Summer is well and truly here in Okinawa, with the temperatures rising and the sun shining. Checked the weather report at 9am this morning and was told that it was 31°C but that it felt “like 36°C”. Thankfully the humidity was only 70% and a sea breeze coming through my apartment managed to keep me [...]
Apologies for the godawful attempt at a play on words in the title. It’s almost 1am and it’s all I could think of so please forgive me. Thought it was time I gave you an update seeing as my last post talked about me throwing a firework into the engine of my car “for testing purposes”. Wanted to reassure/disappoint you all by letting you know that I still live. That little event was not without incident though, as you will see.
So to recap, I was pretty sure my 1991 Mazda RX-7 had a vacuum leak which was causing the surging idle. People kept saying the engine might have a cracked apex seal but I wasn’t buying that as the last time it was compression checked it was all ok. So I decided to get a “smoke bomb” firework and put it into the intake manifold of my car so the smoke would flow around and I could see where it came out of. You’re all thinking “Darwin Awards” already, but to bear with me! Went to the shops and found some fireworks that I needed from the Y100 shop. Bought them and excitedly went home. First plan was to put the firework just before the throttle body and then stick a long lighter in there and light it from a distance. That didn’t go exactly to plan, as you can see.
Yeah, that’s what happens when a lighter, petrol and air mix together. You’re lucky my digital camera doesn’t have sound or you’ll have heard my scream followed by letting an expletive or two out! So I went upstairs, had a stiff drink and revised my plan. Next idea was to light the smoke bomb first, and then once it was smoking to put it into the throttle body. While this didn’t nearly set me on fire, it didn’t really have the effect I was looking for. In fact, the only effect it had was making it look like I’d powdercoated the insider of my throttle body and intake manifold!
I was hitting a wall pretty hard and not really knowing where to go. The car seemed like it would drive well enough, but that idle would most likely prevent it from getting a shaken (the Japanese car inspection certificate). And it wouldn’t make for the most enjoyable driving experience in the world. Once again I took the upper intake manifold and throttle body off and had another look at it. After cleaning both of smoke bomb remnants, I found something interesting with the throttle body. Take a look below and see if you can spot the problem:
See it? What we have here are 3 throttle plates. The top one is fine and is supposed to have a hole in it (the car has to get some air when idling so that it will keep running). The issue is the bottom 2 plates. They are partially open but should be completely closed. This means that the throttle sensor will be sending a signal to the ECU saying that the engine is at idle, and a given predetermined airflow is entering the engine. But in reality those plates being open means that the actual volume of air in the engine is higher than that. This was causing the engine to go searching for a correct fuel/air mix and getting all confused, hence the fluctuating idle. I took the throttle body apart, cleaned it up and did a bit of adjusting so that the bottom plates were closed, and then refitted it all. I also removed a cold-start cam that I’d forgotten to pull when I previously took out the cold start system. Attached everything and tentatively turned the key.
The engine fired as normal and died after a couple of seconds, but I got a different feeling with it. There was no high idle before it died and no misfiring; it was just as if the idle was set too low. I played around with the idle screw and tried again. The engine fired up and started idling perfectly at 800rpm, with no surging, no misfiring, and no signs of problems. I could rev it and it would come straight back to a perfect idle.
And here I am, at a point where the car is idling right and fingers crossed it will drive well soon. So all that remains is for me to get the car booked in for an inspection and to do what I can to it to make sure it passes. Will report back with how it’s gone very soon, but it’s a huge boost to have come this far. I bought a car which wouldn’t start at all, and have got it starting reliably, troubleshooted high & surging idles, and now have it where I think it is fully driveable. Whether that’s the case, only time will tell…
“Baby steps.” That’s what my mate has kept saying as I’ve been troubleshooting my new ride, a 1991 Mazda FC3S RX-7. I’ve been working my way through the factory service manual, testing everything and hoping it was way out of spec, which would indicate the problem lies in that area. But it’s been a long slog, with most things I’ve checked coming right in spec, or just out but not enough that it would cause an issue like an engine not to start at all.
