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I am on a very tight budget, but I would really like to get my car running great and smooth. I also have limited mechanics skills, so something simple that can be done in a few hours, or over a saturday would be great. Simple, yet effective is what I like to do most. i am still trying to learn about my car the best I can, so please, take it slow, and lemme know what you think I should do

93 Mazda MX-3 24V v6 DOHC
Thats what Im working with. And I also live in Hanford,CA so if anyone lives near there, and would like to help out gettin my car workin super spiffy, that would be awesome
Jenkins

Want some sad truth?

In the vast majority of cases, this is how it goes

Power is expensive.
Power kills fuel milage
Power is not easy to acheive.
Power is ~$10-20/hp.

The best things you can do on a budget is a tuneup, for one. Cap and rotor, plugs and wires, fuel filter, clean the ThrottleBody, reset timing.

A good cold air intake setup will see you some gains.

Some headers/full 2.25 exhaust will see you gains. Cat delete, if you can do that where you live, and don't care about the environment.

Engine management is the absolute best way to manage, gain, and tune your power. But that is neither easy or cheap.

Turbo is expensive, pretty hard, but will definately be most efficient way of making real power.

Your budget may expand in the future, a ZE/DE swap would see good gains too. DE's are cheap, and dime a dozen. The swap is simple, too. KLDE is a probe/mx6 motor.

Well ryan, I didnt understand most of those acronyms, like I said, im not really a mechanic, Im new to car fixing, and barely know the basics. i believe the air intake i have is a nice Spectre Intake with a big 250$ mass airflow sensor...not sure what that does for me though. I dont know much about my car, but would really love to learn. so the more people that help me out, and reply the better, so maybe one day i can help others with their problems. and my car is close to 250k miles on it. Suggestions?
Jenkins

The best suggestion I can think of is use the search by clicking on the word under the MX-3 at the top of the page. There is alot of info here!

ve done al ot of reading on here since i joined...which was only a couple hours ago. But I have noticed that most people on here do their own fixing. And most people have many more resources than I do. The only resources I have are my bi weekly 600$ paychecks, and my small box of your basic socket wrenches and boxend wrenches....lol. So I need a lot of help in dealing with problems with my car and fixing my car. I really dont want to have to go to a mechanic to have something simple fixed if I can do it myself. Does anyone live near Hanford, Lemoore, Visalia...Fresno...? If so, and you have spare parts for anything, maybe a distributor, since the guy I bought mine from customized it and I have no idea how to work it. So, if anyone has ideas, or ways to help me out, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you all
Jenkins

You can do almost anything with 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21, and 32 mm sockets. 3/8 plug socket. If you want to do head work you need a 12pt 12mm... lol. Deep 12,14,17 are good to have too.

My bi-weekly paycheques are currently $200 and my costs are neverending. University does that.

You definately don't ever have to hit up a mechanic. you have all the resources they do: http://www.mx-3.com/manuals/index.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Whats with the distributor?

ahhhh mk. i could take a picture of the disty for you with my cell and text it to you if you want, since i dont have a camera, and im on a work computer. But the guy I bought it from said he was a mechanic and customized it. so its definetly not a common piece. I forget what he did exactly, but its not normal.

on a 93, not sure what needs customizing. All it is is a cap and rotor, cam position sensor.... thats all. No coils, no ignition modules to go bad...


made me curious! you can upload the photos to your computer, and then add them to photobucket, and put them on here using the IMG code. [ img ] url [ /img ] no spaces

well i am at work right now, a gov. computer, not allowed to upload anything onto them....lol
if you PM me your cell# i can send a pic of it your way.

Well 1st thing you should know is you won't make any real power on the k8 you have sitting in your engine bay, in all honesty its not cost effective to invest any money into this engine. Now that being said, you can still do bolt-ons for the motor that will help increase power, and later when your budget expands you can swap engines and put these bolt-ons on the larger more powerful motor.

Of course a Tune up is the 1st thing you should do, this will help get your engine to the power level it should be making on its own.

From there you can look into things like:

*CAI (cold air intake) - you can just use a 2 piece kit off an integra from ebay, no point in paying lots of money for a piece of pipe and a filter, though I do suggest getting a nice filer from K&N, they will be reusable and will last a pretty long time.

*HEADERS - these allow exhaust gas to exit the engine faster...

*EXHAUST - 2.25-2.5" depending on how you want your power curve set up

*LIGHTEN FLYWHEEL - generally 8-10lbs this allows for faster rotations meaning less power lost when getting to the wheels, so you don't really MAKE power, but you get more of that power to the wheels

1st you need to decide what you want the car to do. Then decide which route you want to go. This is really done so that you have a plan and know what parts you need. No point in spending your money on parts that later on down the road will not help you and will have to be replace, thus the reason I haven't touched the engine bay of my is300, I'm going turbo so there is no point in touching the motor for NA (naturally aspirated) performance.

and navy huh? Fellow Bubble head? ET2SS Here Though I got out of the navy/subs 8 years ago lol.

navymx3 wrote:ve done al ot of reading on here since i joined...which was only a couple hours ago. Jenkins

Funny, I spent months reading posts here, MX-6 and Probe Talk including Emailing people who had done to their car what I hoped to do to mine. Finally after researching as much as I could I made a decison then looked for a deal on an engine and othr parts. If your looking for a quick answer well then just do a tune up on your existing engine. Other than that educate yourself then decide. Worked for me.

Daninski wrote:

navymx3 wrote:ve done al ot of reading on here since i joined...which was only a couple hours ago. Jenkins

Funny, I spent months reading posts here, MX-6 and Probe Talk including Emailing people who had done to their car what I hoped to do to mine. Finally after researching as much as I could I made a decison then looked for a deal on an engine and othr parts. If your looking for a quick answer well then just do a tune up on your existing engine. Other than that educate yourself then decide. Worked for me.

Similar story I was on the site about 3 months before I even purchased my mx-3. I always prefer to see what I'm getting myself into before I purchase a vehicle

Change to synthetic oil, make a cold air intake with a K&N filter, put in phenolic spacers, make a groundwire kit, get a high flow catalytic converter, and muffler. That's a good start.

You guys keep talking about a CAI, i have a nice Spectre Intake with a big mass air flow, but Im not sure, that came with the car, and I hear its good, I bought a K&N air filter cleaning kit, and cleaned it nice, and oiled it up. Not sure if that helped any though.
ANd about my problem with the rolling idle.
It started doing that after me and my buddy breezee took off my air intake and sprayed and cleaned out my throttle body. A lot of the carb cleaner got into the IM, and when I started the car, TONS of white smoke came out, but I just figured that was from the fluid, but after all the smoke stopped, the idle started surging. What do you think happened? But remember, at that tiome, I forgot to put the 1/4 spacer back onto the throttle body.
maybe that will help with solving my problem...oh, and does the throttle body come off, so I can clean it better? What do you suggest to clean it with?
Jenkins

I like brake cleaner. Its pretty potent.