build diary

September 5, 2005: During the long weekend, I spent a few minutes here and there working on the Seven.
First, the throttle bodies. The first drive, the throttles started sticking open as things got warm. I thought I had enough slack in the cable but apparently not. The next sticking problem was solved by giving part of the linkage a little tweak. Now it idles happily at 850 rpm just like a "real" Miata engine. Well, almost. When it's cold, it's not terribly happy to idle. Part of this is due to the lack of any idle speed control valve and part of it is due to some fairly rough tuning at the moment. On the road, though, it runs reasonably well. Doesn't want much fuel, though. Hmm. Am I that far off on the correction for the new injectors or is the car not making much power? The dyno will tell. I know right now that the car is making some very cool induction noises.

I did discover one problem that had been driving me nuts the last time the throttle bodies were on. Every time I saved any changes to the ECU, the car wouldn't start up. This time I decided to hunt down the problem. Finally, I plugged the old throttle position sensor and idle speed control valves back in. Problem solved. The ISC makes some clicking noises so maybe that's what the problem was. Very odd.

Tonight, I decided it was time to do something about the foolish fender stays. The only time they've ever fit properly was on the first drive out of the garage. The front fenders hit the headlights at lock, they would move around on every drive, various parts of the stays would break and it was a pain to both install them and bleed the brakes. Those who have been reading for a while will know how much reshaping I had to do in order to make them fit in the first place. So, after they broke again at the most recent track day, I decided it was time to stop screwing around with the poor design and build something better from scratch.

I took inspiration from this Stalker build and picked up some 1/2" rod. It was easy enough to bend in a vice with a bit of leverage and after a bit of thinking, I figured out a simple way to make it all work. I still need to put a short stop on them to keep them from rotating around their mounting bolt but I'm very happy. The design is cleaner, much easier to install, leaves lots of room for bleeding the brakes and looks good. They're also much more solid and the fenders now clear the headlights and provide a little more stone protection. The downside? The new ones are 2.50 lbs instead of 2.30. That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

One last thing - while playing around with these, I found the rod ends used on the upper control arms were wearing. One side had axial play while the other had both axial and radial. Now, this car has seen a fair bit of racetrack use. But these must have been some pretty junky rod ends to start. I'll order some decent ones tomorrow and also replace the studs with bolts.

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