Tales from the Batcave (RX-7, rallycross, misc. stuff content)

I decided to get several Bauer tools. The flashlight is a lot more useful than you think and lasts forever on a full charge. The grinder is weird and can't fully replace a corded one but is still very useful. On the whole I like them too.

Found a set of phone dials on Craigslist for so cheap I'd be dumb to not buy them.  Then proceeded to miss his text reply.  Haven't heard back yet.  Oh well.

Late entry to the Batcave as a result.  Went to go tuning some more and found a dead battery instead.  Threw the charger on it, got my laptop situated on the roof, berked around looking at my last datalog and said, well hell, I'll just mutiply the entire map by 1.03, get us good enough for now.  Rallycross is happening soonish and good enough will have to do.  Also added a bunch of cold start enrichment, probably too much but might also be not enough.  After a half hour or so of this, I opened up TunerStudio and saw that system voltage was 9.8v, after charging for a while.

Ugh.  Batteries are frickin' expensive nowadays, too.  Is why the battery in the car is a salvaged core from a customer's car from about three or five years ago.  Frankly, I'm shocked it lasted this long.  Off to find the cheapest Group 24 that I can, all store-boughten and everything.

While the battery was charging, I got out the angle grinder and proceeded to void some warranties.

Enter one (1) KYB AGX strut.

There's some excess metal on this that serves no purpose but to get in my way.  The strut says "Do not cut or heat".  They aren't the boss of me!

Enter one angle grinder with a cutoff disk, one broken hammer from the hammer store, and some careful cutting around the edges of the weld. Not all the way through!  Just enough that it can be broken the rest of the way off with the hammer.

Now for the brake line tab.  It looked like it had two swedge things holding it on, so I tried grinding the tab flush with the tops of the swedge looking things.  Nope.  Then cut the extended part of the tab off and went to town against the middle part, trying to chisel it off every so often.  Cutting into the tube itself is at the top of my avoid list, so this took a lot of time to get to this point:

Eventually I got it so thin that I could just break the ends off.  Not the most efficient way of dealing with it, but it worked.

Dressed all the welds down to where I'm pretty sure that the threaded collar will slip over them, and it's done!

Not pictured: Doing all this to the other strut. Mostly because the battery in my phone was dying, so I had to use my tablet to throw music at my headphones instead, and taking pictures makes VLC stop playing music.

Went back to the laptop.  Turned the ignition on and the MTX-L said "Htr" instead of "E9".  Good, good.  TunerStudio said the battery was at 11.9v.  Cranked the engine and it cranked slooooowly.  TS said the battery was at 9.8 again.  Crud.

I had a long post and ht some key combination that somehow translated to 'back' and the whole post was lost.

The post involved the tach driver circuit.  I'm not going to write all that up again.  I'm too pissed off about Failfox.  Instead, I am going to invite you to get down with the slavness.

(The fun begins at 2:00 ish, but for proper experience, like sitting through three hours of driving to get to the rallycross, one must sit though the beginning)

Trivia:  Cheeki Breeki Hardbass is on regular rotation in teh S60R.  It may have come on this morning just as I happened to pass a Golf R on the way to work, and driver of said "SLOW R" opted to re-pass me, and I may have followed the hole in traffic that he made for a while.  But it was totally not street racing.

I have some good news and some other news.

Evan texted me asking me if I go through Wadsworth anytime soon.  Seems he found some RX-7 phone dials on Facebook and he wanted me to pick them up.

Motherf....

After some textage, I got hold of the dude with the wheels and I bought them.  That's the good news.

The other news is that there is absolutely no way they will clear my rear brakes without cutting half the caliper away.  Oh well, they will look very nice on a 323GTX.

Also in the "other news" category is that I discovered that my trailer lights did not work in part due to some corroded splices, which I fixed.  The "other news" is that the tongue is no longer grounded to the rest of the trailer.  Not sure how that works.  I'll add a ground strap for now, but the fix is going to be a complete disassembly, derusting, and repainting.

Car is ready to go to the rallycross on Saturday.  Fairly sure the tach will be functional, but if it isn't, oh well.  It's not like I actually look at it, I mainly use it for in car camera action.  Tires need air, and I found out my air pump is now dead, and I didn't want to break out the air compressor while the neighbors had family from out of town in their side of the garage.

