sailaholic NA8

[corners]

I'm doing 3 gauges in the centre console. wbo2, oil temp and ?. Any suggestions.

Why not a more accurate oil pressure gauge?

I know they have one in the factory cluster but that isn't always the most accurate measurement.

[Steampunk]

Yeah I'd go amp or proper coolant gauge. More importantly, what brand/s were you choosing? Please don't go AutoMeter, just google and ask around and you'll see how inaccurate they are.
Can't go wrong with VDO, if you want the retro-vintage look then Stuart Warner or Smiths, most all the big Japanese brands have good reputation as being spot-on. A much maligned brand is Sunpro, only because people mistake how cheap they are in price with being mutual to quality/accuracy.

The DC EWP can apparently flow 80L/minute

BTW, if you start colouring the hoses, wires, charcoal canister, windscreen washer bottle etc.... I'm gonna slap you until you come to your senses.

[sailaholic]

hmm, ok didn't realize that the stock gauge or the auto meter ones were known to be inaccurate.

I like the smith dual gauges, but i only want metric and has to be electric not mechanical. Hmm more searching to be done.

No, not going to color all the rest of it. if i did anything it would be hiding it. The cover was always going to get done, once i had the paint it was a case of what else might look good in colour / is looking a bit dagy. It actually dried a bit lighter than i was expecting. I like the crank pulley and i think the water inlet will look ok if i do the do the de-powered water pump as well. Worst comes to the worst i just pull them off again and paint them black. See how it goes.

yah they have 80 lpm and 115 lpm models, be interesting to see how it all goes.

[sailaholic]

Today I didn't seem to get far. Looking at gauges at this stage I'll either go vdo or SPA. Spa gauges are micro processor controlled and come in either 270 odd degree sweep or twin output digital read outs. Not super keen on digital but the twin output makes the price more justifiable, especially with the peak recall and programmable warning light built in.

I got the clutch slave off and some of the hard lines disconnected but the flare nuts were wanting to round off. I'd cut them but my cutters were missing. I'll pick up some flare but spanners tomorrow. All lines will be replaced with a single braided item.

Also did some thinking about water re route. I think I've almost sorted it with out using the mx5 plus spacer I bought. Its only the 4 temp sensors being a problem. Might run some inline in a hose rather than direct in the head. At this stage will probably remove the begi kit and run the stock heater return. Just sooo much neater. Long term I'd get a t or y fitting built into a the hard line for water return from the rear of the head.

Spoke to Warren the new valves along with some raised valve seats that required extra work require some more work so head is delayed a bit more. Will give me a change to de power / de impeller the old water pump housing ready for the ewp.

There will be a few bits and pieces for sale at the end of all this.....

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

[Lokiel]

Have you considered PLX sensors and gauges?

The DM100 gauge can display 4 sensor values at once and is now in stock. You could mount it in the factory Oil pressure location for easy visibility. It has a remote that you can use to change what is displayed (4 sensors in digital mode, simulated single analog gauge, peak values, etc).

See http://www.plxdevices.com/product_info.php?id=MULTDM100OBDII and http://www.plxdevices.com/product_cat.php?id=SEMO

I've mounted all sensor modules (AFR, Oil Pressure+Temp, Water Temp) and need to fit the gauge and wire in the water temperature sensor this weekend. If you can hold off a week, I can show it to you when finished.

[plohl]

can you run them without OBDII?

[sailaholic]

Can definitely wait a week. Maybe even a month :-) . Gauges are lower priory item at this point

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[sailaholic]

Another epic long space. Things have been a mixed bag with a lot of hold ups. In part due to me not having time to do much anymore. I've decided to farm most of it out to a shop just to get it done.

Unfortunately that makes it quite expensive but at least the quality is good.

Much best guess is still a month away minimum, maybe two. :-(. Which is sh*t, but you get that.

Anyway completed is header and head work. Belts, water pump, reroute cops conversion with df and injectors.

Still to come, air box with iac. Trumpets tune catch can, gauges (haven't even thought about them yet). Ms fixed back.

Teaser–>

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[Lokiel]

can you run them without OBDII?

Yup

[sailaholic]

Wow, going to do some self necromancy on this thread........ More then 12 months wow.

I'll do some updates over the next few days in the train.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[plohl]

I forgot you had a build thread...

Your car needs more tofu

[sailaholic]

Ok on a train with wifi which means i can use the laptop rather then the phone , Update time.

