So thought I would give an update! Have the car back and have pampered it a little. Wife was gone for the weekend doing girly things so I got down and dirty with my other love, the FD. Washed it and took it over to the 4 wheel tire alignment store. The guy who did the alignment was very adamant about doing a test drive to ensure everything was okay:O Went with him - he's a Miata race driver but found a lot of respect for the 20B FD. He was all smiles after the drive.

I then replaced my RX8 shift boot with one I bought from Redline Goods several years ago. Looks great but it turned into more of a project then I anticipated because stupid me ripped the LED wires out of my lighted RX8 shift **** and I spent a few hours sourcing connectors and rewiring it. FYI - My RX8 shift boot is up for grabs for free if anyone can use it. It's in very good shape and has a nice button clip on the top to ensure it stays in place.

I then hooked up my PLX gauges so I can use one remote to control both displays. Bummer because it doesn't work as per the instruction manual so I called PLX to resolve but got an answer that wasn't great. IMO, the process from switching back and forth between displays is so manual (requires many presses of the remote) that it is a better idea to use the two remotes and certainly less ricky while driving. So now I need to come up with a good place to position each remote for easy access. Gauges do look sporty though.

I have also spent some time chasing down two issues: water temps and alternator voltage. My water temps coming back from DGRR a few months ago never got about 90C or so during the 9 hour drive but shot up to about 105 on the two hour drive back from Orlando. Yes, it's a bit hotter outside now but that is just too hot for my taste. Got to reading about water pump pulley slippage on the forum and sure enough, my pulley easily spins. Tightened the belt up and it's better now but I also ordered the chadwick ilder pulley to resolve the problem. Finally, I have a 150 amp alternator being shipped to me to resolve my erratic and inconsistent voltage. Sometimes its over 13 volts at idle and sometimes it dips down to 12.2 which is not good. And this is with just the engine on and nothing else. With the backup alternator I had on the car I didn't have this issue, just with the nice powder coated unit so out it goes for the new unit. Could I be missing anything here? What should a completely charged battery's voltage be without anything on? 13.8 or so I think? If so, the battery is fine.

That's all for now. The plan is to have the above fixed over the next few days and then to go back to Kilo for the dyno session. I'm shooting for this Friday or Saturday but I am at the mercy of the idler pulley and the alternator for now.

 

Anything above 12 volts with engine off should be more than fine. Usually around 14v during operation.
Glad to hear you made it home OK. Can't wait to see what you put down on the dyno. G.L. and well see you next time.

Noel

 

I run Evans NPG+. Cost is $42 a gallon; you need three to four depending on radiator brand. I'm sold on this coolant. No water added, lifetime coolant, almost no corrosion, and no need for a pressure cap.

I have run this for 29K miles with 10K of those in Arizona heat at 13psi. Highest coolant temp I saw was 127 Celsius in 43 Celsius ambient. You need to run the 2nd oil cooler if you don't have one. I saw a drop of about 10 Celsius.

In my prior 2 motors, I started having coolant disappear on me at around 25K and by 40K, I had coolant seal failure and housing warpage.

To further prevent hotspots after shutdown, I have installed an aux electric water pump (from a VW VR6) to cool the engine down after shutoff.

I'm sold on the Evans NPG+.

 

127celcius? that's crazy!

 

A good fully charged battery usualy reads between 13 and 14 V

Andrew

 

Thankx for the tip pomanferrari!!!

 

Something else to consider: my '99 Camry with 100K and a fresh coolant change using distilled water shows 0.169 volt with a voltmeter (one lead into the coolant filler neck, the other to battery ground); a 2005 Odyssey with 30,000 miles shows 0.269 volt. My RX7 with 29K and 5 years on the same coolant shows 0.069 volt. How about that for almost no cathodic corrosion?

 

If you run with this coolant you must remove all water from the system. There is a procedure to do this using Sierra coolant in a series of fill and drain steps.

This is very important otherwise you'll have problems with the Evans NPG+ in your system.

 

David i have a few questions.