FYI rural king isn’t all that far from the batcave via 10, and they have the cheapest batteries by like 50%.  

there are 3 or 4 phone dials in the junkyard by me if you are interested. I'd have to see if they were still there. 

In reply to fidelity101 :

Appreciated, but I know now that they will not fit my brakes.

Required listening:  ICP

[it was going to be some Kleptones something or other,  but Jake got back from the junkyard and ended a sentence with "looks kinda nasty", to which I had to continue "...but chicks dig it". So ICP is all Jake's fault)

Today's Batcave saga starts with me getting those phone dial wheels, finding out they don't clear VW calipers on my S40 rear disks (which are on the Ford rearend in my Mazda, if you didn't read the last 43 pages - if you are new here, this sort of thing is normal).  So it was a quik jaunt to drop them off to EvanB who has a much better use for them than I ever could have.  Also, I got a set of 8/32 tread chunky-mofo snow tires that would be awesome on his blue pickup (not the LS powered one, the B23 powered one, although THAT MAY CHANGE) and a pair of Sparco seats that created an actually kind of heartwarming thread here on the GRM Forums that are slated for teh RX-3.

Then I had to drive teh RX-7 down to Columbus with all this E36 M3 loaded up on the trailer.  And it's 44 degrees, Fahrenheit.  "Fahren" means "driving" and "heit" means "heat" (I think) but when you have the heater core blocked, gaping holes in the firewall and floor, and no weatherstripping, "driving heat" is very much an oxymoron.  It was literally 120 miles before I could start to feel the fingers in my left hand again.  Also it was really, really loud in the car. The rearend is extremely noisy, and I don't know if the bearings are shot (they might be) or if it's because I couldn't get a good coast-side pattern (I damn well didn't) and I had fantasies of lapping the gears in with valve grinding compound so maybe they'd shut up since the differential is 2' directly under my head and connected to the tub with metal on metal, no bushes to dull the pain.  I mean noise.

So, fast forwarding a bunch, I am in Columbus, and everything is unloaded.  This is where things get fuzzy:  Evan offers me money for the FC wheels, I say nah, happy birthday (or something:  his birthday is like half a year ago, but you get the idea), and he mentions that he practically forgot that he still had Oktavia's old tires/wheels, and we worked out a deal where he gave me those S40 wheels and now bald-ass BFG Sport Comp 2s (195/55-15) and the trade is done.  I think.  It's fuzzy, did I mention it's LOUD and COLD in the car?  And my wireless bluetooth earmuffs/headphones died before I was even inside 270?  TEH HORROR.

And so, did I end up coming back home with NO MUSIC and also having to listen to the rearend scream, although it got better the more I drove it.  Oh and I came home with more wheels and tires than I expected to bring, that number being "zero".  Also, 100% less bungee cord holding the left Perfect Trailer taillight on.

Pizdec.

Moving right along...

Most, but not all, of Ford WC T5 internals (3.15 gearset).  Some of the important bits are missing and some are worn out.  Going to try to contact Liberty again to see what they want for face plating 1st through 4th.  The input shaft has been turned down to Mazda pilot size and rehardened.  Back in a box this goes for now.

One more pic of how tight fitting this mess is.  All going byebye.

Image set of the strut tops I made.  They started life as '98-up Escort top mounts, because they were the cheapest of the BG chassis spectrum for new mounts.  The black thing is a plastic encapsulated Torrington bearing, which the spring rides on.  The strut shaft is fixed and keys to the upper mount with a D hole.

Bearing spigots into a pair of washers welded to the top of the 3/16 plate.

Spring is located on the underside by another washer.

That's it.  The main thing that centers the spring seat, besides the plastic bearing's fit in the upper mount, is a clearance fit to the strut shaft.  This works just fine because there is only ever relative motion when turning, so if contact is made, friction is low.

And then this happened.

I want to do some redrilling of the control arm pickup points, so everything came out.

The threaded sleeves I bought do not fit over AGX struts without some work.

I wondr what sleeves I bought last time.

