speedy_w_beans

Yeah, I guess it's a breeze if you take 3-4 months to do it! I wasn't under any pressure to finish it in a single weekend, so that was good. Some areas that gave me problems included: Starter motor: There's not a lot of space between the engine and the radiator, and there's a mess of wiring and coolant hoses blocking everything. It took a few tries to pivot, rotate, and wiggle that stupid part out of the car. Wiring harness brackets: These were really annoying. The harness has zip ties and push-in posts in certain locations that make manufacturing easy, but service difficult if you want to preserve those posts. It took a number of different needle nose pliers to get behind some of those brackets and release the fingers so the harness could be lifted out of the way. Drive shafts: I had to take an OTC slide hammer attachment and reshape it with an angle grinder to make it fit the joint cup properly without damaging the seal dust shield. It took some trial and error to make that work. The transaxle itself: Just because it got hung up on the subframe, and it was no fun removing the subframe with the transaxle hanging down and resting on a jack at the same time. Definitely a lesson learned: clear the space completely even if it's a little more work. The power steering rack: Initially we were trying to remove the bolts from below the car and my son and I had all sorts of crazy arrangements with flex head ratchets and cheater pipes. Later we figured out it was way easier to come from the top and down the firewall with a few extra long socket extensions. The clutch slave cylinder: I had topped off the reservoir and asked my wife to help pump the pedal. I was amazed there was ZERO movement at the slave cylinder when we first started. There's basically nothing to bleed if the fluid doesn't reach the slave. What I had to do was open the bleed valve completely and let it "gravity bleed" to get about half the air out. At that point we had some slave cylinder movement, and it took a good hour or two bouncing between the floor and keeping the reservoir full since the reservoir is baffled and the clutch side has very little volume. Lots of changing positions for this procedure, but when it was done I knew it was 100% purged of air. They're all solvable, and like I said, sometimes it was better to walk away and come back later. Putting the starter motor back in was like that. It was later on a Thursday night and I couldn't get it in position no matter what I tried. Then I came back to it the next night and dropped right into place in 3 minutes. Crazy! (By the way, I'm sold on wobble extensions for a few tight spots. Torquing some of the turbo bolts on the earlier repair and accessing some of the wiring harness bracket fasteners wouldn't have been possible without these tools.)

I replaced the OEM motor mounts with some polyurethane mounts from SURE Motorsports; these are meant to be stiffer than OEM and help control engine movement under hard acceleration. I already had the lower mount from 10 years ago and had just replaced the polyurethane last year, so I wanted the full set. I went back and forth a few times and made sure to center the mounts' holes relative to the chassis, then torqued everything down. It was nice to remove the engine support bar and have the engine suspended by mounts again. The chassis cross brace, front subframe, power steering rack, and power steering heat shield went back in. Again, my son helped me with the front subframe as it's pretty large and heavy. We had to rotate the front sway bar over the steering tie rods and get the end links in position with the struts. The axles went in next; I prepped the outer joints' splines with antiseize to help with removal in the future. I used new circlips with inner joints per the replacement procedures. Then the front suspension was reassembled. Lower ball joint pinch bolts, brake lines, sway bar links, tie rods, ABS sensor wires, and axle nuts... The starter motor, wiring harness bracket, and slave cylinder went in next. The original starter motor dust shield/gasket crumbled when I removed it, so I had to find some self-adhesive foam material to make a new gasket. The slave cylinder is brand new; I didn't want to take a chance with the old part and stiffer pressure plate spring. That took care of most of the lower work. The charge air cooler and blow off valve hoses were next. Cold air intake, MAF sensor, and fuel pump resistor... AEM dryflow filter and splash shield. Charge air cooler cover, battery box, and ECU cover... I had charged the battery and found it hadn't lost that much while sitting outside the car... All buttoned up.. At this point the car was basically ready to go, but I wanted to start it and check for leaks/noises/weirdness. It fired right up and it came up to temp. No leaks, nothing odd, so I was happy to drop the car on the ground at that point. The last step was to torque the two bolts holding the suspension arm bushings in place. This has to be done with weight on the suspension so the bushings are captured in their natural position. Good to go! My wife and I went for a drive around town to mail some bills and pick up lunch. Three things jumped out at me right away: 1) The clutch seemed really binary and difficult to drive for the first few miles. But, as we put some more city driving on it, the engagement became more progressive and easy to modulate. 2) The pedal travel seemed a little wonky at first. There seemed to be too much pedal free play, and the engagement point seemed pretty close to the floor. I had bled the hydraulics extensively and knew there wasn't any air in the system. Again, as we drove around town it seemed like the pedal returned to its factory feel. The effort got lighter, the free play shrunk, and the engagement point lifted off the floor somewhat (maybe coupled with the progressive feel). So, it seemed like parts were breaking in and things were seating. 3) The motor mounts were LOUD. I had no idea these polyurethane bushings would be this loud. The vendor explained it might take a few hundred or a thousand miles to break them in, and it's true that in first 20-50 miles we noticed the harshness starting to reduce. I'm going to drive it this way for a full oil change and make a judgment call later; I might switch back to new OEM top mounts (but keep the lower poly mount) just to improve the noise more. So, I'm very happy with the clutch, but the jury is still out on the motor mounts. We'll see how it goes. With this weight off my shoulders, I may very well start fiddling with RC again!

