In reply to Patrick :
Well, for starters, I'm watching X-Men: Apocalypse, and between the scene in East Berlin and the scene in Poland, I'm getting flareups of wannaladaitis.
I might - MIGHT - have someone looking to buy the RX-3. It pains me to let it go but tTo be honest I think I'd rather have a Lada 2107 or a 2101 over the RX-3, which probably pegs me as a next-level weirdo and maybe puts me on some sort of watch list. Eh, whatever, the 2101 is a ruggedized Fiat, which are neat cars in themselves. And the main problem I have with the RX-3, besides the time and money to get it where I'd want it to be, is that I'd be constantly afraid that it would disappear from the last place I parked it.
I’d rock a Lada, but that’s probably painfully obvious at this point
The sad/sick thing is, one of my RX-3 ideas was to leave it the hell alone suspension wise instead of doing a 4 linked Ford 7.5 in the rear and a Volve 740 front suspension in the front and big Gartrac style fender flares, do the minimal work needed to repair the structural rust around the windshield (the only structural rust on the car), and put "anything that runs" under the hood. Try to rebulld the twin dizzy 12A, pop in a stock port FC 13B, whatever. I had ideas of J-spec 1.6l Miata drivetrains, or even something like a Toyota 4A-LC or, in a true fit of weirdness, finally do my VW engine to Mazda rotary trans adaptor and throw a 1.8 8v engine with a Weber 32/32 carb in there, just for funsies.
I'm not a well man.
cghstang said:
This thread needs more comments from the gallery.
I love this car and all the scented brap.
that's less sideways than I'm used to seeing you lol
In reply to irish44j :
Knurled is not the driver in that picture. 
In reply to cghstang_chris :
Indeed... that is the day that you ran a 42.something and I decided I needed to demolish that time...
Went to Summit, gave them a coupon and $140ish, and they gave me an MTX-L with 8' cable.
I thought that would mean ALL the wiring would be extra long. Nope, just the LSU4.9 to gauge harness. So the gauge could not be mounted to the left side where the shift light used to be. Instead I zip tied it to the tach:
and draped the wiring down the right side of the center stack and down under the dash where the MS harness disappears under the firewall. Removed the LC-1 and harvested some of its wiring to extend the 2' or so extra length I needed, ran the 8' harness through the firewall, and calibrated the sensor. Then I loomed the wiring with that nice curled finger trap type loom that is a righteous bitch to get wires into, and ziptied it in some strategic locations. I settled on stopping after putting the glovebox back in (needed to pull it for wiring access) and maybe tomorrow I will remember to take my laptop to work, and bring a 7/8" crows foot socket home from work, and then I'll be able to swap the sensors, finish securing things, and actually start tuning the thing. Weather is supposed to be decent tomorrow.
id be tempted at your rx3 but i fear im just too big for it.
In reply to fidelity101 :
One of the reasons I like it is that it has a ton more headroom. They're actually pretty big cars inside although they're a bit narrow. This may be helped by the fact that it's a 4 door, apparently pretty much every body panel for the 4 door is different from the 2-doors, and I suspect that the greenhouse is wider and taller.
But they're roughly the same dimensionally as a MkII Escort, just a slightly shorter wheelbase (90" like a Miata vs. the Escort's 95" like an RX-7). There's probably very little back seat room, but the fuel tank is in the trunk (like an Escort...) which helps interior room too, since there's nothing under the floor.
Didn't have time to collect my laptop this morning. Went home from work, immediately felt like passing out from fatigue, mounted laptop in laptop bag and embarked on journey to Batcave with side stop to Rally's where I got charged $5 for something that should have been 2 for $4. Then the temp dropped about ten degrees and it started raining.
Berk it. I switched the old sensor out for the new one, tidied up the comically long O2 sensor extension harness, listened to the Batcave's neighbor's ducklings quacking in their nest while I went KOEO to check wideband operation (the Batcave smells like a barn now, but will no doubt be free of any pests that ducks eat), and went the fark home, tired and spent.
I need pierogie. I need cheburek. I need all the Slavic dumplings, with lots of sauteed onion and sour cream.
