Looks like the same spacers I'm using on the rear of the FX16.
GameboyRMH wrote:
Looks like the same spacers I'm using on the rear of the FX16.
GameboyRMH wrote:
Hopefully I won't need them for long...now that there's time, I can swap in the shorter rear springs to make plenty of room for the rear tires, get some negative rear camber and do away with the spacers.
If I'm really lucky I'll even have room for 225 wide tires when the springs are out of the way.
Just got official results...I got beat by a family sedan, 2 drift cars and an Evo X who decided to record official times...OW x_x Not a good way to start the season.
With news that the usual front-runner was taking a break and then another fast competitor not showing up, I was worried there might not be stiff competition this season. Well now I've got stiff competition and a deep points hole to dig myself out of!
GameboyRMH wrote: Hopefully I won't need them for long...now that there's time, I can swap in the shorter rear springs to make plenty of room for the rear tires, get some negative rear camber and do away with the spacers. If I'm really lucky I'll even have room for 225 wide tires when the springs are out of the way.
You might find that once you get negative camber in the rear, the car will not rotate to well. I had to dial it out to almost straight up-and-down (-0.2º) to get the handling suited to my liking.
Sadly this is an update to say that there are no updates and there won't be for a while. There was plenty of time to get the car ready for the track day next Sunday, and so far the mechanic has used exactly none of it. There probably isn't enough time to get everything finished now.
I've been strung along by this guy long enough and it's now absolutely clear that he can't give my car priority when needed, at best. So I'm gonna save up to take it elsewhere, probably early/mid next month. The Samurai rang up $500 in damage recently and there's more to come, so I'm on a really tight budget.
Well the work on the car really started back on the weekend, but I've been so busy getting the Samurai ready for this weekend's rally (the last one I can afford to enter this season...to put it optimistically) that I haven't had a chance to post updates.
Over the last few weeks I've been doing little things like cutting off the seized sway bar links:
Installing the starter heat shield and changing the #1/#4 exhaust wrap:
And on the last weekend I removed the rear coilovers, got them disassembled and put them back together with the new spring setup (should've taken better pics, took this one half-way through)
I'll get pics of when they're installed.
The mechanic agreed to finish getting the engine running and promised he'd get it done on time. This is better than having another mechanic first have to reverse-engineer the half-done work, but if he misses this deadline I'm going to feel like the beaten girlfriend who keeps going back to the same guy, and I'll have no chance at winning this year's championship (I already basically have to get 1st in all remaining events).
On Sunday I put on the new rear brake pad retaining clips and reinstalled the rear coilovers.
Is there room for the tires now?
YES!
Even at maximum negative camber?
YES!
I think 15x8s with 225 wide tires would be a very tight fit though, I'd have to move the sway bar mounting tab above the tire and use a longer sway bar link for that...in fact I'd do it now if I hadn't already bought & clear-coated new stock sway bar links, longer links mean less bind after all.
And with that, I've done everything I can do to speed up this build until the engine is running. It's all up the the mechanic now.
Did a little finishing-up work on the weekend like putting the seats in place and tightening up the suspension, once the engine's running I can do a ride height check & adjust. The autocross has been put off so I should have at least another week.
Over the last few weekends we did the final check & adjust on the suspension. I had to mess with the front so I can't get away with not doing an alignment now, buhbye AC install money. It sits like this now:
The front jacking points are 5.5" off the ground, but ground clearance is only ~3.25" because of the lower strut brace...I better just not go over any speedbumps anymore.
We did some finishing work on the oil cooler mount...I'm gonna add more speed holes after everything is mounted (so that I don't drill through a place that would've been good to attach a PS cooler bracket for example), although more for airflow than lightening:
A little more wiring work's been done. The hall effect sensor mount still needs some more work:
Like I said, there's nothing more I can really do myself now. I've saved up enough for a new set of rotors so I should have those in early June. I assume our previous autocross location at a factory yard is unavailable because the factory is being demolished as scheduled - at this point the only usable location is the bigger (and now more expensive) track here, and the only way we'll be able to afford it is if we get an event sponsor or if we can work out a way to share costs with the local karting club (still a little too rich for our AutoX group's blood), or ideally both. Maybe I'll see if I can help line up a sponsor for the planet's most obscure racing event 
Well here's an encouraging sight, looks like the hall effect sensor should be on soon.