I've owned a first-gen 2007 Mazdaspeed 3 for nearly 14 years and have really enjoyed driving it. While I used it mostly for going to/from work and the occasional road trip, it didn't see an extreme amount of miles and so it only has about 85k on it at the moment. It's one of those cars that "clicks" with me, so I'm not in any hurry to unload it. It's been treated well with more periodic maintenance than the schedule calls for. Last November, right at 13 years, the turbo started smoking and I had to rebuild it. It's a known issue with these first-gen cars, and I'm surprised the stock K04 lasted as long as it did. Ultimately I sourced a new CHRA (Center Housing Rotating Assembly) and just transferred the turbine housing, compressor housing, and wastegate actuator over to the new CHRA. It cured the issue and the turbo has been making full boost with no problems. While making that repair I discovered a leaking front strut, so that prompted an upgrade to Bilstein B6's all around in December. It's been one of my complaints about the car since it was new; the suspension always felt underdamped and bouncy. The new B6's really helped; the ride is more controlled but still comfortable. I'd buy Bilstein again in a heartbeat. This past March, just as SARS-COV-2 was spreading, I started to have problems with the clutch slipping. It was more of a problem in 5th gear, but it started doing it in 4th gear as well, and I knew it wouldn't be long before it slipped a lot more. I drove the car a few more times, but since we all started working from home my need for transportation went down considerably. They say trouble comes in threes, and maybe that's true. If so, hopefully this clutch repair along with the struts and turbo will keep the car going for awhile and I can get a few more fun years out of it. I debated about unloading the car vs. fixing it, but in April I chose to fix it for two main reasons: 1) I know the whole history of car, and it's in great condition overall. 2) The value on the open market is so low there's nothing really to lose if I screw up the job and destroy it. With some extra courage coming from the turbo rebuild and the strut replacement, and no pressing need for the car, why not try something even more complex? And so the story started in April. I spent a few weeks reading through the factory service manuals, listing all the needed replacement parts and special service tools to do the job. I went shopping and found pretty much all my parts at Edge Autosport, and that made me very happy. Getting the special tools, though, was much more difficult. My local dealer wouldn't source and sell them to me (********!), and the distributor in the USA only deals with wholesale accounts. I approached another distributor in Germany, but they refused to sell to me as well. I tried some other Mazda specialty sites, but they focused more on RX7s and RX8s. I was pretty much out of luck for certain special tools and decided I'd have to make some as needed. In May I started placing orders and the parts and availalbe tools arrived pretty quickly. My main problem was an engine support bar I bought from a seller on Amazon; when the package arrived it was missing the main support bar but had all the other parts in the box. It took about two weeks to resolve the issue since the seller went back to his supplier to get a replacement instead of breaking open one of the other 18 he had in stock to get me going faster. I missed my window to start the job on Memorial Day weekend, so the car stayed together and was driven gently until the July 4th weekend came. I had a long weekend scheduled for July 4th and put the car on jack stands. As is typical in North Carolina, July and August are pretty miserable with the heat and humidity. I think I did some of the easy disassembly steps at first, but it was so uncomfortable in the garage even with a fan blowing I hated working on it. Since the car wasn't really needed that badly, I shifted my mindset and decided to do other things and just let it sit until the weather started to cool down more. In September we started to have some nicer days, so I made progress on the project during evenings and weekends. At this point I was treating the repair more like a hobby (instead of RC!) and less like an urgent issue. Time to go to the beach? OK! A new season on Netflix to binge-watch? Yeah! So while this project was still on my mind many days, it wasn't that important. I think in some ways this mindset helped me because there were a few times I was stuck with a problem but could easily walk away and just sleep on it for a day or two. Anyhow, this past weekend I finished the job and took the car out to break in the clutch. It all went back together, nothing is leaking, and there are no loose parts. I think I'm ready to call this a success. Here are some pictures and highlights from the repair... I can't overemphasize how nice it is to have factory service manuals. I have paper copies as well as PDF copies for the complete vehicle and the transmission. It's always great to have the documentation