Posts filed under “Cars” (page 4)

The title understates the success of my weekend. I actually improved it!

You may remember from the last episode:

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Actually, that's a different photo; I used my trusty, battle-scarred SLR to take a photo today in the hope I'd get a better photo of the same thing, and still managed to get a bad photo. Maybe I'm just doomed if I try to take photos of anything but BMWs driving sideways past me at 50 miles per hour.

Anyway, that was the thing I worked out wherein I found it was much easier to get the bottom bolts in if you jack the hub up. At some point in the week, while working on something completely unrelated, I had a lightbulb moment: I had bolted up the front coilovers when the hub was dropped, which, from what little I know about suspension geometry on a car like this (mostly learned by osmosis from the drifters), means that I had ended up dialling in positive camber to the front suspension, which would almost certainly explain the bump steer and the near-dangerous amount of understeer.

I guess that's one of those things you don't know unless you know it; I've only fitted suspension on ancient Land Rovers in the past, so I don't feel bad about it. The upshot is: If you're doing coilovers on a car with fully independent suspension, always jack up the hub to roughly its natural sitting position (since your car is going to be jacked up when you do this, remember you need to do this relative to the body and not the ground) before doing up the bottom bolts.

So that's what I did when fitting my new longer bolts (sourced from the wonderful Franklin Industrial Supplies in King's Lynn, and picked up for me by the equally great Maurice due to my lack of a safe vehicle, so thanks to both). With the car back on all four wheels, I took it for a swervy spin down my street to get everything settled to where it wanted to settle, and with that settled down, I measured the gaps on each corner between the arch and an arbitrary point on the sidewall with my cheap Vernier.

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Hey, I hate to boast about getting my front ride heights within two millimetres of each other, but it was a complete accident, so I'm probably not going to boast about getting my front ride heights within two millimetres of each other. I rather liked the extra ride height on the front, so I decided to raise the rear suspension to match it.

This is merely time-consuming, rather than difficult, especially when you know the thread pitch is 1.5mm. Working from the measurements I have, I needed to raise the rear left by 20mm; that meant unbolting the rear shocks at the bottom (and loosening them at the top, to give me some room to wiggle the shock around) and unscrew the bottom mount by 13 turns. I needed to raise the rear right by about 7mm, which meant unscrewing the bottom mount by 5 turns.

After that, it was time to go for a little spin on the bumpy backroads around here.

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And the end result...is the bump steer is almost gone, and the understeer is gone entirely! Yep, it still needs a proper alignment from people who know what they are doing and who have tools I don't have, and I'm going to see where I can get it booked in next week to make that happen, but I can confidently say this: The new suspension and the ride height has completely transformed the car. Yeah, the K-Sports were a bit of a fiddle, and you cannot fit them unless you have some minor fabrication skills, but they are awesome even at speed on the terrible roads in this little corner of Norfolk.

There's one more good thing that came out of this. Let's go back to the Driftworks steering wheel I bought and fitted a few months back:

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You may notice that in this photo, the steering wheel is at a bit of an angle. The fun part is that this was with my steering centred. And no, this could not be because the boss was fitted incorrectly; there are two nubs on the Mazda steering column that meet two holes on the Mazda steering boss, which means it is impossible to get that wrong. It was annoying; because of the low sitting position in the Mazda, it meant that one of the spokes of the steering wheel was blocking the speedometer in the 20-30mph range.

Unfortunately, it was not quite out enough that I could unbolt the steering wheel and rotate it by one bolt spacing (6 bolts, so 60 degrees). I wrote this off as "I'll deal with it some other time", as I didn't want to pull the engine out to get to the steering box to fix a minor annoyance; I figured I'd get someone else to pull the engine out to get to the steering box to fix this minor annoyance at some point. I'm glad I didn't, because with the new suspension sitting correctly this happened:

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Which looked like everything had changed, such that the steering wheel was out by almost exactly 60 degrees, which meant I could unbolt and rotate the steering wheel by one bolt hole to the left:

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And well, that's actually still not totally straight, but it'll do. And does that mean I actually fixed a steering alignment problem with this car with a prehistoric Halfords bottle jack? I don't know if I did, but that's not the story I'll tell everyone else in the future.