The ducklings are why I didn't tune the car. Ordinarily, I would have just cracked the door a bit and did some idle and light rev tuning inside. But this gets fumey even with some 4' long hoses to direct the exhaust outside, and I don't know if ducks are canary-like in their ability to die in the presence of imperfect air, and I'd feel horrible if I killed someone elses' pets. So live on, little duckies.
Damn, i went by the batcave around 6:45, I would have stopped but i was dying of hunger and had my truck pointed at IGA on bagley
In reply to Patrick :
There's an IGA on Bagley? (edit: Stearns and Bagley? That's on the drive from my new work to there! The fastest way is to take the Turnpike from I-71 to 10, if I have 75 cents burning a hole in my pocket, but I work on 130th between 82 and 303, and Grafton Rd. will take me all the way from 130th to Station without encountering city traffic... Station, as you know, is basically Stearns if it wasn't for that condo complex in the way, and Stearns is a critical road on the path to the Batcave:
My new plan, incidentally, is Batcave every night I don't feel completely dead. Even if it's just to clean up/organize. The weather is warming up so I don't have to worry about my fingers falling off, and there is a lot of cleaning and organizing to do, and the first event (cancellation) of the year is about a month out.
Patrick
MegaDork
3/20/19 10:44 p.m.
Yeah stearns and bagley. Just discovered their apple bread today and it’s glorious. Was in avon today
March 21 is take your RX-7 to work day.
letting AutoTune do its thing because I don't have the one handed skillz anymore. It still sucks, but it's better than nothing.
List of to dos:
Reclock steering shaft - way off to left
Find out why cannot get idle below 1500
Find source of burning rubber odor on acceleration
Annoy the MSExtra community about why I can't seem to find a good way to get it to start cold or hot
Ummm, I swear the volvo was there at 9:30am
also that convenient still has the old wonderroast chicken rotisserie as of last time i was there.
In reply to Patrick :
It was. Got out of work at 2pm today, everyone is scheduled for tomorrow and nobody wanted a Thursday appointment. So I went to get the Mazda and do some tuning.
Until I get the starting issue sorted, I won't trust it to get me to work. Also it is friggin cold in the car.
Other thing to sort: Random RPM spikes causing all sorts of issues.
Huh.
Only started after I did a high end pull in 2nd gear, and then the car got almost undrivable with how it'd keep spazzing every few seconds. Not sure if module or MSD or connection or what, and my tach is on a complete separate circuit so diagnosing will be tricky.
It was the tach-out connection on the MSD. It's exposed to the elements, and the MSD has been on the car for over ten years, so it got a bit corroded. The wire going in to the spade terminal was also pretty weak, all but three strands had been broken.
So, new spade terminal, some heat shrink, some cleanup of the recessed male spade on the MSD box, go for a drive, and the hiccups are gone!
The TACH is now hiccuping at higher RPM, but this is probably more of the same. There's a lot of goofiness with my tach driver unit and many places for it to get hiccuppy.
Annoyance: I did not have my laptop with me. I'd decided to just start with a flat 13:1 air/fuel ratio and then play with mixtures later. It's tuned almost perfectly to 12:1-12.5:1 all the time. Well, it runs anyway, once I sort out the other issues I can get a good log going and edit the maps manually. When the weather gets warmer.
Audi is done! Or at least, my part of it.
It was a nice day for a while and rains earlier in the week hopefully washed the salt from the roads, so I got some more work done. I have the tune set up to incorporate the AFR table, and I manually (well, with the help of the log viewer and some math) dialed in the VE table to where it mostly ran where it was supposed to, after about an hour of putzing around on the road. Then I started tweaking the AFR table.
Yeah, no. Not getting nearly the results I'd want. Like going from 13:1 (where I'd generically set up the VE table) to 15:1 actually got me closer to 14.4:1ish. Proof that my injector constants are way out of whack, as I'd suspected. Fed up, I unclicked "Incorporate AFR table" and drove it as-is. Ran nice in the 14.5:1-15:1 range everywhere, and the engine actually likes running there too. Maybe needed a touch more fuel in the 40-50kpa region in the 2500-4000 zone to eliminate a very occasional lean miss. Fine, good, well and good. Switched the VE table to grid mode (I normally tune in 3D table mode), highlighted the 95 and 85kpa rows and multiplied then by 1.06. Highlighted just the 95kpa row and multiplied by 1.06 again. Went for WOT pull: 13 to 12.5ish everywhere, getting richer at the top end. Perfect, book it, done.
