Well it's been a long time and a lot has happened since my last post here. In short, I'm now at University about to start my third year of my Mechanical Engineering course and it's fair to say that some of the stuff in this thread (particularly with regards to the AE86 diff) now makes me cringe somewhat!
I'm vastly more knowledgeable than I was previously (although I accept there's still a great deal I do not know!) which has as far as I'm concerned massively improved the quality of the work I now do.
I'll cover the AE86 first since it will take the least amount of time, the short answer is that I still have the car and it's become a very long term project, just before I started University we took the car off the road and stripped it to a bare shell, a lot of what we found was fairly alarming, rust had eaten away the front sills on both sides (particularly in the area underneath the door hinges) and the whole front end was basically rotten.
I managed to source most of the replacement parts directly from Toyota (they were a massive help and it took two days of running back and forth by both myself and the insanely helpful Toyota parts manager to achieve this) any parts which were no longer available had to be sourced via breakers in the far east.
As far as its progress goes, well Clark's picture is fairly close, most of the exterior work has been done but none of the interior has progressed since as I've simply not had time to sort it all out, the plan is to build the whole thing to a competition spec car but that's a long way in the future!
As for the MX-5, well, that's progressed much further!
Last year I swapped out the clutch and flywheel to a 1.8 clutch and a much lighter flywheel the whole assembly (bear in mind that the original clutch was a 1.6 and hence a lot smaller) is in the region of 2-3kg lighter than before. This sounds a lot but to be totally honest I've noticed zero difference to the car. There's still upsides though in that the 1.8 clutch should be able to handle a decent bit more power than the 1.6 clutch could so it's not a total waste of time
Following on from that I took the car to Blink Motorsport to have the cylinder head reworked as well as installation of a set of mazdaspeed cams I acquired. I'm not much of a numbers person when it comes to WHP, etc but I know some of you are so I'll state the power figures. Pre-headwork and cam swap the car was putting out around 91WHP and 75lbft of torque, post-headwork and the car was at 99WHP and 85lbft of torque. This doesn't sound much on paper but it's an 8% gain in power and a 13% gain in torque plus the driving feel of the car is profoundly better now, it revs and pulls much, much better across the mid range. I'd also highly recommend the guys at Blink as the service they provided was fantastic and they really know their stuff!
Around a similar time I decided that I'd start looking into some better seats as I'd found myself falling out of the standard seats whilst on track, I decided on a set of Cobra Suzuka's.
One thing I wanted to maintain though was the ability to slide the seat forwards and backwards so that both myself and my dad could drive the car without having to unbolt the seat. No one seems to make such a thing though so I drew up some brackets and machined them at University over the summer. At the time I didn't know exactly how wide the seats were going to be and the passenger side is also 20mm narrower so I decided a slotted arrangement would be the best way. Whilst I appreciate that this arrangement is not as strong as a conventional single bolt hole would be it was necessary for the mounts to perform the function I needed and considering that the runner mechanism is the weakest part of the whole arrangement I'm confident they'll work without fault (and they do)
Here's some pictures of them in the car (although they went in this year rather than last year when I made the mounts as I ran out of time to fit them)
So this year I've been fitting my throttle body kit which has been quite the learning experience!
(Note, to make this easier to read I've split the content into sections, as such some photos may appear to 'go back in time' from previous events, sorry, I just thought it was easier this way!)
First thing to do was to strip the car of its standard intake manifold and piping, which didn't actually take too long at all.
Whilst the manifold was out of the car I decided to do a few other things at the same time, the first of which was installing the oil filter relocation kit from Maruha (if you own an MX-5 I suggest you check them out as they make some really good stuff!)
Basically the idea of this kit is that it makes filter removal and installation much easier by accessing it from underneath the car. The relocation block also comes with provisions for oil temperature and pressure sensor sender units so at the same time I fitted an innovate MTX-D gauge (which I will show pictures of later). I had a small issue with fitting the pressure sender unit (basically it was too big) so I made up a short line and located the sender unit remotely.