In short: I got everything done that I wanted to get done this weekend and fixed a thing I didn't even intend to fix. And that, means it was a good weekend. :)

Onwards!

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So last night that thing happened wherein the clocks shift by an hour, for entirely unclear reasons. I figured it might be time to change the clock in the car. I've never looked at the clock, really, other than that brief time when it was a canary for electrical problems. I've certainly not changed it; that means that the clock has not been set in 13 years. Today, I looked at it:

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The time was actually 3:33pm (what sensible people call "15:33"), so when you ignore the clocks changing, the clock has lost 6 minutes, in over a decade. That's pretty impressive!

That LED poking out of the clock annoys me though. That's probably a remnant of the vestigial alarm system. That vestigial alarm system is something that I want to get rid of. But that, will come in a much later episode of "Lewis spends too much money on a 33 year old hatchback".

So I joked at the start of the previous episode about things going smoothly and as expected until they do not go as expected, but the rears really did go as expected. There's no follow-up joke about this not going as expected this time! And not even the smallest hint of a bracket on this one.

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Yeah, that probably would have been a more interesting photo if I had used my phone in portrait orientation but I refuse to do that for weird reasons. But they're on! It was rather uneventful, so I will visit assorted tangents while I talk about fitting them.

The downside with the K-Sport coilovers is that they do not have any instructions other than generic ones for no particular vehicle. That is expected, because they're specialist parts that assumes a specialist is fitting them. Which I am not! I'm just an idiot learning stuff as I go from an old car that consumes an alarmingly high amount of my disposable income.

One thing I learned is that when setting up the ride height it's not necessarily valid to offer your new coilovers against the old ones and match the heights; that only works if your spring rates on both the old and new ones are similar. It so happened, i.e. it was a coincidence, that this worked for the front shocks. When I tried this on the rear it left that corner sitting absurdly high. Alas, I did not think to take a picture of just how absurdly high it was, so I had to pay some mates of mine from Hollywood a lot of money to make a dramatic but very authentic CGI recreation of how this looked:

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That required some fiddling, and by some I mean about two hours. After much fiddling I found out this: A good baseline is to have the bottom of your coilovers screwed in by about 85mm from the bottom of the thread. To illustrate this, your bottom nut should be in about this position:

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Time for one of those tangents! The cheap Vernier here is one I bought off t'internet the other day, just because I much prefer measuring things with one of these vs tape measures or rules whenever I possibly can, and I needed one that was cheap enough that I wouldn't mind using it in the drizzle (which is basically all but a month or two a year around these parts). It seems that the cheap ones are almost exactly as accurate and, other than lacking the nicety of a "hold" button, about as good for my purposes as much more expensive ones.

Also, I am wearing gloves. I've only had my own car on the road for a few months, but I've actually been working on cars (i.e. other peoples' old shit) for over 15 years. and why had I not tried wearing mechanic's gloves before?! It's so nice to finish up a day without random nasty abrasions, and without a coating of grease and dust and assorted old-car mank on my hands that takes multiple cleanings with a nail brush to remove. These cheapies, with their curious "Qear" name, worked great:

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Anyway. Remember that 85mm? About that 85mm! That will give you a ride height that looks something like this (which will be a bit lower after it gets used and settles):

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...which is close enough to the ballpark of where I want it to sit. More on the ballpark in a bit; just bear in mind I'm on 15 inch wheels and 195/45 tyres; adjust your baseline accordingly depending on the size of your own wheels. One of the other lessons I learned in doing the first side, which was one of the things that made the first side take nearly three hours and the second side take about a third of that, was this (and forgive the terrible photo, as I am incapable of taking a picture with a phone):

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Which is to say: it is vastly easier to get the bottom bolts in if you have a small jack to hold up the hub. That way, you're only fighting to get the holes lined up in one dimension, rather than two; I lost at least twenty minutes struggling to man it out in two dimensions (and by "man" it out, I mean if a woman was doing it she'd have gotten this job done about eighteen minutes sooner by working smarter than me). As the main jack was in use because I'm too lazy to set up axle stands, this little bottle jack worked fine, but in a pinch I'd have used one of those dodgy scissor jacks if I had to.

