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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?

does speeduino require an RPM or cam/crank position input in order to schedule fuel flow? or will it happily do it based on airflow and temperature inputs alone?

dumb question, but I just realised that my starion has no flyweight or vacuum advance on the distributor. i cant think of another way it might change ignition timing... am I missing something? are there other factory cars that just have locked ignition as standard?

Basically there's a car I'm looking at that has a cage welded in, and rego is on hold. Looks like it started to turn into a track car but never got finished. Good to know about the cert, I'll ask about that for sure Are there any roadworthiness issues around cutting the cage out? The rego may be on hold but I'm worried about taking it in for a wof and being told something like "nah this has had a cage in it, it'll never go on the road again"

If a car has a rego and a cage, is there anything about cutting the cage out that would jeopardize the road legality?

Can you adjust out the clutch pedal pushrod to try and get a little more throw on it? I guess you don't want the bite point too much higher though

yeah I'm to-ing and fro-ing about whether to spend the extra on a running legal one but I keep coming back to "but then what would I do with it?" buying a project means shopping for car parts on the internet which is 200% hands down my favorite pastime (miles ahead of "working on cars")

"if you can't afford a decent one, you can still afford to pay three times as much over eight years to make a crap one marginal"

yup I've asked for the paperwork, no reply yet though Deep down I think it's a case of "if you can't afford a decent one, you can't afford to make a crap one decent"

thanks guys, we are already into second hand news regarding what was actually said and done and by who, so yes I will be proceeding with caution OK so my recent revelation is that there is a border check, and a compliance certification process, and they aren't one and the same. the current owner says that the car "went through compliance" which I guess is the certification check. presumably it didn't pass otherwise It'd have plates on it and be worth twice as much. anyway I did the sensible thing and asked for a copy of the border check, compliance paperwork and the rust repair cert, which despite this being a deal worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, I am sure will be seen as a totally unreasonable demand and I'll never get a reply meanwhile he is being offered swapz for everything under the sun

can someone please spoonfeed me like little baby Looking at a car. was bought into the country, issued VIN, flagged for rust, first owner then pinched the engine out of it then sold the body. second owner sat on it and now wants to sell it. along comes a sucker: 1. does the original compliance inspection have a deadline? or can I just get them to ring up the VIN and they'll know exactly what to re-check. 2. is there any significance in it having had a VIN issued? does that mean it's at least passed some level of scrutiny? 3. does the original compliance crowd need to do the recheck? guessing it'll be someone in auckland 4. does the car have to be presented complete in order to finish compliance? (ie do I need to find a replacement engine) if so, would the replacement engine having a different serial number cause problems? do they even check?

if it's a big enough slug of air you might be able to pick it up by tap-testing it? you'll feel like an idiot tap-tap-taparooing down a zillion meters of pipe though I would probably do a proof of concept first, half fill a couple of meters of spare pipe, cap it, bend into an arch and test to see if there's a difference in sound

compressor ran good, except it seemed to be rigged to cut out at some stratospheric PSI. manual was in italian so I was trying to look up the pressure adjustment and it was like a night at the opera. got there in the end though

I'm going to start bonging wires together as soon as I r finished this coffee so I hope not. the old motor had a triangle on the dataplate so delta I guess

Its all three phase... there was a manual with the new one but books are for dorks. perhaps I should read it (like a nerd)

wires and shit, plz help

change of subject, I've just finished replacing our 90 year old American compressor with a brand new Italian one. Got to the wiring and much like a guy at his first orgy I have got no idea what's supposed to go where

The slab would be about 20x5m so probably about the same area as yours although I was allowing 10mm plus depth, at least in one patch where I'd want to put up my hoist. I pulled 40k out of my ass, good to hear it can be done much cheaper, we already have compacted gravel on the site so that probably helps too. But given that I already have the containers, that 8-12k money for the slab would probably cover the costs for getting them gutted and joined, and of course they already come with a floor! Thought about the canvas archgola thing but I've only got a 6x20 site to play with. It's basically going to be a lean-to on the side of the workshop, I already pay lease on the gravel patch so kinda dumb to do nothing with it

anybody have any experience chopping up shipping containers? I've got two 40ft containers sitting next to each other, I had a fever dream about cutting the walls out between them and turning the whole thing into a giant paint booth or something. Maybe raising the roof too? Basically I want more workshop space but a slab alone is like 40 grand