gibbon

oh sorry I thought you said the generator needed an input, re-read it now and gotcha. Can you give a link to a suitable regulator? thanks

hmm not sure about that, this thing is a true PMG, it has no input capacity whatsoever. just spinning magnets

Got a little engine here, battery isn't charging It's got some funky brushless generator in it where the permanent magnets are mounted in a casing and spin around a fixed coil. Output is good but is in AC. the output wiring is very light, I doubt it produces more than 15A There's no part numbers or anything on it or anything. I'm after a single unit that will both act as a rectifier, and as a "down stream" regulator, ie dropping output down to 14 volts without having access to a field input. wondered if this is quite a normal little generator in certain circles and if anyone is familiar with the regulators for them?

OK - so in a more roundabout way, having an LVVTA cert for a modification doesn't necessarily mean that the modification was done here in NZ?

if you import a modified car does it have to go through LVVTA certing for whatever's been done to it? Or is there a japanese version of certs that we accept over here?

can't say I checked for that, I guess I just blank off the booster vac line?

ok well it sounds like I know what needs to be done doesn't mean it's gonna actually get done, but still...

how fast can I swap a head out. do I have the mojo. do I want to buy another head gasket. oh god I'd have to make another inlet gasket because they don't exist anymore..... etc etc

Haven't tried a compression check but starting to think I'd be best served by swapping my old head back on, be it stem seals or cracked head.

could be this, just to add some more info this is what else I tried: I blanked the oil feed to the turbo, pulled the inlet pipe off, disconnected the airflow meter so it was in limp mode, then held the compressor with my fingers to stop it fucking the bearings by spinning with no oil. And what I found was it only smoked after I snapped the throttle shut, ie at high vacuum. I put it down to not having the pcv functioning as the inlet was disconnected, maybe it's sucking through the stem seals... this is a head I hadn't used prior. Is there a way to really isolate a stem seal issue?

it definitely is, but isnt it weird how it doesn't smoke at all until the car warms up. and when it does, it's instantaneous. the revs abruptly drop, the smoke abruptly starts

is that the symptom of a dying turbo? This one is definitely blowing oil out the compressor but it spins happily enough at idle, I don't think it's seizing or anything

some is extremely old. some is new. some is avgas

So I'm still halfheartedly trying to fix the starion even as it disappears out the door. The thing fires up first crank and appears to run perfectly for a few minutes, then suddenly like a flip of a switch the revs drop them start rising and falling every couple of seconds like the idle motor is chasing itself, and it starts smoking out the exhaust. Given the timeframe I suspect it's as it's coming off it's auto choke configuration or going into closed loop, but not too sure why it would cause the smoking? I always assumed it was blue smoke but s guy today reckons it looked white to him. Thoughts? Next steps to diagnose?

got the wideband working, just a dicky plug in the back of the gauge, herp derp

no, fuck it, this motherfucker is going up for sale

aftermarket adjustable suspension, do the threads and adjuster nuts need to be steel to be road legal or is aluminium ok?

fuck I'm so filthy about this AEM wideband. It has literally less than five minutes of runtime on it and it's fucking dead. how? why? I just want to sort out the oil burning issue first. originally it was just smoking all the time but I blanked the oil feed to the turbo and held the compressor with my finger while the car idled, and there was no smoke until I revved up and backed off, then there was a big puff of blue smoke. obviously the turbo inlet was off while I was doing that so there was no PCV function, hopefully that's all that's causing it. not too pleased about having to pull the turbo and wondering AGAIN if I should just yoink the engine out at that point and pop the spare one in also the windscreen wipers occasionally twitch randomly. only seen this once before on an E100 corolla, and a few days later it spontaneously combusted

I pulled the lower control arms on the Mazda as the rear bushings were torn. Pressed the old bushings out without paying attention to the fact that the inner bores are a slotted shape rather than concentric. Is there a standard orientation for the slots?