And now I can get a pic of the custom ring that holds the trigger wheel onto the face of the crank pulley:
Hey I found one more thing I could do: The plan was to mount the PS cooler with a P-clamp, but none are available locally (not kidding). so I fabricated one from a strip of scrap metal (and a piece of 5/8" coolant tubing for a bushing) using just a big C-clamp, a socket bit of the right size to bend it around, aircraft scissors, a drill, and a dremel for deburring:
On Friday I stopped by the shop and the mechanic had test-fitted the oil cooler and lines to make it look like something was happening with my car. I appreciate the gesture. But even after tidying up the lines, I wasn't happy with how little slack was available in the lines and how much airflow was being blocked by the cooler mount and fittings:
So I had an idea that could fix both problems, and was rushing to do some modifications to the mount from Friday evening to Saturday morning:
I wish I'd taken a pic of the mount iself, I figured while I was at it I'd lighten it up a bit, and ended up turning it into a skeleton of its former self with more than half the material removed. It's still stiffer than the bracket it bolts onto. Now the fittings sit in front of the stock vertical bracket, and air can flow between it and the cooler, and there's plenty of slack:
Well this project is going to pick up speed after a major update on Saturday, including pics of either some work actually done on the car by the mechanic, or (more likely) the car being loaded onto a flatbed.
So I stopped by the shop on Saturday with some new front bumper mounting bolts (the old ones were giving even more trouble to go back in than they did to come out), and although there wasn't any real progress, the mechanic left a cute scene to show that he cares about getting the work done:
Don't ask me why he chose to leave a seal puller on top of the engine, all the seals are new. This isn't enough for me to be sure I want to leave the car at this shop, but this is enough for me to roll the dice on giving this guy another week to show some initiative. Taking the car somewhere else does have a cost and it's less than a week of time is worth to me right now. I won't have time to touch this car until I get back from vacation in late July anyway - and I want to come back to a finished car. If I don't it can only be my mistake at this point.
I've been working like crazy on the Samurai and ran across something in the repair manual that gave me an idea. Some Suzukis mount the CAS to a bracket on the oil pan. Hmmm...
So I sent that idea along to the mechanic as well, trying to bolt the CAS bracket to the block somewhere is becoming a conundrum, at best.
Looks like there have been some ideas going on for the next autocross - they're looking at holding it at the other track here, one which is less than 10 minutes from my house, so that's nice for me. What's not nice for me is that they're looking at a date when I'll be out of the island. Plane tickets are bought and vacation days are set...nothing I can do about it now.
Bonus image: Found this nasty little bastard just outside the shop shelter:
Wtf is THAT? !?!
A common bigass centipede. Most painful sting of any land animal they say.
Well I guess I should update, it's been a while...before I left there was a good bit of wiring work underway, so I left the car where it was. A good decision? I guess I'll find out in a couple of weeks.
Also the nuts tore out of the coil-on-plug deck so I'll have to fix that as soon as I get back.
The July 11th autocross went off great which is great for the sport but catastrophic for my standing this season - I'll never be able to dig myself out of such a points hole. In fact, from now on I'll be bringing a knife to a knife & gun fight - the guy with the Evo X beat my usual rival in his '90s Swift GTi by 7 seconds 
and now leads the championship with nearly twice the points of the runner-up. A new guy also brought a Toyobaru. We all run in one class, which worked well as little as 2 years ago when everyone was driving stock to lightly modded low-powered sporty econoboxes.
Anyway, hopefully my car will be ready for the next event on August 9th. All it needs is to get the engine running, and I left the urethane suspension bushings to be installed but that's not critical.