But in the past week I’ve had two pretty significant successes. I managed to borrow a fuel pressure gauge and found out that the car just wasn’t making any fuel pressure at all. Alarms bells sounded straight away and I would have put my money on a faulty fuel pump. So I borrowed a known working fuel pump and fuel pump assembly and put it in. I also did a rewire modification for the fuel pump to make sure that a full 12V is getting to the pump and not less through almost 20-year old wiring. This is a common mod for DSMs and early Evos, but I didn’t know until recently that FC owners do the same. Got the fuel pump pumping and pressure was built up almost instantly. So I figured it must be the pump that was bad. Just to make sure I fitted my old fuel pump up to the new assembly, tried it and the darnedest thing happened. Pressure built up again as it had been doing before. So then I switched it and used the new pump with the old assembly and no pressure was building up. Fuel pump assemblies going bad are almost unheard of so I was pretty surprised that it seems to be the case here, although my shock at this car seems to be diminishing with each thing I find.
Right, so I’m getting fuel pressure and the pressure is right where it should be according to the factory manual. I put the intake manifold back on, turn the key and… it fires up! And then promptly dies. Tried again and the exact same thing happened. It would start, go up to about 1,500rpm and then promptly die with a fair bit of misfiring. If I put my foot down I could hold it at 3,000rpm and it would hold steady there in neutral with a few misfires but nothing too severe, but then when I took my foot off the accelerator the revs would come down and the engine would die again. But I was a lot further than before and it was the first time the car had actually started without the aid of starter spray in around 6 months.
But what was making it die? I checked everything was hooked up and connected, which it seemed to be. The throttle position sensor (TPS) is infamous for going bad in these things, but me and a friend messed around with that for a while but came to nothing. The only problem is that the sensor usually has to be adjusted when the car is fully warm, and I can’t really sit in the car and keep it at 3,000rpm while it warms up; I have to have a little consideration at least for my neighbours and the exhaust is backing right into a wall so it’s echoing beautifully!
So I went back to basics and thought about it again. Revving the car higher got some stability, but it just didn’t want to run low down. The 2 conclusions I came to were either the fuel injectors not firing enough for some reason, or a vacuum leak somewhere in the system. I was lucky enough that a friend had a set of FC injectors spare and was willing to let me borrow them to put into the car and see if they would work. I also took the chance to cut down on a little of the rat’s nest of hard and soft hoses in the engine bay too. I plugged some nipples and rerouted a few lines (more of which I’ll do later down the line).
Turned the key again and… quelle surprise, it started and died. Sounded a little different though so I fired it up again but it did the same. I’m a strong believer in superstition so I gave it one more turn of the key and it started, and stayed started! The idle was bouncing around between about 750 and 1,500rpm and not stabilizing but it was idling on its own without any pressure being applied to the accelerator. Not sure whether it was the injectors or the vacuum lines I’d changed on the car, but it seems to be teetering on the brink of running now. I’m pretty sure the TPS is out of sync which is causing the strange idle, but once that’s sorted out I should be good to go. I’ll also clean up the engine bay a little more and simplify things as much as I can without losing any drivability or performance. My own injectors are going to get sent off to Witch Hunter in the States to get cleaned and flow tested too, to see if they were at fault.
So while baby steps take their time, they seem to be paying off in the long run.
So the car was up and running again, but I still wasn’t really feeling the big increase in power I had expected from a turbo/ECU/injector swap. If anything, it was feeling even slower than before! I knew the best way to check what bost the turbo was putting out was to fit a boost gauge, so I found one of the cheapest I could locally, and wired it up.
My suspicions were proved true, as the turbo was only spooling at over 5,200rpm and then only reaching a maximum of 0.6bar. The stock boost level for this turbo was 1.0bar so something was wrong somewhere along the line. I checked my hosing for leaks but found nothing. Even pulling the hose off the turbo actuator (an action which should cause the wastegate to stay shut and the car to overboost) had no effect on the turbo’s output whatsoever. It was producing boost, but just hardly any of it.
It was at that point that I decided it was probably better to cut my losses and go back to a stock setup to see if the boost was any different. I started by changing the ECU and then testing the car, but it made no difference. The injectors were then put back to stock ones but no change either. Eventually I had to pull off this new turbo and put the old one back in. Took it for a drive and put my foot down. The turbo was spinning to 0.7bar and spooling by 3,000rpm or so, feeling much more sprightly. So it looked like it was the turbo. In the end I sold off the ECU and injectors as a package, and sold the turbo for parts.