So last time head was still getting work done and i was looking at EWP.
I ended up just ignoring the EWP in an effort to get the car on the road and finished. Maybe i'll get back to it one day, at the moment sellinng parts and spending the money on track fees is of more interest.

So from here, the head came back and was re fitted, coolant reroute was done with a full Automotive+ kit and the car went off to the tuners. Prior to that it was running very rich and fouling plugs so i put some cheap (normal bosch) plugs in 2 heat ranges hotter then standard

Initally the plan was to get a new airbox built prior to the tune, but that was going to be too expensive labour wise due to needing to move brake lines, no real area to get air from etc etc. Shelved this as the idea to do a civic half rad was kicking around in the back of my head.

Car was tuned with open trumpets, cams degreed in and throttle bodies synced up. The cam profile turned out to be almost spot on at 0, with final position being slightly adjsuted on both cams.

Also intersting, i thought, was that there was no det regardless of the amount of ignition advance, even with the hot plugs in it. Power just started to fall away, so we left the hot plugs in rather then swap back to the fancy iridium plugs (won't ever be buying them agian)

Been a long time since i've seen the dyno sheet now, but for memory it was 135 Hp? (i'll have to hunt it out and confirm) with a reasonable torque curve. Initially this number of a bit disapointment as i was hoping for closer to 150 hp.

After talking to the tuner, his opinion was that for his dyno, and a stock bottom end that was a good figure. The last na8 he did with a rebuilt bottom end made 145 hp? from memory and the BDA engined lotus with Jenvy ITBS and the rest of the fruit only made 155Hp. Might one day run it on another dyno to compare.

Mainly i was just happy to have the car back and able to drive it around! Which was all good until i noticed an odd stumble / surge cruising around. Didn't think too much of it till i drove to plohls to show off the car a week or so later and suddenly only had 3 cyclinders!

First assumption was the one of the EBay COPS has died. Testing showed this was not the case, so next we pulled the ECU out (which was quite warm) and though...hmm maybe the exhuast is putting too much heat to the ecu as when it had cooled down and we put it back in all was fine. (##NOTE this was NOT CORRECT).

Drove it home, chatted to the tuner later in the week, chatted to Andy @ Adaptronic. Andy noted that had never been a problem before, but send it back and he'd check it, while sending another one up at the same time to keep the car mobile (thanks again Andy).

I was traveling alot at this point, so i didn't get much chance to play around before christmas, after which my share house decided to disband on short notice so all the tools got packed in a container for a few months while i found a new place to live. (Which turned out to have a shed WIN, unfortunately it's in cleveland, so a LONG drive to ...anything fun for cars)

Over the next couple of months i wasn't home much but managed to get to 2 motor sports events. 1 was a Renault Car club happy laps are QR. This was nice and cheap and the first time i got the car out on the track.

Was all good fun, but the car had started blowing large amounts of blue smoke when if it sat ideling the week before and at the track. On top of this the intermittent 3 cyclinder problem was back, and seemed to be at the end of corners when going for full throttle.

Starting to get quite frustated with the constant problems by this point i kept an eye on the oil but basicly diddn't drive the car unless i had to as i had no tool to do anything about it and driving it playing up was screwing with my head.

A week or two later, i took it to the Ipswich and West Mortenon Auto clubs - Come 'N' try day. So auto cross dirt track, that a co worker and Plohl had been trying to get me to for ages.

The day was stupid awesome fun sliding around on the dirt. Like a skid pan but more open / faster. however almost no chance of hitting anything major. Great way to get confidence with car control. Track is actually pretty smooth so rocks etc aren't really a problem.

Unfortunately again the oil and ignition problems were there (no real surprise the only change was more fuel and oil added to the car).

Some other helpful opnions at the dirt lead to A) realising the valve part of the PCV was missing and the end looked chewwed ??? WTF - still a mystery??? and disconnecting the valve cover breather from the inlet manifold and running it to a catch can (Coke can for the win). Interstling this stopped all the oil smoke, but also the catch can wasn't collecting any oil, nor was the engine consuming oil. WIN!!

The other opinion was to try changing the CAS, maybe this was breaking down when the engine got hot on the track? (At this point i still thought the problem was heat linked as it seemed to come in at the end of mountain runs, mid to late through track days, etc). Borrowed a spare CAS from Plohl (Na6 and Na8 unit are interchangable for other reference) and tried that.... No luck.

I'll stop there for this one.

[sailaholic]

Another long break between posts.

Ok, so swapping out the CAS made no difference and the problem persisted, sometimes resulting in the car driving along sounding like a WRX with a huge exhaust.