So I got back on the weekend and the news is not so good. There's maybe a week's worth of wiring work done on the car, and I hear the bolt-on crank sensor bracket is totally finished but I haven't seen it yet. Not really bad news in itself, that's most of what needs to be done to get the engine running after all. But there's one big problem.
The MS3 was sent to a foreign company for hardware changes (not sure what) and when it came back in nearly 2 weeks ago now, customs officers were on strike. What one of the most powerful (cough and suspiciously wealthy cough) groups of people are going on strike over, I don't know, I'll have to catch up with the news. In the '90s it was over the threat of putting security cameras in their work areas - totally unheard of for that kind of work, right?
Anyway it's not looking good and there's nothing either of us can do but wait. In the meantime, I've got the CoP deck to fix up and there's a little more wiring work that can be done.
Well I'm gonna find out today whether there's any chance of getting the car ready for the event, the customs strike ended late last week (it was over the customs department being merged & downsized like virtually every other part of government) and the mechanic should be getting some parts out of customs today and the MS3 might be among them. If so, there might be just enough time to get the car ready. If not, I'll be stuffing myself into my offroad navigator's little Peugeot rally car. It's not a bad car, it would be competitive with mine.
Of course the car wasn't ready, and I didn't have enough upper body strength to drive the Peugeot for long. The hydraulic handbrake has a short handle and it had PS system problems, which is even worse with a small steering wheel. This cost me great deals of time at 180deg turnarounds and low-speed corners, so I didn't do well and may even have come DFL.
Im sorry if this has been covered before, but I have to ask.
You're obviously a competant mechanic. Why are you depending on this guy, who has taken years and still not finished?
Me, a competent mechanic? Hardly, I'm a weekend amateur, and I have no garage and a pretty minimal set of tools - fixing a car at my house is a lot like trying to fix a car in a hotel parking lot. With a full-time job and running another racing effort, I'd hardly have time to get a few hours in on the car per week if I were doing it myself.
The hard truth is that this guy is one of the few who can do the more advanced work required (aftermarket ECU wiring & tuning, fab work - even if subcontracted), handles his own part imports and doesn't charge money by the suitcase-full. At this point I could take on the cost of hiring someone else to finish the car and I very nearly did in late June, I probably should've.
The car is 95% of the way to having the engine running and once it's at that point, I'm not going back to this guy. On top of everything else, in the last few weeks he's refused to answer any form of telecommunication, and that's a deal-breaker by itself. I already know who I'm taking it to after this.
Might as well update, I found out that the mechanic has the ECU back and he's supposed to get the wiring finished up this week (I won't get my hopes up). There's a little to be done in the engine bay, center cluster and passenger floor (where the ECU sits). Fuel rail is back together and I got the CoP deck fixed on the same weekend as the last autocross. So it's just wiring, crank sensor bracket installation and ECU configuration & tuning left now.
After that, I'm going to take it to another shop to get all the urethane bushings installed and then I'll get it aligned, and then maybe get the AC system put together if I have any money left over. August to October is the hottest time of year around here. I want to have it done for late September when my cousin's visiting, next autocross is in November.
Some more wiring got done over the last week (the harness is now set up to be fully modular - the engine could be pulled out with wiring still in place by undoing one big connector) and the mechanic tried to fit the crank sensor bracket, but it didn't line up perfectly so it's going back for more modifications. There's not much to take pics of right now, just rat's nests of wires that are slowly getting more tidy.
Edit: Here's one anyway, took this after I repaired & reinstalled the CoP deck:
Finally a breakthrough: Got the crank sensor bracket done. The mechanic ended up going with a bolt-on mount that sits under the alternator:
This might be the first 4AGE with a crank sensor, belt-driven PS and AC all at the same time.
Here's something I did a few weeks ago. The radiator fan shroud started to "rot" somehow - the plastic turned soft and spongy. I think I didn't get all the ATF cleaned off of it. A new fan can be had for under $60 but I can't buy one right now, so I patched it up with aluminum tape and coroplast. Here's where I was just getting started:
And here it is finished:
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