[Shadowraven]

Track car is ready for Donington on the 12th. I had to take it back to TotalMx5Repair as I had a number of issues with the Bofi clutch after it was installed. The clutch release bearing didn't even last the drive home after the install, and when we removed it this time it had clearly failed. We also found that my clutch judder was the result of glazing. This is very strange as it juddered immediately after install backing out the unit and just got progressively worse on what was a very gentle motorway drive home.

Mark was great as always, and the work was done to a top standard as most of you will know about. We replaced the bearing with a genuine mazda one and gave the clutch and flywheel a gentle scuff to remove some of the shine which seems to have helped. Reversing out the unit the improvement was immediately noticable and I had no issues on the way home. Lets hope that it stays that way.

Given the bearing failing has resulted in a significant additional cost to me (fuel for the additional trip to Wales, a days leave, replacement clutch release bearing, labour to replace the bearing, etc) I messaged Bofi about the issue and am very dissapointed in their reply. I was basically told they have never had any issues with the bearings in their own cars, and that they've never had a complaint about them before, and that was it. Effectively implied my bearing couldn't have failed, no appology or even acknowledgement that my experience of this bearing has been shitty, no desire to do anything about it. Given I've now spent a good few thousand with Bofi on injectors, turbo kits, turbos, M2 exhausts, 2 bofi clutches, etc I'm pretty annoyed and will source the other parts I need like the ME221, rollbar, (another) set of Ev14s, etc, from elsewhere.

 

[boosted]

Have fun

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[LJB]

Sorry to hear you’ve had more trouble but glad it’s now sorted. It’s crap when businesses aren’t willing to accept any fault when the fault is obvious. Even if they “have” never had any issues before there always a first.

 

[Shadowraven]

Back from a very wet and snowy day at Donington.

Due to my Midilite brakes being massive, there are very few wheels that clear them, as a result I had to specifically order a suitable set, thus I only have one set of tyres for the car - Nankang AR1s, which was a bit of an issue when I went to leave this morning and was presented with this-

In all honesty I don't know how I made it.....

There's not really much to say about the day, the weather was cold and wet, I had semi slicks, I was sliding about a fair bit and doing my best but I wasn't very fast. A good number of us went though, for a fair few of which it was their first time out so not the most ideal introduction to track days but it was still a laugh with a group and for £99 I think it wasn't a bad deal. I did have a go out around the track in @guitaristanimes yellow mk1, and it's pretty damn quick, it's definitely faster than my mk2.5 in a straight line even with a 5 speed. I did nearly put it in the gravel due to brake fade, but a bit of adjustment to my driving style managed to control it better.

Apart from that there's not much else to say. The only other event of note was that one of my new EBC Bluestuff rear pads delaminated on the motorway after only a few miles on the way there. I was doing 40mph, I hadn't used the brake in like 15 minutes, I wasn't applying the brakes when it failed, it just randomly let go leaving me with absolutely no brakes. Pretty horrified by it tbh, it doesn't look like the material was really bonded well at all and makes me very nervous about using the front pads I have and if I lost one of those that'd be it, an expensive caliper destroyed, likely the wheel badly damaged, and most likely me seriously injurred. If it had failed on track i'd of been in the wall, if it had failed elsewhere on the road i'd of been in a ditch or the back of someone. It looks like the interface between the pad and backing plate has rusted, which is very odd as these have always been kept inside in my office. A quick google seems to show similar modes of failure, but I thought they were meant to have NRS hooks to prevent this now as EBC got a bit of a reputation for it?

 

[LJB]

Haha waking up and seeing the snow knowing you have to drive with Ar1’s must of been a “oh” moment.
Where do you live? we didn’t have that snow in Derby.
My first track day was an evening session at donnington. It was wet and then started to dry out. It was brilliant as I had to go slow. So I was able to just properly enjoy it and not worry about how slow I was.
That’s a shame about the brake pad. A lack of confidence in the brakes is never good.
Haven’t EBC replied to you a few times on here. It would be good to know what they say.
Any pics from the day?

 

[boosted]

Blimey, ar1s in snow or brake failure ..neither thanks.
Its all happening on nutz lately.

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[Shadowraven]

Haha waking up and seeing the snow knowing you have to drive with Ar1’s must of been a “oh” moment.
Where do you live? we didn’t have that snow in Derby.
My first track day was an evening session at donnington. It was wet and then started to dry out. It was brilliant as I had to go slow. So I was able to just properly enjoy it and not worry about how slow I was.
That’s a shame about the brake pad. A lack of confidence in the brakes is never good.
Haven’t EBC replied to you a few times on here. It would be good to know what they say.
Any pics from the day?