Consultation with Andy from Adaptronic pointed at it being a wiring issue somewhere. Plohl and I spent a couple of sessions going through the wiring again checking continuity, swapping the coil packs back in. Every time we thought we had the problem isolated it would disappear and re appear.

We got it narrowed down to the plug on the wiring harness as jiggling it when the car dropped a cylinder would often get it to come back but we couldn't isolate a specific wire, however it did seem to be in the factory wiring as the cylinders that it would drop would be the one on the factory ignition wiring.

In the end I got Andy to fly up and have a look, as we were out of ideas. Turns out there were two problems the whole time.

1. After a bit of testing Andy figured out the dropped ignition was actually in the factory wiring. The pins while making contact most of the time, and "clicking" into place was a bit loose at the contactor and was only just making contact. So when the wires moved slightly the connection would be high resistance, or not connected causing the ignition drop outs.

It took cutting some of the spare pins off the loom and splicing them in to confirm this. But the ignition (almost) hasn't missed a beat since.

2. The odd and subtle misfire / surge problem took a while longer to work out. Andy got me to drive around and point out when it was happening, and tried changing a few bit and pieces, but nothing seemed out of order. Luckily for me Andy also made some adjustments to idle control and transient throttle behaviour at the same time which made the car significantly better to drive.

Andy noticed the problem not only happened at light cruise but also when idle and free revving. This was helpful as it was more consistent when free revving. Richening the mixture was the only thing that seems to have an effect, and only when mixtures were increased overall, individually trimming cylinders to be richer didn't seem to have the same effect. Individual would have pointed at a possible vacuum leak on one runner.

As it was only when everything was richened significantly (12:1 AFR region), Andy wasn't able to help much more as it wasn't a tune problems but characteristic of the engine setup in some way. To mitigate this he altered the tune to keep it very rich at light load to band aid the problem (which was driving me nuts, to the band aid was a request not a dodgy fix on Andy's part).

I went away on holidays after this and so again the car sat with not much use, however a change of Job in September meant the company car was gone, along with a lot of the travel I was doing. So the 5 was now a second car after the girl friends Yaris, rather than a 3rd and started seeing more use.

Come November, while attempting to drive in to the city in peak our traffic ignition problems again! Turned the car off / on again / wiggling the ECU etc. made no difference at all. So I had to limp the car into the city for 2hrs in stop start traffic sweating like a pig because 3 cylinders don't run A/C.

Testing at lunch time confirmed it was a dead EBay COP, with no spares I just limped the car home again later that night and went to the wreckers on the weekend in search of more COP units. Managed to get the correct Genuine Toyota ones out of a wreck for $100! Not sure why we ever bothered with the EBay units to start with. New units have been working like a dream.

[sailaholic]

With the new coils in I attended my second Dirt Sprints day (I forget when I did the first competitive one, so it will get missed in the notes).

Had a chance to talk to the tuner (Nick from NA Autosport) about how the car was going and the testing we had done before the event started. Straight up response after telling him about it not responding to the individual cylinder tuning and only at light throttle, "It's a bad injector".

I had them cleaned and they flowed ok when new, but apparently they can flow ok at high pulse widths, but can play up / be sticky at low duty cycles causing the misfire.

So that put changing injectors on the cards (Spoiler - Nick was completely right, changed injectors later and the problem was solved).

The dirt sprint day went really well, a couple of spins and some pointers from one of the friendly commodore drivers netted a 11 second drop in my PB from to 1:48 down from 1:59 at the last event! I was stoked, particularly as about 4 of those second came in a rush at the end.

Review, of the results showed the track had got very quick that day with one of the Evo's breaking the 1:30, so a 1:48 still put me towards the back of the field, but a great improvement none the less.

[sailaholic]

Prior to Andy comming up i had identified a problem with the break booster and (possibly) check valve. So got both of thoese changed out prior so i knew they were affecting the tuning problem.

Full details of the break issues are in this link

http://mx5cartalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=58076

Summary, i had really sh*t brakes, super hard pedal, wouldn't lock up etc. Turned out to be 1) a leaking booster and 2) glazed pads.
Still unsure the reason the pads ended up glazed as andrew (the previous owner) was careful to follow the bedding directions to the letter.

I've read mixed reviews on the HPS from Emily here saying she has great brakes to one of the mx5 workshops saying they tried a set on a NC and they where crap cold and couldn't stand up to heat on the track.

In the end i changed them out for A1RM's rather then trying to clean them up and re install.