Todays big moment....

Well after this weeks task of rebuilding and refitting the engine, today we decided to find out if it started...........

some fresh oil back into the engine, and the fuel tanks first batch of fuel placed inside it. it was time for some pre flight checks...

after ensuring all wires has been connected up on the engine block and bay area, my first concern was that i seemingly had no power going to the fuel pump, but it turns out there is no feed to the pump until the starter motor and fuel injection system kicks in.

first stage was to the the engine over manually by hand to get some of the oil pumped around the block and try to prime it up to the head so that when it was turned over on the starter motor there wasn't going to be a lack of oil up top. so the plugs were left out to do this.

once it has been turned over by hand, the engine was then turned over with the starter motor, at this point the fuel pump also kicks in and enabled the fuel system to be primed, the engine was turned over until fuel was being pumped into the chambers. once the fuel system was primed a good visual checks was made on all the fuel pipes and fittings to ensure no leaks were present.

the spark plugs were then fitted and the HT leads connected up and it was then time for the moment of truth..........................................

and on the first turn of the key................

It fired up into life!!!

as it was being run in the shed it wasn't taken much over tick over, but so far every thing seems to run all ok, idle currently seems a little low, but this could be down to now having a whole new air in take system not giving enough back pressure, so i will adjust this later along with checking the timing of the engine. in a few days it will be hopefully taken out to enable it to be run up to full temperature to check for leaks in the cooling system. after 6 months its alive again!!

Engine rebuilding and refitting

this weeks task has been to rebuild the engine after last weekends skimming of the engine block, this is now becoming a rather simple job after the amount of times it has now come apart and gone back together.

once every thing was refitted and rebuilt, it was a case of refitting the engine back into the chassis on friday night, this again went without a hitch and in no time it was bolted back up to the gearbox, all that was then left to do was attach all the wiring and pipe work and refill with water, fingers crossed no more water shows up..............

Switches

whislt the hunt for the water leak has been ongoing, in the mean time i have been working on the dash and electrics, now as i have a carbon dash this will not pass the IVA due to the radius being to small on the lower edge, so to get round this i have made myself a dash out of ally which i am going to foam pad and cover in vinyl to get me through,

Now as i am using a carbon / standard style dash i am not able to make use of the original mazda switch gear, which gives me the task of relocating all the switches with some thing else, now i had decided a while ago that i was going to use the savage stainless steel illuminated switches, so these have arrived and i have now set about sorting out the loom to make all of these work, currently they are all illuminated and this weekend i am setting about making them work,
now these switches are very small but reading in a few places it seems they are rated to 10amps, which means in theory i could wire all of the lights etc directly into the switches as the maximum draw the lights pull is about 9amps, but i have decided to be on the safe side and run relays for every thing for peace of mind.

again for the IVA i haven't used the savage switches for either the rear fog light, or the wipers, as the fog light switch has no real way of being able to distinguish when the fog is switched on, so for this i am using a plain switch with an led in to show when the fog light is switched on, and the wiper switch only has an on or off position, i would need to wire in some sort of toggle switch to be able to select the 2 speeds needed, so to save me doing this i bought a cheap wiper switch with 2 positions for 2 speeds.

The water continued to show....

In my previous post i had just reassembled the engine after having the head skimmed, to see if this cured the water leak... well unfortunately i have to say the water has still continued to seep around the sides of the head...... BUGGER!!

Now we are onto the serious business of looking for a warp in the block, so it was back off with the head again, ( i am starting to get very quick at doing this now ) after removing the the head i brought home a long parallel from work and set about checking the top of the block for distortion.
it then became clear that i also had issues with top of the block being warped, at the moment it looks like there is a .04mm deviation in the center and across to 2 corners, now reading online it appears the maximum tolerance for flatness on the mazda block is .015mm. so now it was time to take the engine back out and strip down, ready for a trip to work to be machined.

