mjrstar

Wife had an ee80 many moons ago, it was stolen twice whilst she owned it.. it was replaced by an ae111 which was stolen zero times which was handy..

I just looks up the old ee80, and once again reported stolen /wanted by police. Random..

I'm all good with the current safety inspection of older cars, one thing I though....

I think there should be slightly more leniency for the testing of brake imbalance on old historic /classic.. I want the convenience of going to a vtnz, but I don't want the ballsache of having to get a 50 year old braking system to be as accurate and repeatable as a modern day equivalent when the car weighs under 700kg and probably couldn't do a 17 second 1/4 mile..

could you maybe make 2 halves from some MDF, then use that to press the shape into aluminium and then weld together, if you get some O state alumimium its very workable...

Don't you just ignore the evaporator box and deal with whatever the blower outlet and heater core inlet look like?

This is the stock MX5 bit.

3 minutes ago, rotormotor said:

Not racecar, road legal.

Mx5 ac box delete is an item but bloody US as well.

I'm pretty sure non AC spec MX5 should be a thing? 

Ooh what about an na MX5 duct as a starting point..

Is there an non-aircon model of your car?

If not I made some heater duct bits from fibreglass, started with cardboard and tape then laid what I needed to over the top.. bonus is no-one will ever see it so doesn't need to be a perfect finish..

it might depend a little bit on just how wild the cams are, i have found with an air flow metered engine you can get away with a bit, certainly more than you can on a MAP sensor engine.

You'd want to be sure it has piston to valve clearance, and see if the cams are designed to run close to base cam timing, i dropped some smallish kelfords into my old evo on stock cam gears, and it didn't really have much affect on AFR's, but I can confirm it did in fact go hard for what it was. 

Would something like the top tank off this work?

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/motors/car-parts-accessories/mitsubishi/radiators/listing/4647905590

I have one with a mystery leak that I couldn't be bothered trying to solve so I just got a replacement rad.. 

^^ yeah 100% hf start if you are learning tig. Otherwise you will give up.

Convert the k24 to run Volkswagen dsg, there are kits.

^^about a grand give or take, there is a pretty consistent supply on face crack but I guess supply will dry up one day..

Old mate had a number of dramas on his rally FD. The culprit was a coolant temp sensor that was internally failing, which made the ecu pretty unhappy when it would read something silly like 150deg and then negative 20deg on a rally stage..

for this reason alone you should at consider a fresh OEM sensor in critical applications if they are cheap enough or inspect / test the ones you have before a full send, and have not stupid defaults for open or closed circuit failure. No need to deviate away from stock sensors... With the exception of the O2.

I would also suspect a stock narrow band O2 might not be much use on a tuned rotary, maybe an aftermarket wideband would make more sense?

Others are probably better positioned to talk about closed loop knock control it might be ok for mild tune?

cool car, hopefully you can rescue it!

that cylinder head is probably 1st gen B16a (the cam cover is anyway).. 

P30 - B16a

P72 - b18c black top (i don't think its one of those unless the inlet manifold has been modified to fit)

P73 - B18cr

^^ good point, I had long body in by brain, even after the @keltik comment. 

i bet there are piles of falcon injectors from turbo barras that have been upgraded, even the non-turbo ones might be around 300cc?  but DYOR

1 hour ago, kws said:

My alto is the same size and weighs 670kg or so 

Yeah wife's new shape swift sport is almost normal sized small hatch and somehow weighs less than my ek civic racecar which certainly doesn't have any creature comforts..not sure how Suzuki do it.

^^ I reckon if you take the batteries out and fit a petrol motor you'd get it under 1000kg.

Is the 1000kg rule going to be gvm or tare. In my mind it kind of has to be gvm.

VF really was peak commodore, so much nicer inside than an VE. Whatever the model after was was blegh / not really a commodore..

Mate has been dealing with a similar situation a knock limited Evo, he expiremented with a few brews of ethanol plus peasant 95, I think he settled on E30 for his conservative road tune, and full fat e85 in race time.

That particular engine (2.4 stroker 4g63) was pretty much garbage on straight 95.

One other thing to consider if that both Commodore and Falcon 6 cylinder models go through what I would consider "peak scumbag" phase at about 15 years old, where they are reasonably prolific but nearly all have welded diffs, mis matched wheels, shotgun exhaust, and peeling paint. 

This is where the market really troughs, after this phase the older models are then owned by decerning gentlemen, think XD, XE, VK,VL and the prices rise accordingly as they exit out from the scumbag phase.. it's very repeatable through the years. So pick your spot and you might be in to something that doesn't depreciatie much.

Maybe EA and VN are on the turning point? Perhaps some models take longer to shake off the scumbag status. 

Had a friend's ford territory that did that..one of the main relays was brown inside and occasionally it would only let about 8 volts through.. quite trickey to diagnose, uncool for her when it shuts everything off and every warning on the dash starts scrolling through..

After some poking and prodding I decided it was play in the inner end of the tie rod, not a lot, but some... I do feel like a bit of a scumbag for reusing the steering rack boot and outer tie rod end, but they passed my inspection, it did at least get a new lock tab.