The alternator, is it a stock unit? If so they are known for beeing faulty. Try one of the NSA stock looking ones. Mine gives me about 14.5v at high revs now

About the varm coolant. What kind of oil cooling do you have? And do you know what you our oil temps are? Water and oil normaly goes hand in hand on our engines. And with the 3 rotor the stock oil coolers is not good enough to remove the heat. What i would do basicly is run a thicker oil, like Royal Purple 20-50 and some big oil coolers. And ducting to everything. Make sure you intake for the oil coolers goes to a ducting that covers the entire oil cooler. And also make sure that no air can go anywhere else then trough the IC and then straight trough the radiator. The air can't go past the radiator on the sides, bottom or top. As that will increas the temps alot.

On a car i did cooling mods on the temps dropped from about 105 celcius to about 85 celcius by just ducting up the intercooler and radiator 100%. But lover oil temps also means lover water temps.

JT

 

looks like you got ripped off man, 127C is absolutely murder to your engine! good luck with that $40 coolant!

 

127 C.... he is probably seeing the heat soak at start up....LOL...

 

Nope not true. This was WFO throttle in 118F heat. The car didn't have a second cooler but was running Mobil 1. Once off-boost, it dropped down to 115C. Knock less than 70 on the PFC. That was in July 2005. In July 2008, the car made 311 rwhp 264 rwtorque with Steve K tuning. You do need to adjust the PFC so that it doesn't retard above 106C.

In the Bay Area, I have not seen any higher than 105C due to the cooler weather. I have not seen 100C since running the second cooler during the recent heatwave.

 

Are you able to get this coolant for less than $42 a gallon? If not then STFU.

And what do you know about 127C (261F) if you had never run this coolant. Again STFU about things you have no experience in. Stick to selling "truck" turbos for "*******".


No I am not selling Evans. I got tired of pulling motors every 40K-50K and seeing housing warpage due to micro-boiling.

 

Pomanferrari,

I read some other threads regarding Evans and boy you have a lot of posts concerning that product and on hand experience. You had very good arguments. I'm about to switch over to Evans, but I have some questions. Seen that we have 20B setup I wanted to make my cooling system bulletproof. What rad do u have in u r install (brand and size). R u tuning a Mazda stock thermostat? Is there a better one for our heat loads and necessary flow? What do you recommend me? I presently have 3 in KoYo rad with 2 oil coolers (R1 model) two 12 inch fans (stock) and the OEM front bumper. The intercoler is in the nose first then the rad at a 45 degree angle. On some of your past threads Fritz was highly recomending the mazdacomp front bumper (which I can't find) what r ur thoughts on that?

Thank you,

Andrew Kanho

 

Hi Guys. How about taking all of these comments about Evans coolant to another thread?

 

lol david. so how does it feel to have the car at the house ? i bet u still can't believe that is sitting out there ready to drive

 

It's great to see the car and play around with it a bit. Unfortunately I am not driving it until I fix the alternator issue. Went to take it out today to see if tightening the water pulley belt helped with temps but the battery monitor's alarm went off. Took the battery in for testing and it is fine so I am not sure what is up. Will see once I get the alt replaced - this will be here by Friday am. My idler pulley is due in today so I'll get that hooked up. By Friday i hope to be good to go with the thought of going to Orlando Saturday AM to have Jesus dyno the car.

We'll see.

 

So help me out guys!

Put numerous bits and pieces on the car this week including an upgraded 150 amp alternator. Started up the car and was pleased to see voltage at above 14 and at 13.8 with the AC on. So far so good. Took it out for spin to verify everything was good to go. Voltage was holding steady - for about twenty minutes that is. About this time I noticed a light flash on the dash. Couldn't tell which one as it flashed quickly and went away. Checked voltage again and I was at 12.6. Hmm...

Stopped for gas and fired the car back up. Now the battery light was on the dash as well as the ABS light, the check coolant light, and the low fuel light. No beeping from anything, just the lights. These stayed on for about 3 minutes or so and then went out. Took the car right home and parked it.

Checked out voltage and I was back to the 13s. So, can this be anything besides an alternator issue? I got rid of my previous rebuilt alternator because voltage varied all over the place and even dipped into the 11s which is not good. This alternator didn't dip that far but did go to 12.6 volts and then the dash warning lights coming on is a first.

I am perplexed and can only conclude that my new 150 amp alternator has issues. As a side note, the previous used, but not rebuilt alternator I had on the car worked great and I didn't have any of these issues. Silly me took it off for the nice shiny powder coated one and it's been problems ever since. Can't go back to the used one that worked because two of the studs snapped when we removed it for the new alternator.

