believe that it is something related to simplifying of the engine harness that I did. I followed the RB instructions, and my alternator is hooked up like so:





Is this correct? The connector has two wires, white with black stripe, and black with white stripe. The other wire (I'm assuming the power wire) has a a single white wire with a pink stripe. It just seems like the Alternator isn't getting the signal to turn on.

Here is a collection of [now] unused connectors. None of these should effect anything now, right?



The problem is that, one, it's hard to start a car with a constantly low/dead battery, and two, the engine simply does not make power over 3,000rpm. It will barely rev higher than that under load. Which makes me think that there is almost no spark. Could the battery being low (well under 8 volts when I drove it) and not charging cause this complete lack of power?

In addition to this, I simply unhooked the vacuum lines from the distributor, effectively eliminating vacuum advance. Aside from that, I should not need to touch the ignition timing, correct? Just use the default factory settings, and the timing curves should be fine under load. The only place I would expect it to run [slightly] worse would be low RPM, but it's fine in that range anyways.



Ignition fault finding has always been my mechanical weak link. Please help!

 

Other observations:

Idiot lights are all constantly on
Tach occasionally jumps around randomly
Fusible links are fine
Battery is pretty old, but everything worked fine before...

 

you just unhooked the vaccum advance? and htat was an upgrade how? plug that back in.

secondly have you tested your alternator? maybe is going blooey on you.

 

Page A-2 of the wiring diagram list connector A-02 with a BW (Black with White strip horizontal spade) and WB (White with Black strip (vertical spade). Looks like your is correct. Wiring diagram can be found here: Foxed.ca - Mazda RX-7 Manuals

 

The vacuum advance, from what I understand, is mostly there to improve low RPM fuel economy...which I don't really care about since I have a 40mpg daily driver. Or am I mistaken?

I'm gonna test the alternator, and see if that fixes her.

One thing. I remember that there was a sort of black block thing that attached to the driver side of the upper intake plenum, and then a short wire connected that to the alternator. Is that little block important? Is it a resistor? I can't figure out what it is according to the wiring diagram.

 

Update. Was able to measure the alternator output, and it was throwing 14v at the battery, so all the connections are probably fine. I might just need a new battery. Starts great when it's on the 12v, 12a charger :p

This was strange, however. I had to rev the car up to 4,000rpm or so for the the idiot lights to go off, and, presumably, the alternator to come on. Why would this happen?

 

The alternator is probably working too hard to charge a bad battery. Eventually it
will fry your alternator. Your symptoms of the idiot lights being on and the tach
being screwy all scream bad alternator or battery. Take the alternator and have it
tested and then get a new battery.

If your battery is more than 4 years old, it needs to be replaced. Whenever I have
an an old battery that gets discharged that low, it usually never workswell after
that and the only solution has been a new one.