Roman

It's the only throttle with an air filter

In other news, those "Jet plane vs car quarter mile race" type things are so stupid. How about a 0-600mph race instead... Or race against a tomcat with an aircraft carrier style launch hook thing starting it off

Yeah I can see the HPC stuff being worthwhile if you fork out for the fancy one and get it dipped or whatever so it coats the inside as well. So it reflects a fair amount of heat before it gets into the metal to start with. But just spraying on the outside seems a bit meh, and as people have said it still seems to radiate heaps of heat anyway. But, I've also had an engine bay full of nasty fibre stuff from crumbling wrap, which in terms of automotive horribleness is about on par with the smell of old diff oil.

My stupid front seats weigh about 10 billion billion kilograms (well, about 15-20kg each) I pulled one apart to see if there were any hidden gold bars, but alas. There's about 4-5kg worth of complete junk in there for adjusting every little seat thing possible though. Think I'll just weld the adjuster thingies all solid except for the seat angle and headrest height and biff all of the stupid shit in there. I didnt even know some of the things in it were even adjustable. Saving ~5kg per seat though is pretty swish. My usual welding technique is: 1. Stick weld it 2. horrible failure 3. Sentra Dave tells me off 4. Drink his beer while he fixes my blunders Oooorrr I might try get the argon bottle refilled this week so I can make blobs and holes with tig instead.

Hey so people use fibreglass a lot for insulation (as in, pink batts etc) But is the air gap between the fibres etc the main reason its a good insulator? So fibreglass + epoxy or whatever, for building stuff. Is that a good insulator against heat as well? Also, I'm torn between heat wrapping my exhaust manifold or not. I want to lower engine bay temps but it makes such a grisly mess when it starts to come off. Looks as though the 'lava rock' type stuff might be a bit more resilient than the fibreglass wrap which I've had some pretty terrible experiences with.

Yeah it's the next logical thing to do really. I dont think I really want to do any other physical mods to the motor. I'm quite happy that I can get 7l per 100km but also have a fun car to drive. Going to bigger cams or whatever is probably going to throw the economy out the window. If this motor blows up then I'll try find a low kms manual Altezza engine with the exhaust side VVTI as well, 10hp for 'free' and should get same or better mileage too. They're cheap now, but were impossible to find when I first bought the MR2 beams motor (And it was originally meant to go into an MR2, haha)

Stripping out an S2k would be an easier and cheaper option. They came with heaps of junk like electric folding roof etc that make them heavier. Can get them under 1000kg. And better looking, S2k with hardtop hnnngg

Haha. Yeah that old civic thing with the K motor rules my face. Honda guys seem to have no love for the older stuff! So it's cool seeing such a pristine example of an old Civic,(or whatever it is) with an awesome motor etc.

Nah it's noisy enough without blowing out all of the muffler packing too. When I get a different ECU for it, playing around with launch control stuff will be on the cards for sure. Although I'm not overly keen on hitting the drags too much as it's a bit hard on the drivetrain compared to other things.

Easiest way is to just import the drawing into draftsight (free download) get the picture to scale then just draw dimensions on it. Dont even worry about drawing the object. Then just select the whole lot and scale up or down and the dimensions will self adjust. if you scale it to be 1mm long to start with then for your new scale you just type in how many mm long you want it to be . Solidworks is really good for this sort of thing with its 'smart dimensions' but they can screw you over if youre not mindful. I hate any type of automatic part sizing etc though. As an example used to have a structural steel program that could automatically plonk things together with correct plate sizes bolt grades etc. A few times i used the auto function to add a stiffener to both sides of an i beam, but dragged the edge of one out longer to be a cleat, added some holes. Job done. But then later the model rechecks itself and changes the cleat back to a stiffener and im getting angry phone calls from guys on site trying to hang a beam on invisible cleats haha.

At taupo or hampton i never use 1st so 2 lights would probably do. One for the 2nd to 3rd gearchange and other for the rest. But at the drags the 1st gear change is critical as well as launch rpm. So could set one to 3k rpm or whatever so i know what to aim for. If it turns out that using just 1 is just as good as anything then ill stick with that. But they were cheap enough that buying a few extra wasnt the end of the world! But yeah the idea would be that all 4 light up. Same as those progressive shift lights that start lighting up approaching redline. But this way i can set each light as i please.

Yeah that sounds feasible and a more elegant solution! but im not smart enough with electronics to figure that out and it would be a bit spendier than using a few $11 shift lights. Will see how it goes when they turn up

Yeah OBD2 setup is easy, cant remember the specifics but when you get to that part let me know and I'll dig up some info. Just need the signal from the SIL pin from the ECU (this blurts out the info), 12v and an earth to get it working. I hate electronics too, I get a cold sweat when I see a big wiring loom!