ANYWAY, about that ballpark! Everything is sitting in the ballpark of where I want it to be, and close enough that I am happy to declare any small adjustments NMFP. And as soon as I source an appropriate set of bottom bolts for the front shocks (I hope you didn't think I'd drive the car any non-trivial distance with just one "spare" thread) she is going to have a visit with to people who have actual level surfaces to work on (and niceties such as hydraulic ramps which make working underneath cars less of a hateful experience than it is for me).

Yeah, this suspension change has completely ruined my handling for now; it has horrific bump steer and alarming amounts of understeer. That is entirely what I should have expected; replacing old and probably half-collapsed suspension with brand new stuff is of course going to substantially alter the geometry and it takes professionals with much more equipment than I have to get everything set up nicely. Something approaching a review of this suspension will be the next episode of "Lewis spends too much of his money on a 33-year-old hatchback".

Onwards!

Fitting new coilovers (to old cars, at least) is dead easy; this job was four bolts on each shock, everything comes undone easily enough, everything fits perfectly and just works and ha ha just kidding you know that wasn't going to happen on this car.

Actually, part of that was true; the old coilovers came off with only minor hammer persuasion, and the new coilovers themselves fitted fine. But on the front coilovers, there should be some brackets to hold the brake pipe in place, to prevent it from hitting the wheel or the tyre when it flaps about. The brackets supplied with the suspension were wholly inappropriate. One of them was purportedly intended to wrap around the body of the shock absorber, but did not have the diameter to do this successfully. One of them was a long rectangular steel band, which was flimsy (and also too thin, which I will get to).

Because the latter one was thin and flimsy, I could attach it to the back of the shock, bend it through 180 degrees with a hammer & Knipex grabs, then add another 90-ish degree bend with a hammer to make this work as an "I need to get to the shop before it closes" workaround. So that is what I did:

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That's ugly. And because it's so thin, it would not hold the brake pipe securely using the standard clip without some more hammer-and-grabs "adjustment". It did, however, get me to the shop, and there's something to be said for that. But what was actually called for, was a proper bracket!

My old coilovers already had such a bracket (I think this would more properly be called a "hanger"):

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Yeah, that's the opposite of pretty, and would have been the opposite of pretty even before it went rusty, but it worked for years and I can't fault anything that works. And that gave me something to work with! Because the old shocks are about the same diameter as my new ones, I was confident that a bracket in the same position of more or less the same size would keep the brake lines from fouling anything.

So you start by making & writing down some measurements, then making a cardboard template:

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Rather than being welded to the shock (a fairly bad idea), this will pick up from the bottom bolts at the front of the shock.The vertical lines are where 45 degree bends are required; they are lightly scored with a Stanley knife to make the cardboard bend naturally along those lines when validating the design.

Always make things out of cardboard first! You can validate, iterate, and throw away designs very quickly, and you can do that at no cost because cardboard is free. The one you see was my second iteration; my first was unnecessarily elaborate.

Validate your cardboard design in place:

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Then transfer your design onto 3mm steel:

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You might think that 3mm steel is excessive, but 3mm is the exact thickness required for the OEM brake pipe & clip to fit nicely. Other people have made these out of aluminium, but steel seemed much more appropriate to me given its safety-critical location. (It's safety-critical not just because it's holding the brake pipe; it's bolted up with the shock bottom mount, and if this cracks or breaks your shocks will be loose.)

Once you're done, you dry run that to be on the safe side, and probably find you have some minor fettling to do (this was the third dry run for me, after some small adjustments to the holes and the slot):

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Then give it a coat of zinc primer and a coat of paint, and fit it for real:

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Don't judge me on the colour! They're loud cyan because I had a can of loud cyan paint kicking around, which makes it a much better colour than any paint I didn't have.

