Pursuit170's emerald green NB8b 'Chastity'

[pursuit170]

Also, suspension bushings and engine mounts from IL motorsport just arrived



have a few days off work this week so hopefully can get that done

[smy0003]

I really dig the white wheels, maybe I'm a closet Honda boy...

I want to get some new engine mounts but have no idea if it's possible to to get them in with pulling the engine.

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

[pursuit170]

I'll let you know when I work it out. I'm pretty sure you should be able too (without pulling the engine).

[Magpie]

Think about installing grease nipples when you change the bushes.

[pursuit170]

finished getting all the bushings in today, havent done the engine mounts yet cause id had enough but they dont look too hard. Some pictures of the long slow process across two days



Chaos for all



Out you get.



in with the new ones.



wheel alignment time.


doneskies.

defs wont be doing a full car again for free for a long time haha.

[pursuit170]

So got my alignment done yesterday. to discover i need to realign some bushings cause they couldnt get the rear toe even remotely close with anything less than -4 degree of camber so today i yet again pulled it apart to fix the alignment again. and also found that the diff seal had completely died in the last 100km, so replaced that as w3lel while i was in there. so another fun day pulling everything out of the car .



measured it up after getting it back from the shop



yay

also lifted it a bit in an effort to reduce the camber and guard scrub issues it has no more slammed miata

[pursuit170]

So Saturday came around and I finally got a chance to drive my car, (albeit a general commute to a friends 21st ) after spending a ridiculous amount of time working on it and driving it in various states of disrepair. finally having it back together and driving properly is amazing. I havent changed the engine mounts yet as i was pretty over it and didnt want to do anything by the time id finished stuffing around with my control arms and diff

But after the standard slightly wrecked mazda bushings the IL motorsport bushings feel amazing. Has tightened up the car a lot with no real increase in NVH levels as a result. Probably the biggest thing you notice compared to the old bushings to see the stiffness increase is when you go to do up the wheel nuts. all the miatas ive messed with you can see the wheel move when you torque them up, that is noticiably reduced now and as i said the car feels heaps nicer.

Among other things that got changed while i was doing this, the wheel alignment and ride heights. As reffered to earlier, the car was ridiculously low and my springs arent particularly hard, so i had a lot of guard scrub and general clearance issues as well as excessive rear camber. I lifted the whole car about 7mm at the spring, which probs worked out to about ~8 at the wheel because it also took preload out of the spring. This finally matched the damper rates a lot better (also helped by the bushings doing their job properly.) (yes they are adjustable but the preload messed with it a bit more than the range of adjustment allowed and i dont have so much rear rebound problems now which is nice, and it rides soooo much nicer, (good considering i spend the vast majority of my driving at 80 in a straight line))

This brings it round to the issues i had getting the alignment right, basically i didnt center the right rear lower control arm bushings properly (by about 2mm) and it meant my right rear had about 4.5mm toe out they couldnt get it back straight without horrendous camber again. So next morning back up on stands (day 4 by this stage, getting over it haha) drop the arm out, fix up the bushings, mess with the upper arm a little to try reduce the camber on that corner. string line the car up again and get it pretty close to the following.

Front camber -1° 22'
front caster +7°
front toe 1.5mm in (total)

Rear camber -1° 10'
rear toe 1.5mm in (total)

I didnt get it perfect as it follows cambers slightly more too the left than too the right, but its by far the closest its ever been while ive owned the car, so im just running up my 1000km till i get it lasered again (as he offered to do me a discount since ive been so many times trying to sort it out, once the bushings had settled in )

So how does it handle on these settings?

Bear it in mind im running falken ZE912s which are about the hardest tyre this side of a trolley caster wheel. So there is no point running out towards -2° camber on mine as it doesnt have the tyre grip to use the camber and just ended up handling horribly and destroying tyres.

I can finally say after 14,000km with the car it doesnt handle like a VT commodore any more. and that makes me so happy

with the old set up id been chasing out of the car it would turn in reasonably then have bulk understeer and then have the rear snap round at random, with very little in the way of progressive throttle response, drifting was just a case of firewall it and hope it doesnt snap

So it hasnt much better turn in response now (probably largly due to the bushings though) and much less steering chatter which for me at least has cleaned up the 'feel' but it will be getting fender braces at some point to clean that up some more.

once turned in you can chose how it behaves now, if your not paying attention it will push the front of the car gently, but this can be corrected by coming out of the throttle and it tucks in nicely as it should, if you throw the car in it will come around nicely, but having said that it doesnt get chronically upset by sudden multiple dirtection changes, (unless you want it too )

once the car is settled into longer corners its nicely balanced and you can choos ebetween under or over steer with a slight natural tendancy toward over steer.

coming out of the corner its still an open diff, so one wheel peel for days but it doesnt snap like it used too.

I did get the chance to do some driving in the rain, (always intersting on the Falkens) the car slides in response to throttle input now, rather than snapping round and being caught, you can drive the rear out or gently pull it back in as you want.

So as you can possibly tell i like it haha.

[tomli123001]

White wheel looks good. Let me know how the Plasti dip holds up after maybe a few months.
I met your friend Josh in Shailer Park a couple of times already. Hope to catch up with you guys once you all finish exams. I am in Daisy Hill.

[pursuit170]

So i got a new surprise driving home on sunday night, nice waftey burning smell everytime i stopped. It would appear the diff breather is blocked and it burst both drive shaft seals on the way home. looks like im back using the parents car while they are away till i can pull it apart again when i do the diff mounts apparently i just love pulling my car apart.



The lovely burning smell of gear oil, all over the exhaust, as well as everything else, thankfully it didnt do the pinion seal as well.

