Mx7? rx5? Newbies build thread begins

[Steve-A]

Right, a little less frustrated than yesterday, here\'s what happened....

Ross popped over around 11 and we set to work. First up we drilled a hole in the intake plastic to hold the intake air temp sensor and glued it in place. Then we extended the section of loom going to the 4th injector. Next we tried to drain the fuel tank, in order to fill it with premix. The anti syphon filler held us up for a bit, but then I thought to whip the carpet up from behind the seats and remove the access panel on top of the tank. I think we got almost all the fuel out of the tank.

1oz 2t oil to 1 gallon petrol seems the done thing if the OMP is completely removed, but seeing as this was first start and there was possibly a little fuel left in the tank we went closer to 2oz. It might be a bit smokey to begin with, but I cant go far without going to petrol station so will stick to 1oz per gallon then.

Next up we put some oil in her, she took 5L all in. In the FC rx7 this engine took 5.6L by the book, but my sump is a little smaller, will keep an eye on the oil level incase the oil cooler hasn\'t filled up properly yet. We did notice it was weeping a little oil from the front cover to main engine block gasket. For the short term I cleaned the area up with some carb cleaner to remove all traces of oil then smeared some RTV over the outside of the join pretty thickly. 6 hours later and its not showing any signs of weeping. Its only a short term fix but if it gets me on the road for a week or two I don\'t mind! Once I\'ve gone a few days without having the engine/car to bits I\'ll gather the enthusiasm to do fix it properly!

Then we filled the cooling system. It took a lot of water, that rad must have a huge capacity as we put 10L of water/coolant mix in! It again weeped from a couple of the silicone join, but a quick tighten up of the jubilee clips soon sorted that. The joins that leaked were either end of the alloy hardpipe section I used, the only part of my cooling system without a bead on the ends, so that may have to be changed, keeping a close eye on it.

So all set.

We turned the key, 1 click, then 2 ... Megasquirt came online. air temp -40 degrees. Damn! A bit of fiddling and I\'d read a diagram upside down, and so connected the AIT sensor up to the old airflow meter connections. That was soon sorted and time to turn it over. It span up to 300rpm on the starter nicely, all looked well but it didn\'t go. I pulled a plug it was damp, didn\'t look flooded but fuel was getting through. So checked for spark, no spark on leading plugs, spark on only one of the trailing plugs.

AFAIK MS1 only fires the leading plugs during cranking, so I went back and checked the wiring. Yep I\'d connected the leading and trailing triggers backwards. I only got spark on one trailing plug as the trailing toggle wasn\'t activated.

So turned her over again, she sounded keener to start but still a long way off. Now I knew this might happen as the CAS position was pure guess work. When I received and fitted my CAS I made what I thought was a good guess at its alignment at TDC, but knew it could be wrong. So we tried to use a timing light to see if we were ballpark accurate whilst cranking. This was tricky as it was a bright day and the timing light was struggling to trigger from the cranking speed. Either way it looked miles out, possibly 120 degrees or so.

So I started playing with trigger angles and we started manually moving the CAS to try and bring the timing into line. I now realise this is where the mistake came. Somewhere along the line the leading trigger output started acting oddly, it was staying low to often, and hanging low for a good 2 seconds after the engine had stopped spinning. This wasn\'t right. It was late, I was frustrated, we called it a day.

With a fresh mind this morning I had another look. First thing I re-flashed the firmware and then uploaded a fresh MSQ, same problem. Then I did some reading on the ms extra manual and the \'if in doubt RTFM\' theory came true. The trigger angle for my twin VR style CAs need to be either 0-5 degrees or 60-70 degrees apparently. I had set it to 0, but when I set it back to 65 all the odd issues with the leading trigger firing went away!

I also read on the ms extra manual about configuring one of the outputs to show when the ignition trigger is active, so you can turn the engine over by hand and see when it picks up each pick-up on the CAS, this should allow me to see the CAS position to within a couple of degrees without having to try and use the timing light while cranking it.

So thats tomorrows plan!

[Mazdarotaryparts]

Wow, awesome thread

Shaun

Yep :chat

Should be there with this soon :burnout

[Steve-A]

I started to post his yesterday, but then fell asleep before I finished it....

Today has been another frustrating day, if slightly more successful.

To star the day Ross rocked up around 10:30 and we set to work. Some internet searching had given us a better idea of where the CAS should be, so armed with this we set it and the car did sound more like it wanted to start. It was still a fair way off though.

So we had a coffee and a think, I\'m fairly sure I was horrid to be around all day as I\'ve a cold coming and I had a killer headache so was quite grumpy. We pulled the plugs and found front rotor plugs wet/damp and rears totally dry. Alarm bells rang an we started checking to be sure the rear rotor primary injector was working. We dis-assembled the upper intake manifold, to find the clip not on the rear primary injector, infact it wouldn\'t clip on correctly, a bit of stanley knife and file later all was well. The intake was re-assembled nd we tried again.

No better, again the plugs were pulled and rears were dry whilst the fronts had flooded. Intake to bits again, we checked through wiring loom and found the rear primary injector was wired backwards. That fixed we re-assembled the intake, removing liquid gasket got boring real quickly..... Still no fueling to the rear rotor. Luckily I have 3 spare injectors I had cleaned and flowed at the same time as the main set, so we dis-assembled it all AGAIN to fit a replacement injector.

Right all back together, turn key, nothing. Rad fan starts up, no lights on MS, everything dead. !!!! I quickly turned it off and then panicked. It was about 4pm, i was feeling really under the weather and it was looking like another day would go by without this car working. Eventually Ross talked me round and we started problem hunting, it took us a while but we realised that MS was getting no power, neither were the injectors. The fuel injection fuse had blown. So we stole one from the cooling fan, and soldered a normal blade type fuse across the contacts of the odd shaped fuses the main engine bay fuses seem to use in the mx5.

