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Post by SeanW on Aug 22, 2017 5:35:57 GMT
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Post by SeanW on Sept 6, 2017 21:43:21 GMT
It's been a little while since I've updated the progress of my build. Life and weather (too hot to work on the car and work eating my free time alive) have been blocking factors but over the long weekend I managed to get some decent progress in. Clocked the compressor housing (again)  Fabricated intercooler mounts and got the intercooler installed in it's new home.    Drilled and tapped the oil pan for the return line. (Heater hose for mockup, oil resistant hose ordered)    Made water feed and return lines.   Modified the lower radiator pipe to fit with the new pump inlet location.  Slight Dremmel adjustments to the turbine outlet casting so that bolts/washer will sit flush when it's time to torque everything down.   Next I'll need to plumb the oil feed. That should be pretty easy, tho. Getting close. So very close. |
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Post by SeanW on Sept 8, 2017 2:12:01 GMT
While working on the car last night, running the oil feed for the turbo, things did not go as smoothly as I'd have liked them to. The bare stainless braided -4AN hose arced against the positive terminal of the starter. No fire (and the line wasn't pressurized with oil!) but it scared the crap out of me and ruined the oil feed. I got lucky.  The reasons why are multiple but basically boil down to me being lazy about some decisions I've made at various points in my build. For example, buying a random oil line on eBay rather than making my own. I've made my own clutch, brake, and water lines so there's no real excuse for me to not have made my own oil line using good quality PVC jacketed -4AN line. I've learned from this is that I need to put another couple of fire extinguishers in my garage. I never want to be more than three steps from one when I'm working on my car again. Additionally, installing a battery cut-off switch in the car has now taken on a higher level of priority for me. I've been planning on doing it, now that has been bumped up in the priority stack. |
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Post by SeanW on Sept 8, 2017 2:16:59 GMT
While working on the car last night, running the oil feed for the turbo, things did not go as smoothly as I'd have liked them to. The bare stainless braided -4AN hose arced against the positive terminal of the starter. No fire (and the line wasn't pressurized with oil!) but it scared the crap out of me and ruined the oil feed. I got lucky. The reasons why are multiple but basically boil down to me being lazy about some decisions I've made at various points in my build. For example, buying a random oil line on eBay rather than making my own. I've made my own clutch, brake, and water lines so there's no real excuse for me to not have made my own oil line using good quality PVC jacketed -4AN line. I've learned from this is that I need to put another couple of fire extinguishers in my garage. I never want to be more than three steps from one when I'm working on my car again. Additionally, installing a battery cut-off switch in the car has now taken on a higher level of priority for me. I've been planning on doing it, now that has been bumped up in the priority stack. |
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Post by SeanW on Sept 18, 2017 15:42:02 GMT
Still waiting a new turbo manifold and waste gate adapter bracket to be shipped to me so the car is still down. However that doesn't mean there's nothing to do. There's tons of stuff to do, like fixing some of my build crimes. (Or Sins of Expediency, if you prefer.) Yesterday I sat down to hash out the hellish mess my rear brake/turn/tail/license plate wiring was. I kinda just crammed everything together to make it through the required brake and light inspection. Honestly, at the time, I had no idea what I was doing or what I wanted to do to clean that up. A year on, with the car down and the tank cover off, seemed to be a perfect time to address that. I'm currently running combined brake/tail/turn/reverse lights and driving them with a trailer light converter. Not exactly ideal but it worked at the time. Also at the time I realized that I could just plug everything into the stock harness using spade terminals so that's what I did. You know, to get it done quickly so I could get the car registered and on the road faster.  With a little bit of work I've gone from that mess to a nice, neat three plug harness on the cassis side. The 5-pin holds brake, tail, turn, left and right sources, and a ground. The two pin holds source and ground for the license plate light. The one pin holds source for the reverse lights which ground through combined tail lamps on the 5-pin connector.   To compliment the chassis side work I also worked up three harnesses for the tank cover. Wiping down the inside of the cover with some acetone to clean up any residues and ensure excellent adhesion I stuck on a bunch of zip-tie stays, then zip-tied the cover-side harnesses into place. This vastly simplified the wiring which, previously, had a lot of extra pin connected that simply didn't need to be there. (Did I mention I really didn't know what I was doing or wanted to do the first time I set up my tail lights?)  When I say cleaned up the wiring, this is just a small sample of the crap I cut out in the process. There was a whole lot more.  I'm very happy with the results. Everything is nice tucked and routed, I'm no longer worried about any of the connections coming lose. I no longer have wire dipping down just below the body line. It's relatively easy to connect/disconnect the weather proof connectors. Any changes that I make the to the rear lighting of the car shouldn't required me to touch the chassis side of the harness at all. In the process I revamped, simplified, and improved the rear grounds for the rear of the car. All in all, it just feels 200% less janky than it did before. |
