mx5cartalk.com

So, I figured since I've owned this car a few months now and its appeared in JoshuaM's thread a few times I'd get on the forum thing.

So I think I best clarify a couple of things first, I am the friend refereed to in Joshs thread, i will take any excuse to pull a car apart mechanically do get to play cars all the time when im not at work or uni.

I bought his St185 Celica GT4 from him when he went overseas last, wasnt that great of a car, needed a lot of work and i crashed it in the rain at like 30km/h and sold it

I also own a 1962 Ford falcon, named Blondy. It's a 170ci high compression 'pursuit' variant hence the user name.

I should also explain the name, cause it is a little.... unusual shall we say. I've always named my cars, from the Peugeot 405 always called, 'Pug', the 2012 Fiesta named, 'Festy', those ones were family cars and obvious correlations. My cars have had names based on the cars character.

So Starting with the Falcon, 'Blondy' Its baby blue two tone with an off white roof, Its pretty, loud, hideously expensive to run, not very good at anything in particular but i love it, so Blondy it was.

Then there was my ST185 1990 Toyota Celica GT4. It was the second car i bought but my first registered one that i could drive, so 'Cella' because it means, 'Freedom' also the name is a bit, well, I didn't like it very much lets say, it always broke down tried to kill me repeatedly, then I attacked a light post with it. Sold it after that and didnt even lose any money. Winning.

Now for the MX5, when I first bought it i started calling it Miki, problem was I know a Mikaekla so that was awkies. Around the same time I had a breakupish (Long story) and i was being a muppet in the rain in front of aforementioned girl and spun the car in front of her (deliberately) to see her reaction. Since then it has been known as Chastity- because it preserves mine.

Anyways, here are my other cars,

Blondy;


Cella;


Anyways, the story of how I got the mx5.

After I got rid of that horrid turbo lag infested not even that fast horrendously unreliable bad handling Celica. (the BOV was fun though ) I was stuck in my rents Fiesta again and hating it haha. So it was back to saving up For an NA, I was still saving and planning and dreaming, when my friend finally decided to abandon the Celica build (rents house was being sold from us so potentially no more garage. and the car was getting past it anyways ) and he bought an NB8b, gave me a drive and I was sold leagues beyond the NA id been in. So i started looking around for NB8bs. Found a red one, lady had already sold it, so found the green one on gumtree, went and looked at it that night, paint look quite decent (not at the fore front of my priorities as you will understand later) but good running gear and body and interior. Drove it, needed a suspension rebuild. (seriously mazda your factory dampers and bushes are aweful) but opther wise exactly what i wanted, so left a deposit and came back and bought it the next morning and flogged it all the way home.



And because I cant help myself let the mods begin.
The next morning it had a pod filter in it. (simply chasing more noise ) and I was contacting my contacts about suspension options.

After pricing up different options, it eventually worked out best to get Tein street advance from Tein in Japan through Joshs agent, commence a very busy weekend when semester 1's exams finished. I did the 4.1 torsen swap on Joshs car, then his coilovers arrived, so I did those while I was there, then as I finished that, my coilovers arrived


(after all the debacle of moving rental properties we ended up with an even better shed )

Since then with Chastity I've replaced the rain rail (upon a no Richard you cant do that before going out) I did it in 2.5 hours by myself. (wouldnt advise but can be done) cleaned out the gutters and gone to a 4.1ratio diff. (still have no speedo gear so if you have one I'll buy it ).

Currently getting door bushings 3D printed from Polyeurethane rubber after I did them up in autocad


In the meantime here are some photos of what the car has gotten up to, warning not a lot sensible











So, what do I think of my NB8b after 12,000km and 6ish months?
Its an amazing soft cruisey roadster stock, that can be modified either way and be amazing.
Any chassis bracing you can throw at it will be greatly appreciated.
Mazda cant make bushings. (seriously, what even are these)
When you get them set up right they handle amazingly, (I'm not running a sport tyre by any means but it has a lot of lateral grip, but not too much, (I like my skids )
You can see where the price of entry went in the design of the car, seriously the best car to work on I've ever worked on. Aside from the oil filter, why is it there, why????
The Tein 6/5kg springs I have in there are nice for me, with the adjustable dampers I have it riding reasonably well.
I really like it, am really happy I went with this over an NA, (id still like pop ups and the little chrome door handles though )
Performed a foamectemy on the drivers seat, do recommend.

