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!

I know, it is the Current Year, you don't need to worry about disk space. Until you do! Via a comment on this article I found this to purge a bunch of old log entries (on my personal machines I don't care about anything more than a day old, tweak according to your situation):

$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=1d
[literally six million lines of text]
Vacuuming done, freed 616.1M of archived journals from /var/log/journal/8ab90b50ecb94b5ba09cacf15a486a8e

Yay!

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...

So I found an original owner's manual for the BF-generation Mazda 323 on eBay! £5.48 with shipping. I'm quite happy with that.

I bought it because of poor impulse control I wanted to find out what one of my warning lights meant; it's the light that looks like a headlight, but it has the word "STOP" written underneath it. Turns out that the manual doesn't explain that. Oh well, this is a nice addition to the glovebox anyway. I do like its minimalist cover design very much. :)

(Edit: a BF-owning friend informs me that this is the warning light for a brake light not working. That makes sense. After all, with my exciting "no alternator belt" episode, it's likely that the brake lights weren't working...)

It was only £7.50 on eBay. It'd be rude not to.

I do believe I need a "grips like a limpet" sticker now.

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!