So yesterday the engine was taken into work, first job was to remove the 2 locating dowels in the block that position the head, i then made 2 new ones to replace them. the block was ten set up on the machine and clocked up, it then showed as expected slight distortion of about 0.038mm.

so a light fly cut was set up and the distortion was machined out, i am now really hoping that this has cured the problem, other wise i might be looking at a new engine if this doesn't work.

i shall find out this week!

other jobs done whilst tracking down water leaks....

whilst awaiting for the water to show up, i have completed another few small jobs,

first job was remake the battery clamps, i wanted to use the original battery tray from the MX, so to clamp it down i would need to make another hook which goes through the panel at the back of the battery, so whilst i was making that i decided i might as well re make every thing, so now i have an all stainless steel clamp system, the original bracket which bolted to the chassis was re used from the MX and 2 riv nuts were fitted to hold this into place, the other side is in theory the same as the one on the front but just turned upside down, and as there was no bracket to screw this too, a hole was drilled in the panel and a large stainless plate was made up to spread the load underneath.

Boot box cover has also been fitted.

Head light lifters for IVA, because i have gone for 'cateringvan' style indicators these would not pass the IVA when fitted the standard head light mount brackets as they would not be visible from a 45 degree angle as they would sit behind the nose cone, to get round this issue i made some 3" lifters that would sit the indicators above the nose cone, this will hopefully keep the IVA man happy, once the car passes they will be removed.

The hunt for the water leak continues......

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so after my last post the head has been taken off yet again and was heading to work for skimming,
the head was set up and machined with a very slow fly cut and a very slow feed rate to make sure a good surface finish was achieved. once it was set up it became apparent that there was not much in the way of material that needed to come off to get the flatness, overall i only took off 0.06mm which was a lot less than i was expecting, i could have actually got away with only taking off 0.04mm but decided to give it another 0.02mm, just to make sure.

after skimming the head was cleaned up to remove all traces of swarf ready to be refitted.

once i got home the cams were re fitted and the head was installed back onto the car and filled up with water again, now it was just a case of waiting to see if the water showed up again.........

DOH....the story continues

So after my last post, i had re fitted the water outlet from the head and waited in hope that no more water appeared and started running down the block, well 48 hours after doing this the dreaded drips continued to show up.............................

BUGGER!

this now means the problem lay with in the head itself, so the tool set was cracked out and off comes the head again.

After removing the head and stripping it of the intake manifold it was time to see where the problem lay..... now before the head was refitted when i rebuild the engine i has taken the head to work and had checked it for flatness, i didnt rush in to skim it as i have read in a few places that the limits you can actually take off are very small with mazda head, so with the aid of a surface table, some parallels and some feeler gauges and a height gauge me and a college checked the head for flatness, now at the time everything seemed to be fine, and the head had seemed as flat as it could be, so it was decided it would be fine to re-fit.

after removing it for a second time i checked it again, and again every thing seemed fine........ so i cracked out the inspection lamp and found a straight edge, this then reveled what i should hope to be the cause of the problem, one corner of the head has actually lifted and is not sitting right by what appears to be .25mm, knowing my luck its probably the one corner we didn't check the first time round with any of the fore mentioned equipment, its also the corner to which the source of the water seemed to be originating from.

so the head will be making its way back to work tomorrow to be skimmed, which stupidly i should have just done in the first place, lets just hope it cures the problem this time.

But in the mean time during all of this i have managed to complete a few other little jobs from the list....

the roll hoop is now fitted and bolted up for the moment, altho this will need to be removed next week so that i can set about making up my boot box cover.

with the head removed i have also been able to gain access to the oil pressure switch, which i was not able to do up due to restrictions on getting a spanner in to tighten it up. so that saves me another job, all tho it could be said that removing the head was a rather radical approach to tightening it up ;o)

Front headlight raiser brackets have been fully finished, painted and will be fitted over the coming weekend, also meaning i can re wire the head lights back in.

i have also with the head removed been able to fit the cable tie anchors that i should have fitted down the drivers side of the engine bay to hold the wiring out of the way, and which i could not fit because the inlet manifold was in the way, i have also moved the wiring to the alternator and starter.

have also started to make my IVA dash, the ally panel has been bent with a good sized radius on the bottom of it all tho i will also be covering this dash in foam and vinyl to be completely on the safe side. and i will start to trim this in over the weekend.

i will add a few more pictures over the weekend for the parts that i have recently covered.