I only bought new ones because it didn't look like it was going to be fun to try to press those Koni Yellows out of the strut housings.  They're really meant to be pressed in once and never come back out, and the sleeves won't clear the threaded collar on top.

Today's listening pleasure:  siromaru - Booster of Life (Came up in rotation today. Haven't heard this one since I had the S40.  Reminds me of driving at high speed through Kentucky in the middle of the night, no traffic but me)

Last time, we discovered that this part number Allstar threaded sleeve does not fit over a KYB strut.

There are lands on the inside that are supposed to interface with a circlip on Bilstein shocks or something.  They needed to be removed.  I did this at work on my lunch break and after hours.  Fortunately, there's a deli up the street that had fresh sauerkraut (kind of an oxymoron) and other goodies, and I'd stocked the fridge.

Much cutting...

Back at the Batcave...  I had downloaded some bumpsteer software and plugged in some suspension numbers and the bump steer curve kinda looked right from memory of playing with ride height and subsequent realignments....

If this sounds like I am SWAGing a lot, you are not wrong.

Anyway, I played with moving the control arm's pivot around to see what it did to bumpsteer and, to my surprise, it made things better instead of worse.  The FC front has a lot of roll understeer built in.  That is, the wheels toe in on droop and toe out on compression.  This has a nice negative feedback loop effect with body roll but it also gives a lazy, sloppy feel that I never liked.  Moving the control arm forward pivot 20mm up and 6mm out turns the curve into more of a gentle parabola, with less of an extreme in droop.  Anyway, it (probably) won't make things so much worse that I need a $160 bumpsteer kit, so let's try.

(part 3 of today's epidose.  New listening: Ryuwave - Till I Defeat You Lots of gabber/hardcore remixes of video game music popping up on the playlist today)

First, the area we are interested in.  Steering is all the way to the right and the tie rod bungeed up.  (Chassis rail smashing was done in 2010 when I did the swap, and ran the steering back and forth at full compression to check for interference)

Incidentally, looking up into the fender with no suspension is kinda freaky.

I marked the subframe with a white paint pen so I could see what I was scribing, then noticed the bushing's witness mark inside the mount area and thought to measure the distance from it to the top.

New problem.  I can't move the pivot 20mm up without putting the arm into the crossmember.  The witness mark is almost exactly 20mm from the top of the pocket, and the arm sticks up a bit higher than that.  Much less than 20mm is suboptimal for reasons of strength, which will make sense in a bit.

I did a bunch of eyeballing, figuring, and more eyeballing.  Decided 18mm was probably good.  Also decided on 6mm further outboard.  The hole measured 12.06mm, so I got out a scribe and a level and scribed a vertical line even with the outer edge.  Then set my calipers to 12mm (18-6) and scribed a mark above the hole, then got the level and scribed a horizontal line.

Then, since I left my centerpunch at work, wobbily drilled a pilot hole and then a 15/32 finish hole.

Now we stick the control arm in there, bolt in the rear bushing, and play Mr. Drill Press drilling a 15/32 hole through high strength steel with no pilot hole.  Lots of force required if dulling bits is not on the day's agenda.

Notice the angle?  This is why I wanted it as high as possible.  With the control arm removed you can see how thin the metal gets.

And then repeat for the other side.

Today's foray into the Batcave is sponsored by Sabaton - Counterstrike.

Not pictured: Grinding away a little weldage on the crossmember so the control arm bolts would tighten down. Then painting the bared metal with white Dual.  Then hitting other bits because why not.  Then grinding down the welds on the struts, painting the bare metal with some remarkably-close red that I got while searching for a color match for the '81, and grabbing a strut by the wet paint so I could hang it in the chassis so I could check control arm to crossmember interference.

Which brings us to this picture:

Technically the control arm hits a tiny bit before the strut bottoms out, without a bumpstop or a spring seat.  But then I looked and realized that the hub to inner fender distance was a lot shorter than 31cm, the radius of my rally tires.  Backed off to 31cm, I see this up top.

And this is that height:

With bumpstops, and 225lb-in AFCO springs, not only do I have a total Win3.1 Hot Dog Stand color scheme happening, but I also doubt that the suspension will compress this much.  Didn't get pictures of the springs or the sleeves.