and the lessons learned from others through Google searches. I followed the whole process per the book procedure, and when it came time to remove the transmission it was really difficult with the front subframe in the way. Ultimately I pulled the front subframe, and it was so much easier to slip the transmission off the engine onto a motorcycle/ATV jack. Here's the engine suspended by the passenger side motor mount and the engine support bar. The bar is angled to align the hook with the tab on top of the engine. Transmission on the jack. The local Harbor Freight had a few different transmission jacks available, but I went with the motorcycle/ATV jack because it would go as low as 3.5" above the floor. This was really important for getting the transmission out from under the car. And here we have a pile of parts as a result of following all those disassembly steps above. I started laying parts out from left to right to keep them in sequence; there are three rows of parts here... It was actually pretty nice to have the engine hanging like it was. I could sit cross-legged where the transmission normally resides, and it made it very easy to clean the old silicone sealant off the engine block and oil pan. Once I had the engine and transmission separated, and all the clutch parts removed, I proceeded with cleaning the transmission and installing new parts. Ultimately I put in new drain/fill crush washers, new release bearing and fork, new axle oil seals, and a modified breather vent. Axle seal installation was one of those steps where it would have been nice to source the special service tool. What I had to do, instead, was buy a bearing installer kit from the local Harbor Freight and then use plumbing parts to transfer the hammer forces to the edges of the seal. I tried pretty hard to not deform the seal's metal construction nor deform any of the rubber parts. The custom tool worked a treat! I also made another tool for the other seal, but this one wasn't as nice. The closest plumbing part I could find was a PVC shower drain. With the transmission prepped I worked on the engine. First up was replacing the rear main seal. This car was built back when Ford owned a 33% share of Mazda, so there are some common parts shared between the two companies. For this installation I sourced a tool from OTC comparable to Ford's 303-328 and followed the procedure shown above. The key thing about this tool is it keeps the lip of the seal pointed in the right direction and it prevents any nicks/cuts from the end of the crankshaft. I didn't want the whole job sunk by a leaking seal. New seal in place: Next up was the pilot bearing and flywheel. For the pilot bearing I used the handle from the bearing installer tool to drive it in so it was flush with the face of the crankshaft. Then I used a deep socket with a brass hammer to drive it in some more, and checked the depth with some digital calipers (spec is 4 to 5 mm in). To torque the flywheel bolts there's a holding tool under it. I had to lie on my side and put a foot against the engine while pulling on the torque wrench for the final torque values. The clutch alignment tool supplied with the kit was made of plastic and had some slop in the pilot bearing, so as I was installing the pressure plate I checked the edge of the clutch disc relative to the edge of the flywheel with the digital calipers again; it was off by maybe 0.25 mm so that seemed close enough. The pressure plate was easy enough. It has a slight interference fit with the flywheel's dowels, so I tapped it with my fist in a few locations to seat it against the clutch disc. At that point I hand-threaded all the bolts and started to torque them in a star pattern in quarter-turn increments. The idea was to apply pressure to the plate evenly so as to not bend the pressure plate and keep the clutch disc in position. The clutch kit is a South Bend Stage 2 Endurance with about 100 ft-lb more capacity than the OEM clutch. I'm hoping the clutch will survive a long time since it won't be used to full capacity (330 ft-lb peak at the crank). I made some alignment pins out of 10 mm long bolts; the intention was to keep the transmission from rotating too much while installing it, but I found they actually made the installation more difficult. The reason is you need to be able to rotate the transmission a little bit to help the splines of the transmission align with the splines of the clutch disc. Oh well; I removed them as soon as I realized what was going on. My son and I worked together; he manned the jack while I kept adjusting the transmission angles and testing fitment. We had to place some blocks of wood and some carpentry shims in various locations to keep the transmission aligned just right. Once I wiggled the gear selector lever and the splined shaft slipped into the clutch disc, we were so happy to have the transmission case slide right in and line up with the dowels in the engine block. We quickly installed and torqued all the bolts, removed the jack, and raised the powertrain into normal position again.

