Just fyi on the HSD's, i have just found the perfect set up imo, zero preload, 3 clicks on the front and 8 on the back, seems to work the best like that, equal compression all round on bumpy roads!
Nice car too op!

 

When last I posted there was technology afoot. But I was keeping it quiet. Well it's done now and I'm too excited about it to wait three weeks to unveil it at the monthly 8)

Way back in the long long ago I changed from a standard rectangular front numberplate to a 6x9 offset plate. It's always a bit of a gamble when you do this to a 5 as to what you will find lurking behind the original plinth.

I was hoping for 2 neat holes. I got TWELVE raggedy ass holes. Three of which were 10mm diameter!

I could fill them and repaint the bumper. If only I knew what colour my car is! (Refer up thread for paint colour confusion stories!)

So I decided to live with them. The car is black so they aren't as obvious as they would be on a white car. Off I set with my mad KITT dash and Car PC and other projects. Ignoring the bumper quite successfully.

Many many people who see the KITT dash ask "So are you doing the scanner" and I would always reply "Nah, that's a bit much really" whilst thinking.. hmmm.. maybe..

After all.... I already have a load of holes in the bumper....

What if... I made a scanner out of 10mm LED's? I've already got three 10mm holes... Just... add more holes...

There was a 10mm hole in the middle. So whatever I did the scanner would need to be made of an odd number of lights. I had a look around and came across this

It's the 'Larson Scanner' from Evil Mad Scientist Labs. It uses an embedded processor (ATTiny3212). EMSL were kind enough to open source the code. All I had to do was download the firmware, burn it to the chip and build the circuit.

Challenge accepted!

The heart of the beast, the attiny.

This is the circuit built on breadboard. The Arduino UNO is being used as a programmer to upload the, slightly modified, firmware to the attiny on the breadboard.

Great! but it would need turning into something a bit more permanent than a breadboard! So I grabbed some stripboard and soldered up a permanent version.

Lovely.... but now for the scary part.

MOARHOLES!

The layout for 9 holes was fairly easy. Using the existing spacings of the three 10mm holes worked out ok.

Pilot holes drilled

No turning back now!

So in between snow storms and torrential rain it was time to remove the bumper. General consensus was that the process was a total nightmare and many seized fastenings would be encountered.

Nah, easy peasy! Not one seized fastener anywhere.

There was no way that having 9 bloomin great holes in the front bumper was ever going to be invisible. But I did want the scanner to be at least subtle when turned off. So I went for water clear LED's

The hope being that with them off and recessed in the bumper slightly. They would be easy to miss. I made a template of the bumper holes and put the scanner bar together

Soldered and heat shrink covered. Win.

With the bumper off and in the living room it was time to fire up the hot melt glue gun.

Another break in the weather and the bumper could go back on -

The scanner is a bit more obvious than I had hoped for I think. But that could just be because I am very focussed on them at the moment. Maybe in a few days they won't leap out like a sore thumb so much?

Well... that's it... the madness is complete... the scanner is installed... so what does it look like???

I love it. Amuses me no end. But don't worry, you are allowed to hate it. I won't judge.

 

Soopahchargrr is reassembled!!!

A quick test.......

 

It's been a bad week..... I needed some quality time with my soldering iron.

All done!

Sequential injection module added and into the case.

Finished!

The much beloved was out at her jiggly bop dancing lesson.

While (cat away)
Mouse == play
End;
A while ago I ran a piece of string through the bulkhead to the ecu location. So installing the MAP vacuum pipe was the work of but a moment.

Then whip out the OEM ECU.

Plug in the new ECU.

Then....... Take one brave pill........

Fan kicked in at 85 celsius as programmed. air conditioning still works.

:thumb-up:

Next job is to install the wideband O2 sensor and wire it to the db15 connector. OEM ecu is back in for now.

I'm quite happy with that!

 

I really want to hate this car, with it's ridiculous stickers, BGW and over the top electronic gimmickery.

But I just can't for some reason!

Your journey to the Darkside is almost complete young Jedi :thumb-up:

 

Dashboard rewire was done. All the knackered black paint was finally removed. Time for paint!

Ta Daaaaa...

Verdict, Matte Black Plasti-Dip works very well on dash tops. :thumb-up:

I trial fitted a few dash parts.

Ready to go back in the car. But first Some new foam tape.

Some along the front edge. Hopefully that will sort the rattle.

Then the blend flap box got new foam.

I was amazed at how knackered the strap that connects the evaporator box to the blend flap box was.

