Eunos Chump

It's Mrs B on her first track event!  With the luxury of a support vehicle (t'Berlingo) we'd brought along the old 14" rims with illegal rubber, plus other niceties such as a trolley jack, overalls, and all the other useful stuff that won't fit in an MX5 boot (including Monkeyboy).  However, there was thick slush, fog and light rain which resulted in little rubber actually being burnt.  Mrs B didn't really get into it either, she was the only female driver and couldn't bring herself to deliberately lose control of the car, like everybody else was.  I soon got bored of going round on my own, so we left at lunchtime. It was valuable as a shakedown test for the car though, there were no problems and it lost virtually no oil.  Mrs B says she enjoyed it, I think she feels a little disappointed with herself though. I do have video of a single lap, but it's not very good; instead, enjoy this excellent '70s car chase:

The MX5 is going to another Mazda-on-Track car control day on Wednesday, and this time Mrs B is going to drive too!  She went out in it today for a short spin, I've had it almost 4 years but I think that's the first time she's driven it alone.  Despite there being quite a bit of ice about, it went 'OK' apparently. Here is a photo of a dog, possibly wondering what happened to the gravy:

Brands Hatch is off tomorrow... looks like I'll have to stay home and play Forza , watch Star Trek and get intimate with a packet of chocolate digestives instead. I had to go to the Waterlooville office today, though it was ultimately futile as neither the engineer nor hardware I was expecting turned up.  I had some fun in the deserted car park with the traction control switched off though... diesel+automatic+snow=GR8 DRIFTN

I abandoned replacing the brakes, and settled for replacing the fluid for now.  The old unions are rusted and not going to give up easily, and I don't have the time to replace all of them before Friday.  Incidentally, the caps supplied with Gunson's Eezibleed DO NOT FIT.  Very annoying. It was then time to drive it... it was very eager to escape the garage, in fact when I let the handbrake off it rolled away and gave the BMW a good punch in the mush.  By coincidence, Mrs B gave the Beemer another wack a bit later when she didn't notice it parked behind her car.  Only it's pride is hurt. Anyway, MX5 good - new dump valve works properly (much smoother on/off power now), and discreet (sounds exactly like the Porsche 911 GT3 in Forza 3 ).  New engine mounts = no clutch judder.  I can't tune it because the LC-1 is broken, it's showing an AFR of 18, will have to look at that in the week; for the moment I've removed it's influence from the fuel map...

It works!  I turned it over with the coil disconnected to build some oil pressure, then it just fired up immediately.  Top end was initially noisy, I let it run for a short while then changed the oil/filter.  Engine still sounds loud, but then it's still on axle stands in the garage until I get around to putting on the new brakes.  Temperature was -1 all day so that was enough for me, it's too icy for any tuning runs anyway.

I've wasted the best part of an hour looking for my poxy spark plug socket.  How could it disappear in a garage so small?  It's very frustrating because the motor is all back together and ready for testing.  I'm afraid I resorted to copious amounts of swearing but it didn't help.  I was also annoyed that I didn't torque the crank pulley bolt correctly first time, I used 100NM which is for the short-nose crank (the one with 6 slots in the crank pulley), for the later long-nose (8 slot pulley) it's actually 158NM.  It's right now, but it's a faff locking the crank. 7 days to Brands Hatch and it's still sitting on axle stands, still with it's knackered brakes and I don't even know if the engine will run.  Great.

I'd been waiting on a head gasket kit from MX5Parts for more than 10 days, so I went down to Autolink instead and got one off the shelf  - cheaper too, so I might start using them more. I've replaced the engine mounts with some competition ones , it seemed sensible while the head was off and access was easy.  I started by loosening the 14mm nut on each side securing the mount to the subframe (each needed a 24 hour soak with WD40), then the 3 bolts at the engine.  With a block of wood under the sump, I gently jacked the engine up to free the mounts, then removed the nuts altogether.  I raised the engine a little more to give enough space to unbolt and remove the mounts.  The mounts have a top and bottom, so I matched up the new ones and slotted them in.  Sounds easy, but it actually required 2 hours of rocking the engine from side to side, swearing, dropping tools, and more swearing before they were actually in .  Was it worth it?  The exhaust-si...