Ironic the frog has to avoid the buggies...

In terms of RC, I'm in an ok spot at the moment. Sold a few things last month and cleaned up my work space and storage room. With that said, I haven't had much drive to do anything lately and it feels like the window to complete some painting is quickly closing until next spring. As the temperatures turn cold the next opportunities include electronics installation and working on 3D printed detail parts on several projects. I doubt much will happen until I get my 1:1 car put back together, make it through leaf cleanup season, and finish scanning paper photographs from family albums. There will be plenty to do as the holidays come as well. In terms of life in general, I'm more irritable than usual. Work is a drag. My wife keeps shopping for houses we can't afford. My son is taking his sweet time launching. I hate having to wear a mask and be deliberate with excursions into the real world. I also hate having to consider if domestic terrorists are marching through my AO and what parts of town to avoid. I miss going to movies, hockey games, the apple festival, and the county fair. I'd love to get back to the more care-free, spontaneous life we were living before. I wish businesses would just focus on serving customers and drop all the virtue signaling they've latched onto. If you've ever laid in bed and felt the room was spinning around you, that's kind of how I feel in the real world right now. Everything is still here, but everything is "off" in one way or another.

That's nice, clean work. I like your paint job.

The caps off PS spray paint cans make fine car stands...

Generally inventions and technology displace previous inventions and technology when it makes economic sense. When the initial purchase price, range, and charge/fill times are roughly equal or better than ICE vehicles across all weather/temperature conditions then we'll see more of a shift towards EVs. I know we should include running costs, maintenance, insurance, as well (basically look at the total cost of ownership), but many people don't think as deeply about the running costs as the first three parameters. The topic of autonomy could/should be viewed as something separate from the powertrain choice; either an EV or an ICE vehicle can be controlled by an autonomous solution. Like @markbt73, I also think autonomy is a dead end and won't see the light of day in our lifetime unless we completely rebuild our road system into a rail system. There are too many uncontrolled situations, corner cases, and evolving signage/landscape to have 100% confidence a system is trained completely. I wouldn't trust it. A controlled environment like a rail system is a different story. One other hot topic in the automotive business is connectivity. Cellular modems are getting embedded in more and more cars, with some projections suggesting up to 60-70% penetration rate in vehicles in the next few years. The automakers are finding clever uses for the connectivity including lease/rental enforcement, diagnostics and remote firmware updates, concierge services, general WiFi/wireless data access, data harvesting for engineering design improvement, advertising, and more. The way I see it is connectivity will become pervasive in the near future because automakers are finding ways to pay for it even if the end customer doesn't subscribe to the service. The economics make sense for at least one party to fund it; it's even more lucrative if the end customer subscribes to the service. The switch to EVs will again be dictated by economics, but that will mostly be tied to advances in battery science. Once we hit $100 USD/kWh of capacity and 5-minute charge times then things get interesting. Feels like another 10-15 years to reach that tipping point for EVs, and then it becomes a function of older cars aging out of the global fleet for another 10-15 years. Autonomy is an unwieldy problem, though. I really think more advances in ADAS levels 1 and 2 and formalized regulations driving automatic braking, lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, etc. will solve a good percentage of traffic collision/fatalities. Current studies suggest around 60-70% effectiveness of these lower-level technologies. Personally I don't want to give control to a fully autonomous solution; I like the act of driving. I also don't want any connectivity; I prefer privacy, quiet, and no distractions. But I would consider a change to an EV when the price is right. Less maintenance and some inherent fun factor (low end torque) would make it appealing to me.