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Post by SeanW on Sept 18, 2017 15:48:40 GMT
Another thing that I did, since I had the tank cover off, was to fix another build crime I'd induced just to get the car on the road. My fuel filler vent, which I'd simply plugged. I got super tired of having to be very careful while filling the car an never being able to get more than six gallons into the tank. Because of where I decided to locate my fuel filler routing the tank vent was a major pain in the ass that I punted on while I was in the process of getting the car registered. (Not required, kicked that can down the road.) So, this is it in all of it's ugly, janky glory. But it works so I'm not going to complain too much.  I regret that I put the filler on the same side as tank ports, that's made routing for the both the filler and the filler vent a nightmare. I'm seriously considering moving them to the other side of the tank cover in a future update. |
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Post by buildercg on Sept 19, 2017 12:24:11 GMT
With a little bit of work I've gone from that mess to a nice, neat three plug harness on the cassis side. The 5-pin holds brake, tail, turn, left and right sources, and a ground. The two pin holds source and ground for the license plate light. The one pin holds source for the reverse lights which ground through combined tail lamps on the 5-pin connector. To compliment the chassis side work I also worked up three harnesses for the tank cover. Wiping down the inside of the cover with some acetone to clean up any residues and ensure excellent adhesion I stuck on a bunch of zip-tie stays, then zip-tied the cover-side harnesses into place. This vastly simplified the wiring which, previously, had a lot of extra pin connected that simply didn't need to be there. (Did I mention I really didn't know what I was doing or wanted to do the first time I set up my tail lights?) I'm very happy with the results. Everything is nice tucked and routed, I'm no longer worried about any of the connections coming lose. I no longer have wire dipping down just below the body line. It's relatively easy to connect/disconnect the weather proof connectors. Any changes that I make the to the rear lighting of the car shouldn't required me to touch the chassis side of the harness at all. In the process I revamped, simplified, and improved the rear grounds for the rear of the car. All in all, it just feels 200% less janky than it did before. Love what you did with the rear wiring. I hate mine...I have about 20 spade connectors and they are a pain to deal with every time I take the rear end off. Can I ask where did you get the new connectors and does it require an special tools? |
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Post by SeanW on Sept 19, 2017 14:39:48 GMT
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Post by buildercg on Sept 19, 2017 15:23:36 GMT
Thanks! Now I have another mini project which will really make my electrical connections much better.
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Post by SeanW on Sept 19, 2017 18:26:19 GMT
Thanks! Now I have another mini project which will really make my electrical connections much better. That's basically my life, now. Lots of small projects to improve things around the car in ones and twos. |
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Post by SeanW on Oct 12, 2017 3:56:24 GMT
Been a little while since I’ve updated here. Things have not gone well. Long story made short, the cylinder head casting broke when I went to remove the turbo manifold before final fitment. Exhaust stud broke out, basically. Decided that since I was planning on having the head rebuilt sometime anyway, now is the best time to do it. I’d probably have to pull the head anyway to get the stud hole filled, drilled, and tapped. Sourced a rebuilt head from Treasure Coast Miata, then began the tear down of my car to get ready for that. (I’m still waiting for the head to arrive, should be tomorrow actually!)   A bit of oil in cylinders 2 and 3, which knew was going to be a problem. No coolant, though, so it was almost certainly leaking valve. Cylinder walls looked pretty good, no scoring at all. After cleaning it up, I have to admit that I was pretty happy with it’s condition for having 200,000 miles on it.  Since I was this far into the engine I figured it’d be pretty criminal not to swap the timing belt, front crank seal, and water pump. Fortunately I had all of those parts on hand. Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare timing gear, woodruff key, or crank bolt handy because those have become super necessary. During the last water pump/timing belt change the mechanic used red loctite on the bolt and the crank gear. Eventually I was able to get the bold free but the crank gear just wasn’t coming off with hand tools no matter what I did. (Included heating it with a torch.) My end solution was to carefully cut a slot on the gear and split it.   