Posts filed under “Project Amy” (page 4)

So, that was expensive, but what can you do. (Other than not owning old shit that is nigh-on impossible to get parts for. I should have thought about that five years ago!)

My car is running a fairly horrible mongrel suspension setup. Shortly after she came off the road in 2007, she gained some custom-made rear shocks from Gaz, as part of my brother's work to get her road-legal after her last MOT failure. These were, and still are, very nice; as good as you would expect from tailor-made stuff by Gaz. They're still on springs of unknown provenance and unknown age, which I intended to replace at some point.

The front ones, on the other hand, are awful; they look like budget coilovers from a completely different car (quite possibly a Mark 2 VW Golf) that were bodged to fit. In other words, they were shit coilovers, that are now old and shit coilovers that feel terrible. They also sit far too low. Weird, I know, someone with a modified Japanese car saying such a thing; except I actually like driving my car on the road, and me driving anywhere means driving some distance on Norfolk back-roads. As much as I like "the lows", I like not having a smashed sump even more.

As you may have guessed, with the GTX being a very rare car and the suspension being specific to the GTX, I do not have many off-the-shelf suspension options; there are only K-Sport and D2 coilovers available for it.^[1] Bear in mind that the UK market for any 323 GTX part is about five people, myself included.^[2]

I was kinda ignoring the suspension issue, mostly because I'm cheap and it handles well enough (tiny wheelbase, 4wd, and good rubber goes an awfully long way). But after multiple painful bottoming-out incidents on the back roads, and with everything being vague on those roads at very high speed, and seeing these selling for about £200 less than I had last seem them sold...this had to be done. It's overdue.

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I'll update when they are here and fitted. I suspect this is going to be a massive improvement; you'll probably get a review out of this.

Aside: yeah I've done this one before, but what is the deal with shipping from the United States? I did notice that these were available from the US, for significantly less money, and I might have been tempted to save a few quid by waiting roughly six years for these to make their way across the Atlantic. And then I looked at the shipping costs:

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OK, so this one was a bit of an outlier, but all of the coilovers that came up in my searches (only one of which was actually for my car) had shipping costs not far off £200. It's so strange.

[1] Fun fact: I'm told that D2 and K-Sport are made in the same factory, branded differently for different national markets.

[2] And I know that one of those people already has K-Sport coilovers fitted...

Milestone: actual working car that is taxed and MOTed and insured!

She's back. She actually arrived home on the first Saturday of the month, but I did not get to drive her properly until Sunday, because I spent so much time on Saturday working on Alex's old shit rather than driving my old shit. So it goes. I did take her for a little 20mph run down my road to ensure nothing exploded, and Alex (who formerly owned this car) did a little completely-legal short drive with a cheeky four-wheel-drift for old times' sake. Nothing exploded. Lack of explosions please me.

She is AWESOME. There is nearly-infinite cornering grip from the four-wheel-drive system, there is horrendous 80s turbo lag (basically nothing below about 3000 RPM) which is more hilarious than frustrating, she is tiny when you park her next to anything made in the last ten years or so, the noise she makes at high RPMs is deafening and encourages you to powerband her constantly and...yup, I love this car. This has been an expensive and time-consuming and oft-frustrating endeavour and it has been worth every bit of it.

She's not pretty - yet. I'm aiming to take her in for a full respray from the best people in the business next year. But given that she started like this in 2015...

...I don't mind being a little bit proud of all of this finally coming together.

So then, teething problems.

No matter how much fuel I put in, the fuel gauge never reads more than half full. Unless she really did drink ten litres of fuel in less than a mile on Saturday, the fuel gauge is also entirely unreliable at low levels too. It's probably just the sender unit. For now, I will live, until I find another one (which is likely a GTX-specific part, i.e. completely unobtainable).

She has a weird pogo problem in first gear when the boost kicks in; if you back off the throttle at about 3500-4000 RPM, she will drop revs, then rapidly gain them, then drop them, etc, which is dangerously undriveable. This only happens when the clutch is engaged and only in first gear. Alex mentioned that he recalls messing with the throttle cable damper to make the throttle response more snappy, and thinks that is related. "Just see 1st as an ON switch" was his advice. I'll roll with that for now.

The day after her first long drive, she overheated MASSIVELY in a 30mph zone - the bad "hit the red mark on the temperature dial and start knocking" kind of overheating. Fortunately this happened metres away from the entrance of the Tesco car park in Downham Market. Not to worry - I topped up the lost coolant with some of Tesco's finest bottled water, gave her an hour and a bit to cool down, and drove her home in full driving-instructor-approved highest-gear-possible mode to keep the airflow high and revs low. Nothing went wrong and I made it home.

Curiously, while I was in the car park waiting for her to cool down, I put the heater on full (this, if you did not know, helps to cool your engine in an emergency) and only got luke-warm air coming out even with the temperature gauge hitting the red. Curious, but could be an unrelated problem, so I thought...

What I thought was the problem, after some investigation, was that the fan wasn't kicking in. That would somewhat explain why she had happily been power-banded for an hour straight and then boiled almost as soon as she came in to a 30 zone. That was down to a bad connector, which only required some electrical contact cleaner. Happiness.

Or so I thought. After a test drive a little while later, in which the temperatures were lovely, I parked up at home, went to grab a bottle of water, and a few minutes later she inexplicably did not have enough voltage to start. I thought this strange, but I put the battery on charge, drove her a half mile to the best local shop in the world as a test the next day, and found that she would not start again.

On a whim, while in the car park I decided to poke around to find out why my battery was not charging and saw this.

Oops. At some point, she had randomly decided to lose her alternator/water pump belt and her power steering belt. There wasn't far to go, and I did barely make it home with what charge was in the battery after a jump start; in a rare example of me making a sensible purchase and a sensible decision, I had purchased some Sealey jump leads the day before and put them in the car.

Still. This mystified me. A missing water pump belt would certainly explain why it was overheating, but that belt also drives the alternator and given that I was almost in "no electrical systems" mode after a mile of driving, there is no way she would have survived any of the much longer drives I had taken her on previously.

The only explanation of this is me being an idiot. About thirteen years ago (when she was under Alex's ownership) I rebuilt this engine. I very distinctly remember tensioning the timing belt (on some engine designs, a slipped timing belt can explode your engine, though I did not know at the time that the Mazda B-engine is not such a design). I do not remember with the same clarity doing the same for the alternator and power steering belts. If I hadn't tensioned the alternator/water pump belt properly, that could leave things working to an extent, but not sufficiently, and would lead to the belt falling off eventually.

And that, as much as the non-functioning fan, would explain the cooling problem. With a poorly-functioning water pump, water will circulate itself to an extent by virtue of hot things naturally wanting to travel to cooler places, but not sufficiently. That also could explain the luke-warm air coming from the cabin heater.

I got two new belts from my local motor factor. So that this information is out there for anyone that came here from a search engine, you will have luck by searching for Gates part numbers 4PK878 (the power steering belt) and 6264MC (the alternator belt, which is also QH part number QBA887). Your part numbers for the power steering belt will be different if your car is fitted with air conditioning.

I took her for a short drive today. The temperatures are lovely, I have more charge in my battery than I did when I set out, and my power steering actually works now.

This, is just how it is. It's expected. She is a 33-year-old car that had been off the road for thirteen years, I fully expected certain things to not work quite right. And even if I had cause to be mad, she's way too cute to get angry at, isn't she? :)

Onwards!

I bought Mazda Amy without caring about the mileage. I mean, there's a pretty low overlap between people who care about how many miles a car has done and people who buy completely rotten cars from 1987. But while cleaning the interior, after five years of owning this car I checked it on a whim. Just under 63,000 miles! That seemed remarkably low for a 33-year-old car, even if it did spent 13 of those off the road.

Today, I was looking at the history of my car on the government's free MOT history check website, and well:

That would explain that, wouldn't it. 😶

Hint hint: you should never trust any online advert in which someone hides the number plates; anyone who thinks about it for more than a second knows it's pointless, and there's a non-trivial chance they're not wanting you to enter its reg into a certain government website...

Off for final MOT prep at Setch MOT centre. She'll be back soon!

Some people feel like they're giving up by giving their project to someone else to finish - that it's less authentically "theirs" if they haven't done every bit of the work. I don't feel this way at all. This is this car's fifth year of being a project. It's come an awful long way, but seeing that interior looking as beautiful as it does made me want a working car this year, and hopefully this summer. That simply isn't going to happen if I only do this on my free time.

First, there's some jobs I just don't care to do. Those would be things like the oil changes (all four: engine, gearbox, transfer box, & rear diff). My excuse is that I am getting old; I'm too old to want to crawl under cars to change fluids. Been there, done that, had hair caked with grease and eyes full of whatever that is that always into your eyes when you're working on an old car. Buy me a four-post ramp and I might think differently.

There's also some stuff that I just can't do; I don't have the presses required for doing suspension bushes, and that's more crawling under cars that I don't want to do as well.

Then there's...the wiper blades! I'm weird; I rebuilt the engine on this car, but I still don't know how to change wiper blades. Also, there's a whole bunch of other tiny jobs where I just want to hand it off to someone else, receive a working car, go drive working car.

Finally, as anyone should who owns a car that has been off the road for a while, I want someone to check over everything. If you work on something enough you will develop blind spots. You want someone with a fresh pair of eyes - and an MOT-tester set of eyes, at that - to look over everything and find out if you've missed something totally stupid. That's why she is heading off on the back of a recovery truck and not under her own steam. (That and I don't want to use the fantastically fragile transmission until I know it's got fresh fluids in it.)

Onwards!

I'd paid almost no attention to the interior of Mazda Amy so far, because there seemed like little point in doing so while I might still be in and out of there with tools and boots. And of course I left a ton of crap in there because just in case I need it for a future job on the car.

That left me with an interior looking like this:

Yeah, not really proud of it, but now there's a point in making it look nice.

In the best case scenario, this would be the first clean since 2007 when the car came off the road. It was pretty foul in there. My approach, if you care, was just brute force:

• Everywhere: Lots of industrial hoover action!
• Plastics: Cloth and soapy water on the plastics to get off any loose bits, then ZEP foaming citrus cleaner, sometimes in the reverse order if those bits were nasty. For the faded black bits, especially the dashboard, I hit them with WD-40 electrical contact cleaner (not at all to be confused with regular WD-40), then went over them with Gtechniq C4.
• Carpets & seats: I used whatever worked; if I thought I could get a particular area clean with a damp soapy rag, I did. I used Vanish carpet cleaning spray in places. I had to resort to electrical contact cleaner where I saw proper oil. I was more careful about using water in these areas, of course, especially the seats.

Over four hours later:

Much nicer. Seeing the interior looking lovely (look at all the purple and the 80s bits!!) was enough to remind me why I have spent so much money and time (mostly money) on this thing.

The reverse view, with lovely Driftworks steering wheel:

Next to arrive (tomorrow) is a blanking plate for that hole in the middle where the stereo should be and then I can call this done. Maybe I'll actually get a stereo in there some day!

Mazda Amy may not be the most powerful car in the world, or even more than slightly quick by modern standards. Even so, it seems a waste to have a four-wheel-drive performance car, with an awful lot of grip and go-cart handling, running on the nastiest no-name ditchfinders (it's a terrible idea for any car - don't cheap out on tyres if you don't have to).

She's now running on Toyo Proxes TR1 supplied by Demon Tweeks and fitted by my favourite local tyre van. One more job down.

Onwards!

On my brief test movements with Mazda Amy, it always struck me that her gear change was always awfully vague. And not just "old car" kind of vague, but Land Rover "there's a gear around here somewhere" vague, with no clear stops on the X axis, and an enormous throw on both axes. That's one of those things I was prepared to live with as part of the "drives old shit" package, though I did have my mind on getting someone to do a short-shifter mod for me at some point.

Last month, word reached me that Jeff Sylvester, a chap from the USA who is a legend in the small global 323 GTX community, was offering a short-shifter modification for the GTX at a price I thought entirely reasonable. Things were arranged, money was paid, and I pulled my shifter out for a journey across the Atlantic. This is what mine looked like:

Those disintegrated pieces of black plastic next to the shifter ball are meant to be the stops on the X-axis, so that explains the vagueness!

This is what it looked like in progress. You'll see Jeff replaced the pointless plastic stops with metal ones (and the really eagle-eyed who have an eye for that sort of thing would have spotted a Corvette panel in the background):

The physics of a short-shifter mod should be familiar to anyone who has sat in an unconventional place on a see-saw; as I understand it involves cutting and shutting things to move the pivot point around to make the same amount of gear lever movement induce more movement on the cables, i.e. a shorter shift with somewhat more effort at the gear lever.

Jeff didn't stop there, though he could have; he cares about the quality of anything that leaves his workshop, so he cleaned everything up and gave it a coat of paint. Here's how it looked when it came back to me yesterday:

Refitting was dead easy. A bracket for the centre console tray, which bolts to the shifter assembly, needs to be gently (angle-grinder) modified to clear the slightly taller shifter, but that's all.

It feels lovely. I have gears in easy-to-reach and mostly predictable places now!

Now, about that manky interior.... Onwards!

Aside: why is it rather cheap for me to send parcels to the United States, but horrendously expensive to get anything sent in the other direction? I paid whatever it was I paid to ship it over there for modification, on a three-to-four day service. It cost me very slightly more to get it shipped back on a nominal three-to-four week service. This is not the only time this has happened; I did not order a Walbro fuel pump from the United States because the shipping cost nearly as much as the fuel pump, and previously I had to contend with £30 shipping for some decals. I would love to order more things from the US because there are far more GTX parts available over there than here, but the shipping costs are usually unreasonable enough to put me off the idea.

Bumper restoration with Gtechniq C4. Before is on the right, after is on the left. The picture speaks for itself.

My original bumpers & sideskirts are from 1987. They are not body-coloured, they were faded and looked awful, and I wasn't sure what to do with them. This being one of the rarest cars in the UK (5 on the road as of time of writing, the bumpers & sideskirts being specific to a subset of this particular generation of 323), I could not risk doing anything irreversible to them, and I wasn't willing to try anything that hasn't been proven to work.

"Back to Black" and everything of its kind does close to nothing when it's gotten this bad. If anything, it makes it somewhat worse, because rather than having tired-looking plastic, you will have tired-looking plastic with a nasty residue that will have to be removed before you give in and spend £20 on a bottle of C4.

Spraying these plastics black (as I did with my mirrors, which were already painted) was not an option. Unpainted plastics are not metal; you will never be able to remove the paint you've sprayed on.

Apparently you can apply heat to black plastics to restore them. Good idea, and this apparently works well, but that is something incredibly easy to get wrong (especially with my clumsy hands) and any getting-wrong on those lines would, again, be irreversible.

I sat on this problem for a couple of years.

At some point I came across Not 2 Grand's review of Gtechniq C4. Chris Pollitt, the author and by all accounts a very nice guy, is someone I trust very much, and is one who is willing to call things toss when they are toss, and at some point not long after that I decided to pick up some.

Again, look at the picture. It speaks for itself. Also, go read Chris's review. This stuff would have gotten you convicted for witchcraft a few centuries ago.

I'll second Chris's advice on making sure that your surface is meticulously clean. C4 will not work if it is not. Your surface must be clean of any dirt, dust or grease. It must also be clean of any lesser detailing chemicals such as "Back to Black".

I gave my bumper and sideskirts a thorough scrubbing with a very soapy mix of water and Fairy Liquid, then rinsed that off with cold water. After that, to be on the safe side, I rinsed the panels with extremely liberal amounts of U-POL System 20 fast-drying degreaser. That degreaser is about £20 on eBay for five litres of it. I used about half a litre, because I had some left over from my bodge rattle-can respray.

C4 seems expensive, at £20 for a small, eyedrop-dispenser-sized bottle. But a little C4 goes a long way; two of these tiny bottles covered my front & rear bumpers and my sideskirts with a little bit left over. Modern cars that do not have acres of unpainted plastic will need far less of it.

The last word goes to Chris:

It might be £20, but £20 for for something that works is better than a fiver here and a fiver there on a load of things that don’t, right?