Maybe I'm weird, but I like the car with the rear bar. On a turbo car with more power I can see where I might want to remove it.

 

Good work, I was looking at the solo rules for street stock a little while back and it looked to me like FC's should be great for it. (especially the "GTUs" and the earlier "sport") I plan on using my new sport for Solo as well but not street-stock. (My 7 isn't pristine enough to bother restoring lol.)

It's nice to see you are doing this with a GTUs its a shame to see them unrestored or highly modified. They are a great car the way Mazda built them and they are collectible besides. A friend of mine also has a black 89 GTUs and we agree on this. I'm sure he'll be just as impressed as I am once I have him look at what your doing.

 

Hey John,

How do you like that brake bleeding system? If I see one some day I was planning on picking it up.

Greg

 

Hey John, thought I'd poke my head in here and say hi. I'm Cory, the guy with the GTUs at the race last week. Good job in the Elise, BTW.

Re-reading this thread makes me really jealous of your build! I wish I had the means to perform the same. FWIW, I'm running Racing Beat (?, on car when I got it) front and rear sway-bars. I did autocross it before with just a rear RB sway-bar and stock front and preferred that.

Good luck when you get back to your car. Keep us all updated!

 

Hey Greg,

I love it, but I hate that they don't have a special cap for Mazdas. The cap I bought worked on my Porsche and my wife's VW, but the setup for the Corvette and the RX-7 is a universal cap. It works, it's just fiddly. But it is so easy to flush the brakes with the Motive.

Hey Cory! It was good to meet you and see my car's twin . I imagine the suspension tuning will take quite a while to figure out.

Autocrossing the Elise on street tires is fun, you can actually get a little wheelspin! I think we should have registered in the street tire class instead but I guess it doesn't matter now

 

Excellent thread, great info in here, thanks for documenting it so well

Dave

 

Thanks for the comments.

Big updates should be coming in about a week.

 

A week? Well, not quite. But the big update is that the car is completely back together. My modified ECU came in from digital tuning (RTek 2.0 upgrade). I opened it up to solder a wire for the wideband sensor to pin 3F and threw it in the car. After initializing the ECU with the Palm and playing around with the menus a bit, I cranked the car and it fired right up.

I still have a nagging no-idle situation. It revs to 3k and holds there smooth as silk as long as I can stand it (header only ... loud ... neighbors ... tools flying... ) but when I blip the throttle to lower the idle or put the car in gear it wants to stall out. Need to figure that out. No obvious disconnected hoses or anything so I'm not sure what's going on. Could be timing... but it's too loud to diagnose anything.

Speaking of the header, it's a g_d damned work of art. I can't say enough about the job the guy did building it.





It's a little close to the 6 port actuators which I'm worried about. I need to wrap the header in something and make a heat shield but it's going to be tricky.

With the header bolted up for a test fit, I finished putting the interior together (passenger's seat, taillights, new a-pillar trim since the car didn't have any, and a bunch of other little things). It looks ... well, it looks like a really low 1990 GTUs that's pretty much stock otherwise. These wheels won't be sticking around, except for using with rain tires, but I haven't gotten the tires on my new wheels yet so pics of that will have to wait.

I also mounted up the two-way adjustable ST front bar, the stock rear bar and a set of custom heim-jointed endlinks (I hate those things, but they do work). Still have no idea how the thing is going to handle, but there are lots of ***** to turn!







The car leaves for Piper motorsports on Friday and it should have the full exhaust completed in a couple days. The outlet of this header is a 3" megaphone, which will lead directly into a 3" spun-metallic Magnaflow pre-cat, to a 3" main cat, to 3" stainless pipe to a 3", 18" long magnaflow straight-through muffler. It'll probably be too loud, but I can always have a resonator welded in later. Figured I'd start loud and add stuff if needed rather than having to remove things to keep the weight down.

