Lucky's Series 3

[Lucky]

There were a load of things wrong with the FD to be honest. Some arose simply from neglect... it's such a complicated bloody thing that some things get overlooked just because they're such a pain in the arse to get to. The cause of the lungful of oil smoke was simply that the turbo drain hose had got scorched where it was touching one of the block studs. Just enough for it to weep a bit, but on full booooooost and then shutoff at the end of the Silverstone straight, it was enough for it to pressurise and splurt a load of oil out... which then made its way back onto the downpipe. It's now a gurt bigbraided stainless pipe with AN-8 fittings!

The reason it wouldn't run was (mostly) plugs. Which was no surprise really; I discovered it had one BUR8, one BUR7 and two RX-8 plugs in it Now, I'd just like to state the bleeding obvious and say it wasn't me who put them in there. I think the last time it was dyno-ed, it shat the plugs (like they do) and there weren't any good spare ones handy so the shop bunged in whatever was available just to get it home and intending to swap in proper ones later. Which then didn't happen presumably cos they were too busy or forgot or whatever. I'm being generous here. Anyway, given that one of the plug electrodes came out when I pulled the boot off, it's a miracle the bloody thing ran at all

Once I found that, I needed to take a long hard look at everything to find out what else might be neglected or overlooked. It's my own fault really, I've tended to let the shop do a lot of work on it purely cos I distrust myself around electronics and wiring and there's so much of it in an FD, but I've learned my lesson and will be doing as much of everything as I possibly can in future



Anyhoo, on with the FB stuff then. So, what was I so unsure about? well, it's got to be wheels, hasn't it? AGAIN

I do like the Compomotives (that's why I bought them, after all) but I've never been quite happy with the dish on them. It's weird, given that they're an offset of +10 I'd expected them to be a lot more dishy than they are. But they're not. All that's happened is that they're a bit of a pain in the arse fitment-wise (and now my lovely new arch liners are in they rub and scrape a bit ) without really giving me the look I was after. So that's a fail/fail then. Anyway, I've been thinking about a change for a while so when some utterly inappropriate wheels popped up for cheaps on RR I thought it was worth a try. Helped that they were a style I've always had a bit of a soft spot for, although arguably several car styling clans would consider it heresy to consider putting them on a Jap wagon...



Yes. Borbet As Oh yeah, that's how cool I am. Or really not, depending on your viewpoint



Sooooooo, there were a couple of problems. One being that they were the wrong PCD, being off an MX-5 (which is why they came with daft tiny tyres stretched unpleasantly). Not such a problem as I have a set of 4x100 to 4x114.3 spacers. But that was a problem cos then the offset was increased by the 20mm of the spacers to a fairly manly 0. So yeah, they genuinely weren't going on with stock arches. A solution was trialled...



...and that was as far as I got Whilst I love the look of JDM y0-style bubble arches ... Thomas' FB is one of my favourites... and I loved the look of mine with a bit of dish (finally)...



...I really don't know if I can bring myself to carve up a good car. Not so fussed about the front wings because I could source some stock (albeit expensive nowadays) ones if I ever wanted to go back standard. But the rears are obviously major surgery and the car would never be able to go back stock. I know it's my car and I can do what I want to it, and I don't believe in acting like some kind of custodian for future classic collectors... but...



...ahhhhh... just dunno. Unable to make a decision, I put some tyres on them as part of the problem was the silly diddy MX-5 sizes and it was hard to envisage what the car'd look like with proper sized ones on. Then the FD rebuild kicked into higher gear and it was months before I thought about the Borbets again... only to realise the tyres were the wrong size. Dunno if I got my maths wrong or the tyre shop put the wrong size on... whichever it's probably far too late to get them exchanged now and I dunno if I want to splurt another 200+ quid on tyres for wheels that may never go on anyway. So for now you can file me under indecisive

and that's ironic really, because a perfect excuse presented itself to start hacking the car up. Remember how I suggested my hasty rust treatment bodges would come back to haunt me? Oh, come on, it was only in the previous post!. Yeah, well. MOT time came around. I figured it might fail on the rear light conversion I'd done. What I wasn't expecting was it to fail on what at first glance looked like a relatively inconspicuous rust hole that I didn't even know was there since it was hidden underneath and partially behind the skirts



There was a matching one on either side. Yep, the sills had gone through As they do. To add insult to injury, the front wing I thought I'd managed to stop the rot in had re-tumoured too. A bit of screwdriver pokeage revealed



Anyway, the sills were the real worry. The deeper we cut, the uglier it got. Sorry for the awful phone cam pics



