New battery stick came in the mail yesterday and I ran it through a charge cycle. It looks like the rest of the sticks that I have decided are 'good' so I'm topping all of them off to see if there is any weird self discharge going on. Unless something terrible shows up, tomorrow is reassembly!
IMA light off. Battery indicator says full. 170V at idle. I'm not going to say it works yet, but it's a lot closer than it way this morning. Tomorrow, road testing.
It's back together and I drove about 20 miles around the neighborhood today. I need to get insurance and a 30 day plate on it so I can do more serious road testing. I have a cylinder #2 miss. I played hot potato with the coils and it stayed on #2. Checked the plugs, they look nice. I suspect it's an injector and I'm hoping that some fuel system cleaner, good gas and driving will sort it out. The car hasn't been on the road consistently for a couple of years, there are links that need to be worked out.
The big issue is VTEC. It's throwing a code saying it's not working. I pulled the solenoid and it clicks with power applied. I cleaned the screen which was well and truly clogged with goo. Still throwing the code. I'm trying to remember if I changed the oil (it's clean looking) and if that would make any difference.
More troubleshooting tomorrow, I'm up for suggestions on my VTEC woes.
I just saw on the Smoking Tire youtube channel that you can retro fit Nissan Leaf batteries and double the voltage? True?
No idea. I can see doubling capacity, but I doubt doubling voltage would make the systems happy. Not sure it's worth it without a bunch of other trickery. The car HAS to have the gas motor on to move with how it works now, more electric power would give you more boost, but it wouldn't be as useful as it would be in a hybrid that let you drive around on just electric.
There is one guy working on the Leaf conversion ("Linsight"). It is not complete, though he does have some demonstration videos on youtube and an occasionally active thread on insightcentral. It will require a bunch of other trickery.
Does VTEC on this motor shut off 2 of the cylinders on decel so that engine braking is done by the hybrid system like on the Civic?
I know that coasting or very light braking will cause the charge indicator to light up, so it's using some sort of logic to do that. Not sure if it deactivates cylinders or not, but VTEC engages at whatever high RPM makes massive three cylinder power.
Texas has an interesting registration purgatory in areas that require emissions testing. You can't register a car without passing emissions, but you can't drive a car (to get enough drive cycles to pass emissions) without registering it. Luckily you can get a 30 day paper tag for any car that you have insurance on. I own this car, but that's not strictly necessary. $30 and I'm on the road.
I decided I should baseline the car with specified fluids before I decide things are broken. The transmission takes two quarts plus just enough to make you buy a third. Luckily I have the left over bit from the RSX so I only needed two. I only takes 2.6 quarts of oil. It's the anti R63 in so many ways.
The transmission is better. Not good, but not needing to be thrown away. As long as you wait until you are below 20mph it will slide right into second, and first is a complete stop affair. Manageable. The new oil seems to have fixed the VTEC issue, which is awesome. All I have left is a cylinder two miss under light load steady state driving. Could be an injector. Could be the many years old gas, could be a combination of the two. I think I'm going to try and run a couple tanks of premium through it and see what happens.
It's fun to drive in it's own special way. Very light, very short, very slow. It behaves best above 3k RPM so so winding it out is pleasant. The car has been sitting, it needs to be driven.
The miss has been traced to the EGR system. More to follow, but I LOVE troubleshooting this stuff. I'm very close to bringing this car back from the dead.
Ok, it's definitely the EGR. Driving with it unplugged makes the car behave perfectly, except for the CEL for the EGR. 
Lots of potential fixes which I will start on today, but it turns out I love driving this thing so I have to find down time to let it cool so I can work on it.
Picked up deucekid#1 from school last night and took the car grocery shopping this morning. The more I drive the car the better it gets. Grocery shopping for a family of six is interesting. This is what you see when you open the hatch. Not a lot of space.
There is a nice smugglers compartment which is very useful. 
The plan of attack for packing groceries is to put the milk, flour, ham, and anything you don't want hitting you in a panic stop in the hole.
The rest goes on the shelf with the understanding that the little lip at the front is likely to act like a ski jump if you need to brake hard.
And yes, I could have put things in the passenger foot well, but this was an experiment. I wanted to see how practical this car would be for the kind of young cool couple that I imagine would have been buying these new. Not as practical as a 911, but not bad.
Glad to see its back form the dead!