It's not a drama to keep it, because you'll already have the loom which plugs all that stuff into the ECU already. I've got mine converted to 100% cable pull, and it makes the throttle a bit jerky at cruising because it's a big throttle body and a small % change in opening lets in a big amount of air. So the idea with the electronic one is that it can have a non linear opening rate to give a more linear change in power/air/whatever with a big throttle body. Prior to electronic throttle bodies, for anything with a big throttle area like 20v motors or 1UZs they would have a dual staged linkage thing which would open the throttle non linear with cable pull. If that makes sense. I think it can also get commands from the ABS/traction control ECU to tell it to close the throttle a bit etc, but I dont think that will matter if you've got none of that stuff hooked up anyway. It should be easy enough to setup anyway, if you're chasing down any niggles with electronics etc then the easiest way to figure out what's going on is to buy a cheap bluetooth OBD2 thingy and download the Torque App onto your phone/tablet. So you can see sensor data etc in real time based on what the ECU thinks is happening, and it can also show you a list of error codes etc if it thinks its missing any bits. My ECU throws 3 'soft' error codes because it's an ECU from a car that came with auto but it's not seeing any response from the shift solenoids. But they arent codes which stop the motor from working and it doesnt make the CEL flash either so it's no drama.

The car still gets fumy which is annoying and makes me feel sick after an hour or so of driving. when I removed all of the sound deadening from the car initially it actually exposes some holes in the body which are normally covered by the sound deadener only. So I pulled all of the interior back out today to try patch up these holes, turns out there are two gaping big ones where you can see the road and 4 or 5 smaller holes that need covering up. Will just use some plastic card and some silicone I think, doenst need to be pretty just needs to stop me from choking to death haha. Another problem that I've got is that my tacho is too slow to respond in 1st or 2nd gear and it's too hard trying to look down at the tacho anyway because it zings through those gears kinda quick because of the gearing etc. Since my powerband is smallish and peaks at redline its important to shift accurately and it's something I was struggling with at the drags. Traditionally a shift light comes on at a particular rpm. So for example if you wanted to shift by 7400rpm you would set it to 7200rpm so by the time you react it's at 7400. The problem with this though is that the speed that the engine increases rpm changes with each gear but your reaction speed stays the same. Testing my shoddy old man spec reaction times: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime Under ideal situation it takes me about 1/3rd of a second to react to a flashing light or whatever. So 1/3rd of a second in each gear means you need the light to flash at a different rpm before redline each time: It might seem like splitting hairs but if I shift at 6900rpm instead of 7400rpm each time then it costs about 1/3rd of a second on the quarter mile and god knows what at Taupo or Hampton. So the solution: I am going to buy 4 shiftlights haha. If you've got a link or a megasquirt or whatever it's easy to setup the same thing using a single light but this is a solution which will help my shifting which costs under $50 so will see how it goes.

It's got an electronic throttle body, when you pull the cable it only moves the throttle plate 45 degrees. Anything above that is controlled by the ECU and whether it 'lets' you have full throttle etc. So it's got a TPS that measures what you're wanting to do, and then a TPS on the other side that the motor uses to determine where the throttle plate actually is. It works well enough but if you're going to an aftermarket ECU best to just bin all of that junk and turn it into a normal cable pull throttle body.

Took it for a drive... I'm not good at distinguishing fact from placebo when I cant datalog things. But it actually feels smoother and a bit revvier. Might be the imagination at work though. Next drag or trackday though and I'll get some more GPS data to compare. Some other Davescience that I've been fluffing around with - The intake manifold has a rubber spacer at its base, to stop the head from heat soaking the intake manifold. Which works pretty well, but the manifold still gets quite hot from radiant heat in the engine bay. Which ends up doubly bad because I've made the return line for coolant from the back of the head come under the intake manifold. So for testing purposes I thought I'd wrap the shizzle out of it with foam/foil insulation and a judicious amount of duct tape and see if it keeps it any cooler. I've only driven it at night time so far, but after over an hour of driving the manifold and throttle body stay as cool as when you first start the car - used to feel hot to the touch after maybe quarter of an hour or so. The intake temps still creep up by 3-4 degrees by the time the radiator gets hot though so it's still heat soaking a little bit. Might wrap the rest of it and see if that makes a change. Otherwise it might be hot air spilling out the front of the radiator and into the air intake causing it. Not sure if this makes any useful difference but it's not doing any harm apart from making my engine bay look ugly so it can stay for the moment. If it ends up working well I can pretty it up later somehow.

Nominal bore bores Nominal.

Took the extractors off, to get a suspected exhaust leak fixed (Cheers Sentra Dave!) I was just about to put it all back together, when I noticed... The head has been ported on this motor, but the exhaust manifold doesnt match. Woops. so that 'step' has been impeding flow straight off the bat. So I spent a shit tonne of time today grinding the ports out larger to suit, god stainless filings are awful! I dont want to do that again. All finished now, havent had a chance to drive it since then but I suspect this could be worth a horsepower or two! This change might be worth a little bit of time on the drag strip, cant wait for a rerun once traction brackets are sussed! If I get really desperate I could pull out all of the interior too, hahaha. Something in the 14.0 - 14.2 kinda region would float my boat for sure.

Awesome! Thanks I'll give you a shout

Dont see why not... Do you have an M12 tap?

I believe it is/was an M10 1.25.

Hmmm okay. Not much chance of getting it fixed until after the stat days etc. sad face

Fuck ive stripped the thread for exhaust manifold on the head of my engine. Best way to fix?

I saw an iron pipe today it was Fe nominal