I used to use a hookit scotch-brite wheel until the engine shop told me off, apparently too abrasive even for an iron block?

too afraid to get them tested because I'm not sure what my options are if one goes bad! yes still running the factory setup, I thought about fitting up the CA18DET inlet manifold but at that point it's basically less work to do the evo head swap I just bought a GSR-V workshop manual from yahoo japan. wasn't cheap and all in japanese but google translate is pretty magic these days. i'd say an english version doesn't exist except that when I bought my car, amongst the shitload of spares was ONE tantalising page torn out of an english manual describing the DASH valve system

three years later, oh the drama I have had. including another child which relegated all vehicles to the naughty corner for some time, during which time they repaid me with rust (triumph) and various mechanical failure (starion). I'll probably dig out some pictures later so this post is pretty much a blog for my benefit until I have time to format it. OK where were we. right the exhaust was back in and the car was sort of running. then what happened. oh yeah, all the brakes seized up because fuck you. so I pulled them out and rebuilt them all. The tyres started going down which I'll get to eventually. I faffed around a lot trying to work out why the wideband was reading ultra lean with any load on the engine. Maybe the secondary injector wasn't firing? I pulled the injection top hat and confirmed the injectors were both working. I remembered some of the air flow meters I had in the box had a single tube that bypassed the sensor, and some had two tubes. Maybe I had too much air bypassing the sensor? I swapped in a single tube meter, now the thing wouldn't start at all! It was around this time that my daughter was born so the cars went thoroughly on the backburner About six months later I got back to the car. the brakes had seized again. this time I think it was something to do with the master cylinder. I pulled the cylinder and ditched the one way valves. it was full of rusty crap so it got a clean then back in. Bought another one from Rockauto but the flange was wrong. reconnected it, refilled it, now one of the output lines has a leak. doing some one man bleeding and hit the throttle by accident, only to find the pedal totally stuck. turns out the throttle plate had corroded completely shut. eventually managed to free it with a lot of wd40 and heat. I thought to myself yikes if the throttle has seized up, I'd better keep this engine turned over more regularly HA HA TOO LATE IT WAS ALWAYS TOO LATE Engine totally seized. turns out when I pulled the top hat to bits to inspect the injectors, I disturbed one of the water jackets and the coolant system gleefully poured into the throttle body, inlet manifold and cylinders. wouldn't budge for love nor money. I poured boiling oil down the plug holes and left it for a week. Nope. I pulled the starter and levered the ring gear with a pry bar, nope. I borescoped the cylinders and found them full of rusted water shit. head came off, I scraped the rust out as best I could and filled the whole thing with oil again, gave it a blast with a heat gun and got on the ring gear again. it moved, ever so slightly. more heat, it moved back the other way the same amount.... over the next hour I nursed the thing into a full rotation. I'm going to call the bores marginal at this point because I want to be able to justify the not-pulling-of-the-block that I proceeded to (not) do. Instead I ran a hone down the bores as best I could. I drained the oil and found no water in it. turned the engine over a crapload, then put the head back on with a new cam belt. stripped out the aircon while i was there because let's be honest... So I finally got it all back together and of course it won't start. crank crank crank crank. I check the valve and ignition timing, they're fine. oh there's a plug off the distributor LOL I'm so silly. hook it up, crank crank crank, still no start. faff around again, disable the fuel pump and spray a bunch of shit down the inlet. no start. crank crank crank, at least the oil is getting a good cycle through. eventually I get two farts and a pop, but ONLY with my foot hard on the gas pedal. too much gas somehow? at this point I notice that my brand new AEM wideband sensor has shat the bed and will only read maximum lean. it feeds back to the ECU, so maybe that's the problem. I try without the air flow meter and o2 connected, and it farts into life and smokes the entire garage and neighbourhood out. testing my theory, I plug the AFM and o2 back in, but this time it starts perfectly. So who knows? Anyway now I have a running car and two new problems. one is a busted wideband, the other is the smoke, it aint going away. it's there at idle, it gets worse with revs. it's stinky oil smoke. surely it's busted oil control rings. I've busted the oil control rings breaking the bottom end loose. or is it my shitty hone job, too little too late? one last hail mary... maybe it's the turbo oil seals? maybe a $27 ebay turbo rebuild kit wasn't the key to component longetivity? pulled the compressor discharge tube and it's slick with oil.... THANK YOU EBAAAAAAY And that's what three years of progress looks like folks

I was hoping there was a flow per second option rather than being RPM reliant. easy enough to take a signal from the coil I suppose

is it really that big a deal? look at your alloy inlet manifold, it'll have steel fittings out the wazoo. is stainless steel that much worse? I actually don't know

I figured that might be the case, but the rotor is still only where it is, right? If the computer tells the coil to fire twenty degrees earlier, the rotor won't be lined up with the distributor cap pole?