I have no problems grocery shopping in the Miata but it's just me and a 9 year old. I'd love to have that much room.
I think the Miata trunk is about as big as that, and keeps things from flying forward.
Love to see the progress on this thing. Hate to be that guy but after seeing the detail work to bring it back to life, have you thought about hitting the grey trim with some black trim paint or to Back to black?
This unplugged thing is the EGR valve on an Insight. Very easy to get to, which is nice, non serviceable, which is absurd.
There are several reports of fixing EGR related surging by soaking the whole valve in lacquer thinner for a couple of hours. I'm not usually a fan of these witchcraft type fixes, but every other fix for the valve risks destroying it, so worth a try. While that's soaking we move onto problem area #2, the EGR plate. This little guy is sandwiched between the block and the intake manifold and has enough passages to confuse the Minator. Word is they get clogged. I pulled the metal gasket and the plate off together and things looked bad.
Pulling the gasket carefully away revealed the passages to cylinders #1 and #3 completely blocked and the #2 passage mostly blocked.
Bit of work with a pick and some solvent and things were pretty again.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly, three bolts, four nuts, a couple hoses and one electrical connector. A quick drive around the block and we have no misses, no hesitation, and for now, no codes. Crossing my fingers that things are solved for now.
Still can't quite get used to the valve train noise (though it sounds about like the Civic did) so I think I'm going to do one more check of the valve clearances tomorrow and then just drive it for a bit.
crankwalk wrote: Love to see the progress on this thing. Hate to be that guy but after seeing the detail work to bring it back to life, have you thought about hitting the grey trim with some black trim paint or to Back to black?
It's on the list of possibilities. I shouldn't keep this car. I should just send it up the road now before I get attached. I should be working on the R63 instead.
In reply to mazdeuce:
I would try to look at it from the "Wheeler Dealer" POV:
How much is the car worth?
How much can you sell it for?
How much do you have invested in it?
Will freshening up the trim add enough value to the car to be worth the effort?
Glad to see you got it going
In reply to Ian F:
That really brings up the next moral issue. Right as I was taking the battery apart someone from the forum said they'd take the car as is. I didn't feel comfortable not finishing the fix, so I told them to wait and we'd adjust the price a smidge it it all worked.
But, and there's always a but, now it looks like it really works properly. Maybe. Don't want to jinx myself, and that means it's a $25 radio and a little soldering away from being a $2-2500 car here in Houston. I could probably let it for somewhere on the north side of $1500 and break even which is like winning the lottery for me with project cars.
I don't want to leave $1000 on the table, but I did kind of imply that the price wasn't going to go up that much.
New code of the day is P0420. Catalytic converter. Berk.
I'd see if an O2 Sensor Simulator works on the downstream sensor. Also, maybe try disconnecting the battery for a while to allow the fuel trims to reset? Could be running in a certain way due to low EGR flow, but now that you've fixed that, it hasn't compensated back to normal yet.
stylngle2003 wrote: I'd see if an O2 Sensor Simulator works on the downstream sensor. Also, maybe try disconnecting the battery for a while to allow the fuel trims to reset? Could be running in a certain way due to low EGR flow, but now that you've fixed that, it hasn't compensated back to normal yet.
This is a topic close to my heart as well. Our SUV has pre-cats that are known to burn thru, which then in turn, they stop catalyzing. Once this occurs, you see a CEL for emissions. CEL = no remote start, which sucks because getting into a cool car in the summer, or a warm one when its snowy is great. Not having it because a stupid unnecessary part that the EPA Nazis forced on the industry took a thousand dollar crap boils my blood.
So, im curious about something. The upstream and downstream O2 sensors for these precats are about 18" apart. How could one go about mixing some combinations of resistors and transistors and wire smoke and voodoo wizardry to fool the computer into thinking that a modified version of the upstream sensors data is valid for the downstream sensor? Im thinking that if one had such knowledge, that splicing into the upstream wire, and running the signal thru a small circuit of some kind could modify that signal to make the ECU happy, and run it into the wire for the downstream sensor...If all that gibberish makes sense.
Is something like this possible?
/threadjack
In reply to stylngle2003:
I pulled the O2 sensor this morning (mostly to make sure it wasn't stuck) hit it with a torch for a few seconds to make sure there wasn't anything gross on it (looked great) a simulator is my next option. Still 27 days on the paper tag to get it working or sell it.
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