[pursuit170]

Its been a while since i last posted here, but a few things have happened with the car since then. Mainly the diff, something went bang and it has been undoing its pre-load adjusters and was eating itself. bought a 4.3 T1/2 ( T2 internals in a T1 housing so behaves like a T1 but less aggressive lock on throttle, (completely open on coast)) also swapped to delrin diff mounts.

After all the hassle with the original diff i was not at all sad to see it go, getting a T1 style center and going shorter again to the 4.3 is amazing. no more one wheel peel wooo. did make a car that's already useless in the rain even worse though haha (teach me for getting hard tyres ) but definitely a great addition to the car.

Also changing to delrin diff mounts is great. it wasn't great on the old diff considering it rattled clunked banged ground its housing and screamed through the whole car when hard mounted like that. but on a good diff, it controls the torques and weight transfers a lot better than before, and the gear box definitely feels nicer to use now

[pursuit170]

decided today was a nice day to change my engine mounts. managed to get the drivers side changed. passengers side. for what ever reason instead of going into a slot on the cross member it has a hole, and the engine pretty much has to be out to allow enough room to extract it. so i have one new engine mount. made the car a litle nicer two new ones would be great though

[pursuit170]

Been a very long time since I last updated this thread. So here is roughly what has happened to the car in that time.

It went for some cruises with friends.






hottest footwell ever problems

Trying to out run a 370z on the worst tyres ever was a huge amount of fun getting everything out of the little mx5.

Speaking of Tyres, I got new ones, yayyy. Now rolling on Michelin PS3. and they are fantastic

Also made a fire extiguisher bracket with the hope of doing track days at some point.




Then one of the screws holding the boot release solenoid in fell out, and jammed the entire show, so had to drill my way back into my boot to fix it.




just poked it with my finger then the boot opened.

It got a new wheel alignment to work better on the new tyres. See this thread I wrote on how I to that. viewtopic.php?f=30&t=71897



Then I went to the dodgy Day which was fun to work on other peoples cars and meet some other mx5 people

its my car the paint and body work is wrecked anyways i can stand on it

Tomorrow JoshuaM and I are going to essentially a private session on the Mt Cotton skid pan, So a few little things to prep for that. I added a hand brake button hold feature (a coin and some cloth tape.) as well as a red piece of electrical tape marking steering center for bogan skid swag






Amongst all of this my rear main has started leaking as well and the 200k KM service is creeping up on me. So lots more fun to be had

[pursuit170]

Yet again long time no post, so i figured an update on how chastity is running, and cause my garage thread some other car stuff that's been happening.
I guess the most important thing to have happened since last post is ive gotten a chance to use my fancy new pilot sport 3's. I wont carry on too much as they are nothing new to the automotive world, but they have amazing grip for a street tyre, they work really well on my setup and are the first tyre I've been able to drive on really hard for extended period without the tyre over heating. (I'm looking at you Continental premi-contact 2), Still driving around on the 4.3 T1, still loving it, hasn't made the car fast, but I can just outrun my friends dull hatch backs now so I guess that's a plus

While I'm on the subject of differentials, my car has been making so much grip that mid corner it can lift an inside wheel completely off the ground. Which results in a moment of one wheel spinning for freedom as the torsen goes open when completely unloaded. This issue is largley due to the spring rates that came with the tein street advance coil overs, a 6kg front and 5kg rear is probably a bit too close together, a 7kg front would be a bit more reasonable. But alas that would be money i dont have, so what else would alow the rear some more independence and create a little more rear grip to calm some over steer? Rear sway bar delete of course
Initial impression is I can get into my driveway now a bit easier, the ride from the rear is a little less fussy, and the car isn't quite so prone to lifting a rear, ideally a bar a bit softer than the stock would be good but we shall see how this goes for a week and see how we go, other wise probably just at the mercy of the MX5s complete lack of rear suspension travel

Other things that have happened? My best friend is getting married and they wanted a car, so I decided to try my hand at spray painting. probably the most time consuming thing ive ever done, much prefer working on mechanical things. But anyways here are some photos of blondy.

Among other things ive done since last post is a couple of my friends blew clutches and another older friend crashed his first gen. So I've been kept busy fixing stuff, doing the clutch in a subaru wagon was probably the most annoying of all the jobs. Anyways, here are some photos of all the shenanigans.


So many different colours its silly.


Thats not suitable for a wedding. better make all those colours the same.


A page of lies courtesy of Ford.


Pretty.


The three panels I've completely finished. I didnt realise it was possible to use so much sandpaper.


That was fun. Not really.

[bruce]

I do like a garage paint job.
You can pop the gearbox out of my Suss-zuki (it needs fixing).

[pursuit170]

So I've had the rear bar out for a bit now and the changes its made have been interesting. Classic case of solved one problem but caused another. So the original aim was to let the rear wheels move a bit more independently and stop it picking up the inside rear wheel. This it did achieve, as now I can get on the throttle early without one wheel being in the air. But it hasn't been the cheap solve all we hoped for. The problem with having no rear bar is it lets the rear roll a lot more (shocking I know) and this brings us back to the limited rear travel of the miata, the rear gets upset more mid corner by bumps as its pretty close to the bump stops on my soft springs.

The other thing is while letting it have more mid corner grip at the rear has settled the oversteer, it hasn't fixed that i still have a silly aggressive alignment, -1.7° at the front and -0.8° camber front and rear is a bit too far apart. So the car is still over steery but it now cant handle quick transitions as well as the rear picks up more momentum in the transition.

Ideally then I should put the rear bar back in and get a stiffer front bar, but that cost money so maybe another time and maybe change my alignment settings, -1.3° for the front is probably a bit more reasonable