I realise now I’d gone from pretty much a stock car setup and headed straight to stage 2 modifications without doing the basics first (i.e. I had tried to run before I could walk). The parts sale had gained me some money too so I elected to save a little of it and spend some on the stage 1 upgrades I should have made in the first place.
When I last left you I had arrived at my tuning shop with my car engine being held together by some red RTV, and me a nervous wreck after making the longest 20-minute drive ever from my house to the garage. The guy stopped working on a car that was infinitely more powerful than mine could ever hope to be, and took a look.
Now the non-car people might not know this, but when engine heads are made/cast they will have some holes in them that were made in the moulding process. These holes are about 2-3cm in diameter usually, and are then capped off with something called “freeze plugs” which are basically a disc of thing metal which just presses into the hole and blocks it off. There are usually a few of these around the engine in various places. This I did not know, and was soon to be left feeling very stupid about.
“It’s just a cracked freeze plug” the guy said, telling me I had nothing at all to worry about! It had cracked possibly because it was weakened when my car temperature went up during the drive home from installing my turbo after the fan wiring mishap. I just needed to buy a new plug from Suzuki, knock the other one out with a screwdriver and a hammer, and then press this one in, in its place. So off I drove to Suzuki, and it turned out this repair that at one point was looking like it might cost me over Y100,000 cost me Y110. Just a small difference! But I felt so lucky I’d missed out on a couple of auctions for engines when all I needed was a 2cm disc of metal to fix it. In 2 days my freeze plug was here and I hammered it into place, with a fair bit of RTV around the edge to make sure it sealed, and that was that! I was on the road and fully mobile again!
Had a couple of little issues since, but they have mostly been ironed out. One pipe was leaking a little coolant. Some RTV fixed it for a while, but I managed to pull the right pipe off an Alto that was in the junkyard to replace it so fingers crossed that’s sorted now. A radiator cap leak was also causing some of the coolant in my expansion tank to be leaking out, but a replacement cap has fixed that too.
The next issue to come up… well who knows! But I’m sure it won’t be long until it does. Until then I’ll just have to get myself ready for whatever it is going to throw at me.
I frequently say on this blog that I learn from my mistakes, and I certainly do make a few with my car. The last time I posted about my own ride was back in October, when I was eagerly waiting to install a new turbo, injectors and ECU. Well that set of upgrades didn’t really go to plan, and has kind of been indicative of the past 6 month here in Okinawa. Big plans, the works of which proverbial spanners have been flung into from all directions. But I have lived and learned (just about), and hopefully as some of you read my mistakes you might do too.
The injector/ECU/turbo setup was installed back at the start of November, with big thanks going to Josh at the Hobby Shop for helping me out. The first 2 parts of the threesome were a cinch, but the turbo was a swine to get out and replace. This was mainly due to the fact that I had no real idea how to get at the turbo and get it out. or the record, the easiest way is to take the front bumper off and then all the safety bars and such, and bring it out the front of the car. What took me the best part of a day the first time I did it, I have since done in under 2 hours. And then other issues came up. We decided to remove the radiator so we could have better access to put the new turbo in, but we didn’t expect the main radiator inlet to just break away from the hose when we pulled it off! So a radiator rebuild was then needed. As a stopgap I managed to find a radiator from a similar but not the same car which would fit so decided I would just throw that in until my original one was rebuilt.
And then while the car was in the air and I was looking around it I suddenly thought, “Oh, what’s that liquid near the passenger rear brake caliper? Ahhh… that will be a brake fluid leak.” So a caliper rebuild kit was needed for that. That in itself was a learning experience though as I rebuilt both calipers on my own. They work now fine with no leaks; the only downside being on rare occasions it sounds like I have a foghorn in my car on light braking!
But the turbo was eventually installed and I headed for home. The upgrades I’d made didn’t really thrill me but I was thinking it was just because I had to get used to the bigger turbo. Headed on the expressway as I just wanted to get back home and relax. Had been going for about 5 minute doing about 80kph when I suddenly noticed my water temp gauge going up. A few expletives later and I’d pulled into the nearby rest stop and opened the bonnet. A bit of steam was coming out, but then the water temp on my gauge went right back to normal. Very strange I first thought. The fan behind the radiator was running and blowing air forward… and then it hit me. The fan’s wiring on this radiator was opposite to the one on my original radiator. This means that as I was driving on the expressway the fan was trying to blow air forward and was competing against the air coming into my engine bay, creating an area around the radiator where there was almost no airflow at all as the forces were acting against each other! The faster I went the more heat would be generated and would not be able to escape through the coolant system. My only option was to drive home as slowly as I dared on the expressway. Once I was on smaller roads I was fine as the speeds were slower and so the fan could actually work to cool the coolant.