Now you have one possibly-overengineered brightly-coloured brake pipe bracket. Just like that! Do that one more time and you have two possibly-overengineered brake pipe brackets!

So that part is done (though I am possibly-irrationally nervous about there being only one "spare" thread on those bolts with the bracket in place, so I might swap them out for something longer to put my mind at ease).

In a short while, which means however long it takes me to work out how I make a pretty drawing in FreeCAD, I will publish my designs for this bracket to help anyone else facing this (very very niche) problem.

Onwards!

It took me five years to find one of these in usable condition. And even then I could not find one! Instead, my brother did, because he has a weird skill of finding parts that don't exist. Back when he owned it, he somehow managed to source rear seats for it (the owner before him removed them and binned them, because racecar), and what might have been the last three 323 GTX rear arch repair panels in the country. And Alex delivers again! He managed to find a parcel shelf in the United States, priced at $100 (plus the usual horrific shipping costs).

The interior, then, is now complete, other than the boot carpet situation, which the parcel shelf allows me to ignore. The parcel shelf definitely needs a clean (that'll be my lunchtime project for tomorrow, because working from home is pretty great), but otherwise it's in awesome condition.

Today's episode of "shipping from the US is madness" thing (previously): I have still not worked out whether and under what criteria I will be paying import VAT for anything I import from abroad. I had to pay £28 on this $100 parcel shelf, yet paid none on my short shifter & bush kit, or on my as-yet-unfitted digital dashboard (all of which are worth substantially more than $100). If it's not actually random, the criteria are obscure enough that it may as well be!

Unrelated story from today: A chap spots my car outside the shop - as I learned, he is a mechanic by trade and a petrolhead - and told me that he's heard it driving around but can't work out whether it's turbocharged or whether it's supercharged. Yeah, maybe I really should stop ignoring that timing belt whine...

The only positive side effect of my Facebook account reactivating itself (it is now scheduled for permanent deletion, since Facebook won't play nice) is that I got to find out about a car meet on Saturday with Only Fools & Motors over at the Coach & Horses at Tilney All Saints on Saturday. It seems that this would be the last event of the year, and not just because of that thing that is going to forbid gatherings of more than six people. And so everyone's (my) favourite sleeper Mazda 323 got to have her first outing!

So, before my car returned to the road at the start of August, I had not even left my village since lockdown started. With the car done, I did get to go further away, but this meet was the first time I have socialised and mingled and generally been around a non-trivial number of people, and it felt good.

It was a nice way to burn about three hours. I didn't expect that at any car meet my 1987 Mazda would be about the median age of vehicles in any particular place, but that happened - the variety of cars was huge! And I met some old friends (there were more than a few drift friends there) and I got to make some new ones too.

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...this seems like a good idea. This was just shy of £25 on Amazon, and while I doubt I will need to use it because I totally trust this car to not set on fire, there's no reason I should not have one handy. £25 and a tiny bit less boot space is a small sacrifice for not losing four years of work.

Also...the boot, where the extinguisher is bolted in, was not part of my interior cleanup rampage, and it looks absolutely terrible. The carpet is a Mazda carpet, but it is not from a Mazda 323; it has a nicely-sewn Mazda logo suggesting it is a carpet made for a Mazda Something but it has been cut about to fit inside the back of the GTX (which is why I didn't mind drilling a hole through it). It is also hopelessly warped by the car not being watertight when I bought it. I'll look into my options.

My brother Alex came over in his E30 to make my driveway look much cooler. 80s car friends, yay! 💕 We've been meaning to get a photo of them together, when they are both working, so we did!

Actually, the goal today was not to add even more obnoxiously loud colours to my driveway, but to get Alex's clutch working on his 1963 Land Rover, not pictured (yet). That did not work, because of a lack of parts. We thought the clutch slave cylinder was dead, because Alex had installed it upside down (which means bleeding it will not work as as it should). With the slave cylinder installed the right way up and with the system bled appropriately, the clutch still didn't work, which means the master cylinder is probably dead in some way. We didn't have a master cylinder, so that should have been the end of the day.

