Four days of frustration (rant/long)
03-21-04, 02:16 AM
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Four days of frustration (rant/long)
Wednesday March 17, 2004 – Day 1:
Well, I finished my last final for college today and spring break has officially begun! I’m so happy I’m done with finals and this quarter is over, I can’t wait to get some things done on my RX7 I’ve been putting off until I had more time.
(Later that day)
Off to my friend’s house to start finish the OMP removal. We took it out already and blocked it off, took out the lines and everything, but the holes we are supposed to plug next to the primary fuel rail wouldn’t go in with the given bolt sizes in the how-to before, so we merely plugged the holes when we first did this so there wouldn’t be a vacuum leak. Now that we have the right size bolts we can finish it.
We took the intake off, TB/dynamic chamber and upper intake manifold to get to the bolts. Yep we finally got the right size ones and were able to finish the job! Uh oh, we found that my fuel lines are pretty crappy, though, so I need to replace those. Off to some car parts places to try and get some fuel lines. After going to 5 different shops, none of them had the fuel line size that I needed and wouldn’t until tomorrow. Oh well, not that big of a deal, I can wait till tomorrow to finish it. We go back to my friend’s house to look at things and read some stuff in the RX7club.com archives. We decide its time to do the TB mod too, but now its too late to get all the things we need for that, so I decide to wait till tomorrow to get those as well. I also decided its time to port my upper and lower intake manifolds after reading the how-to in the archives, so I’ll get everything for that tomorrow too. At this point there’s not much we can do until I get all my supplies, so back home I go, and off to sleep.
Thursday March 18, 2004 – Day 2:
I woke up extra early today to go out and get everything I need for doing all the little modifications I decided I wanted to do. Went to Tacoma Screw, Home Depot, Napa, and B&B. I finally have everything for the TB mod, porting, and got the fuel lines I needed to replace.
(Later that day)
I’m back at my friend’s house and we started to work again. While I’m working on the porting, he’s taking off the lower intake manifold and finishing up the TB mod (btw, we followed the how-to on RETed’s site). While doing the TB mod, some of the small screws really didn’t cooperate and got stripped; we ended up having to drill them out, oh well. All the manifolds are now out and I’ve started porting using a saw drill bit and drill to do it like the how-to in the archives states. DAMN!! This is a lot harder to do than the how-to led me to believe, and is taking WAY longer. It would’ve helped if the pictures still showed up in the how-to so I knew how big he went, cuz I kind of had to guess, no biggie. While my friend is taking off the primary fuel rail to replace the fuel lines he checks the PD, uh oh!! The PD is ****!! Seems that it’s broken, good thing we found that before my car caught on fire. Too late to go to the Mazda dealership now, I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow for that. Porting is taking forever with my friend’s cordless drill; I wonder why it’s so much harder than the how-to makes it out to be. Well it’s late, and there’s not much else we can do at this point. The TB mod is done and I’m about 1/3 of the way done with the porting, I guess I’ll go home. I took the manifolds with me so I could do the porting during the day tomorrow before my friend wakes up.
I went reading through the archives again and noticed a thread about removing the 6p actuators/rods/sleeves/etc on N/A’s. It seems that people say once you start getting up in the mods the 6p sleeves actually become a restriction. I think I’ll take mine out now since they’ve always had issues opening and getting stuck anyways.
Friday March 19, 2004 – Day 3:
I woke up early to go to the Mazda dealership to order a PD; I hope it doesn’t take more than a couple days for them to order one. Hmmm, ran into some problems here. It seems that this particular Mazda dealership hasn’t sold one in so long that it got bumped out of their system. I describe exactly where it is and what it looks like, and it is NOT showing up on the diagrams on their computer, strange. He gets an idea, though, and checks the part number for the PD on another car. After that, he calls up that part number and finds the PD needed for the S4 N/A RX7, that’s good. Wow!! They have one in stock?! I was amazed, it seems that they accidentally ordered one that someone didn’t need, and they had it in the parts room. That’s so awesome, now I wont have to wait for it to be specially ordered; maybe I’ll get to drive my RX7 home finally!!
Back home I go to port.
My hands were really sore from porting the night before, and my friends cordless drill kept running out of power so I had to stop every 10 minutes or so while porting. I was about 1/2 way through when I got extremely pissed at my friend’s drill. I was able to find my moms drill that plugs into an outlet and decide to try this one. NO WONDER IT WAS SO HARD!! OMG it started going so fast after that. Now I was able to make the ports bigger, smoother, and faster. So I touched up the ones I had already done and started working on the others. I got all but 2 of them done before I had to go do some things, but I can finish the last 2 at my friend’s house later.
(Later that afternoon)
I’m back at my friend’s now finishing up the porting while he cleans up the upper intake manifold, TB, puts the new PD on and finishes putting on the new fuel lines. I took out the actuators and sleeves and everything to check them out. One of them seems to be great and smooth, no problems. The other one seems to be kind of sticky and not turning as well. Screw these; I’m ripping them out. So I took them out (which is a good idea to do when porting anyways, even if you are putting them back in) and then had to get a tap and bolt to plug the holes that went into the lower intake manifold. No problem. My friend went and got the stuff we needed to tap the hole from his dad as I finished up the porting. I got it all done and smooth and started sanding them down a little to be more smooth and cleaned up. Got that all done and my friend got back so we cleaned the lower intake manifold. We then tapped the holes and put the bolts in, it’s now all plugged so there won’t be a vacuum leak and all the actuator junk is out. Looks like it’s finally time to put the car back together!
We started putting everything back together very carefully making sure we checked every clamp, vacuum hose, plug, etc. We are sure that everything is back where it needs to be and checked everything about 10 times to make sure it was in. We conclude that everything is where it should be and since we have no plugs, vacuum hoses, bolts/screws or anything left over, we believe that everything must be in correctly, right? Well it’s the moment of truth, time to start the car. We check over everything one last time and make sure everything’s on tight and torqued to the FSM specifications. I climb in the drivers seat to start it, and what do I hear? REE REE REE REE REE REE… It just keeps cranking and won’t start, what could be wrong? We check over everything again and can’t find anything wrong. Uh oh, though, we find out that when putting the upper intake manifold, dynamic chamber/TB we must’ve hit these things; they’re broken. We go and look in the FSM and find out that they are the “Pressure Regulator Control Solenoid Valve (orange)” and “Switching Solenoid Valve (gray).” It doesn’t seem like these could be causing it not to start, but maybe they’re creating a vacuum leak? We plug them after concluding it won’t hurt the car much to plug these temporarily while I drive it home and order the part from Mazda. Plug them up, car still doesn’t start. We tried checking everything again, and checked what the FSM says to when troubleshooting why the car doesn’t start. Can’t find anything wrong. Maybe the car is flooded, so we did the EGI fuse trick to see if that would help, nope still nothing. I tried giving it some gas while starting and it *almost* sounded like it wanted to start, but still wasn’t close. We have no idea what’s wrong and it’s getting late, so I guess it’s time for me to go home. I’ll post on rx7club.com and see what people think might be wrong.
Saturday March 20, 2004 – Day 4:
I woke up today and checked what people said on rx7club in my post. Rxmfn7 said to try and prime the fuel system with the yellow connector. I’ll try this, I really hope it works, I’m tired of my car being at my friend’s house, and I’m sure he probably wants it out of his garage by now. I then went to the Mazda dealership to order the parts we broke, looks like it’s a special order only part and I won’t have it until Tuesday. That’s not too bad, I just want to get the car started so I can bring it home.
(Later that day)
Went over to my friends again to try and get the RX7 running. At first we tried jumping the yellow connector to prime the fuel system. We discovered that the fuel pump was working, and this did absolutely nothing. The car still did not want to start. So what to do now? Well, there wasn’t much left and we figured it was still flooded, so once again we tried the EGI fuse trick. Pulled the fuse and cranked it about 6 or 7 times with a few seconds in between each one and doing it for about 5 seconds. We then put the fuse back in, started to crank it, put the gas to the floor, and slowly the rpm’s fluctuated and jerked up higher and higher, and IT STARTED!! However, it was now blowing tons of white smoke and would NOT hold an idle on its own, so I kept my foot on the throttle slightly to keep it running. It finally stopped smoking after a long while but was still not holding an idle on its own. A little later, still holding the throttle down the whole time, I slowly started to let it off and it was able to stay running. Now there was a new problem, though, instead of idling where it normally did at around 800, it idled at 450 to 500. After making sure it would stay running on its own for a while, I turned the car off and tried to start it again. It now started fine on the first try and was holding an idle around 500. We did all the idle adjustments that the FSM says to (TPS, idle speed on top of the TB, idle mixture, etc) and the best we could get was an idle at 500 to 550.
After a lot of searching on rx7club, reading of the FSM, and pondering on what could be wrong, we were lost. Finally we decided to take the BAC off to clean it. After cleaning and putting it back on, we checked to make sure it was working like the FSM states. There was resistance on the BAC terminal within the FSM specifications, and when we hooked a 12v power and ground straight up to the BAC terminal it began clicking like the FSM said it should. We figured it must be working properly and plugged it back in. I started the car and the idle was still between 500 and 550. Just to see what would happen, we unplugged the BAC again and hooked the 12v power and ground straight up to the terminal with the car running, and the idle jumped up to 1500 and help there. Once the power and ground were taken off, though, it fell back down. Something must be wrong with the BAC, but we don’t know what it could be. Finally after searching on rx7club and reading more of the FSM, we just decided to try something. We tightened the throttle cable to see if it would help, and guess what? IT DID!! After trial and error with tightening the throttle cable, we got it to idle fine at 750. We drove it around a bunch and it was doing fine, kept holding it’s idle and never stalled. I guess it’s all fixed. It has been an interesting and frustrating journey, that’s for sure.
Lesson Learned:
Never go into a project expecting it to be done in one night, never go into a project without realizing it may change (whether some problem arises or you decide to do some other things along with it) and never expect after taking that much stuff off/apart for the car to run perfect on the first try.
Did I enjoy these past four days? It’s hard to say. Some parts were good, some were definitely not. But would I change or trade any of this for a car that was more reliable than an RX7? Never!
Well, I finished my last final for college today and spring break has officially begun! I’m so happy I’m done with finals and this quarter is over, I can’t wait to get some things done on my RX7 I’ve been putting off until I had more time.
(Later that day)
Off to my friend’s house to start finish the OMP removal. We took it out already and blocked it off, took out the lines and everything, but the holes we are supposed to plug next to the primary fuel rail wouldn’t go in with the given bolt sizes in the how-to before, so we merely plugged the holes when we first did this so there wouldn’t be a vacuum leak. Now that we have the right size bolts we can finish it.
We took the intake off, TB/dynamic chamber and upper intake manifold to get to the bolts. Yep we finally got the right size ones and were able to finish the job! Uh oh, we found that my fuel lines are pretty crappy, though, so I need to replace those. Off to some car parts places to try and get some fuel lines. After going to 5 different shops, none of them had the fuel line size that I needed and wouldn’t until tomorrow. Oh well, not that big of a deal, I can wait till tomorrow to finish it. We go back to my friend’s house to look at things and read some stuff in the RX7club.com archives. We decide its time to do the TB mod too, but now its too late to get all the things we need for that, so I decide to wait till tomorrow to get those as well. I also decided its time to port my upper and lower intake manifolds after reading the how-to in the archives, so I’ll get everything for that tomorrow too. At this point there’s not much we can do until I get all my supplies, so back home I go, and off to sleep.
Thursday March 18, 2004 – Day 2:
I woke up extra early today to go out and get everything I need for doing all the little modifications I decided I wanted to do. Went to Tacoma Screw, Home Depot, Napa, and B&B. I finally have everything for the TB mod, porting, and got the fuel lines I needed to replace.
(Later that day)
I’m back at my friend’s house and we started to work again. While I’m working on the porting, he’s taking off the lower intake manifold and finishing up the TB mod (btw, we followed the how-to on RETed’s site). While doing the TB mod, some of the small screws really didn’t cooperate and got stripped; we ended up having to drill them out, oh well. All the manifolds are now out and I’ve started porting using a saw drill bit and drill to do it like the how-to in the archives states. DAMN!! This is a lot harder to do than the how-to led me to believe, and is taking WAY longer. It would’ve helped if the pictures still showed up in the how-to so I knew how big he went, cuz I kind of had to guess, no biggie. While my friend is taking off the primary fuel rail to replace the fuel lines he checks the PD, uh oh!! The PD is ****!! Seems that it’s broken, good thing we found that before my car caught on fire. Too late to go to the Mazda dealership now, I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow for that. Porting is taking forever with my friend’s cordless drill; I wonder why it’s so much harder than the how-to makes it out to be. Well it’s late, and there’s not much else we can do at this point. The TB mod is done and I’m about 1/3 of the way done with the porting, I guess I’ll go home. I took the manifolds with me so I could do the porting during the day tomorrow before my friend wakes up.
I went reading through the archives again and noticed a thread about removing the 6p actuators/rods/sleeves/etc on N/A’s. It seems that people say once you start getting up in the mods the 6p sleeves actually become a restriction. I think I’ll take mine out now since they’ve always had issues opening and getting stuck anyways.
Friday March 19, 2004 – Day 3:
I woke up early to go to the Mazda dealership to order a PD; I hope it doesn’t take more than a couple days for them to order one. Hmmm, ran into some problems here. It seems that this particular Mazda dealership hasn’t sold one in so long that it got bumped out of their system. I describe exactly where it is and what it looks like, and it is NOT showing up on the diagrams on their computer, strange. He gets an idea, though, and checks the part number for the PD on another car. After that, he calls up that part number and finds the PD needed for the S4 N/A RX7, that’s good. Wow!! They have one in stock?! I was amazed, it seems that they accidentally ordered one that someone didn’t need, and they had it in the parts room. That’s so awesome, now I wont have to wait for it to be specially ordered; maybe I’ll get to drive my RX7 home finally!!
Back home I go to port.
My hands were really sore from porting the night before, and my friends cordless drill kept running out of power so I had to stop every 10 minutes or so while porting. I was about 1/2 way through when I got extremely pissed at my friend’s drill. I was able to find my moms drill that plugs into an outlet and decide to try this one. NO WONDER IT WAS SO HARD!! OMG it started going so fast after that. Now I was able to make the ports bigger, smoother, and faster. So I touched up the ones I had already done and started working on the others. I got all but 2 of them done before I had to go do some things, but I can finish the last 2 at my friend’s house later.
(Later that afternoon)
I’m back at my friend’s now finishing up the porting while he cleans up the upper intake manifold, TB, puts the new PD on and finishes putting on the new fuel lines. I took out the actuators and sleeves and everything to check them out. One of them seems to be great and smooth, no problems. The other one seems to be kind of sticky and not turning as well. Screw these; I’m ripping them out. So I took them out (which is a good idea to do when porting anyways, even if you are putting them back in) and then had to get a tap and bolt to plug the holes that went into the lower intake manifold. No problem. My friend went and got the stuff we needed to tap the hole from his dad as I finished up the porting. I got it all done and smooth and started sanding them down a little to be more smooth and cleaned up. Got that all done and my friend got back so we cleaned the lower intake manifold. We then tapped the holes and put the bolts in, it’s now all plugged so there won’t be a vacuum leak and all the actuator junk is out. Looks like it’s finally time to put the car back together!
We started putting everything back together very carefully making sure we checked every clamp, vacuum hose, plug, etc. We are sure that everything is back where it needs to be and checked everything about 10 times to make sure it was in. We conclude that everything is where it should be and since we have no plugs, vacuum hoses, bolts/screws or anything left over, we believe that everything must be in correctly, right? Well it’s the moment of truth, time to start the car. We check over everything one last time and make sure everything’s on tight and torqued to the FSM specifications. I climb in the drivers seat to start it, and what do I hear? REE REE REE REE REE REE… It just keeps cranking and won’t start, what could be wrong? We check over everything again and can’t find anything wrong. Uh oh, though, we find out that when putting the upper intake manifold, dynamic chamber/TB we must’ve hit these things; they’re broken. We go and look in the FSM and find out that they are the “Pressure Regulator Control Solenoid Valve (orange)” and “Switching Solenoid Valve (gray).” It doesn’t seem like these could be causing it not to start, but maybe they’re creating a vacuum leak? We plug them after concluding it won’t hurt the car much to plug these temporarily while I drive it home and order the part from Mazda. Plug them up, car still doesn’t start. We tried checking everything again, and checked what the FSM says to when troubleshooting why the car doesn’t start. Can’t find anything wrong. Maybe the car is flooded, so we did the EGI fuse trick to see if that would help, nope still nothing. I tried giving it some gas while starting and it *almost* sounded like it wanted to start, but still wasn’t close. We have no idea what’s wrong and it’s getting late, so I guess it’s time for me to go home. I’ll post on rx7club.com and see what people think might be wrong.
Saturday March 20, 2004 – Day 4:
I woke up today and checked what people said on rx7club in my post. Rxmfn7 said to try and prime the fuel system with the yellow connector. I’ll try this, I really hope it works, I’m tired of my car being at my friend’s house, and I’m sure he probably wants it out of his garage by now. I then went to the Mazda dealership to order the parts we broke, looks like it’s a special order only part and I won’t have it until Tuesday. That’s not too bad, I just want to get the car started so I can bring it home.
(Later that day)
Went over to my friends again to try and get the RX7 running. At first we tried jumping the yellow connector to prime the fuel system. We discovered that the fuel pump was working, and this did absolutely nothing. The car still did not want to start. So what to do now? Well, there wasn’t much left and we figured it was still flooded, so once again we tried the EGI fuse trick. Pulled the fuse and cranked it about 6 or 7 times with a few seconds in between each one and doing it for about 5 seconds. We then put the fuse back in, started to crank it, put the gas to the floor, and slowly the rpm’s fluctuated and jerked up higher and higher, and IT STARTED!! However, it was now blowing tons of white smoke and would NOT hold an idle on its own, so I kept my foot on the throttle slightly to keep it running. It finally stopped smoking after a long while but was still not holding an idle on its own. A little later, still holding the throttle down the whole time, I slowly started to let it off and it was able to stay running. Now there was a new problem, though, instead of idling where it normally did at around 800, it idled at 450 to 500. After making sure it would stay running on its own for a while, I turned the car off and tried to start it again. It now started fine on the first try and was holding an idle around 500. We did all the idle adjustments that the FSM says to (TPS, idle speed on top of the TB, idle mixture, etc) and the best we could get was an idle at 500 to 550.
After a lot of searching on rx7club, reading of the FSM, and pondering on what could be wrong, we were lost. Finally we decided to take the BAC off to clean it. After cleaning and putting it back on, we checked to make sure it was working like the FSM states. There was resistance on the BAC terminal within the FSM specifications, and when we hooked a 12v power and ground straight up to the BAC terminal it began clicking like the FSM said it should. We figured it must be working properly and plugged it back in. I started the car and the idle was still between 500 and 550. Just to see what would happen, we unplugged the BAC again and hooked the 12v power and ground straight up to the terminal with the car running, and the idle jumped up to 1500 and help there. Once the power and ground were taken off, though, it fell back down. Something must be wrong with the BAC, but we don’t know what it could be. Finally after searching on rx7club and reading more of the FSM, we just decided to try something. We tightened the throttle cable to see if it would help, and guess what? IT DID!! After trial and error with tightening the throttle cable, we got it to idle fine at 750. We drove it around a bunch and it was doing fine, kept holding it’s idle and never stalled. I guess it’s all fixed. It has been an interesting and frustrating journey, that’s for sure.
Lesson Learned:
Never go into a project expecting it to be done in one night, never go into a project without realizing it may change (whether some problem arises or you decide to do some other things along with it) and never expect after taking that much stuff off/apart for the car to run perfect on the first try.
Did I enjoy these past four days? It’s hard to say. Some parts were good, some were definitely not. But would I change or trade any of this for a car that was more reliable than an RX7? Never!
03-21-04, 02:31 AM
#3
i am legendary
Thread Starter
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Kirkland, WA
Posts: 8,478
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Received 0 Likes
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Yah, mine has been interesting since I got it. Things keep coming up, but just like any used car that's expected. I just take the problems as they come, and i figure since im fixing all the stuff thats old/broken, then at SOME point it should be all in good working order heh
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