May 16 edit:  Okay so I got to it "eventually"...

Ride height with old suspension, which involved 175lb springs with about an inch of slack at full droop:

New suspension, which has 225lb springs with a touch of preload:

So we're 30mm lower chassis-wise. Plus I took off those 185/65-15s in favor 195/55-15s.

Pulled it onto the aligmment rack at work... and I don't recall having any cross camber before.  Uh oh.  Yes toe is affecting camber but not THAT much.

Here's where the right side control arm is sitting now...

...and the driver's side.  Berrrrk.  I used a level and stuff to measure 6mm over and 18mm up, and gave a solid centerpunching before drilling.  I can fix this, but it isn't super critical right now.  And what is up with the mark on the tire?

It appears I do have a rubbing issue with the fat rubber on Volvo 15x6 wheels. (Yes, teh RX-7 is wearing Oktavia's old shoes)  I checked the right side but not the left.

Left side looks like this for clearance:

Right side looks like this. 

The wheel weight probably had a mutual destruction event with the lockscrew for the spring seat, which will suck for the poor bastard who has to work on this.

Tried shifting the subframe, which got me nowhere because Past Me made the subframe a close tolerance fit.  And so, this is the final result.

While I had my impact gun and 17mm socket available, I tried attacking the tension rod mounts (which are now skidplate mounts) to see if they'd come loose, like they didn't six years ago when I last tried.  They zipped right out.  Well, at least something went right.  I hit the threads with Fluid Film and zipped it back together.

Then, I got a bumper shot to crowdsource an opinion:

Wednesday pictures. Much less picture intensive.

In an attempt to get the idle speed below 1500rpm, and also maybe make it catch after starting more easily, I put the advance weights back in the distributor, so it isn't idling at 22 degrees.

All this junk has to come out for access.  I only dropped three of the tiny little screws.

While putting it back together, I swapped out the ignitor that operates the tach for another one.  It should be under basically no load, but hey, let's try it.

Today.  No pics, because most of what I did was trailer loading in preparation for this weekend's festivities.

To further try to combat the tach bouncing issue, I rerouted my tach feed wire since it ran right behind the MSD coils.  I also spliced in a 4.7k ohm resistor, because Autometer said to try a 10k and I had this sitting there already made.  (It's actually an RPM pill with wires soldered to it, but don't tell anyone)

Also spent $42 at Advance for five quarts of store brand 20W50, and one gallon on Pennzoil 2-stroke oil.  The engine oil is the same oil I started the engine with 600mi ago and it smelled heavily of fuel.  After the bearing almost-carnage I witnessed during my winter 2018 refresh, I am not taking chances with competing on diluted oil: Fresh oil before every event, period.

While that was draining, I also added a jumper wire from the main Megasquirt ground location to the ground location for the MTX-L.  Maybe a slight difference in ground potential was why I was seeing different readings from the MS versus the gauge.  Will see on Saturday when I drive it around some.

Well, the suspension works really good.

What broke?

In reply to cghstang_chris :

Leaving the Volvo Farm shortly.  Managed to weld the tissue paper back together.

It was 2014 Nebraska all over again...

Stitching together tissue paper:

This used to be .125 wall pipe.

The trick to tacking it together is to weld ACROSS, starting from each side, and then meeting in the middle.  Trying to butt weld an overthin section is a recipe for blowthrough, there is nowhere for the heat to go.

In progress.  I'll weld a quick, thin line 1/8" or so along next to the crack, then start bridging the gap.  When the puddle gets hot, STOP and let it cool.  When it's yellow, let it mellow. 

Repair complete.  No it is not pretty.  It is thr opposite.  But what it is, is sealed up.

Also, berk the dingbat commentors on Jalopnik.

So, due to tech inspector duties I had no time to walk the course.  Due to certain biological imperatives and a lack of a near-site porta-potty, I had no time for a parade lap.  This is my first time seeing the course.

I was faster than many of the people who did actually get to see the course beforehand...

This is my second afternoon run.  The first one, I gave Orion a ride so had to take the camera out.  He'd never got to ride in it before.  He laughed the whole time.