I know I had issues with a new timken bearing replacement on my RX8 earlier this year, Was odd being as I've never had any issues with them before.
Good luck!
I know I had issues with a new timken bearing replacement on my RX8 earlier this year, Was odd being as I've never had any issues with them before.
Good luck!
JtspellS wrote: I know I had issues with a new timken bearing replacement on my RX8 earlier this year, Was odd being as I've never had any issues with them before. Good luck!
Switched to national which is federal mogul which is a rebranded NTN which is OEM. however when leaving today my cheap main circuit breaker took a dump on me today, I don't think it likes being in the sun all day when its 90 degrees outside with no shade...
popped it after a few cranks of the starter and now it mechanically re-sets but doesn't electrically give my continuity... FML
Why do you have a circuit breaker between the battery and the starter. Nobody does this, and for good reason.
Knurled wrote: Why do you have a circuit breaker between the battery and the starter. Nobody does this, and for good reason.
safety? But now in hindsight it seems with the master cut off switch its like belts and suspenders...
Damn, no idea how I have not been following this thread, having actually raced against this car when we were both rallycrossers....Hope to see you out there sometime soon on the stages - you should come to Black River...me and Nonack and some other GRM'ers will be running there :)
irish44j wrote: Damn, no idea how I have not been following this thread, having actually raced against this car when we were both rallycrossers....Hope to see you out there sometime soon on the stages - you should come to Black River...me and Nonack and some other GRM'ers will be running there :)
its for sure on the list! However this September is a bit busy for non car events and summer sno*drift is this weekend and if all goes well I will be at LPSR. Still need to fix the tow vehicle too which is another project now... until then I am mooching my co-driver's new f150
lol nice. well, look at the BRS entry list right now and you may change your mind. OVer half the field is RWD (including two RX7s) 
two e30s, an M3, two RX7s, an XR4Ti (Nonack), a Mighty Max, a Ford Ranger, a Mk1 Escort, a Starion, two Porsche 944s, a Volvo 240, and a Lexus IS350......
trust me I wish... GF's birthday event among other things and we decided to visit NYC. Personally my first visit to NY would be upstate but pick your battles, am I right? haha
real wheel drive! We have good turnout this event for RWD too: Datsun, 1st gen rx7 (G5), my rx7, old school celica, mike hurt's cosworth powered capri, E36 3 series and I think an E30 as well
In reply to fidelity101:
Is that the RA64 Celica with the Marlboro colors on it? If they so much as hint that they might sell that thing you have to let me know 
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: In reply to fidelity101: Is that the RA64 Celica with the Marlboro colors on it? If they so much as hint that they might sell that thing you have to let me know
Yeah that's the one that's the Andersons', they're good friends of mine. I'll be sure to drop the hint but I don't think they are selling it any time soon.
In reply to fidelity101:
No, you don't need to harass them about it- but do tell me if they say they're thinking of trading it for, say, a turbo Ford product...
You can tell them I said thanks for helping us get our RX7 out of the stage at Magnum Opus, though!
JtspellS wrote: Good luck!
Summer sno*drift is over and it was a complete & utter failure. Some minor tweaks to get through tech (no big deal) and then we were ready but the 1st stage was boulder city - just stones and loose sand everywhere the car shut down about 5 corners in, something with the fuel pump relay - jumped it and kept on going.
about a mile later the exhaust fell off at the v-band due to rocks or something, the car is too low when a full tank of gas and added spare + tools etc with too low of a vehicle to begin with. I will have to upload some video of it - if it was recording... because an open header rotary is loudest thing on the planet, it physical hurt it was so loud but POR! I literally could not hear the co-driver over the volume of it.
Shortly after that the engine died again and sweep had passed us so we we handed in our time card and we were done for the today. Verified spark/air/fuel and determined it must have been an ECU issue. Luckily the exhaust was dragging behind us hanging on 1 rear hanger. Tossed the exhaust section in the back of heavy sweep and the towed us about a mile to a recoverable area as the the stage was about to be re run shortly.
