yoeddynz

Even Shaun the sheep had micras!...

Swoon! Sooooo many to choose from !

I think the standard heads and even the stock manifold can flow quite well. Plus they apparently handle a bit of boost on the stock bottom end ok (if sensible) So this morning I swapped the plugs out. The old ones are certainly old with eroded rounded electrodes but clean- no signs of an oil burner and a nice light brown colour... We took it out for hard trash around 'the loop'.. a good drive if its quiet and no freedom campers sitting on 30kph. Up and down, narrow windy road with a decent hillclimb to finish on before home. Perfect for little cars with big hearts. It pretty fun. Almost forget its just a little 1300 until you hit 6500 and then select third and it falls on its face. Luckily it seems fine with staying in 2nd all the time for the really tight bits. I think the few cars we saw heading the other way must have thought 'wtf! Well look at that Karen- I think those kids are on meth and have just stolen some grannies car for a joy ride' We got some dirty looks Got home and poured some engine flush into the engine and ran it for ten minutes at idle. Never used this stuff before but thought why not- oil on dip stick looked/smelt fairly dirty. Hannah then did an oil and filter change. We'd have used the hoist but someone has thoughtfully filled the floor up with loads of timber for some glorified shelf build. Poo. Sump plug and draining easy to do on the ground. Oil filter not so easy - not when the last monkey had overtightened it. But all good and sorted. Old oil yuck. New oil yum. Engine even sounds a bit quieter. Thought I would check the air filter. Hmmmm. There is no air filter installed! FFS. Luckily there is a fine stainless mesh covering the TB mouth. So a filter is on the list before we next drive it. No wonder the engine sounds so neat. Also- both cv boots are torn so that's another job- especially before we start Colin Mcraeing it on the gravel roads.

I presume they must have sold a fair few across OZ but like many a 'bland grannies shopping car' from the early/mid '90s most have probably been crushed now. There seems to be a decent core group of enthusiasts over there though- where probably many cars sell through word of mouth.

Nissan superhatch engine secrets..

