Laminar

It's like for a second there I forgot the junkyard was a thing. Went to Wrench N Go over lunch break and found a Mazda6 with auto climate control. The sun load sensor didn't match, and neither did its connector. But I was able to snip off the pigtail from the climate module and that got me all of the pins I need to add wires to my climate module. Then later I found an Acura sun load sensor whose connector looked suspiciously close. With a little hobby knife work, it fits right up in the sensor and I can see voltage changes from dark to shade to direct sunlight.

Laminar

Continued tinkering with the climate control upgrade. I'm not sure exactly where the cabin air temp sensor mounts - its gasket makes it appear that it should be pressed tightly against a square tube, but I can't find anything in the realm that looks like it would fit. I assume it would sit somewhere around the driver's right knee, behind the little "vent" grate below the steering wheel. I poked around back there a bit and pulled the radio out to look behind and below it, but didn't spot an obvious spot. The wiring location diagram makes it look like it's just next to or below the radio, and maybe even facing down? The parts fische doesn't really show it very well.

Since the car came with a set of plugs, I figured I'd swap them. Probably a good thing.

The leading plugs were pretty dirty.





But when I went to remove the rear trailing plug, it was just finger tight .





It was all kinds of goopy wet with oil. Glad I got that changed out.

The passenger window was acting weird and I narrowed it down to an issue with the motor, so I ordered a replacement "front right" motor from eBay. It showed up, so I pulled everything apart and looked at it and realized it was the front left one, but plugging it in fixed my gear skipping issue. So I just tore each motor apart and swapped out the good gears into the correctly-oriented unit. If I knew I was going to have to do that anyway, I would have just bought the gears...



Fueled up for the first time, did 16.9mpg (with a loose spark plug...). On the same route I'd usually do 18-19 in my old car, so actually not that much worse, though the $/mile for 91 hurts a bit more. I will say I'm driving much more gently and carefully with this car than I did with my old one, I'm very self conscious about ripping around in an ear-splittingly-loud car with dark tint. With my old grandpa car I could go full throttle all day every day and no one would notice because it just looked and sounded slow all the time, hence the bad mpg.

I took the RX-8 to visit my parents for Mother's Day, about 45 minutes each way. If I ever road trip this thing again, I'm taking earplugs, my head was abuzz when I got there. I let my dad take it for a spin and he noticed right away how responsive everything was, he liked it a lot.

Had a CEL pop up, I'll have to pull the codes and see what it says. Kind of funny that it didn't mind a loose plug, but with fresh new tight plugs all of a sudden something is wrong

Federighi

iTrader: (7)

Nice thread, fun handwork.

Be careful with your hearing. 100% make sure to use protection if you're going to continue to drive the vehicle like this. As I've gotten older, I've found that exhaust tone is more important than volume and I personally can't stand anything that's overly / obnoxiously loud anymore.

Sustained db levels of 70 or greater will cause harm.

Laminar

I get tested yearly for work, no degradation yet. I'm more surprised that all of the years of working on old motorcycles didn't hurt me.

Laminar

Haven't had much time to tinker lately. I did get the new sun load sensor installed and pulled wires under the dash to go from the blower transistor and the sun load sensor over to the new climate amp. Just need to tap into the power and ground wires for the cabin air temp sensor, then I can plug everything in and see if this works at all.

Got a set of RT660s in and mounted up to put on the M3 for this season. Gonna have to roll the fenders even more, these things are wiiiide for a 255.

peloponisios

Good tough sidewalls these tires. Good choice. Hope you enjoy them

TeamRX8

iTrader: (25)

they aren’t that wide; what wheel width and offset did you use?

.

Laminar

This is on the M3. Anything wider than a 245 requires rolling, anything 275 or up requires flares. It's another reason I'm turned onto the RX-8.

TeamRX8

iTrader: (25)

rereading the post it seems obvious now, didn’t click at the time though

but there is a whole slew of off-topic side posts going on considering this is the RX8 racing forum area.
.

Laminar

Like I said before, give me a Build Threads section and I'll gladly post in there.

Interesting development this weekend - the car has sat for several days with the blower resistor and the AC amp unplugged. I went out yesterday to pop the trunk to grab the chairs for soccer and the battery was dead. Like...3V dead. I hooked up the charger and something around the front bumper area started clicking rhythmically like it was trying to move but couldn't. I'm wondering if having that stuff disconnected confused something and it stayed awake and drained the battery? It has sat this long before and started without a problem, and the battery is an Optima red top that was new last year, so I don't think that's old and dead.

