Nice ghetto fix. I might have to steal that idea when I start cleaning up the engine bay on my Avante.
Nice ghetto fix. I might have to steal that idea when I start cleaning up the engine bay on my Avante.
I haven't posted any updates without major progress because it's probably almost as frustrating to read this train wreck as it is to experience first hand, but a definite milestone is coming up that I'm excited about.
There are some days in the next few weeks that a lot of people are excited about. Star Wars 7 comes out on the 18th and Christmas is on the 25th. But the day I'm really looking forward to this holiday season is the 28th, which is the day I'll tow my car to another shop if the engine isn't running. I'd like this guy to at least finish the wiring so the next guy doesn't have to reverse-engineer the whole harness to complete it, but he probably won't which only makes me wish the 28th were here sooner. I'm not giving anyone an opportunity to screw up the next season for me.
A quick review of the last year to date.
==Stuff the mechanic did as part of his full-time job==
Designed & fabricated crank sensor bracket
Most of a wiring harness done
Part of the fab work on an oil cooler bracket
Height adjustment to 1 coilover
==Stuff I did on weekends & evenings, almost all in the first half of the year==
Swapped springs on rear coilovers
Rebuilt brake caliper sliders all-around
Rebuilt brake pistons on the rear
Designed & built CoP deck
Finishing work on oil cooler bracket
Fabbed hardware to mount PS cooler & mounted it up
Cut off seized front air dam fasteners and got replacements made
Installed starter heat shield & changed ruined exhaust wrap again
Patched up a rotten fan shroud
Whatever happens, taking this project to this guy has already turned out to be easily among the top 3 worst decisions of my life. I can't wait to put that disaster behind me.
Haven't hauled the car off yet, but it's not for a lack of wanting to do so. For a while I thought this mechanic might've smartened up after my offroad navigator hauled away his rally car from the same shop, but so far I'm pretty sure he hasn't. Got a track day in a Radical SR3 for Christmas and had to schedule it for the 28th (driving that car fast is all about the throttle control BTW). On the way to that track day, my Samurai broke down with some kind of ignition failure (seems to be yet another distributor problem), so I've been trying to get that taken care of over the last couple of days but I still have no wheels.
So this weekend's looking like a pretty good haul-away date now.
Shoulda done this sooner. The new guy's working on the car at his house, I didn't take pics there but he wasn't impressed at the current wiring setup...he asked if I had another harness in fact.
Also found out yesterday that the MS3 had been sent out of the country for repairs (from what I wonder?) and was in customs now, should get it back this week. Wiring work can still be done without it. First autocross of 2016 is in late February so I need to get the engine running well by mid-February at the latest, it needs an alignment and a little suspension work, and will probably need the adjustable brake proportioning valve installed before it'll be ready for competition. So there's no overabundance of time.
Also I realize a lot of the older pics in this thread aren't loading, so I'll have to go through and re-upload them.
Still following along; looking forward to seeing this come together this year!
I'm pulling for you, man.
Customs got the MS3X back to me at the speed of government, so I got it yesterday.
They sent a whole new unit. I should be able to get this to the guy doing the wiring today. Also you can see the spare hall effect sensor - that's a part that will make it impossible for the engine to run if it dies, so I'll be keeping that in the trunk with a spare CoP unit. Don't know if there's enough time to get the car running for the first event now.
New wiring/ECU guy thought it was best to start fresh rather than to try to fix up this harness, so he's going to order up a generic Megasquirt harness from DIYAutotune and start with that. Gonna get it rush-shipped in so it should be here before next weekend.
Had a nasty scare today when I thought the barely-used battery was dead, but 2 hours on a charger at 40A seems to have fixed it.
Due to a customs holdup, which to be fair was due to the electrician trying to import the harness as an electrical part (coulda got away with it if it didn't come from an automotive company) we only got the new harness yesterday, but he's optimistic it can still be done with time to spare. First autocross of the year is next weekend. I'll probably take a couple of days off this week to get some mechanical work done on the car.
Just got news that the engine has fired up with the MS, but it's making a scraping/grating noise. I'm hoping it's just a bad accessory, I don't think it was doing that last time it ran.
I'm going to pick up a new main alternator wire today.
Edit: The likely worst-case scenario is that the bolts that hold the trigger wheel to the crank pulley weren't cut short enough and are scraping on the oil pump housing...hope that's not it.