Whats to come for Chastity?
What isnt?
I would really like to get a Torsen II diff center at some stage, I'm sick of the one wheel peel
When this semester is done ill be fixing all the previous owners gutter rash on the wheels and painting them, so that should be entertaining.
Do something about the ridiculously slow electric windows
Maybe one day a nice bucket seat, and roll bar or something.
Longer term, some decent dampers, the Teins are good enough considering what i paid, and I like the spring rate, but the dampers lack enough adjust ability and just aren't as nice as some much more expensive others, (more rear rebound damping would be great, what even is braking stability )
Ill probably rebush the whole car soon as the bushes are starting to rattle on occasion and i cant get the wheel alignment right, (cant get the rears under -2.4deg camber )
Clutch and fly wheel, mine has the classic NB8b hot spot shudder, not at all helped by bulk clutch abuse when i first got the car
I think to round out this list Id like to see it make 200HP, not quite sure how that will happen and it wont for a while, I always wanted to do a KL-ZE V6 swap, but i recently discovered the KraftWerks supercharger, but thats a few years away at the earliest.

Any other side notes to end out this new thread?

I love messing with chassis stuff, gearing, alignments, tyres, springs and dampers, its great, if it can be adjusted ill adjust it. So I'm having a great time trying everything. One thing i have noticed, (not a complaint) Is stiff springs, light car dry weather alignment and not exactly soft compound Falken ZE912s dont work very well in the rain (read skids in 3rd on the 3.63 diff at 80 ) fixing the alignment and dampers sorted that out to a large degree, but still round abouts in the rain are sketchy (or very entertaining depending if you ask my passenger or myself )

Anyways, Good to finally get on the forum and I hope to meet some of you soon at cruises and stuff and ill be sure to post stuff when I play mods



tried thw hite wheels on the Green, me likey.

So today, In procrastinating my assignment, I went to JoshuaMs house to get his old speedo drive unit, as well as to do do noise level testing to see if his canvas roof is any quieter. (read his thread for the answer ) Anyways, I havent had a speedo since i did my diff ratio swap about a month ago. Ive just been using the sender with no gear on it to plug the hole in the box. When i bought my FDR from japan it came with the shaft and gear from an NA something (so mechanical drive unit) not so helpful with the electronic sender. So after a month or so of no speedo, and not being able to track one down, gave up and decided to make one, so here goes,

Started by taking the gear and shaft, and setting about separating them, shaft looks about the same size so lets hope its a nice match.
I suspended the shaft between two bricks and pointed my blowtorch at the base of the shaft to heat it up and melt the resin around the shaft enough to push it out with a screw driver. Once the resin was starting to just look soft i pressed the shaft down with a screw driver carefully not damaging the resin. Once this was done and the plastic cooled again, revealed that the hole was still nicely concentric (good start) and would give me something to work with.


once it was removed


slightly heat treated shaft anyone?

Anyways, then once i got back from Joshs, i set about working out what id have to do fit the gear to the shaft on the electronic sender. Figured engineers are lazy (im studying to be one so ) and wouldn't change the shaft size if it weren't necessary.

Turns out, it was a perfect interference fit pushed it on fill the D on the shaft with a little epoxy resin to stop it possibly slipping and put the circlip on. Now when i go get my tools back and finish some more assessment ill put it in the car and see if my idea is genius or i have bits of plastic circulating my gearbox


Tadaa.

can confirm did not work, still part hunting -.-

pursuit170 wrote:I am the friend refereed to in Joshs thread, i will take any excuse to pull a car apart mechanically do get to play cars all the time when im not at work or uni.