So that got more foam tape too!

I hope the vent output is significantly improved by all this new foam!

I finished off the passenger footwell wiring

and finished the tidying of the drivers side loom

By then I was out of time and out of foam tape. The blower motor box will go back in one evening after work and then the dash can go back in. Hopefully for the last time!

 

Mmmmmmmmmmmm

Shiny

 

Lots has changed on my car since I last posted. I'll mostly let the pictures do the talking.

The rear spoiler got a bit more JDM -

Remember kids, every Hello Kitty adds 10 JDM points.

Japanese market only!

The bonnet prop got changed for Gas struts.

And I put in a nice yellow strut brace. Need to torque it properly yet tho.

I got some quite awesome valve caps.

More JDM points!

I pulled my car-pc out of the Volvo.

Made a new screen case.

Then got it all (quite roughly) installed,

Quick video here of the first power up. It is massively out of focus but I didn't want to cheat and do another take and pretend it was the first power up.

PC First Fire Up

C

 

 

DON'T copy this one Cerbs! Lol

 

That is perfect, wheels are a great fitment as well!

 

I've got 4 stands if you need to borrow them.

 

Well what a read through that was from start to finish, that was awesome, I was sitting giggling away to myself with some of it, I think the car looks awesome, the HK stickers are brilliant, the tech is amazing, you got some skills I'll tell you that, and KITT..... AMAZING!! Me and my sister went to see The Hoff at Edinburgh Fringe this year we were mega disappointed at there being no KITT there and to add insult to injury he insisted on singing Broadway Musical hits and his German No.1's haha! I'm still to buy my Mx5/Eunos, going to see 2 on Friday (already been round most of Scotland and North of England searching for a nice un' 6 down so far and still nothing decent) and 1 of the first things I'm buying for it is those shiny HSD's, never dealt with Coilovers before so will be interesting fitting those and guessing ride height etc!! When I seen the part about the onboard computer i was blown away, thats some awesome stuff!! Tip of the hat to you squire, I will keep my eyes on this its blooming amazing

 

Cheers! Give me a shout when you get sorted and get some HSD's on your imminent purchase. I should have figured out the ride height settings by then!

 

Why can't I ever do anything the easy way??

I have recently added to the car....

An OEM hardtop
A set of OEM Fog Lights

I really wanted to hate the hardtop because hardtops are for sissies. Turns out I really quite like it.

I knew I would like the OEM fog lights....

Is it just me.....

or do they look a bit......

You know.....

Shit

Oh but it gets worse. So much worse.

My car is a 1994 JDM spec. So there isn't one connector behind the dash for the front fogs and one for the HRW in the hardtop. Oh no! It's ONE six pin connector. You can plug in a 6 pin fog switch and not be able to use the HRW or plug in a 6 pin HRW switch and not be able to use the fogs. Or you can find a switch P/N: MZ-N021-V7-237

(the one on the left)

It's JDM or USDM only and because only four people in the world ever spec'd a MK1 in Japan or USA with a hardtop and front foglights it's as rare as rocking horse poop.

I never ever ever chop off multi plugs and rewire then to after market switches. That's a bodge and I shall have none of it.

I have found a supplier of the switch HERE (not cheap)

I could just bin the foglamps and start looking for a 6 pin hrw switch. But even they seem to be a bit rare.

Aaaaaaaaargh! Bloody car!

 

If you cast you mind back up the thread you may remember the loss of my beloved HKS exhaust.

The HKS was replaced by a standard exhaust. Thank you to Shogun for the donation.

That failed due to rust after a week

The standard exhaust was replaced by another standard one. Thank you to Mozza for that donation.

I took that off after a week and replaced it with a full system that I purchased form Simon.

Similar to this one

All except for the tubular manifold. Which was for a 1.6 and had to be sold. Sucks cos it was bloomin pretty!

but.....

(Come on, it's me, you know there is always a but)

I never really have bonded with that stainless catback. I don't really like the tip and because I am a fashion victim and run hellalow I keep twatting the centre section hanger on pebbles and lint.

So when I saw this

Advertised on the forum and located in Sutton Coldfield. I sprang from the blocks like Linford Christie reacting to a very spicy curry in a faraway lavatory situation. I was first in a queue of many.

Met the seller last night. Talked him onto joining P5's and collected my new exhaust.

It is, in fact, the quitesimilarlookingottheHKS exhaust that I considered buying from eBay america

Mine has seen a few miles since it was as shiny as that.