Update: Well the timing belt is loose, for some reason. This one is less than 3 years old and doesn't have much run-time on it. I have to get it replaced tonight somehow. Also the last two coil drivers are bad on the new MS for some reason, he's running it using two in wasted-spark mode. Using individual drivers, or at least having them all working so that there are spares, would be better for reliability.
Man, everything's going to E36 M3 all the sudden 
Just dropped a cool $200 on a new timing belt and tensioner from the stealership in case that needs to be replaced tonight, that should ensure that the timing belt on the engine is fine and just needs a little adjustment -_-
man it sounds like the only luck you have is bad luck, heres to hoping and best off perseverance! were here rooting for you
So yesterday evening I went over to the shop and found out that this timing belt wasn't just lacking some tension, it was flapping in the breeze. The engine started normally at first and then started making an awful noise, then the electrician shut it down. It's amazing that the engine didn't shut down on its own with a timing belt that loose.
Got a mechanic over there to have a look at the timing belt, I heard today that he was working on it until 1am this morning but it's fixed now and the engine isn't making any odd noises. He said that "everything that should be tight was slack, and everything that should be slack was tight."
The electrician told me that the remaining problems are that he doesn't know the pinout for the gauge cluster, particularly which wire goes to the tach, and that the crank sensor bracket still isn't stiff enough and is vibrating too much, so it needs reinforcement. There might not be enough time to have it ready for this weekend now.
Got the engine running well enough to drive around on yesterday, but then ran into another terrible mechanical problem, it seems the flywheel bolts are loose. I think that's it for this weekend. Electrical stuff is all good except that we still haven't figured out which pin on the gauge cluster drives the tach. The repair manual says it's a black wire but those don't seem to have any effect.
I dropped off the crank sensor bracket to have a bunch of reinforcing gussets added to it and I'm going to see if the guy who built this engine feels like taking responsibility for this problem.
Edit: Nope he doesn't. He says he hasn't had any problems with any other engines he's built and that these problems should've shown themselves earlier if they're due to undertightening. So now I have to save up money for someone else to pull the powertrain apart and fix these problems that apparently just came out of nowhere. Lovely.
Those flywheel bolts need to be replaced. They can stretch. They may have been torqued correctly when installed. I had issues with this on my 4age.
Can't remember if I replaced them or not...but now that you mention it, I should definitely pick up some new ones at this point.
Edit: Stealership only has 7 in stock, gonna grab 'em now. Might have to try the nuts & bolts specialty shop for the last one.
You know with a build thread, no news around the time of a race is usually good news. Well there's some good news but it ended kinda bad...there's a lot to write about with pics and videos, but there's still a lot for me to do so I'll update later.
Hopefully you are ok, and it didn't end in fire or shrapnel.
I'm OK, no fire and no major damage but some shrapnel...I'll post up tomorrow.
Lots to post now, I better start back with Thursday night, when I picked up the reinforced crank sensor bracket. The guy who did the welding painted it as well. This is the first time I've been able to post pics of the whole bracket:
Before, the car was regularly losing sync at high RPMs, the reinforcing gussets & bars have very nearly eliminated sync loss. I also added a big washer to the single mounting bolt to make it harder to flex from that point. I'm trying to figure out what more can be done to make it perfect.
On Friday morning (took Friday off work) I headed over to the electrician to pick up the car, he wasn't there but all I had to do was fit up the crank sensor, put on a wheel and lower the car, no big deal. Hauled the car to a little shop not far from me recommended by a friend. This guy has his own race car (visible in the background) and he works FAST.
I needed him to fix this flywheel problem and change the brake proportioning valve. I wanted the brake system as close to stock (for a GTS model) so that I'd be sure to have decent brake bias. The current setup was a wild-ass guess and there was no time for that now. I went to check the last shop that might have remaining flywheel bolts. While I was there I asked about a GTS master cylinder rebuild kit, just out of curiosity, and they had one. I'd pulled the master cylinder from the donor car a few days earlier when I took out the prop. valve. Now I was thinking maybe I could change that the same time.
When I got back the mechanic already had the flywheel out, and found that while the bolts looked good, there was this weird cratering effect on the surface that the bolt heads tighten onto:
So I took that to a machine shop to get it smoothed out, and came back with that and the GTS master cylinder. Even though this guy put the gearbox back in before he started work on the proportioning valve (which is behind it), he soon had that swapped and was working on rebuilding the master cylinder. And then he noticed that the brake booster is different and I'd need to swap the one from the donor car. So we both went to work removing brake boosters, I went home and started pulling one from the donor car. I had to pick up the mechanic and get some help because after unbolting everything mine wouldn't come out - the car's frame was tweaked enough from so many accidents that it was sort of trapped behind the front shock tower, and took some persuasion to remove.