As some might have seen in my wanted advert I've been looking for a Nissan k11 Micra (march) for a while, mainly to have as a daily for when the Imp eventually goes under the knife to get its new flat six heart, but also just because both Hannah and I fancy k11s. There's a bit of history with them for us both and this connection along with just the cute unpretentious little car looks has us hooked. Not to mention that overseas there are some wickedly cool uprated versions doing the rounds. Quite a following for these cars in many countries except weirdly in NZ. When I was living in the UK I'd spot these everywhere. Very popular little cars, but ones that I looked past. That is until Hannah's younger sister needed to buy her first car. I helped them look for one and a Micra K10 came up for sale locally. We knew little about them except that Hannah and her two other sisters both learned to drive in K10s. Simple,easy cars to operate (685kg light too!!) So we Leila bought the little K10 and loved her first car, which became known as the Badger mobile - due to the trips Leila would take in it to Badgermans beach down in Cornwall... Sadly, because mother nature can throw out some right horrid things at us, Leila became ill with a rare disease called Crest syndrome, a type of auto immune thing. It started with her hands and she was unable to operate some items, including the windows. The little K10 became a bit run down and the road salt had done its job. Combined with the trickyness of using cars controls Leila decided to seek out a more suitable car. This is where the little K11 came to reside with Hannahs family. Hannah helped her look for a suitable car and then her brother found one. A four door 1000 facelift in dark blue. It had electric windows and central locking- two small things that made life for Leila show much easier... That little K11 did many missions about the place and the family became quite fond of it. Its also what made me start spotting K11s and becoming a fan. In a horrible turn of events Leilas life was cut short. The condition had continued to worsen to the point where it was effecting her heart. She died from a heart attack in 2017 at only 26. A huge loss to the world. Her little Micra was then taken on by Hannahs brother and he now continues to take it on adventures and the other siblings borrow it. I used last year for the 2019 Retro rides gathering - this being the first time I had ever driven a Micra any real distance and I really enjoyed it. While at the gathering I also spotted and fell in love with this little hillclimb beasty... I was amazed at how peppy it was for a 1000cc car. Its handling was 'floaty' but fun. I could instantly see how they would make a sweet little pocket rocket for twisty roads- in very much the same way as the Imp is. Hannah was also smitten and of course there is the family connection to add. So we would own a K11 one day- that was that! Fast forward to last month. I old my Viva wagon during lockdown and had some cash. I know that the Imp is to come off the road for the transplant. Lets start looking for a K11. There were requirements to be met though. It has to be a manual, two door, pre-facelift (PFL) and ideally would have the CG13 engine- not the smaller 1.0. But we soon found that these combined features are a very rare thing indeed in NZ. Kiwis never got Micras here new. They are all imports from Japan. Most are auto (CVT) with the 1.0 and most are 4 doors. All the earlier pre-facelift models, made up to the change over point of around 97, seem to have disappeared. Weirdly - Australia had them new - imported from the UK! They apparently are all PFLs too! Lucky. We found a very tidy 2 door manual face lift locally- but it stunk of ciggy smoke, was a 1.0 and a couple of other alarm bells rang about the owners and their honesty. They were also asking moon beams for it and wouldn't accept my lower offer. Plus- it was a not so pretty facelift version... Then this 4 door PFL turned up locally, going cheap. After a quick look up on carjam we found out that it was a 1.3! Also spotted in the photos were a rev counter. That rev counter dash is certainly a rare thing here- quite a bonus. With some more research Hannah deduced that it might be a March S. These have a few extras like the rev counter and a split rear seat. I messaged the seller and he confirmed it had the split rear seat. Oooooh we thought! Now a March S is not the same as a Micra Super S- as sold in the UK and Oz. I believe that the Super S has a few other blingy things like rear disc brakes, sportier seats, quicker steering rack and a deep front spoiler with added fog lights. ^Dreams. We went for a look. First thing I checked was the engine number- just making sure it was indeed a 1.3 with all those extra 20 ponies. Took it for a hoon (wow- the 1.3 is way faster ! ) checked some things and made a cheeky low offer. 2 days later there was a counter offer and we bagged it for a nice cheap enough price of $825 Picked it up yesterday afternoon. Bought some engine flush, oil, filter and new plugs. Will giive it a bit of Tlc. Its a bit dented and rough but will still clean up ok. Plans : 1 - look for a tidy 2 door PFL car to swap all the good bits into. Probably will be an auto 1.0. Wont be a quick job this so it can wait till later in summer because there are way more urgent jobs about the place. Plus this car is meant to be a runner to use while the Imp is off the road- not another project..... but hey. How can we not have a play! 2 - Lower it. Most likely using some garden variety 'Makita modified' springs... Apparently one can remove 2 coils and they will remain safely contained. We shall see. 3 - Find some nice alloy wheels. 13" x 6 would be nice. The pcd is 100mm so not too odd. 4 - Hannah wants a yellow Micra. So eventually it will be re-painted the official Nissan custard yellow.. 5 - add a turbo. Maybe. Could be fun. That's a way off in jobs to do here though! So here are some pics I took... The seller had the most amazing jumper on! I'd have been stoked if that came with the car... Before handing over the monies I thought it best to quickly check that the spark plugs were not seized in the head. Not coomon but worth checking to save a lot of aggro... All good! So we paid the man and hooned off into the sunset- me in the Imp and Hannah getting used to 'her' new toy Filled the tank.. Played cat and mouse over our hill to home... I took some quick pics in the evening light... JDM factory crystal for added healing power and bling. Some Marches came with these factory fitted... One key element to a good Micra... Another great thing to have when you're ragging all those little ponies to the point of exhaustion... \ Some service items... More to come soon. Lets see how much money we find under the seats etc

what box is it? If its a series 2/3 box then you can move the shifter forwards by around 70mm or something- if that helps. But sounds like ya don't need to Fake edit- I looked at the pic again and see its a series 1 box.