Certainly not in bad shape at all. But we could do better. So we cleared the coffee table. Slipped a sleeping bag into two binbags and set to with fine wire wool and autosol. Just the sort of romantic Sunday afternoon that we like here at Cerbie towers.

Before

After

Before

After

After

After

Just got to get the lil bugger bolted up in place now!

 

With the Christmas tree down some reality is slowly returning to Cerberus Towers and a few days off last week we decided to have some quiet days pottering about the house.

So I made myself busy with some graphics for the car pc and some new software.

First up, New buttons for the front end. The original buttons from the FreeICE project (The front end I use and the project I am part of) have become a bit of a mish mash because the focus has been on getting the core code stable. Took me a morning to knock up some better buttons based on a standard button outline that I created.

Much nicer than the old ones.

Then on to the K8055 relay control board. For those not keeping up that's the box of tricks that allows me to interface with 12Volt relays via USB from the car pc.

The application that I wrote to control the relays was looking a bit past it.

New buttons were needed! This is what I came up with.

I was going for something with icons rather than wording. I'm not sure I hit the mark with them but they are better than the old ones.

Next up was the real challenge.......

To listen to the radio one had to click to the main menu, hit the relay app icon, hit the aerial button to raise the aerial, then back to the main menu, then hit the radio icon.

Pain in the bum!

So I coded a plugin that intercepts the hitting of the radio icon and sends the relay control app an F6 key-press. I then rewrote some of the relay control app so that it will listen for key-presses and if it sees an F6........

The grade A students have already figured this one out. Automatic aerial raising whenever the radio app is started!! 8)

It only took me three days to figure out how to do it and get the code written and bug free.

But now I can listen to the radio without having to pull over and press a million buttons.

Well it pleased me........

 

Not much happened to the car lately. Been too cold to wield the spanners. But the list of niggles is growing. As soon as the weather is above freezing I will have to fix the central locking

I finally took the leap and had some door roundels made up. Thanks to Valentinik for sorting these for me

Excuse the use of TiltShift but I quite like this picture

Still can't decide if I like the roundels. Might try them without the numbers. Will live with them for a few more weeks and see how I feel about them.

 

Oh, and I built this -

But I can't tell you what it is for yet. Top secret!

 

Snow..... Seriously? Snow...!

Forrrrr fuuuuuuuuuuucks sake!

Don't care. Hardtop is staying off. I don't care that the roof has holes in it.... I got one of these

at the weekend and I'm going to do epic win roof repairz with it. So.. there... #SCREWYOUJOHNKETTLEY

I still need to do a load of important jobs like-
The cam cover gasket which is leaking like a waterfall
Change the oil. Because it is well overdue.
Change the spark plugs because they are ancient.
Put a proper passenger door lock solenoid in because the one in it now is frankensteined.
Strip and regrease both door glass systems
Replace the drivers door glass mechanism because the wire is frayed to buggery.

These jobs mostly involve being out in the cold and therefore I am ignoring them.

Besides I can always find things to do indoors to make it look like I am achieving something......

Remember the HelloKitty fuel lid?

It was made of awesome and winning. Hand stickerbombed, 3 coats of PVA and then 3 coats of UV resistant lacquer. It lasted a month and then the whole thing faded to white.
I haven't even taken a picture of it. It is that awful looking!

Quiet Sunday night in, Bottle of wine, good film on telly, a third fuel flap and 10 bags of Kitty stickers.........

Seems rude not to eh...

Needs to be lacquered.

With a lacquer that actually DOES resist UV rather than one that pretends to! If you know of such a lacquer then please do give me a shout!

 

Cheers for all the kind words folks

Time for a leeeeitle update...

I've known since I first pressed the loud pedal in an MX5 that this car needed more power. I came from my Big Lazy four litre Jag and my 170bhp turbo bonkers Volvo 480 into the MX5. I was so disappointed with the power.

Plans were drawn up to one day, some day, when the boat comes in, buy a Moss M62 charger kit and have at it. Bit of a pipe dream really.

Then one day not long ago the much beloved and I were discussing my upcoming birthday. She's just had a nice little bonus from work. Nothing banker sized. A three figure amount. She said she would split it with me for my birthday and we joked about how it was a shame it wasn't enough to buy the M62 kit because she's really like to have been able to FI my car for me. (Yeah, she's a keeper).

About four hours later my FB went 'ping' on my iDevice. Someone in the P5 group had posted a sale thread for an MP45 charger with all the TRL brackets.

