MX-3.com

Well, aside from not really being able to tell when the wheels spin... it feels like it holds fine. It wheel hops if I drop the clutch, so I'd call that holding.

Speaking of it maybe making more power, I'll be getting it on a dyno in the spring, all things be willing

Was out in the boonies late last night and figured I'd make some stereotypical videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4SRT-wXVvI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-nRg9wCIBE


And then the camera battery died.

Its still running a KL55 and KL02 combo, sadly. It will see nice gains from MS if I can get it dialed in with the cams up top, I have a feeling it runs quite lean over 5ish. Plus it will be nice to get the VRIS going.

It seems to fall on its face at almost exactly 5500 RPM, but not always. It seems to be a "some-days" issue, and I haven't been able to track it down yet. It was throwing the VRIS#2 code (legit, it was infact not working) but my VRIS haven't worked since I put in the ATX harness, even before the KL swap.

I'm hoping to get my other MX on the road for winter so I can park this one and work out the bugs at my own pace.

Put on the fall/spring tires... lol. Those are RS 14"s with 195/65's.

Also, I need a RR caliper if anyone has one laying around.

Well, it happened.



I drove it a bit more, since I didn't have the other car ready yet.

Started to leak about 1/8L of oil for the first 30s on cold starts, and then refuse to do it after that. I changed the filter the first time, thinking defective o-ring, but it continued... so I just put a pail under the car at night, collected it in the morning, and added it after a little warm up period.

Eventually got the other car ready, and now she's parked and stripped of her battery, starter, and KL02/KL55.

Motor will come out over the holidays, and get torn down again, just for inspection, and to fix up a few things in the ports, and the oil pan, and the oil leak, which I'm pretty sure is the O ring between the sandwich plate and the block ( a Topline ring...)

I also want to check the piston/wall clearances, because I never did that .

Maybe a 24v valvecover.

General clean up from the previous leaky cover.

Maybe a new timing cover set up.

I'll invest in MS and a WB02 and get it wired in this spring, then its tune time, then dyno time, then ITB/race time.



I ran it up to redline for the first time, the day I parked it. I'm also DD'in a plain KLDE now. The ZE doesn't quit like the DE does, but it also lacks a little oomph around 2-4.5 compared to the DE. Or so my butt dyno tells me.

Sounded purdy too. Can't wait for 8k.

Man that snow looks rough. :[ We don't have snow down in Va yet.

Out of curiousity did you ever talk to anyone at interprep about what they do for oil improvements when they go through a kl? Just seems like your going through and awful lot of work for all these improvements.

Nah.

Admittedly I was shooting in the dark, but I've been through a fluids course now, and I was pointed in the right direction, I was just emphasizing the slightly wrong things.... what I should have been doing was designing the bends to minimize the minor head losses, which means lowering the friction factor, which is a function of the corner radius as a function of the diameter for bends.Its an easy value to find in a table. I was doing that, but blindly, and not confident why, just intuition. Also the finish should be as smooth as possible.

The same reason I'm going to be modifying my ports some more, too. The roof needs to move up if it can. Don't touch much of the bottom, and knife edging may produce unexpected results. Leaving the mismatched junction between head/manifold in the injector recess is a good idea, don't smooth that out. You don't get a lot of flow there, the mass hugs the outside of the turn down, and you want the turbulence of a straight edge to pick up the fuel.

Also, you ALWAYS want to polish. People say you don't want to polish because you need (insert invalid argument about turbulence and boundary layer here). The effects of a porting job won't be negated if you forget to polish though, it will just amplify your results. The flow won't be neat and laminar anyway, and the relative roughness of your porting job will likely be less than stock, unless you used a reciprocating tool...

ALWAYS polish. This minimizes your boundary layer, leaving a greater area for higher velocity flow. You can create turbulence locally if you want to (like in front of the injector)

I didn't really do a lot of work. Not at all. I don't have any machines to do it properly, either.

And that snow is nothing. Since we're continental, we don't usually get heaps (just all the cold), the coasts get all the snow, especially the east.

Ryan wrote:Well, aside from not really being able to tell when the wheels spin... it feels like it holds fine. It wheel hops if I drop the clutch, so I'd call that holding.