As you can see a huge hole in the undertray has appeared
The reason for this is that Maruha also sell a carbon access panel for the filter relocation kit which I purchased at the same time. This is a really nice piece (it's made as a single sheet of carbon and having tried to make similar pieces myself from single ply's I now appreciate how difficult that is!). Cutting the Mazda under tray was not particularly fun, the way I managed it was by using a knife and heating the blade to help it cut through the plastic. To get the round corners I used a 10mm wooden drill bit (I found the point helped keep it in the correct place although making a small pilot hole would work just as well I found when testing on the old tray).
With the panel in place:
At the same time I also decided to perform the 'coolant reroute' as it's known, for those that don't know it's basically to swap the coolant exit from the front of the block to the back in order to improve cooling to cylinder 4 and involves running a pipe from the back of the head to the top of the radiator. I've seen a few of these done now and I'm not really a fan of how some people do them (I don't like long sections of silicone hose if I can help it!) so I got some solid 40mm pipe and decided to run it along the side of the engine bay. The pictures will describe it better than I can type it so see for yourself, it's actually pretty simple, I've reused some of the bolt holes which hold the AC pipe to hold the main length of the solid pipe. There's one flat bracket and one L like bracket which have hose clips attached to them, this doesn't take much to do other than a bit of time and measuring (you can make these with just some alloy, a vice, a dril and a saw (maybe a file and a grinding wheel if too if you want them like mine). The hoses are just modified radiator hoses from Stoney Racing so it's quite easy to copy (if anyone wants to and wants to know exactly how I did mine just post here or PM me).
Because of the throttle bodies I've also fitted an oil catch tank and blocked the PCV hole with a bung, the catchtank was fairly simple to install, I just used some braided hose to match the Maruha oil lines and some fittings from Torques. However, I didn't make a 'proper' line with the connectors since this line is only for ventilation, because it is impossible on the valve cover (barbed outlet) and because it would have caused space problems on the catch tank connection end. So instead I have used a worm drive type clamp to the valve cover and a barbed outlet on the catch tank.
Now, onto throttle body related business! I'm just going to show this here and talk about it briefly as I think it's a neat bit of kit. Basically, the car comes standard with a PWM controlled idle valve, in short, this allows the ecu to adjust the amount of air bypassing the throttle plates in order to better control the car at idle. This block allows the same system to be used with throttle bodies (the other valve on the block is a 'dumb' valve which bypasses more air whilst the coolant is cold, this closes off once the car is up temperature). The air is passed via nylon pipe to connectors on the manifold (the later pictures show these)
Here's some quick pictures of the phenolic gasket
I'm actually not sure what I think of this yet to be honest but we'll see after I've ran it for a while.
Throttle bodies on for the first time, the studs are there for the fuel rail, one thing I'm not a great fan of is that the manifold studs aren't quite as long as I'd like them to be but this is due to the throttle body manifold being thicker and the phenolic gasket also being thicker.
There's actually not too much to say about this since not much happened really! The only things of note are that the intake air temperature is screwed into the cylinder one path, time will tell as to if there's significant heat soak but the sensor is of the open element type so I hope it will not be too bad and that the vacuum assist to the brake servo is provided from cylinder 4, I had thought that this might be a problem but having driven the car the performance is similar to that of when the feed was from the original plenum.
Now I suppose this is the part of the story where we can say the fun began! Firstly, for the idle control block I mentioned further up I made up a little bracket, nothing too crazy, just a bit of measuring, bending, drilling, riveting and painting and it turned out like this:
Again, this is only using existing bolt holes in the car, the reason for this is because I hate drilling holes as it's just another point to rust (even if you treat them properly they still seem to rust) so it just makes sense to me to reuse as many existing holes as is possible.
Here's a few shots of the ecu and how it's bolted to the back of the existing ecu floor plate, this is a great bit of kit from MS Labs, it's basically modified MS2 architecture that plugs into the existing factory wiring on one side and has an 'extra' loom on the other side for a wideband O2 sensor, oil pressure and temperature inputs, flat shifting, launch control, etc.