If I added a few beer tokens to my 'birthday money'.........

Oh crap......

Rude not to really........

So!

My missus has brought me a supercharger for my birthday (5th of April by the way, you still have time to send a card)

Beer tokens were exchanged and the kit landed at Cerberus towers.

I span the charger by hand and it sounded like it was full of sand. Looked at the seller's pic of the charger that he sent me before I brought it.

He's fitted it up and run around with it fitted. With no blanking plate over the outlet! Naughty! It's full of dust and bee's!

So that made up my mind. It would be broken down and cleaned. Very gently so not to upset the Teflon coating. The tips of the rotors did show some scoring.

The rotor lobes looked fie but filthy.

So I began the strip down.

Nose fill plug out. Nose oil siphoned out

It was black as your hat and it stank to high heaven. Not like any fluid I have ever removed from a car. Supercharger oil smells BAD! I am so glad I an changing it. It was spent.

Ok so that's the charger made safe.... Cover me! I'm going in!

Yes that is our living room. Yes it cost me many many boyfriend points.

<Nicolas Cage> I want to take his nose, off. </Nicolas Cage>

Nose coupler looks in good shape.

Now the easy part. Slide the rotors out of the casing.

Nope....

It's a mini charger. For reasons best known to BMW they drive their water pump from a power take off on the back of the charger.

"Hey Wolfgang do you think this superchargenspitzenfraud creates enough parasitic load mein buddy"
"Well no Heinz I don't think it does!"
"Vell then let us bolt zee vater pump on zee back using a shoddy pair of gears that vill strip and cause catastrophic coolant system failure"
"Ha yes! That will teach the capitalist pig dogs!"

First up, remove the PTO (Power Take Off) I removed the rear drain plug and extracted the sum total of sod all oil. This is common on the mini. The PTO case leaks. The gears run dry, get shredded and the PTO fails to T O the P.

Four bolts to remove the PTO plate, revealing...

The small PTO gear that is pressed onto the end of the rotor shaft. Which is in perfect condition! Marvellous! That can go onto eBay to help out an estate agent with a broken Bini!

But I couldn't slide the rotor out of the case because the gear is pressed on and I needed a puller to... well... pull it off!

So that stopped play for the day and I retreated ot the sofa to grumble about not having the right tools for the job.

Until, at midnight, inspiration struck.

Remove front cover bolts. Extract rotors as far as you can till the gear jams against the case. Then tickle the rotor shaft with a big effin hammer. Drifting the shaft out of the trapped gear.

Ta Daaaaa!

Some slight scoring in the case

No huge gouges tho. Ok so it's not pristine but I don't believe it's bad enough to be considered a problem. This is a 30k charger after all!

The rotors and case were cleaned up using Extra Sensitive Skin Baby Wipes, which seems to have done the trick without melting the teflon.

Just awaiting some some gasket replacement goo (Which Steve is donating to the project. Thank you!) and the charger will be reassembled. The PTO will be replaced with a plate. Which I will make. It won't have the gears fitted or be refilled with oil.

The nose will be reassembled with replacement oil. It's coming from an eBay seller so should be here in a few days. I'm hoping the fresh version doesn't stank as bad as the used stuff!

 

OMG! False starts a-go-go!

If you have, squirreled away, the supercharger_cad_drawings.zip with some dreams of some time in the future using the drawings to produce yourself some outlets and brackets and shizzle....

DON'T!

no... really...

DON'T

They are bloody useless.

This is the one I used to make an outlet cover. Keep the poop out of the rotors while I lop off the unwanted bracket. Yes I could tape over it but I have a lazorrr and it would be the work of but a moment to make a blanking plate.

Easy. Take that drawing. use the measurements to cad up a plate. Bosh!

Chop from nice flat mdf on the lazorr. Take it home. Doesn't match up to the four bolt holes in any way shape or form.

Ok, next day, take two. Perhaps the picture is good but the measurements are apocryphal? I can export it into the cad package. I'll do that then. Import the pdf into the cad package. Remove all the extraneous info. Print on the lazorrrrr.

Take it home.

Nothing lines up, not a bolt hole, not a damn thing.

I should put masking tape over the outlet, I really should.

No!

Dammit I have started I will finish!

Took the TRL outlet into work with me. Drew round it with a crayon (they wont let me have pointy things). Measured all the bolt holes and sides etc. Compared it to the pdf. When I finished laughing. Printed to the lazorrrrr.

