Pulled the engine again (luckily this job is getting easier the more I do it)
Cut off the seam that was making things tight, and welded it up along its whole length. I had a little flash of inspiration when I banged my head on the clutch master while I was welding away. Don't know why, but I'd kind of dismissed the idea of swapping the master cylinder, due to thinking it would need a ton of work to fit a larger bore cylinder, it was whilst cursing at it that I realised that I'd seen loads of other cylinders that looked almost the same. Yep, turns out that universal ones are available that should be a straight swap for the original. From what I can find, the standard mazda one is 15.88mm, but they're available in a larger diameter, which will increase the volume of oil moved when the clutch is pressed (pedal will end up heavier) but should easily be able to get enough throw to clear the clutch without preloading.... Goodbye clutch slip...
Put a layer of skinz sound deadening on, as we no longer have the original fluffy sound deadening, or the room to fit any in. I'd normally have gone for dynamat extreme, just from experience previously, and knowing it's a good product, but decided to try this stuff instead, and it's actually much nicer to work with, the smaller sized squares make cutting to shape easy, and because it doesn't come rolled up, it doesn't have loads of ugly creases in it.




Started bolting the engine back in tonight after rewrapping the manifold again after it got a bit crumbled in the move, and fitting some denso iridium plugs, wanted something that would last as long as possible, what with it being an absolute bitch to change them. I'm hoping to get most of the car finished off tomorrow, only really pipes and wires to connect up once the engine is on its mounts, then a little fiddling around to get the Sierra fan switch wired into the fuse box, I wasn't happy with the temperature the 8's ecu Brought the fans in, and as a temporary fix I'd added a resistor across the mazda coolant temp sensor, this forced the fans on a few degrees lower, but was making the temperature gauge read in the middle constantly,which was getting on my nerves