Great build! That really came together well. Love the paint and lighting.

Least popular? A month ago I'd tell you to look at what's still in stock at Tower Hobbies, RCMart, or Stellamodels. It's like the one or two brands of toilet paper still in stock at the stores... The brands people like were completely sold out.

I would argue the TB03 and EVO5, TB04 and EVO6, and TB05 and EVO7 are roughly related to each other, at least from layout/architecture standpoints and release dates. TB03 and EVO5 have rear motor location, longitudinal motor arrangement, and ball diffs. TB04 and EVO6 have slightly forward motor location, transverse motor arrangement, center gearbox, and gear diffs. TB05 and EVO7 have multiple motor mounting locations, longitudinal motor arrangement, and gear diffs. The EVO7 has three motor locations and the TB05 has two. Earlier generations of TB and EVO I'm not so sure about.

My first suggestion is to not give any children a smart phone, tablet, or personal laptop. My daughter didn't get a smartphone and a laptop until she was 18 and leaving for college. During high school she had a prepaid flip phone for emergency calling and texting. We had a common laptop placed in the kitchen where the entire family circulated. She hated the arrangement, but we were acutely aware how much time her peers were wasting on social media. In the end, her moving away from home with these gadgets still addicted her and her moral compass shifted thanks to peers and Reddit. We put the same deal in place for our son, but he continued living at home with us while going to the local community college for his training. He has a smartphone and personal computer, but he's retained a lot of his best qualities. I think there are several differences:. He's a boy not a girl, doesn't care about his peers as much, is surrounded by his parents moreso than his peers, and is working on practical hands-on skills. I read somewhere even certain people in Silicon Valley don't allow their children to use social media or have a smartphone. That tells me everything right there.

The moment of truth is fast approaching; I'm almost ready to pull the transmission out of my Mazda and replace the clutch. It's been a slow process taking everything apart as it's all packaged so tightly in the engine bay. It's pretty clear things were designed for easy manufacturing but not for service; I've had to make a few custom tools along the way. Fortunately I've been working from home, so leaving the car up on jack stands for weeks hasn't been a problem.

Technically not today, but last night... I've been working from home since March and my office/hobby space has been a mess. Spent some time reorganizing the shelves, cleaning the mat, and putting parts away in their respective storage bins. With some free space available again and the weather changing I'm feeling a little more motivated to start building again.

So on TC Photos, can you upload 50-100 photos in one folder or album? I just want to keep my build threads organized by folder and not have to span multiple folders/albums if possible.

Wow, that really has some presence with all the bling! Hard to believe this is still a T3-01!

I thought blue was a nice color on the Ghia, but that gunmetal is fantastic!

Update: The kit arrived today! That is completely crazy. I placed the order on September 16 (HK) / September 15 (local), and the box arrived today on the 18th (local). It was only a $13 difference between regular mail and Fedex, so I splurged and was expecting it to take a week instead of 2-3 weeks. Meanwhile, the order of parts I placed on September 14 (HK) / September 13 (local) has only just now been processed through the HK post office on the 18th. I'm sure it'll be another 2-3 weeks before the parts get here. This is a SF-Express E-Parcel as noted in another post. At least for the chassis kit, it was well worth it to me to spend a little extra. I don't mind the parts taking the slow boat over.