What I should have done is taken my own measurements straight off the charger. Honestly, whoever made this PDF was on drugs.

An exact copy ish. So if that doesn't fit I have bigger problems because the TRL one won't fit either.

Sometimes being clever and doing something the flash way isn't smarter and faster. It's just a way to show how stubborn you can be.

 

What I should have done is taken my own measurements straight off the charger. Honestly, whoever made this PDF was on drugs.

You should've tried the old Mr Bean trick when he was at the dentist, and spun the drawing around the opposite way, then upside down and finally upside down the right way round, you know all angles covered lol

Thoroughly enjoying your build of this supercharger and ever so slightly envious, or should that be ever so hugely envious! Fantabulous!

 

LoL I did feel a bit like Mr Bean I recon. Maddening! I do have two very handy blanking plate/throwing stars! Every cloud

In other news thread has just breached the 10,000 views barrier!

 

The win is strong with this thread.

 

With the charger back together and sealed. Time for a little wash.

Came out ok.

Then I had a little a look at the bypass valve. It needed a little tickle from a wire brush in a Dremmel. The vacuum is set up a little differently with dual throttle bodies. The vacuum nipple on the bypass isn't used. The vacuum instead comes from the intake manifold. So I hacksawed off the vacuum nipple. Drilled out the remains. Tapped the hole. Then plugged it with an rtv smeared bolt of the correct size.

It's the bolt on the left.

There is another unused hole on the charger. That needs plugging.

I'm going to tap it to M10 and seal it with an Allen head M10 bolt.

Little steps.....

 

I'm going to tap it to M10 and seal it with an Allen head M10 bolt.

Famous last words!

I picked up a nice new set of HSS drill bits. A decently expensive set. Much nicer to use than the usual disposable sort.

I selected a bolt to blank off the hole M10x1.5 The rule of thumb is select a drill bit that is the M minus the pitch. So for the M10x1.5 that's an 8.5mm drill bit.

I had an 8.5 in my shiny new drill bit set so that was easily done.

Then run the tap through it. Simples!

Except my tap kit appears to have been forged from the finest cheese and is utterly rubbish. All it did was chew the first few mm of the hole and refused to start a nice thread.

So in desperation I drilled the hole to 9mm to give it more chance. Which worked in that the tap now cut a thread. Except the thread was utterly useless. Argh.

So I shut the door on it for a few days and gave Shogun a call to see if he had some taps made of real metal. He did! Yay!

We decided the best bet was to drill up to M12 and start again with a proper tap. With a tap of decent quality the job went much more smoothly!

One M12 allen head bolt, smeared with RTV sealant and tightened into place.

That saying "A bad workman blames his tools"? It's total bollocks! Without decent tools you just cant do a decent job.

With that done I trial fitted the TRL intake and second throttle body.

The MDF blanking plates are the prototypes. The, laser cut, metal versions are on the way

 

I feel your pain with eBay sellers, I don't understand why they can't just supply what they advertise, surely having accurate descriptions matched with correct in the flesh items will lead to repeat orders like any business. It baffles me why they think that shoddy 'any thing will do' will work best for them, I always try to stick with UK sellers as much as possible, I once ordered a small CCTV camera from an eBay seller in China, 3 weeks later a jiffy bag with 3 fake LEGO men turned up, so i contacted the seller and the broken English response I got back was just about legible and eventually managed to get a 2nd camera sent out.... 3 weeks later, some fake LEGO women turn up in another jiffy bag, I tried to contact them again and the responses became more and more illegible so I finally gave up, I just couldn't be bothered arguing with him any more about a £5 camera ... I did though then have 3 lovely couples, I then felt the need to build them a LEGO house out of the little sisters old LEGO blocks in the cupboard... I had took a picture but it was on my old, now fried, laptop lol Another thing that annoys me about them is the delivery estimates etc, for example, I ordered a set of tuner wheel nuts for these new wheels and the ebay seller I bought them from had on his advert FREE & FAST DELIVERY on or before Thursday 25th April, 24H Courier.... Now looking at my order once I actually ordered them, it says before the 29th April..... Thats 4 days of a difference, this irritates me highly, I don't like things being late, I'm hoping they do turn up today as I want to test fit my wheels at least, but if they don't then I shall be moaning, even though the delivery is free, the reason I bought from them in the first place was because it was a fast delivery/next day delivery. Pain in thee bottom!

Rant over.... apologies for clogging up your thread with my empathetic moaning :soapbox: