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Thanks for those part numbers! That will be very helpful. I have a feeling I can spend more on various bits and bobs like that than the actual paint job
Put the car back together enough to drive it, have a small upgrade that I may sneak in before totally blowing the car apart.....
I've talked about a build thread for years but it's mostly been replacing old stock stuff, nothing glamorous. Love the thread, Dale! I've also wondered what your personal FD looked like and how personalized it would be. Nice old school look, not tacky. I have the same momo wheel with the neat little cruise control buttons integrated into the horn button. Would also love to speak more about your AC and heat exchanger stack/ducting. Trying to expand the knowledge, you know.
AC is nearly stock, I even have R12 refrigerant in it. The Blitz FMIC basically stands the radiator and condenser up at about a 45 degree angle. Some line bending was necessary.
At one point I had a local AC shop fab up an aftermarket drier since I have a MANA system with no drier available any more. It's kind of janky looking but it works. AC is nice and cold. Long term I might do an RX-8 condenser.
Good Lord, I love everything about your car. It's period correct from the good ole JDM 90's.
I thought your car was black as well but like someone mentioned that satin yellow looks sweet.
I'm also going to plastidip my car, just haven't figured out the patterns yet.
And I value all your experience and knowledge you shared with me. Im sure you've said a bunch of "I told you so's" while watching me go through my paces, but I needed to make mistakes to learn from them.
Your guidance helped me to pay attention to my testing to see and takes notes to how it fails and how to improve things moving forward.
Excited to see you do a build thread / refresh on your car !!!!!!
Thanks Ben! I'm hoping to have a little time with it this weekend but we've got a lot of people coming to down and stuff going on.
One thing I will be doing for sure is getting 100% the laptop I'm building for PFC/Datalogit. Got an older Dell XPS (many of those have carbon fiber cases, pretty neat) that had a shot battery and no power supply, battery should be here today.
One thing I will be doing for sure is getting 100% the laptop I'm building for PFC/Datalogit. Got an older Dell XPS (many of those have carbon fiber cases, pretty neat) that had a shot battery and no power supply, battery should be here today.
Dale
i've learned that while having a 90's JDM car is really neat. having a 90's laptop is not.
mine had a serial port, which made it cool in 2001, but the new laptop has internet, and the battery lasts forever....
Yeah there's really no need to have a laptop with an old school serial port. You do have to get the right USB-serial adapter, some are crap and slow. A good one will run as fast as a regular serial port.
Also want a good battery so I'm not in a tuning session watching the battery drop like a rock.
That's right a laptop for tuning. I thought my laptop would be too old as I got it when Windows 8 first came out. It is an HP laptop. I had to install Classic Shell to get it easier to work with. But it works great with FC tweak and logging after using instructions on how to make the data transfer faster through the fc edit Data port. It also log data so much better after un-plugging the FC Commander. And yes definitely want to get a dedicated laptop for tuning as well when this one craps out.
The Edit: I have an HP Envy. The battery used to last 8 hours and then I didnt use it for a few years and it died. I got an upgraded battery pack thats twice as big and sticks out from the bottom. Then it sat for a year and damaged the battery pack from not being used, now it last 2 hours instead of the advertised 12.
So aside from keeping it plugged in I know we are supposed to use it so it's cycled to last longer.
In your laptop build, do the newer laptops have better battery management. It would be cool if there was software to internally disconnect it from AC while it is plugged in to go on the battery and then switch back to AC. Kind of like how satellites do it when they go between the earth and the moon and loose solar power, they go on internal batteries and then back to solar.
Last edited by rotaryextreme; 06-04-22 at 09:38 AM.
Not to get too off topic, but laptop batteries are just weird. Typically charging cycles kills them more than anything. If possible when not in use have it in the house, a hot garage isn't great for batteries (or a cold garage).
Also you can update that Windows 8 to 10 for free FYI.
Yeah there's really no need to have a laptop with an old school serial port. You do have to get the right USB-serial adapter, some are crap and slow. A good one will run as fast as a regular serial port.
Also want a good battery so I'm not in a tuning session watching the battery drop like a rock.
Dale
my new laptop is windows 10, and its pretty derpy with the USB cable drivers. it wants to use the default driver, which does not work, so you uninstall it, and then it uses the driver for the cable which works, until windows loads the default driver in again, and it doesn't work. its not a big deal to fix it/get it working, but like why is windows still showing us this 1980's crap?
obviously this is better than the windows xp and serial cable, but not as much as it should be
So I'm at a bit of a stand still right now on the project, last week we had new carpet installed in our bedrooms so we had to move all the crap out and are still trying to get everything back 100%. On top of that I decided I was done with my 15 year old corner computer desk that isn't very functional so it went into a pile of MDF pieces on the curb. Currently rocking a folding table, going to start the process of building a new computer desk from scratch to my needs. Should be a cool project and great when it's done but that's less time with the FD.
Also traveling to Nashville this weekend to see my favorite band, Failure, play in concert. My best friend Matt and I (he lives up there) are going and I got VIP passes to hang out with the band before hand. If you like quality hard rock music and a band that is STILL putting out good albums and not just playing their 30-year-old hits, check them out - https://failureband.com - they are excellent in concert as well.
On top of that around July 4th we have our family reunion so that's another weekend I can't do anything.
One thing I did mess around with a bit is I got Xavier Borg's 10xb igniter module......
Xavier has started manufacturing an upgraded igniter for our cars. It is supposed to work with the PFC and stock coils. It removes the necessity for IGNs or the HKS Twinpower. I've got one in my garage yet to install. Can't wait.