You might think that’s it but I’m only just getting started here! So I made it home and rewired the fan that night so it would actually suck air through the radiator and not try to blow air forward. The next day I did a bit of driving around and tried to test out the new setup properly. It just felt so sluggish and like it wasn’t boosting much, but I could hear the turbo spooling a little. I decided to do a little more testing another time and went for a drive into Naha. Here is the scary part. On the same road and even at the same bend as I crashed my Evo, the water temperature gauge started to go up again, quite quickly. I was getting quite used to this by now and pulled over, but this time the steam had got a while lot worse. It was also joined with the engine losing power and misfiring, and it was smelling of sickly boiling coolant. I rushed to the engine bay and lifted up the bonnet to see what was going on, and was greeted with not a nice sight. There was coolant everywhere. It was all over the engine bay, and especially near the head. The reason the car was misfiring was that there was coolant around all the spark plug leads, and I was assuming next to the plugs themselves too. I filled the engine with more coolant and slowly drove back home, even though I had to stop every 2-3 minutes and turn the engine off for things to cool down.
I made it home and left the engine to cool while I went to my apartment and onto the internet to find out what the hell was wrong. The first idea was a cracked head, as was the second… and third… and almost every other answer I could find. This just made my heart sink like you couldn’t believe. Just a few months after having to rebuild the engine on my Evo, I was facing the prospect of having to do another rebuild on another engine. A few hours passed and I went down to inspect the engine some more and clean up some of the coolant that had covered the engine. Looking down on the head I could see a hole about the size of a ball-point pen nib that it was all coming out of. Spectacular…
For the next 2 and a half weeks I was back to being a pedestrian again, and using public transport to get to and from work (a painfully frustrating and quite expensive thing to do in Okinawa). After a couple of weeks though I made it down to my tuning shop who had been looking for a new head for me. Typically, the twin-cam F6a engine heads were all but impossible to find in Okinawa, and I was looking at having to buy a whole engine from mainland Japan, having it shipped down and then doing a whole engine swap. The engine prices were coming to about Y60,000 plus shipping, which meant that the whole swap of the engine would probably cost over Y100,000. This was still at a time when my employment situation was dodgy at best and I was just about breaking even each month.
The guy at the shop asked me to explain where the crack in my head was so I drew him a diagram and tried to show him as best I could. To my surprise, he said that a crack like that might be repairable if I could get it down to the garage. He told me to try RTV’ing the hell out of it and leaving it for at least 24 hours before trying to drive down there and they would check it out. That raised my spirits quite a bit as I had the realization that this repair might not be as costly as I first thought. So I went home and liberally coated the area around the crack in RTV and left it to dry for a couple of days. 48 hours later I filled the radiator with coolant and fired up the engine. Hate to use the cliche but minutes seemed like hours as I waited for the engine to warm up so I could fill the cooling system properly. And then I began the 20-minute journey down to the garage.
That is probably 20 of the longest minutes I’ve ever had! And every minute I was watching the water temp gauge for any signs of it going up. I was torn between driving fast and having the engine run hotter but getting their quicker, or driving more slowly and keeping cooler but taking longer to get there. In the end I opted for a middleground and it worked well as I made it down there in one piece. The guy from the garage came out and opened the bonnet and took a look at the engine…
And as for what he said, well I’ll tell you about that in my next post!
A Happy New Year to you all, first and foremost. Wishing you much success, happiness and good stuff like that in 2009. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my ramblings in the past 12 months and especially to those who left comments. I’ve said it before, but comments on my little rants and reviews make me want to write more. Whether or not that is a good thing is completely up to you!