Well because I have a couple of updates worth of advance progress to use up before I have to actually start tinkering again here is another 'update'.. So I had sussed out my oil pump drive. Cool. Lets ignore the tensioners for now...mainly because I have not actually fitted the ones I have - this will be one of the next jobs once Hannah and I finish the workshop mezzanine main structure mentioned in the last post. I know they should work but I wanted to skip ahead to other more fun bits. Sort of like eating your meat before finishing the vege. I needed to join these to assemblies together, neatly and most importantly - completely accurately. I had completed some rather fine looking sketches in pencil of how I might fabricate something, along with measurements compiled by the time honoured tradition of starting at set datum points and then using a selection of various rulers, verniers, bits of string, bluetack, tape measures and a bit of eyeballing to suss out the positions of a new flywheel, seal housing, clutch height, starter pinion position at rest and at full extension. It was all going to be made up along the way but I still needed some datums to work to and from. The main thing I knew the position of and that I could not change was the end of the crank and my added on adaptor with its seal landing. I also had a nice flat, square face on the back of the engine - the flange to which the old clutch and gear housing bolted to. I needed to start with that and work out towards the Subaru gearbox. The Subaru gearbox does not really have a full length bellhousing as such. It normally bolts onto another section of housing that is bolted to the Subaru engine. This was fine because I was going to make my own housing extension that suits both the Honda engine flange and the Subaru box, with a depth to suit a custom flywheel and the clutch. But the flywheel offset was not a known thing yet because I had not yet secured a clutch to use. That's another story and I'll cover that with the flywheel. I'll mention now though that I almost made a complete balls up in clutch pressure plate selection. An easy mistake because its not normally something one would ever need to think about when looking at clutches. See if anyone can guess it? Go on - have a go.... Anyway- back to my flange plate assembly. So the most important thing to keep bang on is that the input shaft is concentric with the crankshaft and this is how I did it. I started with a plate of 6mm thick aluminium, cut larger than the back of the engine and front of the box. I made a pretty damn big hole in it with a large holesaw. It had to be much bigger than the rear main seal I had bought to suit my crank adaptor... Then I machined down a big lump of alloy bar to fit into the hole perfectly. I machined it with a large flange so it could be bolted to the plate. Pushed into the plate and then drilled the flange and tapped the holes. The flange was dot punched while on so its always bolted back up to the same holes after removal. I fitted the flange back into the lathe, drilled and bored it out to fit the gearbox input shaft snug... Now I was able to slide the whole lot onto the box. Luckily these boxes have a decent bearing supporting the input shaft so there is no up and down movement (unlike the Imp box which has a two piece input shaft and wobbles all over the place) I machined a couple of centre punches that tightly slid into the gearbox bellhousing bolt holes, enabling my to accurately mark the bolt holes onto the plate... Now I had a plate that lined and bolted up perfectly concentric to the gearbox input shaft. Now to mark and drill another set of holes on the back of this plate to suit the engines flange. I removed the flange and bored it out to slide onto the crank adaptor seal land snugly. With the flange bolted back onto the plate I was able to slide the lot onto the engine, concentric, and repeat the marking process with yet another set of centre punches machined to suit. Then drill the holes to suit... I did have to add a little extension to reach out to one pesky bolt hole that refused to stay within my square... Now I had a plate that was bolted to the engine, bang on concentric, which had another set of holes to suit the bellhousing. I would connect the bellhousing to this plate with machined bars, of a depth that I was yet to finalise. I knew roughly what they would be, around 40mm, but could not confirm this until I had made my flywheel and the clutch to suit it had arrived. That'll be in the next update. In other news- I have been a little undecided about which ECU route to go down. I was planning to build either a Speeduino or go with Megasquirt again. I had started buying the bits for a Speeduino ages ago (I already had a board I had bought from @kws and from aliexpress I bought the main arduino cpu the runs it, an ATmega 2560, plus scored some other bits from @NickJ) but I still wasn't convinced about Speeduino for this application, as tempting as the possible sub $200 price might be. My Main reason against it was because I really would like to run this engine with full sequential injection. However the Megasquirt that offered this on more than 4 cylinders, along with a couple of other non big brand name options were just too expensive for what I want to throw at the project. But then last week I ended up buying a megasquirt 3 with an expansion card at a price I couldn't turn down. I'm stoked about this because I know Megasquirt well and I like the support plus I like using Tunerstudio (which is also used for Speeduino but with a couple of features left out) . I'll leave the Speeduino for something else in the future (the quad bike! ) Oh and after having ordered these uprated valve stem seals from Norway of all places in July they finally arrived yesterday. 2 months! Ha. My new headgaskets and cambelts have also arrived so I've pretty much got the bits I need to through it back together when the time comes.

Ask @maxted about a drive shaft- he might have a spare

Wow!!!! swoon. So jealous (well except the 4 door bit)

yeah this whole hunting tooth thing was new to me but its makes sense eh. I like learning stuff like that

Just a small update to say that there wont be much work taking place on the engine for a few weeks because the workshop is now full of timber, wood shavings and dust as we build a rather large shelf (some might say a mezzanine floor but no Mr councillor, this is just a shelf to store stuff on...) I'm pretty damn excited about this shelf project it must be said. A chance to properly sort out the workshop and move all the non- engineering like stuff and various car spares upstairs. Its all a bit hectic though. There is loads of paid work on that we are putting off for a bit plus the housetruck sale has gone too contract so that is another load of things to sort out. But fear not- I am still mega excited about finishing the Imp off and luckily because the updates on here are a bit behind I still have a few more stages I can post up. I shall eek them out though, buy myself some time.. In the meantime I'm going to post up few vids I have found on youtube. Ones that keep me enthused about the build- mainly because of the sounds I hope my Honda engine should emulate. This one here I found recently. Now I imagine the aircooled 911s do have a lot more engine noise but the exhaust note is what I'm loving in this vid... This next vid from Harry Metcalfe has some nice bits (in between his lovable waffling on) and the car is just lovely!... And finally here's a clip of a Goldwing that gives an idea of the similar exhaust note when extended. It sounds lush! ... I'm looking forward to the exhaust stage of the build but I do need to learn what's the best layout for sound. I'm also doing continued research into Itbs and injection, plenum chambers feeding itbs, remote air feed etc. That's definitely more of a subject to discuss in the injection thread though. Excited about that stage though!!!

yeah pretty much that. I think it can have any tooth combination (so long as the cam sprocket has twice as many teeth as the crank one) but the chain has to have a number of links that cant be evenly divided by either sprocket. Does that sound right?