Xavier has started manufacturing an upgraded igniter for our cars. It is supposed to work with the PFC and stock coils. It removes the necessity for IGNs or the HKS Twinpower. I've got one in my garage yet to install. Can't wait.
Yes sir, I have mine too ;P
I was wondering if Dale had an update on that, or if he will make us wait like Stranger Things S4 Part 2 .. lol
Yo Dale - best desk ever: https://www.fully.com/standing-desks.html
RE & Pete - What are the deets on the ignitor thingy? Got a link so Dale's thread doesn't get hijacked?
Yo Dale - best desk ever: https://www.fully.com/standing-desks.html
RE & Pete - What are the deets on the ignitor thingy? Got a link so Dale's thread doesn't get hijacked?
Since this is Dale's thread I was gonna let him do all the story telling, I'm just here waiting like a puppy dog for when he comes back.
I invited a bunch of the car guys over, had about 10 of us total over today. Started around 9am, had a lot of BS and goofing around, then started getting down to business.
By 11am the car was 95% done. Fired up the grill at that point and we had burgers, chips, Winn-Dixie cookies (if you know, you know) and a ton of diet root beer and Mt. Dew. Everyone had a great time, weather was awesome here today (mid-80's but actually not humid) and we put up the pop-up canopy that helped a LOT working under the shade.
The dip peeled off well, I was afraid of it being on there so long, but that was no big deal. Panels like the doors all came off in one big piece. Some spots had thinner dip and required more work to pull little pieces at a time but most was a good thickness. The front bumper I sanded and worked on before I did the dip and it had a rougher matte finish, the dip stuck VERY well to that, so much so that 3 of the guys spent the whole morning just doing that bumper. On the shiny panels it came off easily.
It looks REALLY WEIRD to see the car in black again, it's been a LONG time. You can also see ghosts where the old vinyl stripes were on before I did the dip. Also various spot repairs - I had a shelf collapse in the garage some time back and it dented the passenger A-pillar and the door up. I fixed it with some bondo and paint and it's been hiding ever since .
Few pictures -
My buddy Shannon with the passenger door dip all in one piece Peeling the dip off of the passenger B-panel. You can see the white first layer on the opposite side of the dip. The whole crew at it peeling. Yeah, we needed to move the tent for the front bumper guys. Pretty much done save for the pressure washing. You can see a few yellow spots, those will be worked on as I blow things apart. You can see the patched up B-pillar and some paint work/body work that was done on that fender The rear hatch was repainted by me, poorly, a number of years ago, it's VERY crappy looking now. Car looks kind of sad, but it's going to get better.
Feeling sad for this beauty. You ruined its paint. Did you apply some adherent to stick the vinyl on it ?
Yo Dale - best desk ever: https://www.fully.com/standing-desks.html
RE & Pete - What are the deets on the ignitor thingy? Got a link so Dale's thread doesn't get hijacked?
I'm going to build my desk, after I built all the cabinets for my garage a few years back I have the skills to do that and I'd like to have a custom desk that fits me (I'm 6'6") and the odd area I want the desk to be in. Going to have a long workbench area on the desk for working on computers, I do some computer flipping and also end up fixing and tinkering with machines.
Feeling sad for this beauty. You ruined its paint. Did you apply some adherent to stick the vinyl on it ?
First off, welcome to the forum!
Re-read the thread, it's not vinyl, it's Plasti-Dip. The dip itself did no damage to the paint, the paint was shot from being 30 year old Mazda paint. I did have vinyl racing stripes on it for a few years and peeled those off when they started getting a weird moldy look that wouldn't come off. Peeling the vinyl did do some damage.
The dip hid the sorry paint job for a few years but now it's time to get it done right, hence the thread .
Xavier Borg, who is the developer of FC-Tweak, discovered a few things about the stock FD ignition. The FD actually has VERY powerful coils, they have to be on a rotary engine. But, the ancient 80's technology of the igniter the FD comes with is holding it back. So, he developed a modern igniter for the FD with modern components and a large heat sink. It's called the FD-IGN-10XB.
So I got one of the first 10xb's, when I heard what he was doing I was immediately in line. It will also allow me to remove the HKS Twinpower which is no longer needed with the setup.
Here it is next to the stock igniter.
I discovered that the cruise control bracket interferes with the 10xb, Xavier now knows about this and I think he will revise the heat sink in newer versions. This is ONLY on LHD cars with cruise which is a configuration he wasn't able to test when developing it.
The good thing is the fit is VERY close, only needed to remove about 3mm from the cruise bracket. Before -
Modded cruise bracket, about 5 minutes with the Dremel and some back and forth to test the fit. The bottom edge is what I was taking off under the rubber grommet -
After with the igniter in the car -
I need to pull that bracket and re-paint it since it now has a raw metal edge that can rust.
Next the PFC needs to be set up for the 10xb. FC-Tweak now has an auto setting where you just specify that you have it and it sets up the map appropriately. He also has in the instructions what settings to make in FC-Edit to do it manually as well.
With the map tweaked I went out for a test, Unfortunately I'm getting misfires and issues. Emailing with Xavier it's likely either a grounding issue or my ancient coils aren't up to the task, most likely the latter. The coils need to be in top shape for the 10xb to work well. Also the Twin Power can hide dying coils so it's possible mine have been dying for some time and I didn't realize it. I have a set of low mileage JDM coils in the attic stash but I need to find time to pull the UIM, pull the coils, and do some bench testing to see what's going on.
I'm confident that I can get this new setup to be awesome, but to be on the safe side the twin power and old igniter aren't going anywhere just yet
05-29-22, 05:43 PM