Most accurate comment ever! Also, the number one reason why my mechanical prowess is limited to knowing exactly how other people pull apart cars

Sliding dirt with it that low, you must have either some very flat dirt roads, or a very scuffed up underside on your '5

A bit of both. That road is very flat. The scuffing under my car is from speed bumps and some great NSW roads :p

pursuit170 wrote:Performed a foamectemy on the drivers seat, do recommend.

Did you take any photos of the process? Did you just take foam from the bottom of the pad? Contemplating doing mine.

I found some photos on my old phone, i didnt really take them with the intention of making a forum post thingy so they arent great. But yeah essentially i just took the seat out, pulled the rails off, separated the base from the back, removed all the hog rings, pulled the foam out of the base plate, cut off the section on the bottom that sits in the dish part, then replaced all the hog rings with zipties and reassembled it all.

That's perfect. It looks like you could easily put it back on if you wanted too. How does it feel - I know you'll get more head room (how much?) but also want to be sure it's not going to feel odd/uncomfortable.

initially, it felt a little odd, (but this was largely because i didnt cut perfectly flat so its a little higher on one side ) i wouldn't cut any more out of the base as you would start to feel the seat base through the foam. it does give a little more head room and you sit a little lower in the car which was much appreciated since I'm 178cm and have really short legs and long torso . I'd recommend as it is easy to undo if you don't like it and I've found it really good now I'm used to it. Every time I get in JoshuaMs car to try something i immediately complain he hasn't done his seat yet haha.

So today I got around to getting my 3D printed door bushings installed. For my car i deliberately made them a bit oversize so that i could file them down really accurately and get the best fit possible. I had them printed by my friend on his 3D printer from polyurethane filament.

Installation:

the bushing being prepped to go in my car, as I said i made them too large deliberately so i could get a perfect fit for my car.


After some sanding and filing and trimming they sat really nicely in the little catch thing.


Bolted too the car.

So after I had installed them I did the next logical thing. Roof down, go for a drive
So because I made mine super tight I do have to slam the door a little if its not on a perfectly flat surface and if the roof is up in order to seal the window. But future versions will be made to fit within the tolerances of different cars.

But aside from that, Wow! it makes a huge difference.
So first thing I noticed was reversing out of my drive on an angle, the whole car didn't twist as much as usual. which was great. this could only mean good things to come.
Next on my street there are a few manhole covers that sit about 20mm down from the surface that usually cause my entire car to shake and rattle which has annoyed me since day one , drove over them, still a tiny little bit of flex in the car, but other wise just a simple thump-thump as the suspension did its thing. and best of all, nothing rattled. After that I was completely happy with them and anything else would have just been a bonus, but I shall go on.

Just generally ambling around town the car feels a lot nicer, rides noticeably better and the stupid rattling is like 98% gone. (didnt fix some bits of broken trim but alas cant help stupid here (my bad))

Then on to asking the car to do what its for, turn corners; It finally behaves like the alignment and spring rates say it should. doesn't turn in then push then come round like before. Just turns in and the rear will do as asked so much more nicely.

Also I did notice the audio quality cleaned up a little and the base was a tiny bit stronger. which is always nice.

So while bracing just the doors a little doesn't fix everything completely and give complete rigidity, it does make the car so much nicer.
So definitely worth it.

The plan is to make another set for my friends car to make sure the new design will just bolt straight in and do the job. Then if the material still holds up after Christmas I might look at selling them.

Finally got a new speedo drive in the car today. Seem to be getting 0-100km/h in about 7.4seconds. not bad cut 4tenths or so from the old 3.636 diff

(timed by filming the gauges working out the exact revs its doing at 100 in 3rd and timing the footage.) super accurate know

Since you like playing with cars and you are in Queensland have you considered attending a Dodgy Day, to help out others not as mechanically minded?

Josh and I were going to attend the last one, but we ended up stuck working on his roof and stuff . maybe after uni semester or something

So Plasti dip was on special this can never be a good thing haha, but i wanted to try white wheels so



and on the car,


it looks ridiculous and its great haha,

Will have to paint them properly eventually, but as a proof of concept of the colour