Before I get into the main part of this article, I was reading on Newzjapan the other day about news articles that you would think are big national stories, but then rarely get reported. The story in question in this particular article was about a man in Kobe murdering his pregnant girlfriend and then putting her body in a freezer. Now there has been a lot of information on this story and it has been reported locally, but you would expect that it would be a big story that would be on all the news stations. However, it didn’t make any ripples in the media outside Hyogo. It could have been the sheer number of huge news stories breaking in Japan that day… I mean the top crime story was about a Waseda student stealing a woman’s underwear (living in Japan for a while makes you wonder why this is even being reported as news as it’s so commonplace). But why didn’t this story make headlines outside the immediate Hyogo area as it seems like a big crime? Similarly, on December 20th a man’s torso was found in a rural area of Okinawa. The body parts had been put into 6 plastic bags and put in holes in the ground, the killer leaving behind suitcases, a pickaxe and shovels. In addition, one of the arms was still missing. This story was reported in the Okinawan news the day after it was found, but since then nothing at all has been reported in the media. There’s been nothing about an appeal, no identification of the body, no more reports from police about clues they have found. And this was never mentioned in national news bulletins when you would think that body parts being found in a field might be newsworthy. Am going to go out on a limb here (pun intended), but I reckon that if the shovels were US military issue then there would be a lot more coverage of this. It could be that the media just does not want to worry the Japanese public as revealing to them that the country they live in might not be as safe as they thought could shock them hugely.
Anyway, onto what I was intending to write about…
I am happy to report that only 48 hours into 2009 and I had already broken a New Year’s resolution I’d set myself. Most who know me can testify that I’m not the most decisive person in the world. So I set myself the task of being more decisive as the new year dawned. A couple of days later I was in a hardware/furniture store and took 15 minutes deciding whether to buy a nice new chair for my apartment. Got it in my trolley and got all the way up to the checkout before I decided to turn back and put it back. It’s all connected with me not knowing where I’m going to be in 7 month’s time and not knowing if I should plan for a future here or not. But saying that I then spent 20 minute trying to decide if I should get a new Y500 (3 quid) interior bulb for my car. I didn’t get one in the end…
So I drove back from the store and when I pulled into my apartment I realised my car engine was making a strange knocking noise when the engine was idling. I stuck my head into th engine bay and had a look and listen around. Scarily enough the noise was coming from around the timing belt area of the engine and towards the bottom of the engine. This was not a good sign, and this tiny video I took on my phone will let you know why I was not ecstatic about it.
So at this moment I’m thinking that my car has something called rod knock. For those who are not well up on car stuff, that is not a good thing, and if confirmed would require an engine rebuild. And as you can imagine, that would not be the cheapest thing in the world. I posted the video on a few Evo and DSM forums to see what people were saying it could be. While folks over at the Mitsubishi Lancer Register in the UK were all saying it would need an engine rebuild, and that I should start saving my yen, a couple of guys at DSM Source and DSM Tuners suggested it might be something different. They suggested I should take off my front passenger wheel, get my head under the car and look at something called the crankshaft pulley. This is a wheel that 2 belts go around which is made from 2 concentric pieces of iron with a circle of rubber between them to act as a dampener (see below). Apparently, this layer of rubber can crack and make a knocking noise. So I crossed my fingers and jacked the car up.
Well, this is how mine actually looked:
Now I’m no mechanic by any means, but half of the rubber being missing between the 2 iron parts of the pulley didn’t seem that good to me. My suspicions that all was not well was confirmed when I removed the bolts attaching it to the engine and the pulley actually came off in 2 pieces! Now this may be some sort of weight saving plan by Mitsubishi to shave a couple of grams off the weight of the car, but I was thinking I may have solved my problem.
The pictures themselves may not mean so much to you guys, but I was told by people who know their stuff that it was one of the worst condition pulley wheels they have seen for a while. Now if that had come off completely, the best case scenario would have been that I would have lost power as it drives the alternator, power steering, and a/c. Worst case scenario is that one of the belts flies through the timing belt cover and shears that, which pretty much means the for horsemen of the apocalypse do a number on your engine. So I’m pretty lucky in that regard. Was carless for a couple of days and was expecting it to be more, but surprisingly Mitsubishi in Naha had a pulley in stock on Monday when they reopened after the winter break and I was able to go pick it up. Fitted it and fired the engine up. Was a little surprised that a repair I had done myself passed without major incident an the engine fired up with no problems and no knocking. So until the next time something blows up, I’m up and running again.
Now I’ve got to think about the shakken which is coming up for me in March, but that is a topic for another post. Until then, take care and dive/drive safe.
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