Anyway we eventually got all of that changed, so I had a full stock GTS brake system and the death rattles from the engine were gone now that the flywheel had been machined (and fitted with mostly-new bolts). A little adjustment to the crank sensor and the engine fired back up.
I'll have to pick up from Friday night next, I came back to a busy day at work today and my phone's touchscreen is acting up too.
OK, picking up from Friday night. Drove the car myself on the MS3X for the first time that night. Just a short distance home, then the electrician stopped by to do a little basic tuning. That's when we found that fuel was dripping out somewhere. We decided we'd take care of that on Saturday morning at his shop.
On Saturday morning I grabbed some bolts and headed to the electrician's shop, there we found that the fuel was pouring out and it had lost nearly 1/4 tank pretty quickly. A totally missing hose clamp was to blame. Why it leaked now and not the last time I drove it was a mystery.
From there, the electrician was trying to get the tach working but found that it requires a spike signal so it'll need the "modded relay" circuit to run from the MS3's tach output. Can't get electronic components on Saturday so we spent the rest of the afternoon reassembling the interior and tying up loose ends, often literally with zip ties. Had to use zip ties to hold my CoPs on because my JB-welded nut system failed in less than an hour of engine runtime. I'll change that to a bolt-as-stud setup later. As I was driving away I noticed the engine had a fair bit of pinging at low RPMs and medium/high load, so I went back and the electrician tried to tune it out, but couldn't get it done and suggested I put in some race gas and/or injector cleaner to try to troubleshoot it. The race gas and injector cleaner didn't help, so he suggested that the cam timing might be off, which could make sense.
Anyway I spent the night cleaning a deep layer of stuff from the inside of the car, throwing out trash and categorizing parts. Took it for a spin late at night and found that driving the Samurai had blinded me to the degradation of the country's roads, and that with any traffic there's really not enough space on the streets for a car this fast. Being able to cruise past people for a minute on engine braking after putting the gas down for just 20 seconds is the next best thing to cruise control though.
I found that some of the parts I'd chosen were too uncivilized for street use. The non-interference-fitted spherical-bearing camber plates sound like loose sledgehammers in the engine bay, and the exhaust is just too loud - Doing a Nurburgring-style noise test with a phone app measured it at 105dB. I might have to change to a "turbo-style" muffler, just like the guy who fabricated my exhaust predicted.
Anyway at the end of the night I had the car ready for the autocross on Sunday. I decided that no matter what, I must avoid spending any more money on the car before the end of March. Foreshadowing...
On Sunday morning I was at the track. Things were looking up for a change (although I'd found the first signs of a ruptured CV joint boot on Saturday afternoon. Forgot to mention that). Before the event we had a chance to do some brake testing, and that's when I found that my specially imported Z1 Star Specs with plenty of tread on them were now rather crusty. The car still turned nearly as well as it used to, but I think that was due to suspension improvements, and you could really feel the lack of grip under braking...these aren't the same tires that used to pick up sand and fling it at the wheel wells anymore. Forgot to mention I had Superpro poly bushings put on the front suspension on Friday, honestly any difference in handling is hard to notice among the other changes, but I know that the rubber front bushings don't last long with this suspension, and now I don't have to worry about that. The EBC Yellowstuff pads seemed surprisingly civilized so far, they feel more like typical street pads than the cheapo semi-metallics I've run before in fact.
When the autocross runs started, I went out there too aggressively at first, a combination of me trying to set a top time immediately and a car with decreased grip resulted in 2 trashed runs from spins and stalls. On run 3 I thought I was ready, I knew what to expect from the car, the tricks to getting around the course, and I'd scale back the speed to set a respectable time and work my way back up. Then this happened:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0ChBWDcRGy8
All four lugs sheared off at the rotor face, but I don't think they all went at the same time, one broken stud was found in the pit area and I'm pretty sure you can hear one breaking off and see it flying past at the 25sec mark. The inside of my rim is gashed and the steering's tweaked somehow, hopefully just a slipped lower camber adjuster because I have no clue what else it could be, the tie rod's still straight as an arrow and I can't find any other damage. It wasn't a very violent failure so I don't see where enough force to bend something could've been applied. Good thing I'm about to replace these brake discs anyway. And good thing this didn't happen on the highway the night before, or someone could've been killed.
More updates tomorrow on recent developments.
Don't give up!
You'll need to log in to post.