Found the issue by wiggling the connector and the car fired right up, better than push it up the trailer:
so we bust ass in service and get a new v-band on the exhaust, weld the 3 pieces together so they don't pop off and help seal some of the exhaust leak as well and fix the connector so that its properly installed. good to go after service and get to start last but we get to start. 1st stage out we get held up by an accident (spun blocking the road) then we basically transited behind 3 other cars to the end.
After that head to stage 6 and it was a blast! saw coolant temps as high as 220F but I didn't care it was running great and we were having fun. Tulips were virtually useless I don't think my co-driver said anything productive on stage all day. Then we got lost heading to stage 7 because we turned on hardwood hills not hardwood road and then got stuck in the sand, giving us a DNF for the day.
We had issued with tulips on prior transits and caused me to doubt my co-driver. I thought this was the wrong road and we saw some familiar tracks so others made the same mistake but didn't go as far as us, so I went in reverse and kept going the whole way back (1/4 mile or less) then decided to listen to my co-driver once more and went to turn around at a spot but when I lost momentum we were done and just sank.
We missed stage 7 & 8 and didn't even go to parc ferme and did not participate in awards, beaten and ashamed we headed back to camp
but well that's racing... next steps for LSPR? probably not competing - I need to raise this car in the air to gain ground clearance and the proper tow truck needs the engine replaced/rebuilt. it was awful being crammed into an extended cab f150. Probably just going to spectate this year.
Here is the video of stage 1 after I got the car running again, the exhaust falls off - it gets SUPER loud and then the car dies down the road later for unrelated exhaust reasons.
Enjoy!
Sorry to hear about your challenges.
Re: LSPR - don't spectate - volunteer. Rallies always need more workers and its a way to give back to the sport.
NGTD wrote: Sorry to hear about your challenges. Re: LSPR - don't spectate - volunteer. Rallies always need more workers and its a way to give back to the sport.
If I get the truck ready in time I would love to be apart of heavy sweep. I haven't spectated a rally in years either so it would be nice to do that again.
APB to the MS guru's out here, I am having trouble re-producing this but I have logged the issue. Its like it fuel starves kind of misfire. It ran fine when parked but then after sitting for a few months this issue started to occur. Any help would be appreciated. The last 2 rallycrosses (most recently this past weekend) have been interesting with an intermittent miss...
Here is some background:
here is the link to the datalog:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ih4iCD-S628djNrFDBKqrAU43PVpCFiw
I wish I could help, but I have no idea. Is the tps going crazy because of your foot? Or is it or it's wiring at fault?
No thats my foot... when it misfires I go zero to wot and everywhere in between just to try to get it to unhiccup.
I gotta try to re create the miss then log just that because right now that s a lot of data from 1 rallycross run lol
looks like I found some poor connections near my fuel pump relay and a relay not consistently switching so it should be all better now! really on the fence about sno*drift
Well it’s time to get back to working on the primary project need to correct the issues from the prior failures, the December rallyX went okay even though I was having the misfire but when I added the GIANT mudflaps on for the event it and I wasn’t gunning for championship points since I was in no position to podium for the season so I went hog wild and slide it any chance I could so this photo pretty much sums up the event.
Couple big issues,
So I have been experimenting with the rear suspension a bit the springs at sno*drift were too soft but decent ride height, the springs at summer sno*drift were good rate but far too low and every other spring out there lowers the car which is bad for rally (obviously) so I have been the goldilocks of springs: This ones too low, this ones not stiff enough, this one is juuuuuuust right.
The RS*R is on the left which is 225lb and ~13” spring, the middle is the stock vert which is ~90lb and 15” spring and the one on the right is a 16” spring with 225lb rate…. Juuuust right! Fun fact the 2.5” coilover springs is a direct bolt on to a rear rx7 shock UNLESS you have a bilstein and in that case the spring perch needs a few minutes on a lathe to go from a 2.8” OD to a 2.5” OD to accommodate, any regular Monroe or KYB/tokicko style will work.
So while I wait for this to get completed I move onto the next open item.
I chased a few things down and realized that I should get new plugs and replace the exhaust gasket at the header as this was leaking among fixing the exhaust in general since the SSD incident so that helped but it would still misfire which I found to be bad contacts near the fuel pump relay causing an intermittent connection. With this mended I moved on upgrading the rear skid plate structure it took such a beating that all of it was virtually trash and we started over.
Due to some work/life events and poor planning I did not have the material to make the structure I wanted with the time we had available so after making a few base plates we decided to move onto what else we could do. The car was starting to look like dog poo or like a bad novel with 50 shades of white. So I wanted this to look somewhat presentable so it was time to clean up the body work because everything else was a hurry up and wait kind of thing.
Started out by removing all the stickers and making everything the same white then mark up what it should looks like, unfortunately I will be doing spray paint and this car does deserve better but oh well, it used to be a real nice car
However when I got this car 10 years agoit looked like this:
But even if you’re not clever you should be able to spot the intent J
Hopefully some better updates soon, holiday shutdown is upon us which means decent garage time ahead of us.
slow day at work today so I did the throwback thursday better justice just to remind me how much this car has changed and keeps changing, who knows in 10 years this may have 4wd and an extra rotor in it too!
Pretty rally cars crash faster
In reply to DaveEstey :
That is why I didn't opt for the $2,000 wrap job. After masking paper, rolls of tape and paint im under 120 bucks probably overall and I got a bunch of leftover paint too...
Almost done with the paint job, couple small touch ups and then I'll be sure to take good photos. Also still torn on what to do with the hood, may rotors stencil offset or just stick with the stripes and keep it simple.
To aid with the coil spring indecisiveness for various setups, I figured 1 trip to the hospital would be worth the investment on a proper spring compressor instead of those sketchy threaded clamps.
They also make swapping out WAY easier and faster which is incredibly useful so I picked this one up second hand for a good deal and quickly made good use out of it. It was minutes on a lathe to get it the right size and I did manage to compress a 16” long 2.5” dia coil spring on it with a stock upper perch. I ordered a new spring rubber top hat too as mine existing ones were rotted away to nothing. However, I decided to go for a proper upper spring perches too and by doing so I managed to get the last FC upper pillow ball shock top from AWR. They have been downsizing rx7 parts in favor for other Mazdas recently… The alternative option is buy a complete coilover version kit and only using 2 parts from it which was not appealing and Mazda sold their last one in August. They are NLA parts now from their competition catalog.
However to fit the 16” spring it was compressed 3” and had so much pre-load that it felt like 1000lb springs instead of 225. So I went with a 14” long spring and it seemed to be the sweet spot.
…with that being said the paintjob is done! I learned how to use pin striping vinyl tape to make lines and properly mask, it was pretty interesting and challenging experience ( but in a good way). I printed a bunch of photos to use for proportions and kind of eyeballed it. It was painting a color a day for about a week straight.
But it came out great! A solid 10’er just using rustoleum spray paint. I also used this as a time to increase the serviceability of my mudflaps (now that I have developed a good/proven attachment scheme) with rivet nuts and using oversized flange button cap hardware to keep these functional scrap pieces of mudflaps a functional template.
Not sure what color mudflap I will choose at the moment… but now with this setup it is more serviceable and really easy to install.
But it works for now so let’s see if it holds up through an ice racing season.
A few daylight shots too on a proper snow covered bitter day!
I used another big white vinyl sticker over all of the other stickers then painted that to get the roof to be the correct pattern.
The front is actually lowered still so it sits in a drag car mode right now but with the back higher it is much easier for me to get into now lol
Since I didn’t have the exact same front end style as the real car and it’s not 4wd it doesn’t have to be an exact copy of the Millen livery so I took to adjustment on the front end because of my fixed light situation, plus the bumper gets so beat up in the front the paint likes to flake off anyways. I figured a fun offset
All loaded up!
It did manage to start later that day after being dragged through the cold across the state with the help of some ether with coolant temp gauge reading 12F.
Ta da!
I took it to TRF to do the rear skidplate and structure to support it, I can’t weld aluminum and then we did chat about how to gain a few inches of ride height and travel for the front suspension. currently it has 5-5.5” of travel so that will be fun. No photos of that but I will be sure to show some when its complete. After that is done then it’s going straight to ice racing! As long as the Megasquirt ECU decides to not misfire or anything… So once that is ironed out I can continue putting the stickers on it.
You'll need to log in to post.
