Exhaust
things Lewis Collard likes, by Lewis Collard

Posts filed under “Project Amy” (page 5)

Stories from the recommissioning of a 1987 Mazda 323 GTX. The GTX is the incredibly rare four-wheel-drive, turbocharged hooligan edition of the Mazda 323.

This particular one came off the road in 2007, I purchased her as a rotten restoration project in 2015, and she finally returned to the road in July 2020.

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Lockdown is awful, but on the upside, it is giving me a chance to do all those jobs I haven't had time to do otherwise. Several of those jobs are to sort out all the minor electrical problems, figuring out the intermittent starting fault, sorting out the horn, fixing the sticky centre-diff lock switch. Let's get started!

Just kidding, I didn't get any of those done today. But I did buy a cool steering wheel! 🎉

Driftworks Basics deep-dish steering wheel.

This is a Driftworks Basics 350mm leather steering wheel. It costs a mere £55 as I write this _(2021 update: It's now £80, which I still think is very cheap). You'll need a boss to adapt it to your steering column, which costs somewhat more. This MOMO one works fine for my GTX. I had to do some minor modifications to the horn push (trimming off some protruding plastic) to make it fit into the boss. At half the price of an equivalent Sparco or OMP wheel: I'll live.

Driftworks are willing to put their name on this wheel, so I expected it to be good. It is. It feels nice, it feels solid, and the deep dish is comforting and looks cool. This is a bargain, especially as this costs just a few more quid (in absolute terms) than dangerous wish.com tat.

Here's my old steering wheel:

My old steering wheel, looking a little tired and missing the horn push.

It doesn't actually have to look quite this bad. I have the original horn push. But the horn push is missing its badge, and I am unlikely to find another one. Also, the horn push once had the hilarious habit of randomly sounding the horn, usually at 3am, and I'm not sure I will ever trust it again.

This looks way cooler, especially with one of the free Driftworks stickers they threw in, and the simple design and deep dish doesn't look at all out of place with the 80s interior:

Driftworks leather steering wheel in Mazda 323 GTX interior

I know I know, the rest of the interior looks like a dump. It'll continue to look like a dump until I'm mostly done with the rest of the car; there's not a huge amount of point cleaning up in there until I know I'm not going to be in and out of it for any reasons other than driving it.

Onwards!

pumped up kicks

Sometimes, when I show things to not-car people, I often comfort them with "nah, it's just surface rust", because rust isn't actually all that scary (for someone that mostly works on old shit cars). On the other hand, sometimes it really is as manky, bad and dead as it looks:

dead fuel pump

That is my former fuel pump. It is dead. I think it is dead because the filter fell off. Most likely, something nasty got sucked into the pump, and that killed the pump. Probably some of this stuff that we scraped off the bottom of the tank:

crap scraped from the bottom of my fuel tank

On the other hand, it's plausible that it was 33 years old and ready to give up as 33-year-old parts occasionally do. In both cases, it was the reason that my car was not starting.

One massively overkill Walbro 255 LPH pump from Driftworks later:

Walbro 255 LPH fuel pump

This was a dead easy fit, and there is nothing to report there. And, with a change of the other fuel filter, I now have a working car!

I was considering giving the inside of my fuel tank a clean. My brother's advice is to fill the tank up, keep it filled, and change the filters regularly. I'm going with that, and not just because I don't want to shove my arm into the fuel tank again.

Onwards!