Oh you guys. Lol. When this engine explodes I'll post up some fantastic vids and then start planning my Fezza f40 engine install which I'm totally happy to be gifted...

All I need to do is stick some tape on my headlights and I'll have a race car!

I think it needs a thread on here! Can you persuade him to join up to oldschool?

Ohhhhhh were you now. Easy to say that now eh? Too late - you cant claim that one barryboy

Yeah good idea on a little sight window. Or better yet - a little peephole camera which connects to a 7" screen on the dash for real time chain wear watching. With a strip of warning leds that light up progressively as the chain wears out. That will appease Anton I can use some sort of etch a sketch with one arm connected to the chain tensioner then linked via gear cables (shimano sis because that's my flavour) to the sketch pad on the dash. Real time graphs for @Roman @Spencer the chain barries on Retro Rides forum are good too... Until last night I had never heard of a 'hunting tooth' and then one excited Barry who thought he'd catch me out quipped in ... "have you added a hunting tooth for each chain run?" Fuck me! Here we go again ! I looked it up... "In design of all kinds of power transmission gearing, also applicable to design of chain or toothed belt drives. A "hunting tooth" is used to avoid gear ratios where the tooth count of one gear is an exact multiple of a gear it mates to (e.g. ratios 1:1, 2:1, 3:1 ...). The reason for avoiding integer gear ratios is that in such a design each tooth of the smaller gear always contacts exactly the same tooth or teeth in the gear it mates to. This in turn will cause accelerated wear, usually into an oval shape. Thus if designing an (approximately) 2:1 gear ratio, the designer uses gears with 49 and 24 teeth respectively, then every tooth on each gear comes in contact with on it's mating gear. This in turn causes minor variations in wear to be propagated across all teeth. In sprocket design, it is desirable to design for the chain or belt having a number of links which should not be evenly divisible by the number of teeth in any sprocket," Needless to say I hurriedly put down my evening cup of Horlicks, donned my best slippers and popped out to the workshop to check it out. By pure luck my combination of sprocket tooth counts vs chain link count happens to work out with an effective hunting tooth. Thank fuck. Must have been a birthday present from the engine god (yep- I was one year older yesterday) Although in reality if there was not a hunting tooth I'd probably have left it anyway... Its all shits and giggles

I've already lined up some pretty sweet 13 x 7 wooden cart wheels.

Neither chain is very long and are as short as I can go - if I remove a link the teeth will clash.

There's no room for double row. Anyway- the chain I have selected and bought wont be snapping in a hurry. Wear over thousands of miles is more my worry but I'm not losing sleep over it. Its all just a fun toy to play with. Next time you need a chain fitting please let me fit it for you- decent quality chains on bikes should not snap if fitted correctly. They'll only give trouble if mashed up in a previous situation like dropping down between the rings and chainstays etc. Then you can go riding with me again Mazda rotary chains are single row- well at least the 12A ones are that I'm familiar with.

yeah sort of like that - definitely tensioners. Possibly a guide on the longer chain. Interestingly ford removed the guide on their later duratec engines because whip is not really a thing on oil pump drives- the oil pump acts as a buffer (always a consistent resistance) and so takes away the pulses that you get on the cam chain setup for example. So ford found somewhere they could save money.

I'm still quite far behind on the updates so that bit has just yet to be posted up. After lockdown ended and I kind of 'went back to work' with paid work coming back in the goldwing project went right to the back burner so to speak. In fact I have spent more time in the last few weeks typing out these posts than I have working on the engine! Something to do with it being warmer inside than out in the workshop. Now we are right into the start of building a mezzanine so engine fettling is going to be put aside again. Lucky I have a few 'updates' still to be released eh

yeah just an oil pump. Previously there was a smaller chain that ran two oil pumps plus a water pump! So as far as torque loadings go the chain I have selected is pretty burly and compared to the torque a strong rider can put through a chain its nothing. Wear over a long time is the issue but yeah- oil bath. Certainly going to find out over time how long it lasts. Treat me and my engine as an interesting experiment in the testing of bicycles chains.