Backed it back into its spot and went about debugging. The steering shaft had been installed two splines off, and I'd kept forgetting which DIRECTION it had been off, so I never bothered until now. The tach also still goes haywire over 7000rpm. Previously, I'd decorroded my tach driver module. Today I attacked the connector to the tach's ignitor module on the distributor. This may have been it, as it took no effort at all to unplug. Cinched the terminals tighter and we'll see what happens next time.
I also still have some bad driveline vibes, worse with the trailer attached. I read somewhere that you have to set up an aluminum pinion support with .001"ish PLAY no preload at all, but I think this is allowing it to gyrate at certain speeds. I checked the rearend when everything was hot and it still had play. I am thinking that the pinion has to come out and some shim removed from the bearing spacer. Fortunately, with the 4.44 gears the pinion can be removed without having to pull the differential out.
Next, I need tp do something about the geometry. The lower links sit lower on the axle than with the Mazda rear, and to clear the raised Watts arm I had to raise the axle side of the 3rd link by about 1.5 inches, so I have a ton of axle rotation happening with suspension travel. This makes getting the U joint angles happy impossible. So, I am going to raise the pivot on the chassis end, and fix a lot of problems happening back there in the process. First, we remove the mover's blankets that I use for sound deadening.
"Somebody's been sleeping in MY bed!" That's all poop. Time to find my vacuum cleaner. Moving blankets are probably hazmat by now, so to the trash they go. Just out of frame is the horribad job I did splicing in trailer controller modules. That must also be dealt with.
Looking at the last datalog after I declared the tune to be good enough, I think I see what was going on. I apparently have a floating voltage issue. The AFR numbers in the histogram do NOT match what the MTX-L gauge is reading.
Knurled. said:
I'm not a well man.
The first step is to acknowledge the problem, sadly you picked the wrong support group (aka GRM) AND like Hotel California, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave... 
No pictures because it's hard to take pictures with a tablet when you are wearing gear oil covered latex gloves.
Used my new Bauer 1/2" electric impact gun to zip apart the pinion bearing assembly on the 9". I really like this little device. What don't like, however, is that the new battery that I'd put in my calipers had died, and I could not find the package that had the other battery, so I couldn't really measure the shims to see which one was the thinnest, to pull out as a starting point. So, I went for the ultra scientific "see how easily they flex" method and removed one that might have been .002" or so. Put the pinion back together and there's no detectible play, and extremely light drag, so this will have to do.
The rear (well, middle, given there are three) pinion bearing's race didn't look all that hot. Was kinda "cloudy" looking and there were marks in it like some flakes of debris went through it. It doesn't look like the surface is coming apart, so we'll run it for now. It might just have been getting beat up due to running with clearance instead of preload, we'll see. There were also some small (very small) chips missing from the very tip of one of the pinion gears, and I don't remember if it was like that or not. The fluid came out clean, at least.
Then I cross threaded the 1/8"NPT drain plug, and remembered that I don't have a 3/8" Allen to get the fill plug out, and I started to feel a bit low-sugar woozy, so I stopped there. WIll probably finish putting it back together tomorrow night as I may need the car mobile on Wednesday immediately after work.
Pictures now, text later.
Found a wooly bear on the floor! I couldn't tell if it was dead or not so I blew at it and it curled up. Of course it was in a high traffic area so I had to watch my step as I worked finishing up putting the rearend together.
Had a kind of Three Stooges moment. Was vacuuming up the mouse poop, the vacuuming up the debris in the front floor, vacuuming up inches of accumulated dust behind the driver seat, vacuuming for HOURS, HOURS I say. Then I got up to go to the other side and noticed the air in the garage was opaque. Apparently I'd removed the filter from the vac to use it in wet mode and sort of forgot about it, so it distributed all the dust and dirt to everywhere else in the garage. Oops.
Went for a drive. Really need to adjust cold start by like 20% at 70F and taper it out to 160. Also need to add some fuel in the cruise region and at idle. The drivetrain vibes, however, and 80% gone! It was the play in the pinion.
And then I heard an odd clunk/swish sound when I came to a stop on the off ramp. The sunroof decided right then to unbolt itself completely.
Well, found that rattle anyway...