Thanks for the thoughts, guys. Fortunately there's some time before my photos are dead.

Over the years I've been stung a few times by "free" photo hosting sites that went to a subscription model and blurred out my images. I finally settled on using Google Sites because their file cabinet templates made it easy to store whole build threads in one location. Well, I've just been notified Google is going to shut down Classic Sites in 2021. This means roughly 13 build threads on TC will be affected. Migrating to the new version of Google Sites won't work because they are dropping the file cabinet template and all my URLs will change. Soooo, what's the go-to photo hosting solution these days? Ideally it would be free with unlimited storage and stable for the next 30 years. Realistically I'm guessing compromises will be required. I'm thinking about acquiring a domain name and some inexpensive web hosting so I can control the URLs and never have to update build threads again; are there any easier/cheaper/more stable options? I'm kind of bummed; this will be the third time I've had to update image links, and the job just gets bigger each time...

Just ordered a chassis kit from RCMart, and it was only $55 for Fedex on a $300 kit. The total price was a good $150 less than any local seller. We'll see about delivery time.

Just to be clear, I don't intend for this thread to turn into a political discussion. I worked for a company in Silicon Valley for 15 years doing a wide variety of things (mostly hardware, not software) after working another 10 years in heavy duty businesses like trucks, engines, generators, power distribution gear, etc. So most of my life I've viewed engineering as problem-solving and bringing greater utility to my fellow humans. All of this energy conversion, transportation, communication hardware has improved the lives of many people by performing simple functions to meet needs. I've always been a bit suspicious of the popular software/services running on computing hardware because the business models and motivations are very opaque to the average person. If you need an engine or a satellite link, it's a simple benefit vs. cost discussion and it's clear what you're buying. But if you get sucked into "free" social media, there's something going on in the background that people don't understand, and it affects their thinking/acting without them realizing it. That's really quite nefarious and worth bringing to our attention since social stability, governmental structure, absolute truth, and moral standards are at stake. The way many of the interviewees talk in this documentary is really quite shocking. They'll talk about how they need more users in some part of the world and start turning the dials on their algorithms, whether that is driving engagement, or growth, or ad delivery. There are classes at Standford University about "persuasive technology" where design patterns and techniques for hooking people are taught; all of this is based on psychology and leveraging how our brains function. There's a great discussion how computing power has increased a trillion times in recent history, yet automobiles might be 2x better than they used to be. Other items are marginally better. Our brains have not evolved at all, though. What we have, then, is a pool of humans with no evolution to their basic psychological makeup pitted against vastly increasing levels of computing power and sophistication of the algorithms driving them. It's really quite scary as the algorithms learn what people like and feed them more and more related content, which in turn narrows perspective, which in turn reduces tolerance for other points of view, which then leads to rising tensions and social instability. Why else do you see factions like Antifa, BLM, Proud Boys, etc. coalescing? Yet, at the same time, these social media companies are raking in the money as they create channels to propagate targeted advertising. I just read the other day that the overall stock market would actually be doing more poorly if it weren't for the top five or so social media companies. Just a simple Google search has become almost unusable for me. I used to be able to enter a few search terms and get some genuinely interesting, independent results to explore. Now, nearly the whole first page of results is advertising and the second page of results is not nearly as useful as it used to be. I'm pretty convinced advertising has become the priority and the diversity of information/opinion has narrowed considerably in the last decade. It's really unsettling and basically renders the service useless (to me). Here's a taste of the Netflix special; similar themes are here: I just want to raise awareness. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to maintain broad views and be critical thinkers.

I keep waiting for Nostrol brand oil to make its debut, @Juggular!

This is one of my favorites. The format used to present the race gives it some legitimacy with other sports. The announcer's energy is palpable, and that one critical "robust" pass and subsequent driving error makes it truly exciting! This is a nice highlight from Marc Rheinard's career.

Can he join the fun? Couldn't resist, my friend! Great looking car!