Cheers.

It was really bad in mk, less so further north but it still snowed at the track. I'm really not a fan of wet track days, my car is so focused and reliant on dry grip and brakes to be competitive.

Yeh I messaged them, not heard back yet but only been a day. They've generally been very good with me so hoping they'll sort it out. The lack of hooks and the rust despite being kept inside makes me suspect they've (maybe accidentally) sent me old stock. These pads were given to me to try after I gave someone some feedback about my experience with yellow stuff, ebc reached out to say they'd remade the pad compounds etc and see if I wanted to try them as they should be a a big improvement over the old ones.

 

[EBC Brakes UK]

The sets sent back in July 2021 were in a special test material that we were potentially planning to adopt and we were looking for feedback on the material, which we never did get having only installed them recently, but it did not work out and we went with a different material blend anyway.

No production was ever made of these but we are embarrassed that your set was not made with NRS and debonded.

As mentioned in our private messages, we will replace both front and rears with our latest Bluestuff material and ensure NRS hooked backplates are used (these are now used for all new pads) and there will be no chance of a repeat. If you have any damage to the rotors please do send us photos and if seriously damaged we will replace these also.

Once again this was an awful situation and should not have happened. These were free of charge hand made sets in a development material that was never eventually adopted made by a lab technician, who clearly made a mistake. When we make pads via the normal factory production (which was controlled under ISO 9000 and is now a BS5750 and ECE R 90 approval system) there are rigorous tests done all throughout production. Things like this cannot happen with this process and especially now with NRS hooks being used on all production.

For many years we made Blue with what we called an “Interlayer material” which is the precursor to NRS hooks and is a high strength softer layer of material that first goes down on the backing plate that enhances the bond, but it appears these did not even have that interlayer and certainly didn't have NRS hooks. There are a number of reasons debonding can happen, and we would like to get the sets back to strip them down and check if it was one pad or all four and do a full analysis of them.

So with profuse apologies we offer to replace fronts and rears with the latest Blue grade on plates with NRS hooks and replace your rear rotor which may have been damaged also.

 

[Shadowraven]

All the brake issues are resolved. EBC have been excellent in their reply and handling of it, offering a replacement set of pads and to sort anything that might have been damaged as a result of the failure. Mirroring Guitarists review everything arrived quickly. Overall I'm very impressed and am looking forward to trying the new Bluestuff compound next year.

For my records the NBFL has had an oil service at 57900 miles. It's currently sat up for winter but I really do need to crack on with things on it, im just too old to have the will to work on it in this weather. I also really need the NB out of the garage and into other dry storage to free up the space as it'll likely take a few weekends to complete everything, sadly everywhere is full or £400 p/m atm.

 

[Shadowraven]

Bofi have injectors on sale so I've grabbed a set of them for the Track car/NB. I go 640cc again as I'm lazy and doing so means I wont need to pull the 640cc that are in the NB for diagnosing idle issues. It also means I'll have both cars with the same injectors should I ever have some fail right before a track day. It also saves the risk of damaging seals so not too bad.

I've been bugged by my spark map for awhile now. As a reminder the car has an M62 charger making 11psi and 210bhp on regular fuel. It's been tuned properly on a dyno by a reputable local garage in Buckinghamshire, one who's name is apparently good enough that mx5 specialists in Wales had heard good things about them. We checked base timing and timing latency is negligable so I am confident the timing values on the map are what the engine is seeing.

Still, I've been worried my timing is too aggressive, especially in boost sub 4k rpm. The tuner didn't have det cans which is part of the reason I am nervous about it, this area of the map has been changed from the base map, so he did go over it, but still, it's making 200ftlbs at 2800rpm. I sought some advice online and a number of reputable tuners who you'll all be familar with have confirmed that it does look pretty silly in places.

As mentioned, the car has been on a dyno so I know what peak power it makes and where, I just want it safer. I've arranged for someone to help street tune it at the end of Feburary to make it a bit safer, but in the mean time I decided to sit down and adjust the map myself so I can get an MOT on it and use it a little before.

This was before (area of particular concern in the red box):

And after:

I've not added timing anywhere, only removed it. Here is a plot of the timing I've removed. Opinions welcome. I've removed 2 degrees around where it made peak power (176kpa, 6400rpm), it's likely fairly safe in this area as it was, but it was tuned until it made no more power, so I dont think removing 2 degrees will actually lose me a lot of power anyway, 5hp or so at an estimate.

 

[dadbif]

How often do you actually use that area of your ignition map?