Ideas? Solutions?

 

David I think you have a wiring issue somewhere. Something is causing a significant drain on the battery. I would get a volt meter and start pulling fuses one by one and try to isolate the problem. No alternator is going to solve the problem if something else is going on. What is the condition of the b attery/starter/alternator harness?

 

This is an interesting one. When I had the old, but not remanufactured alternator on the car, no issues. In fact, drove it to DGRR and back and no problems. Took this one off for the new powder coated one and problems cropped up. Replaced it with the 150 AMP unit and new problems (i.e. the warning lights coming on yet no beeping from cooling warning light, just the coolant light, fuel light, abs light, and battery light). The battery is new and I took it to have it tested to eliminate this. The starter is also new and the wiring to the battery is new.

On note I forgot to mention last night is when I got back from the test drive, I turned the car off and then turned it back on to see if the fans would come on. They did, but when the ignition was in the first position not the second. Thought this was not right, turned the ignition off and then back on. This time, the fans didn't come on until the second position.

Ihor, I have a volt meter but how would I go about isolating this? Gordon, help me solve this and I'm coming up to the Chris Carlisi event I think I will post this up as a new thread to see what advice I can get.

 

David,
It seems that your issues all started because of swapping from the old unit to the "pretty" coated one.You also stated that the very 1st alternator worked fine BUT it has 2 broken studs so you can't re-install it. Seems to me, and I'm no expert, that you really don't have an electric issue but an rather an alternator one. What You can try is to take the internals from the OLD original one and install it into the "PRETTY" coated one and get this resolved. The casing isn't the important part of the equation but rather all the internal components that make the alternator work, which according to this thread, was working fine in the old unit.

L8R
Joe

 

No can do on swapping out the internals. All three of the alternators are of a different style so this won't work. The pretty powder coated one is a cosmo unit, the "new" one and FD unit, and the previous one with the broken studs a different type, but I can't recall what kind.

 

Hey David,

For what it's worth, I resolved a similar issue by running a 1-gauge wire directly from the battery to the alt and grounding the battery where the passenger side seat belt bolts in. (Even though was reading zero resistance to ground, that didn't mean current was not being choked off somewhere). It sounds to me like your alt and battery aren't working together as well as they should, causing the alt to work too hard and overheat; I had the exact same issue and ended up having to swap both. The beefy unit you had before may have had the same issue, but was affected less due to its robust design.


***

Just thought of something else. Where did you have the alt casing powdercoated? If it was coated by someone who does not specialize in alternators they may have coated over some key contact points; I had a conversation about this same issue with the owner of Power Bastards who specializes in this area.

http://powerbastards.com/

 

ohming a high amp circiut is useless.

I can connect my starter and batt with 24 gague wire and it will show show 0 ohms. this does not prove it is not a restriction under it's intended operational load.

do a voltage drop. put the neg lead on the batt + put the pos lead on the end of the circiut to be tested. run the car, crank the starter do whatever the circuit is intended to do. measure the dc voltage. any voltage reading produced is the losses due to connectors, switches corrosion, wire sizing etc..

 

Ok let me make sure I am understanding this correctly. The car is dropping voltage while it is running? If so I wouldn't worry about looking for the voltage drop right now. It was my first impression that one of your accessories may be causing a drain but that shouldn't really matter if the car is on. I would really look into the altertnator/battery/starter harness. That harness very often becomes oil soaked and also gets damaged from heat when it lays against the motor it is very common for the power steering, oil fill neck, and filter pedestal to leak oil on this harness. The crappy mazda wiring likes to become brittle and crack under all the tape and loom they use, and is hard to see. The wiring also sometime corrodes under the insulation. Check it out and if its questionable replace it. It should be around $400. I don't know where your battery is but I would do this: Run a 0. Or 2 gauge power wire from the battery right to the original positive terminal location.There is a bus bar in there. Make sure it is secure and the positive terminal is bolted down tight.The factory hardware there is plated to prevent corrosion and get a good contact. Run 2 grounds to the battery to different locations. There is a spare bolt hole under the passenger seat belt behind the 1/4 panel that works well. The floor under the bins is another good one.if you want to get fancy you can use the gold plated stereo terminals. Crimp and solder all connections. Once your power and ground are solid, you can look at other areas is the problem persists.