Man, the last post was back in mid december....It was certainly a long,cold winter! luckily I spent the whole thing tied to a computer! But spring is here and it is time to start work on my car again. Nate and Tim came over to help me get started back up. I removed the old wussy 7", open diff and they helped me replace it with a torsen limited slip from 1.8 miata.

We also mounted up my new clutch and flywheel from FM. We had to stop work there because I need to pick up an OEM head gasket. Nate and Tim agreed that my super cheap ebay gasket kit-headgasket was not a good idea. So instead I started mocking up the coolant circuit for my coolant reroute. This will involve taking the hot coolant from the back of the head instead of the front. I think that with the collection of parts from the escort doner, I should be able to work it nicely.

I did not have any overheating problems before, but due to a funky coolant routing in the miata, the #4 cylinder tends to run much hotter than the others. It can lead to a bad lean condition there. Since my compression is up from the head shave and I tend to run a lot of timing i thought that doing the coolant reroute made sense. It should dramatically increase the cooling capacity of the engine, if Tim's experience is anything to gauge by.

Let's try to keep it PG in here Justin

yeah, um, freudian slip.

Spent a little more time with the car today. It fought me every minute of it! I did figure out the coolant routing from the back fo the head. I was able to reuse a few parts from the the escort motor to make it work. Unfortunately I now have to figure out a way to put a bead on some bits of steel tubing.

I had a failed attempt to make a custom bead roller using some pieces a friend machined for me and a bench vice... did not work.

Nate suggested I use JBweld. I kind of like this idea. It's easy, but I have some concerns about it's longevity on hot coolant tubes. I don't really have any other option though, so I guess thats it.

I did bolt on the cylinder head, so the motor is officially in a long block state now. When I went to a mount up the intake manifold I got another suprise. The intake interferes with the alternator bracket from the old 1.6 . So a bit of grinding and cutting ensued. It was pretty easy to make it fit, but now the alternator bracket has to go on after the intake manifold. I don't expect to have to take the intake off anytime soon so this is only a minor issue, but it still annoys me.

The engine has moved into it's new home. I took a little more effort and a lot more time than I expected, but Tim and I got the engine in the car Sunday. I spent the whole weekend working on car stuff, splitting my time about 60/40 between working on my engine and building Tim's new Megasquirt engine controller. That went together very cleanly, though DIY autotune seems to have stopped including the 4 high current ignition drivers in the standard kit. We won't need them for Tim's car in stock form, but if he wants to switch to coil on plug he will need to order the parts from DIYautotune.

All and all it was a good time. I came up with a neat way to prime the oil passages in the block. I used a fluid pump (same kind I will use to fill the transmission and diff). I pushed the hosed into the fitting on the block where the oil pressure sensor threads into, and started pumping. I got about half a quart of oil in there, when we saw oil leaking out the other side of the block. My first thought was, "Why the hell is oil leaking out of my brand new engine already? DAMIT!". A quick check revealed two oil galley plugs that I had not installed yet on the other side of the block. Cool, now I know where to get the oil feed from if I ever put a turbo o the car!

The rest of the weekend was spend putting various little components on, and rummaging around for nuts and bolts to attach them with. I thought I kept every single nut and bolt as I was disassembling stuff. Somehow though, I am still short two exhaust manifold nuts, and I had to go digging a number of times through the tub of misc miata bolts that Nate lent me!

My goal is to have it running by the end of this coming weekend. Anyone want to place bets on the likelihood of that actually happening?

So... I can get it to start but not keep running. I am not really sure what is wrong. I have checked the electronics through out, and can't find a problem there. So tonight I am checking the timing of the cam gears. BuI also suspect a fuel pressure problem.

This is pretty frustrating though. I get it all put together, only to not be able to get it to run!

LOL exactly like the C4 Vette but its the actual injectors.

I win! I drove the miata today. Man that was fun. Four fast laps around my own personal 1 mile track (my road happens to be exactly a mile!)

I tried reinstalling timing belt. Its a pretty easy to get the cam gears one tooth off on a Miata! Even Sharon helped out on that one. I made here tripple check the number of teeth between the cam gears like 10 times. The engine still would not do more than start up. It would fire right up, idle for a few seconds, sound real good, then start to get really really lean and die off.

I played with the settings in the Megasquirt for a while, and I was able to stretch out its running for about 30 seconds. This gave me enough time to get some better data logs of what was happening. So I was able to study the FAR and timing of the engine as it died. The numbers just did not add up, because while the ecu held pulsewidth constant the AFR would get progressively leaner. Not to mention that a back of the envelope calculation indicated that the engine should have been running at like 7 to 1 AFR with the pulswidths the ecu was reporting, but it was actually running more like 15 to 1.... so something is wrong with the fuel system then!

Ok, thanks to Tim i have a spare fuel pressure regulator. I swap those out, but no dice. Finally, reading over some troubleshooting tips int he shop manual it mentions forcing the fuel pump to come on with a special jumper. Eureka! Turns out there is some very funky FP wiring in the 1.6 miata. It has a special circuit that was giving me fuel pressure during cranking and then the MS was failing to trigger fuel after that. So I could run for about 3 seconds on residual fuel pressure then it died.

Install the jumper, and the car idles like a champ! So it turns out that I had a fuse installed (supposed to be there for stock ecu) which actually burns up a circuit in the MS. I did not know this because this neat little fact was only determined by DIYautotune after I got my ms. It was never a problem before because of some special circuitry in the MAF (of all places???) that turns the fuel pump on without the ecu. Since I just deleted the MAF, i just found the problem. Why did we not figure this out sooner? Well the MSPNP was originally developed on my miata, which had this blown fuse already... so they only figured it out after they tested it on a second car, at which time I already had mine and was off and running.

So I did not totally win... Sharon seems to think that the miata does not like it when I say, "I win". So I won't be doing that any more. After I took a few laps around the street, it became obvious that I had a large oil leak. It was coming out of the bell housing in copious amounts. A 5 minute drive could put half a cup of oil on my garage floor! My initial thought was that I completely forgot to put the rear main seal in. What else could leak that much oil?

So unfortunately I had to pull the transmission, after having just gotten it into the car! Nate, you're the man for giving me a hand with this with not much notice! You managed to make a pretty good entrance too, driving up the driveway just as I managed to get myself pinned underneath the transmission when I tried to pull it out on my own!

With the trans off, the source of the oil leak was not really obvious. The rear main seal was installed, and did not any fresh oil anywhere. So we tried to run a bit of pressurized air through a special oil plug on the exhaust side of the block. So we hook up the air, turn it on and BANG! The oil galley plug in the rear of the block come shooting out. So we found the problem.

What had happened was that the plug was loose the whole time, but the engine backing plate that goes between the engine and trans held it from coming out completely. So I had a fairly large oil leak, but nothing like I would have had if the plug was not there at all. At least I managed to not contaminate my shiny new clutch. We hammered that into place and put the engine back together. No more leaks!

I managed to pass emissions, on the second try. The e-check guys were all pretty impressed with my super awesome megasquirt gauges on my laptop during the first test. They let me datalog the first run and I was running a bit rich. So I leaned it out and passed! I have about 100 miles on the car at this point, and except the the steering column kind of, sort of coming apart while Tim Carrite was driving it, I have not really had to many problems. I still need to do some tuning with it, but the engine pulls hard and feels good. Sounds pretty nice as well.

This was a huge project with costs that easily doubled my initial estimates! Thankfully I have a pretty understanding wife. At this point, she has become kind of emotionally attached to the car's welfare. Not really because she likes the car, but because any time something breaks or goes wrong, I stomp around the house all miserable until I get it fixed.

I'd say you came out ahead; usually projects like this triple the initial estimates.

Some projects never finish.

Triple??? Note to self: never trust any cost estimate Sean gives on anything. Second note, send email to all people who have been victim of Sean's terrible estimates for insurance claims!

The initial engine swap on the RX-7 came out about 1.5 times the original estimate, mostly due to engine components that needed fixed/addressed. After that (over the next year or two) I cleaned things up, added a Turbo II rear end and halfshafts, suspension, brakes, tires, etc, and ended up about 2.5 times the original estimate, but then those things weren't initially in the budget. It does add up fast though.

In truth, I did pretty well on keeping within my engine swap budget. Like John, it was all the extra stuff that I tacked onto the project that which killed the final cost numbers. I fact the vast majority of the expense was not in the engine. It went to the diff, the wheels, the clutch, the exhaust, the trailer, the high-flow cat, the wide-band sensor

I chose to not count the tires in the budget.... damn, they are expensive!

I don't count tires in my budget when building a car since they are a recurring expense. I keep a spreadsheet of everything I spend, Entry fees, hotel, tires, and gas/food at events go in one category, parts and repairs for the car go into the other.

I have nearly $1,500 budgeted for tires this year, I thought that moving to ST would make things cheaper

When will we see your Civic?

If we have an event on Saturday, I might get to bring it out, but I probably can't make it. Otherwise I'll be at the May 15-16 NWOR events. The spring rates were chosen with Toledo in mind so this should be a good test.