But the 2A charger couldn't bring it back to life. I've had it restore totally dead lead-acid batteries before, but on this one after a few minutes it just turns red and says check battery, which I've never seen it do. A friend of mine has a nice battery refresher that I'll have to borrow and try.

Laminar

Oh man. Lots to report.

I was racing on Sunday, so I had to get the RX-8 started and out of the way so I could get the M3 out of the garage. I tried putting my 2A motorcycle battery charger on the RX-8 but it would give up almost immediately and tell me to check the battery. But I was able to jump the car and let it idle so it could charge the battery on it own. Upon getting into the car while it was running, I noticed the dome light turned out. I'm going to blame some little 3 year old fingers for pushing all of the button in sight and leaving that dome light on for a week or two. With that mystery solved, I was able to move the car out of the way and work on getting the M3 ready to race. I probably spent 4-5 hours working on the corner balance since I finally have my own scales. I got those dialed in and went to check the alignment at the current height, only to find the rear control arm mount almost entirely ripped out of the body.



Only one of those bolts is holding the trailing arm in place and taking the entirety of the fore/aft forces. Not good, and definitely not racing on Sunday. So now it's 3PM on Saturday and I had to figure out what I was going to do about a race car. Well...the RX-8 would work in theory, but I still had the climate control yanked apart and it's still on old all seasons. So I connected up the last few wires for the auto climate swap and started the car up. The module was recognized, all of the new buttons work, and everything showed up on the screen like it should. I could hear the AC compressor cycling on and off as I adjusted the temperature. Two problems - the temperatures were in Celsius only. I tried holding the Ambient temp button down but it didn't swap units. I couldn't figure out how to adjust that, but that's minor. The other problem is that the blower never came on. The auto setup uses a power transistor instead of the blower resistor and apparently it wasn't firing up the blower motor. I didn't have time to check the wiring or input signals, so I swapped everything back to stock and confirmed that it all still worked, which it did. My only modifications were to tap into existing wires and add pins, nothing was cut out or de-pinned, so no fuss to go back to stock. The hardest part is re-pinning the blower resistor plug.

With that working, I turned to the issue of traction. I wanted to run the new Falken RT660 tires I got for the M3, but they're on 17" 5x120 wheels, and the RX-8 has the stock 18" wheels, so I couldn't swap the tires and I couldn't bolt up my wheels. I put out some feelers to see if anyone knew where I could get some wheel adapters locally on short notice, and somebody piped up and mentioned they had some wheel adapters he had used to run M3 wheels on his Mazdaspeed3. I swung by and picked them up, and the M3 wheels bolted right up.



The offset on these wheels was already low, but with an extra inch of wheel spacer, it ended up being a LOT of poke.





Not my desired fitment, but beggars can't be choosers, and I was just glad to get some good tires on this car. I loaded it on the trailer and got all packed up for Sunday.





I don't know if anyone has ever discovered this before, but the RX-8 is actually a really good autocross car. While I'm afraid to wring the car out on the street due to the horrendously loud exhaust, it was a blast on course, and everyone on site was made extremely aware of my throttle position at all times. The throttle is incredibly responsive and the dearth of torque, plethora of traction, and stock suspension compliance let me get really aggressive with the throttle application without upsetting the chassis or having the rear end get wild on me. And the brakes were fantastic, no excessive pedal travel like the E36.



I struggled with hitting a lot of cones at first - still figuring out where the corners of the car are, and having to account for an inch or two of tire sticking out trying to nibble at the cones took some time. My best clean run of the day was a 58.0 (I did have a 57.8 but coned that one out), good for 8th overall in raw, only 0.2 seconds behind the turbo Miata in my class that beat me by a full second at the last event on the M3 with old tires. I'd venture to say that the RX-8 even on what appears to be the factory original 130,000 mile suspension and wheezing rotary engine is just as fast as the M3. There's a lot of compliance there and it feels like the tires have grip for days.

Of course, during my last run the oil light started blinking, which apparently means there's a fault with the oil injection pump? So I whipped it around and got on the trailer right away. I started the car back up and the light was gone, so maybe I'm good.

And then this morning on the way to work the check engine light started blinking at me a couple times for just a few seconds, indicating a misfire I guess? So it's great that I'm getting the authentic rotary experience.