 

[Shadowraven]

Given that a SC is always making boost and the manifold will see that pressure as soon as I crack the throttle it'll see it more often than you'd think.and even if it didn't it only means there's even less harm in making it safe. It's also very close to 50mph motorway variable speed area pottering. Loading a car up in the wrong gear on a hill with that timing would kill the engine.

 

[dadbif]

I had an M45 on my 1.6 and rarely entered that area of timing, lugging the engine obviously would.

 

[Shadowraven]

Got some time (and motivation, barely) to fit the 3.6 diff to the NB. Never again, I'm too old and being under the car like that makes me feel really sick now, similar to bad vertigo. I got everything out the way to get the diff out in less than an hour. Getting the diff out alone though was 4 hours of faffing. Getting the new diff lined up and in was also about 3 hours..... partly due to the bushes being slightly off so they dont line up well with the subframe, but it's in. The car has it's MOT next Saturday so I only drove it around the block to check for weird noises and it seems ok, second is noticably longer but I wont really get a feel for it until I can get on proper roads and use the gears a bit.

 

[Shadowraven]

It always seems to be one step forwards and 2 back. The NB has a legit MOT for another year and by some miracle is emissions compliant, but it's breaking up badly at full load and above 4k rpm. Iv changed nothing since last year apart from the injectors and moving to sequential injection. Iv upped the dwell time to 4.5ms, swapped spark plugs and coil pack but no change. I feel like it might be blow out but I Duno. I don't want to have to buy r8 coils and didn't think they'd be necessary at about 10psi. I don't even know if the DIY efi can run them. My idle afr still oscillates too, and I feel the issues might be related but iv no idea. Short of engine damage from when it was made to do Dyno pulls with fuelling totally out I'm at a loss again, but it drives around so nicely at part throttle and has all the compression/leak/smoke/leak down tests thrown at it which were fine

 

[guitaristanime]

Its coil pack. I'm 99% sure of it.

Find out if you can run R8 coils perhaps and we can sort something out for you to test with mine? Altho that said petrol costs dictate it might be cheaper to just buy some.

 

[Shadowraven]

I think it's time to let the M62 go. It's great, the instant 11psi is incredible and on the road the response means it outpaces a TD04 (long dual carriage way might favor a TD04, but point to point on normal roads it's miles ahead), but I'm having trouble fault finding the idle issues and the resolution now is likely going to be trying a different ECU and R8 coils. At that point I'll be over £6000 into the kit, and given that i'll have all the supporting mods such as 640cc injectors,R8 coils, the relatively strong NB engine, and need a new tune anyway, I think it makes more sense to either sell the parts to recover some money and go back to NA or to just turbo it and aim for a streetable 280bhp with boost taper keeping torque at a consistent 220ftlbs. I've disconnected the charger and run NA to check and it's definitely nothing to do with the charger.

I'm going to try and get the gt2860rs on the NBFL over the next month or so and get that car finished to see how I'd feel about having 2 turbo cars and then likely put the M62 kit up for sale. DM me if anyone is interested. For reference it's a M62 kit with bypass, dual throttle body, intake that clears ABS and fits the Racingbeat intake, 67mm pulley that puts the charger at just under it's 14000rpm limit at redline (so not over spun), has a dayco autotensioner and clears a 4-1 header. It really is a no compromise M62 build, it works with PS and AC as well. It makes 10-11psi, 210hp and 200ftlbs from about 2000rpm.

 

[Shadowraven]

Well so much for installing the gt2860 anytime soon.... Looks like there's been yet another mistake in my Kraken order (bringing the total issues I've had to 5 over 2 orders). I have a T25 top mount kit, but appear to have been sent intercooler piping for a EFR low mount (hot side pipe below)....

When I ordered the website wasn't as clear as it was now, there was just a generic image and some drop downs (no pictures of the actual kit variants) hence I didn't catch the error.

I've raised it with Kraken who is unsure which is correct and we're trying to work it out. I think it's pretty clear that the part is wrong though based on the photos but I don't know if there has been significant revisions on the kit, hopefully it'll be resolved but it's likely to take months to get replacement parts if they are needed. Due to a few reasons I cannot have the NBFL sat in the garage unable to move if it's not right, I need to smash out the entire install in a few days and ensure the NB is in the garage.

 

[dadbif]

Could your NB problems be related to the changes to sequential injection and dwell? Should not be too difficult to revert to original setup to check.

 

[Shadowraven]

I had the same issues on the previous settings so can't be. Got new HT leads on order as that could be a cause, they are 10years old now according to my service records but they really don't look it so I might have just forgotten to update it at some point