Pretty ugly scene once the cam gear came off. Clearly the crank seal was leaking, looked like the water pump might have been weeping as well. (It was, the bottom two bolts on the water pump were only hand tight, not torqued to spec.) I cleaned up the crank nose, removed as much of the red loctite as I could, then swapped out the crank seal. After that I pulled the water pump, cleaned up the mating surface, and installed the new water pump, this time properly torqued down. I also threw the new timing belt idler and tensions on even though I’m not going to get to install the timing belt until the new timing gear, woodruff key, and bolt arrive.   And, of course, I have my oil cube installed but now in addition to the high pressure oil line for the turbo it also has oil temperature and pressure sensor installed. For now I’m just using the old oil pressure switch as an 1/8th bspt plug. (I’ve ordered an actual 1/8th bspt plug from Amazon.)   Since the head is off the car, I also realized that it will never be easier than right now to swap out the motor mounts, so I did. I have no idea when the mounts were last changed. Threw in a set of AWR 70 durometer motor mounts that I ordered from Fab9 Tuning. They went in pretty easily but I did have to do some slight grinding on one of the bolt holes in each flange to get everything to fit perfectly.    This has been a very long and frustrating setback on the build up of the car but, ultimately, necessary and good. The car will be better for the work I’m doing on it now. |
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Post by snowbird1 on Oct 12, 2017 14:48:48 GMT
It is worth noting that the drive for the timing gear and front damper is via the contact faces of the crank and components, the key is just for location. Make sure all contacts are clean and dry on assembly, it is worthwhile lapping the contact areas with fine valve lapping compound.
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Post by SeanW on Oct 20, 2017 16:40:55 GMT
More work in prepping the new head to go onto the car. I’ll try to keep the post concise and picture guided.  Old head on the left, new head on the right. Some parts needed to get swapped over and the new cam caps all needed to be cracked and re-torqued to factory spec. Some of them were too lose, some were too tight, now they’re all just right.  One of the cam gears on the rebuilt head was broken so I swapped the gears from the old head since i know that those are good. In doing so, I found that the rebuild shop didn’t install cam seals. Going back in my documents, it’s true. They didn’t. I didn’t specify for cam seals to be installed nor was I charged for cam seals. Fortunately I had a spare set of new cam seals sitting on a shelf in the garage. Used the old cam-seals from the old head and a piece of copper pipe to gently nudge the new cam seals into the new head.  Transferred over the water re-route block and installed a new water temp probe into the 3/8ths heater porter using a 3/8ths to 1/8th NPT adapter. When installing the front water neck I accidentally snapped mounting flange. Rather then replace it, I just cut down, shaped, and tapped the old thermostat block-off plate to be a water neck block off plate with a 5/16th’s nipple. Made a template of the new block-off plate’s shape and cut a custom gasket from a sheet of FelPro rubberized fiber gasket material, then mounted it into place with a touch of black RTV sealant. Cleans up the front of the engine a lot and will still let me run the turbo water feed and throttle body return lines using a 5/16ths tee-fitting while also cleaning up the look of the front of the engine. So that’s an all around win.      The last part of the puzzle lands today, the Cometic head gasket. I should be able to begin putting this beast back together starting this weekend! |
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Post by SeanW on Oct 23, 2017 3:12:27 GMT
Another weekend, more progress in getting back to where I was before everything went bad. Over the week some additional parts came in, all in the “nice to have” category if not expressly required. ARP head studs Cometic Gasket 1.8L BP .040 83mm head gasket 1.8L BP dowel pin 323GTX PCV valve (boost friendly valve) Spent Saturday working on the tail lights again. Ditched the trailer adapter and went to individual tail/brake, turn, and reverse lights that look much better integrated into the car. Reworked the rear lighting sub harness. Cleans things up even more and ditches the wonky trailer adapter that had been causing some very minor but annoying blinking habits in the car.    Sunday was spent putting the head back on the car. First time I’ve ever done anything this in depth on a car, went pretty well.     Tomorrow night I’ll start putting the timing equipment back onto the car, time the cams and get it buttoned back up. |
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Post by SeanW on Oct 27, 2017 16:44:36 GMT
More update - Head is bolted down. Rubber fuel lines replaced and FPR o-ring replaced. Intake manifold re-installed. Turbo manifold mating surfaces smoothed out with 60, 120, and 220 grit paper. Turbo manifold installed with Stage 8 locking fasteners. Fuel injectors installed. Fuel system pressure checked for leaks. Getting close to being able to fire it up.     |
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