Except...once you start, you're sort of committed to doing something that day, so we decided to save it by getting stuff done in lieu of getting anything done that we actually wanted to, like cleaning up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted.

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By which I mean Alex cleaned up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted. I mostly sat around making stupid jokes and offering encouragement and giving the occasional good idea. The work itself didn't require a second person.

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But, I did get to hang out with my brother at a sensible distance, we had a day of fun and of getting things done that we didn't intend to do and of decades-old in-jokes, we consumed food, and Alex departed with a wicked rolling burnout down my street to round it off.

Sometimes, an unproductive day can be a good day. ❤️

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Photo credit for the last and second-to-last photo: my brother's 11-year-old kid Rowan. Thanks kid!

Small victory: Mazda Amy has a working clutch! (Again.)

Obviously, I had a working clutch at certain times when she returned to the road. Not long ago, though, I had an hilarious (by hilarious I mean terrifying) incident while parking, in which my clutch pedal went straight to the floor with no resistance and the car kept moving and...no, that was not nice. That's definitely not something your driving lessons prepare you for, since driving instructors own modern cars that work, rather than old shit that works when it's in the right mood.

It just so happens that, a few weeks earlier, after working on my brother Alex's old shit Land Rover, he had exactly the same problem, and his save (turn off the ignition and slam on brakes and full-force it out of gear simultaneously) prepared me for what I would have to do, if I ever had to do the same thing. Like watching some automotive version of Bear Grylls making a tent out of an otter or whatever, not something you will think you will use, but now I know how to deal with that situation, not that I'll ever have to do that...

So it goes. I drove her home very carefully because she was actually dangerous; I am glad the clutch failure happened during low-speed reversing rather than the clutch engaging while I was in first gear waiting at a junction onto a main road. The episode scared the shit out of me, and so she came off the road until I worked out exactly why that happened and how I could make it not happen again.

I was not entirely sure about any of this, and until I was entirely sure, I would not drive her.

Rewind a few months. While I was cleaning out thirteen years of accumulated "might need that some time in the rebuild" shit from the interior, I found...a clutch slave cylinder.That was not my purchase; Alex bought it when he owned the car back in 2007. I didn't like the look of it; it looked like generic poorly-manufactured aftermarket blah that might be useful for something else some day, so I threw it into my big box of parts and didn't think much more about it.

So. It did strike me as strange that Alex would have randomly bought a clutch slave cylinder rather than any of the other parts that the car needed. I had a word with him and he could not remember why he bought it. He also couldn't remember whether he had any problems with the clutch. This is understandable; 13 years have passed since he had it on the road.

Fast forward to today! I bought a clutch master cylinder with the intent of replacing both cylinders. As I found out today the master cylinder I ordered was entirely the wrong part, so I was prepared to write the day off and wait until I could find a master cylinder that was actually the right part. But on a whim, we pulled back the boot (dust cover, as it is called in the Colonies) of the slave cylinder and a bunch of fluid came out. For those of you who don't get it, the proper role of the boot/dust cover is not to hold in fluid. (The bits of liquid mess you see in the photo would be freshly-liberated clutch fluid.)

So, the slave cylinder was clearly the problem, which is nice, because that means it wasn't the master cylinder (for which I had the wrong part) or the clutch itself (which is only available from ACT these days and costs £500). With the "new" slave cylinder not looking like an OEM part, it was dismantled to see if anything was wrong with it before any attempt to fit it...and yep, there was a lot wrong with it. There was machining swarf inside the bores, the bores felt horrible, and most inexplicably the hydraulic fittings seemed to be threaded to Imperial rather than metric. Trust me: when you have the option (I don't) of getting OEM parts, get OEM parts or parts from reputable tuning companies; the quality of aftermarket generic parts is rather variable, and by that I don't mean surprisingly good.

Oh well. Bores were cleaned, swarf was eliminated, Imperial threads were tapped to metric, a thing was fitted and actual working car again. For real this time! Until something else breaks.

Onwards!