Speaking of it maybe making more power, I'll be getting it on a dyno in the spring, all things be willing

I was thinking about building a wheel speed monitor for the Mustang LOL. I ran it through the gears and it felt really slow, then I looked in the mirror there was two black stripes as far as the eye could see. I was thinking you could use a wheel speed sensor for the front and rear wheels, then you could tell what was going on. altough drag radials might be cheaper LOL

Before Christmas I had this car running again (basically put starter disty battery and ECM back in) and its still good.

Fixed the oil leak problem(did I mention this? cold start it would drop about 1/8L of oil from the filter area), it was the O ring between the filter sandwich and the housing on the block. I think that ring is going to be yearly maintenance unless I can find a higher quality one.


I did have plans to remove the motor to look at it more in depth, but I can never seem to find time to even plan to get a bigger project like this going. I think it might just stay in there this winter.

Looking very seriously at MS. Have my shopping cart ready to go, all <$600 for everything I need. Minus coilpacks or COP's, which would be a simple JY find.

Looking into racing a whole lot more this summer too.

1-off costs: $150 helmet.

racing costs: $200/weekend, + $50-odd in fuel for Solosprint, $30 and $20 for AutoX. Some for food.

related yearly costs: $50 membership, $4-600 on tires, $100 odd on brakes.

Its not a cheap hobby

Ryan wrote: Its not a cheap hobby

True that. I've been looking into it for a while too. I learnt to drive by doing AutoX, and have been really keen on getting back into it again. I'm thinking I should be able to once I get back from my 12 months overseas, but until then, I just can't afford the extra expense!
The other thing you didn't add into the equation is the extra expenses from things that inevitably break/go wrong after a while of hard driving... And the cost of buying/owning an extra car (assuming you're not planning on using your perfectly good, road registered MX! Haha)
Speaking of which, it's looking good, and by the sounds of things is up & running (mostly) well, too haha

It was like 15º today, and its looking to stay above freezing from here on in, so I went and dug out my ZE.

Tried to start it up on K8 management, but it was riiiiich as H and flooded itself to death, literally.

Popped out plugs, put in KL management, fired up and ran like a beauty.

The synthetic is not agreeing with my gaskets, so I have oil in 2 wells now. I fixed the previous leak.

Now that I've DD'd the regular KL for a 5 months now, I can really tell the difference in the power. The DE isn't a weak motor, but it comes on at 4.2 and comes off at 5.5. KL comes on at 4.2 and doesn't die off. It continues to pull harder until at least 7.

Ryan wrote:It was like 15º today, and its looking to stay above freezing from here on in, so I went and dug out my ZE.

Tried to start it up on K8 management, but it was riiiiich as H and flooded itself to death, literally.

Popped out plugs, put in KL management, fired up and ran like a beauty.

The synthetic is not agreeing with my gaskets, so I have oil in 2 wells now. I fixed the previous leak.

Now that I've DD'd the regular KL for a 5 months now, I can really tell the difference in the power. The DE isn't a weak motor, but it comes on at 4.2 and comes off at 5.5. KL comes on at 4.2 and doesn't die off. It continues to pull harder until at least 7.

i really need to invest in a set of ze cams.

I've bounced it off the limiter a few times now, and it really doesn't let up. Gets stronger and stronger right up to the 7.5 limiter (gauge is on crack looks more like 7.8 )

They aren't ZE cams, they're Colt's 218/255 cams.

I've had the car out for a few months now, just DDing it. Everything is working just fine.

I picked up a set of horizontal led projectors. Just thinking about wiring now.

I think I want to wire the opposing halo with the high/low beam, so the other halo is on when the light is on, and on top of that, have the halos on a separate switch so I can have them only on, or I'll wire them into the parking light only relay, the TNS relay...but I think that power is maintained when you switch to headlights, so I may need to get creative with diodes and relays. Use a NC relay to open the circuit when the light is on, but leave the opposing one on....

Put in the horizontal LED projectors today. Not impressed with the quality (the plugs are all loose and the connections are s---) its missing a mounting point, the fitment isn't great but neither is stock, and the halo LED's are cross-wired so the left one lights the right halo (unsolder-resolder, s---).

then I backed into a tree, so now I found a place for my new rear clear markers and one of my spare bumpers.

I spend 8-11 hours at work, and the rest of the time at SAE or sleeping, so I may drive around with a knackered bumper and terrible headlight alignment for a while.

Oh, but Megasquirt II is in the mail.