So onto what remained, the fuel system. This has got to be hands down my least enjoyable part of the build.
I decided to replace all the standard rubber hose with braided PTFE lined hoses. The first step was converting the hard lines to AN6 fittings, this was fairly simple although required some effort to fit the olives over the pipes once they had been cut, I used a brake pipe cutter tool to cut the pipes, basically, it's just a sharp disc which you tighten up and rotate around the pipe until it cuts through. You then have to slide the lower part of the converter fitting over the line followed by the olive, after that it's just a matter of tightening up the AN6 fitting portion into the lower section to seal the olive against the pipe, these can be seen in the throttle bodies picture further up
I placed the regulator underneath the brake master cylinder, it fits pretty neatly here and there was an existing factory bolt hole I could use too.
The regulator is from Aeromotive with a range of between 40-75psi, I set mine at 43psi (without vacuum line attached) what I would say though if anyone else has one is that you absolutely must remove the gauge port bung and replace the sealant with true fuel resistant sealing paste, I initially did not (as the gauge was placed elsewhere as you will see later) and subsequently the paste broke down and caused me to have a fuel leak!!
I know the regulator is only held with one bolt however I used both thread lock and a spring washer on the bolt to prevent it undoing in service, it is also impossible for the bracket to 'spin' as the regulator is constrained by the two fuel lines coming off it.
So after that I made the first fuel line I've ever made in my life...
This was not fun in the slightest!!! For a start fitting the locking sections over the hose is a ridiculously tight fit and took many hours of struggling. Secondly, tightening the pieces to make the line is one of the most nerve racking experiences I've ever had. The fittings are all alloy and the clearance between the socket and the fitting Torques specify is very tight and the fittings are extremely difficult to do up to this level! In the process I completely destroyed the first fitting I made as the vice slipped and mangled the fitting
In the end I purchased the alloy vice jaws Torques sell which made life a little bit easier but still very difficult. Whilst I'm happy with the results of these fittings they are certainly not fun to make and I advise anyone that gets them to purchase alloy spanners in an effort to avoid marking them.
Onto the fuel rail, this was one of the nicer fuel system jobs initially, until I found that the rail 'blocks' (the rail is a two piece system) are not a particularly great fit on the injector o-rings, the standard rail has proper seats for the o-rings to seal against whereas the kit parts did not so the ring just sits in the rail against the walls. I was informed by the previous owner that I would tear many injector o-rings and he was not wrong!
I first had problems with injector 1 and then again with injector 3, I suspect a casting problem though as in both cases the rings were damaged in the same way and place, after clearing the ports with some sand paper and washing them out I was able to fit the o-rings without tearing them and have not had any leaks since
Anyhow, here's the rail in place:
Placing the gauge where I have might seem curious and I may revisit this at some point, it was not possible to place on the regulator due to it's position but I could have placed it at the front of the rail. I just liked the look of it in the middle though but if it becomes a problem I'll remove it as I've set the pressure now anyway. The needle does fluctuate somewhat but I believe this to be a combination of the rapid opening and closing of the injectors causing pressure fluctuations in the rail and also because the gauge is not fluid filled like others so the needle has no damping.
Now a finished picture of the fuel system:
Some tidying up of everything and filters installed:
Here you can see the nylon pipes I talked about earlier running to the manifold to provide the air from the idle control valve
This system is remarkably effective! To put the bends in the pipe I used a spring to prevent the pipe from collapsing, heated the pipe with a heat gun and then submerged the pipe in cold water whilst holding the bend radius I wanted.
Here's a few more pictures too:
(Note, I installed the braided oil catch tank line after these pictures were taken which is why it is a silicone pipe in the photos)
I think that about wraps it up! I'll take some more photos once I've cleaned the car somewhat, I know I've probably missed a few things so if anyone has any questions just let me know