When I got home after returning the trailer, I noticed the truck's front left brake smoking, so I have a new caliper on the way for that, which makes the RX-8 my only driveable car right now.



Hoping it holds together for the time being!

peloponisios

Seems you had a great experience. Hope everything turns out well
Regarding the a/c, I don't know if it helps, but in mine I have to set it at 15 celsius to blow cold air. It does work though.

Laminar

I've spent enough time in Canada to be familiar with where I want my hotel thermostat set for comfort . But all of the threads here say to hold the ambient button to swap between F and C, though maybe that only applies to S1 cars. I'll have to review the owner's manual to see if it says anything.

Laminar

Here's what I found:

So I'm not sure why holding the Outside button didn't toggle it for me.

Laminar

Totally, looking forward to racing this car more. With better driving, I know I could be knocking on some top times even in stock form.

Also with these wheel adapters, I can run my BMW winter wheels/tires. I'll just have to see if the tires tuck in better on wheels with better offset.

Laminar

Funny, I can toggle F to C with my normal manual setup by doing this, but I guess not in auto?

Laminar

Here's the video from Sunday.


I was a bit cone shy after hitting more that day than I did all last season, but I tried to tighten up as I went.

Laminar

This has started being a consistent thing - every day about a minute or two after getting onto the interstate, I'd see a flashing CEL once or twice for a few seconds. No noticeable odd running conditions, but it was happening every day. Last night the CEL actually stayed on once it was done flashing, so I checked the code when I got home - cyl 1 misfire. I was suspicious of the trailing plug I installed when I put new plugs in. The electrode looked crooked, like the plug had been dropped. I had already ordered a replacement and had it on my workbench, so I went ahead and put that in. No CEL this morning, we'll see how it goes over the next few weeks.

Also I need to figure out which wheel is wheel #1 so I can swap out that TPMS and hopefully get rid of that warning light as well.

TeamRX8

iTrader: (25)

just a reminder that you always need to reset the ESS profile whenever anything ignition related is touched; e-shaft pulley/trigger wheel, ESS sensor, coil wiring, ignition coil, spark wire, plug; pretty much anything. It’s that sensitive. Even doing anything on the other end of the e-shaft, clutch, flywheel, etc. can cause a slight change that will raise the CEL flag if it’s not reset.
.

Laminar

I didn't know that, so thank you, I'll give it a shot. The manual also mentions resetting the auto window operation after that. My driver's auto window still doesn't work, so maybe I'll give that a shot after work today.

Laminar

Played with the window a bit while waiting in the school pickup line. I found that in the ACC position, I can still raise and lower my passenger window, but the driver's window won't move. The wiring diagram shows both constant and switched power into the power window control module, but the inside of it is a black box. I've tried two different driver's switch assemblies to no avail, so now I'm wondering if there's something in the motor assembly that'd preventing the switch from learning the open and closed positions.

Laminar

Raced the M3 again last weekend after getting it back together. Finally found some time today to give the RX-8 some love. Threw on new pads and rotors. Found the rear caliper piston boots totally torn apart.



I've found a how-to on the front piston, but not the rear. Do I screw it all of the way out to get the piston out of there?

And I also found something else slightly alarming:



Looks like someone must have tugged the car around by that lower arm. Looks like they're cheap enough from Mazda, I'll have to get one ordered. The parts diagram calls out 28-500A, but the list has two items under that number. What's the difference?



Got the clutch speed bleeder installed and bled the clutch a bit, we'll see if that makes engagement more consistent.

TeamRX8

iTrader: (25)

or hit a curb

500B is a revised version of 500A; moves to the next letter with each update/change

choose 500B and you might even get 500C if 500B was superseded

I’m out of town, but will check to see if the rear caliper rebuild procedure is in my service manual once back home.
.

Laminar

Thanks for the info. It just threw me off that the prefix was different. I'm used to Ford part numbers where it's vehicle-part-rev. I saw F151 vs F189 and figured it was something else.

Fronts are done but I'm still waiting on boots from O'Reilly's.



There were supposed to be in yesterday but I didn't have a chance to check.

mrazny

iTrader: (1)

Just wanted to offer, when I did my exhaust experiment (3.5" header back) I was insanely loud. Based on what Team's done with his exhaust versions I went with a spiral baffle solution in a gigantic 4" pipe section welding in the baffle. Tamed everything so well I could probably even get rid of the muffler in the back (I won't).