The first shakedown event is a practice event in two weeks. I don't know that I'll have gotten the motor broken in by then (new bearings, remember... need to put some significant miles on them). Then an autocross school that I'm teaching the week after that. So it's going to be a bit of a mad rush to get miles on it and get the idle issue sorted out.

I sure hope it's fast!

 

+1 Based on the amount of time, money & effort you've put into that car, I'd have to agree.

The WDCR battle in STS should be a blast this season.

 

The car looks great! Have you tried adjusting the idle using the ECU software?

 

I am guessing that the majority of this season is going to be throwaway trying to figure out how the car wants to be set up. But I could be wrong. I built it for Pros, so at this point my goal is just to qualify for the Pro finale.

I guess at this point my goal should be getting it to idle! It wouldn't idle with either the stock N350 ECU or the modified N351 ECU so I shouldn't have to fiddle with anything to get a nice idle. The way it's behaving, it seems like the timing is a little bit off and it has a vacuum leak.

John

 

The exhaust is done! Unfortunately I won't be able to go tow it home until Thursday, but I should be able to snap some pictures of the exhaust on Friday.

 

Did you ever get this resolved?

 

awesome

I'm getting my r-comps mounted today so I can test fit them and order spacers, hopefully my car will be in some sort of decent condition by the auto-x on the 28th.

I doubt your car will be broken in by then, hopefully I'll see you there though.

 

No... I haven't had the car in my posession for a week.

 

Idle is fixed.

Exhaust is done.

It's way too f*cking loud. Lovely. I'll have to get a different muffler to try.

 

Hm. Bad day. I've put about 35 miles on the car, about 20 start / stop cycles, no big revs. On the way home from the gym, a side seal let go. I don't know why yet, but I am getting two very strong pulses on the rear rotor followed by one very weak one. . I am guessing I was a little aggressive clearancing the seals to the corners and it caused a seal to stick.

I'm pulling the motor tomorrow and hopefully will tear it down in a couple days. Need to get my hands on another engine stand adaptor. Anyone got one I can borrow?

John

 

ah that sucks about the side seal

I had an s5 n/a car with some tuning it was fairly fast I could easily top out 4th gear if that means anything

i couldn't imagine how much quicker it would be with the 4.3 final drive and being abit lighter than a 91 coupe

 

Sorry to read this John... -Chike

 

Yep, cracked side seal on the rear face of the rear rotor. Could have been a couple things. Maybe the seal was a bit too long and it expanded and snapped. Maybe a piece of grit trapped it and it broke. I have no idea. I was very careful when clearancing the seals and am pretty confident none of them were tighter than .002" which is the min Mazda spec. If there was a bit of carbon in that groove, or some grit from the housing resurfacing... dunno.

Now I have to decide if I want to tear down the whole motor (I just have the rear iron off right now) and re-check everything, or if I just throw a new side seal and spring in there, new water o-rings and put it together.

Decisions, decisions...

 

Sorry to hear about the set back John.
If it is any constellation, I finally got your old car back on the road today. Took it for a quick jog around the Lake Country area, so far so good. It won't be boosting for a while, but I was just happy to get it back on the road again.
Good luck with the rebuild.

 

John,

I feel your pain. My first rebuild suffered the exact same fate. (Rear face side seal failure) I never could figure out why one side seal snapped. My clearances were all perfect during assembly. Was the rotor side seal groove damaged?

The good news is that all the soft seals in your motor should still be good to go with only a few cycles on them. I'd pull the rear rotor and inspect it, then just seal up the engine again. No need to go any deeper. This is what I did and I had no issues.

 

Whew! At least that's the only damage.That's an odd failure. Any marks on the corner seals where they meet the sideseals? Is the sideseal to sideseal groove clearance within specs?

 

Was there low compression or none at all?

 

Who makes the rear camber adjusters/pillowballs? Not familiar with the initials. Thanks for the enlightenment. Heading a similar direction with an FC

Sincerely,

GD