Well, it needed to be done. This is the osrt of thing I don't mind getting an MOT fail for; from the tiny rust holes about the size of a 1p piece, all this horror was revealed



and you genuinely wouldn't have known it was there until the rear part of the sill snapped right off. To be fair to the guys at Super 7, they did a great job of hacking out all the cancer and making up repair panels. I don't know if official panels are available but having struggled to even find bolt-on wings I a) doubt it and b) don't want to pay for it so the shop's fabrication skills seemed the best option. They did it in record quick time, too, at my request as I was stuck with no transport for the duration. So quickly I missed most of it. I visisted to check progress and it was rather depressingly like this





and within a week (and £700) it was all back up together and all I had to do was invest in some waxoyl. Oh, and get the original tail-lights out of the garage for the MOT. Yep, told you he'd fail it on the LED ones


So that was really 2016 for my FB. Not much to report, still got an abortive attempt to change the wheelage to conclude and a weeks' worth of open-heart surgery. Since then she's been back happily on the daily grind in snow, fog and gales. Here she is sharing woes with an Ian-spec wedgey Mister Two



Ate a set of plugs the other day, but I suppose you have to allow her that and one de-flood a year is forgiveable, given how I've had to neglect her

[A7RXY]

As we have always said these car are great at hiding their rot. Now back to looking good. Sorry to say I still think it looks better on the wheels in the last photo.

Dibs

[Hobbawobba]

Ouch. I've got that exact welding to look forward to when the weather warms up. Nice update though Nik. I was wondering just the other day what you had been up to! I've never particularly been a fan of that style wheel on any car so I can't really have a helpful opinion. That's just me though.

[Lucky]

Fair enough, Borbets are a bit marmite! As much as anything, I got them cos they were offensively cheap and it gave me a chance to play about with different offsets to what I already have. Seems to me that you can tit about with wheel calculators till the cows come home but there's no substitute for just trying the damn things on the car Never was much good at maths. I figure if I take the plunge then the car'll be made ready for whatever righteous wheels I decide upon, should I want to change.

Have to say, I find these enormously arousing...

https://www.autoalloys.com/15x8-stuttga ... ack-bronze

[gt_james]

Looks like a good job done on those sills, £700 well spent on a daily driven FB keeping the tinworm away. I personally think if you want to keep the car at that ride height, then bolt on arches will look awful, but if you lower it (a lot) then you'll get rid of the big arch gap and probably pull them off. I like the look of the borbets and think they suit the rear spoiler and skirts. Do they really stick out that far from the stock arches? can't you pull them or add a smaller flare like Marcs?

[KiwiDave]

Have to say, I find these enormously arousing...

https://www.autoalloys.com/15x8-stuttga ... ack-bronze

Mutual appreciation society now formed

[gt_james]

I've got some pictures of an FB on those wheels on my old laptop if you want to see what it'd look like before committing to buying them

[Lucky]

Arch gap looks massive because the tyres are miniscule and the overarches were hastily thrown on with sticky tape

[Lucky]

Y'see, I knew I was forgetting something! It's only a few pages back in this thread, but was over a year ago now that I was asking for advice about why my electric radiator fan kept not working, if you remember? I got as far as cutting holes in the shrouding with a mind to including air-pressure-opened flaps but that seemed like a bit of a bodge, and the most liekly cuplrit seemed to be the wiring. So, I asked many stupid wiring 101- level questions on all the forums that tolerate me and gained a decent enough understanding of the magic of relays and how they work, and finally felt brave enough to have a go at... shall we say "rationalising" the wiring.

Now, the reason I bought an all-in-one kit when installing the fan was specifically to avoid having to mess about with wiring, but it seemed thi was an epic fail. The little adjustor box that allegedly let you set the on and off temperature range of the fan seemed a likely culprit, as did the way th efan kit was spliced into the original car loom. So, I stripped it all out. And damn, but there was a lot of it! In fact, so much of it that in a totally non-scientific experiment I laid it out on the floor and lo and behold, it was longer than the car itself!





Now, I'm clearly no expert, but that seemed excessive. Yeah, it's one more thing I trusted to a shop to fit but as I've said, I'm getting to the point where I trust no-one. If I couldn't find a way to simplify the wiring so it ws less than five metres long, I probably oughtn't be allowed to work on a car. well, I did. Old loom;



New loom;



Included a nifty little fuse that was reset-able so at least if it kept blowing, I would be able to just click a button to put it back in rather than keep chucking blown fuses away. Well, guess what?