Finally the MS acted like it should, and both plugs were getting wet, but it still wouldn\'t catch. I realised it was closest to catching when I was foot to the floor, and that meant cranking injector pulse widths were too wide. So I halved them, took the plugs out and turned it over to clear any fuel puddle and we had another go.

LIFE! It lived! It was lumpy and missing like mad and really struggling but it was running. I quickly got the timing light out and found I was around 10 degrees to retarded. That set properly it was beginning to feel a little better. Unfortunately I think my LC-1 took exception to the amount of fuel in the exhaust pipe from it flooding repeatedly and just kept saying it was super rich.

The video is the 3rd/4th time the engine actually started, its running on a base map thats obviously not right for my engine really considering I had to halve the cranking fuel. We took her out for a gentle roll around the local area, hoping to clear the back-log of fuel in the exhaust and get the LC-1 working properly. Alas it wouldn\'t play the game, so no tuning could be done, this resulted in a very lumpy engine that has a long way to go yet before it runs right.

Aside from the wideband not working right the speedo isn\'t working, the coolant cap above the thermostat is playing up, my oil cooler is leaking a fraction and I\'m using a pair of my sisters tights as a temporary air filter. Oh and the noise! its a bit loud!

Tomorrows plan will be to try and resurrect my wideband and then get tuning.

Edit: Embed wont work for some reason, so heres a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr4PojCNyFU

[fil_auto]

mate, hats off to you! Sounds n looks great in that engine bay ;o)
Am sure there\'ll be some tweaking to do but I thought it looked and sounded ace! :mmmm

[TiddlesRX7]

Nice one fella. Looks and sounds good. See you at Rotorstock

[Carbon RX]

epic thread!!!
 
Enjoyed reading every detail... Well Done !!

[Steve-A]

Glad it\'s meeting with approval .

Spent most of today working on it. The coolant and oil leaks are now fixed . I found the problem with the speedo, it seems the rx7 gearbox has a different size drive gear on it for the spedo and it\'s mashed all the teeth off my mx5 speedo drive. So i can either fit the spare mx5 speedo drive and drive gear to output shaft, which is mega hassle as it means re-building the box, or try to find an rx7 speedo drive. For the next couple of days I\'ll just use my phones gps!
 
Ross came over again and we spent most of the day trying to sort my wideband. It just doesn\'t wanna play. It acts normal when the ignition is on but the engine nt running but once the engine runs it doesn\'t do the normal light flash as the heater warms, it just reads a random arbitrary number and doesn\'t respond at all. Having had most of the interior to bits chasing the wiring around to check it\'s all plumbed in right I fear I\'ve killed the sensor when it was flooded for two days with not just petrol but premixed petrol and 2t oil. Ill get on the phone to the local motorfactors first thing in the morning.

[antnicuk]

well done,  it must be very satisfying.  What are your first thoughts of driving it?  it sounds like they did a great job on the exhaust,  it sounds great.

[shaunwil]

Does sound lovely though

Shaun

[marcusd666]

Sounds great you have done a cracking job on it the 13B looks right at home in the MX5 as well.

[Steve-A]

What are your first thoughts of driving it?at.

Well I\'ve not really had chance to drive it in anger, and its not been past 4k really. All because of this lambda sensor problem. First impressions are that it feels no flatter, possibly stronger, than my 1.6 did right low in the revs, and that as I took it closer to 4k it seemed \'happier\' like my 2t motorbike does as it gets towards the powerband. But with no idea what air fuel ratios are running right now I suspect there\'s far more power to come

I\'m sure its gonna be amazing when I can get out there and confidently wind it right up in the revs and scream along some lanes. :burnout

On more general car things, the gearbox felt great, much smoother than my old one, and nice for having been cleaned out. The wide spaced engine mounts meant the box was twisting very little with the engine torque, which is good. It felt soooooo nice to be back in MY mx5, bolted to the floor safely beneath my roll bar with hugging seats, firm suspension and a properly weighted manual steering rack feeding back loads of information to the wheel.

The exhaust does make a lovely noise. I\'m hoping it will quiet down a little as it soots up though, as its slightly anti-social loud right now! If anyone needs any custom exhaust work done the a44 exhaust garage in worcester seem like nice chaps and they\'ve done a good job with this one Just don\'t expect them to build you anything quiet

p.s. anyone got an FC EGI speedo drive?

[kiwimazda]

Bloody brilliant. Dont worry about the anti social loud part. If you leave your house fast enough they wont see who it was.

[antnicuk]

your first drive was much more elegan than mine,  im almost too embarrassed to post it up due to the stupid commentary by my mates on the video...

[RamoNZ]

Looked like you are using tunerstudio? I\'m going to get VE Analyse for mine to assist with tuning. Apparently (obv not tried it) it is pretty good, but doesnt yet to WUE or EAE, but that really is minor stuff.

[Steve-A]

Yeh I am using tuner studio, I much prefer it to megatune. The VE Analyse feature is a god send! Once you learn the best parameters to use with it, like how aggressively it can change the map and to set the limits so it doesn\'t get confused by things like over run fuel cut then its great. You just got for a drive and the car gets better and better!

Unfortunately my lambda sensor controller has died Gotta go buy a new one so cant really drive the car till thats sorted, which is gonna be friday at the earliest.

Antnicuk, I\'m not sure kangarooing up the road on a poor map with the car missing like mad counts as elegant