That's right, it kep blowing


Curious. Having checked and double-checked my wiring, there was only really one thing left that could be causing the problem. So the Kenlowe fan was removed and investigated. Not really much that can go worng, you'd think. And not much that can be investigated, it being a sealed unit. And first investiations seemed to say that it worked fine; it span freely, with no runout and when fired up direct across battery terminals, it span up perfectly happily. And then, purely by chance, one trial the blades stopped in exactly the right place... or the wrong place, depending how you look at it. For some strange reason, there was one single spot in the spin of the blades that should they stop there, it caused a tight spot and it was actually really hard to get them spinning again, even by hand. Using electricity, it was impossible. The fan just stuck tight and refused to budge

Weird. If the blades stopped in any other orientation, there was no problem and you could spin them by hand without ever being able to detect the tight spot. But if it stopped there by chance... no chance! It was during this period of investigation that I connected it to the battery whilst the blades were seized and then gave them a bit of a shove to see how hard it was to free up. It was hard, but I managed it. And then discovered why all the advice stickers and manuals say to never put your fingers into a fan when it's spinning.



Yeah, that was a sore one. The damage was out of all proportion to the size of the cuts, and no matter what I did it wouldn't stop bleeding.



After a four-hour wait in A&E (yeah, I was lucky) a nice doctor type expained this was cos I'd cut right through the entire thickness of skin, but once he'd superglued it all shut, it was fine. It wasn't one of my favourite fingers anyway, so I wasn't too upset when the nail went black and fell off.

Right, so the (brand new a year before ) fan was clearlythe problem then. And there was no way to really find out why; the casing is crimped from the factory so to get it apart I'd probably have ended up just mutilating it irrepairably anyway. Nothing for it but to just bite the bullet and buy another. I've never heard anything bad about Kenlowe previously, but my personal experience was that 100% of them were shit, so I wasn't buying another one of those! I also took the opportunity to go up a couple of inches in diameter; as all the ladies will tell you, length is important but girth is what really matters. Besides, you can never have too much cooling on a rotary!



Yeah, she's a big'un, innit! And figuring that Spal supply a lot of OE fitments, including for the likes of Mercedes, it'd be up to the job. Slim fitment, too, cos space is a bit tight with a wider radiator and Gilmer pulleys



Needless to say, the connectors were incompatible with the wiring already on the car, so I went full mental and got some kwol waterproof natty conectors to replace them with. These are great, though a little fiddly. First, crimp the actual pins onto the wires, remembering to slip the little sealing rubber olives on first!



These then slip into the body of the connector block from behind



and it was all neatened up with some nylon loom braid and heatshrink. There's a little plate in the face of the connector that locks the pins into place



...as can be seen more easily on the male side of the thing;



Should last as long as the car now! I still hate wiring but at least I'm getting better at it, mostly through necessity. At least my soldering no longer looks like a camel with the legs cut off. Next was to make up a new shroud to accommodate the larger fan. At least with the bigger diameter there was no room to piss about cutting flaps in or anything



I used rivnuts to make threaded inserts for the fan to bolt to



and then spaced the shroud away from the actual core slightly using some ally angles, which also gave it a bit of rigidity and strength



And it only fitted, didn't it!



Just!



My natty new wiring loom discretely fitted out of the way, the relay just screwed onto the side of the battery box I made earlier. The reset-able fuse meant the little waterproof cover on the fuseholder couldn't close as it stuck out to far, but I figured once I proved it wasn't going to blow every other day it could be replaced with a normal one.



But what about the temperature range, I hear you cry? Didn't you junk the Kenlowe adjustable control box? How will the fan know when to turn on and off now? Good question. Glad you asked. Well, in the quest for reliability and as few things to go wrong as possible, I got a solid-state temperature sensor fan switch that fitted into the sensor boss cast into the back of the waterpump housing. This meant there was no need for the stupid temperature probe wedged between the radiator fins that the Kenlowe used, nor cutting my lovely (and expensive) Racing Beat hoses to put a fan switch insert in or even (shudder) one of those hateful capiliary bulb things with about eighteen feet of copper tube that flaps about all over the place.

Nice and simple, just screw the sensor into the boss, connect two wires and it's done. The only drawback being that the only one with even near the correct temperature range but with a small enough thread size to fit into the stupidly small M12 thread boss Mazda cut into the waterpump came from a Nissan Micra! It comes on around 90 degrees but unfortuntely turns off at about 75 or something ludicrously low! This means that in hot weather, once the fan comes on it tends to stay on. But hey, at least it actually comes on!

I have a spare waterpump housing so when I feel enthusiastic I'll have a go at tapping the thread out to M14 and then the whole world of sensors will open up and I'll be able to choose whatever temp range I want!

[DKWW2000]

Nice neat job Nick (on your finger) Fan/Shroud looks good too

Now you have entered the Dark Art of electrics it is not so dark after all:o You have used the KISS principle which is the best.
It must be worth a "Strongly worded Email" to Kenlowe for all the trauma you have suffered PTSD £££