Wheels went back on, and the last few bits of subframe under the exhaust, and it was ready to come off the stands for the first time and see what happens, we had a little test up and down the drive to check we had at least one forward, a reverse and a working clutch. It was one of those moments when you almost cant believe it works!
We had a little run out, and aside from a couple of small issues to sort, it all seems to work well, we have a low oil level warning lamp which needs desoldering, as its having a hard time coming to terms with the loss of the rotary, theres a scraping from the front passenger brake, which will hopefully be nothing of a job to sort. my only real concern is the alignment of the gearbox and engine, which must be slightly out, causing the input shaft to rattle when in neutral sometimes, im not even going to hazard a guess at how long it will take to chew up the box, but replacements are less than a tank of fuel, and ive managed to get the bolt patterns for the engine and box, so we shoud be able to get a much more accurate CNC'd replacement.

The car actually feels very civillised to drive, I think the long intake and the drop down from the 3" downpipe to the 2.5" standard mazda exhaust is keeping the off boost noise down nicely, but on boost it still roars well. There is a fairly large boost leak on one of the lower intercooler hoses which will have been sapping some power, which im going to sort tomorrow along with the brake.

Then hopefully it will be time to get it MOT'd and all the engine swap paperwork done and on the road.... Well suited

 

Stunning work mate

 

That looks right at home there!

Great work chaps!

 

Fantastic work!

 

Thats brilliant mate! Always liked the rx8 too! Nice conversion!

 

Thanks guys, really enjoyed the build so far, actually had my first moment where I got so pissed off I had to walk off and leave it the other day though, I'd been chasing boost leaks for hours by blocking off the turbo inlet and the throttle body with a bit of jeans leg and some plastic bag under the hoses to seal the pressure in, and then giving it about 2 bar off the airline, and after about 3 joints popping off, I finally thought I'd got it. while I was nipping up one of the t-bolts on the last little leak "FUCKIN BOOM" one blew right next to my ear, I think I almost browned my pants whilst simultaneously flat braying my forehead into the most immovable bit of subframe possible. Gave in and launched the ratchet like an angry chimp, and went off to think of a way to get a bead on the end the aluminium pipes.
After swearing again when I saw the price of a bead roller I set about making this



Haven't had chance to test it yet, but I'm hoping to spin the pipes in the lathe and have the two bearings rolling on the outside of the pipe and then press the lever to push the inner bearing onto the inside of the tube, with any luck it will roll a nice ridge onto the end, other possibilities are that it will chew up the plastic outers on the bearings or it will break in some way and launch my hand/leg/penis into the unstoppable chuck, I'm hoping for a bead to be honest ;p

 

on the final stretch, stick with it

 

im sure i have seen somewhere a pair of mole grips with washers welded on to them to make a bead somehow.

but good thinking on the tool. lets hope your penis will stay intact!

 

looks like and exhaust clamp and a washer.

 

I'd seen something similar on the net to these, but I have 6 or 8 tubes to do either end of, so I'm hoping this will be a quicker way, but if it doesn't work and I still have a hand left, I'll be reverting to that method I think

 

Wow this looks brilliant

 

Its been a long time since my last update, but i can return with some good news!!

After the boost hose shenanigans with pipes popping off all over the shop i eventually managed to get them sorted, the rolling tool was an epic fail in all honesty, and i ended up using the method suggested by fudgey with the mole grips, it does indeed do the job, but with 16 ends all to flare it was a proper pig of a job, involving sitting down for a long period snaffling jaffa cakes and swearing to myself about how much it was hurting my hand clicking those grips shut a million times.

With all that lot back on it was time to take it for another sly test run under the cover of dark. All the boost leaks were gone, but we were still only seeing around 10psi of boost we laid her up in the garage for the night, still feeling pretty suited nonetheless

 

Next days job was to find some of our missing boost, and work out what the scraping from the front brakes was.
I'd already checked the brakes over when i had it jacked up for the boost pipes, and found nothing wrong, and assumed it was perhaps the new discs and pads bedding in. Being honest, once you have swapped a few sets of discs and pads it gets to be a fairly simple mundane task, and its not the sort of thing you can fuck up too easily. so i started looking at other possibilities which it could have been, and as it turns out, it was in fact the anti roll bar droplinks, a combination of the suspension diving under braking and the hubs possibly twisting ever so slightly on the bushes was allowing the top of the droplinks to come into contact with the lower end of the shocker. I just took off the complete link/bar assembly as a quick fix as i didnt have access to a welder at the time, i have a couple of other bits and pieces to weld up in the near future, so i'll just get all the welding bits sorted at the same time, they only need to be cut and have the balljoints turned 90 degrees, so its an easy enough job

 

Glad you got the hoses sorted

There are always niggly little bastard jobs that show their heads on builds like this, but looks like you can sort them out.

As for the lack of boost, have you set the wastegate correctly etc?

 

Found our missing boost
Had a good fiddle with the Amal valve, but couldn't get it to click and divert the air, so I took it to bits, expecting it to be all gunged up. I do a fair bit with solenoid valves for air and hydraulics for a job, so i kind of knew what should have been going on in there. But it still took me a moment or three to work out what the hell was going on here



Yes some (strong expletive deleted) has actually removed the spool from the centre, and then simply bunged up the bleed port with a chopped off bolt, and then melted a hole in the side with a hot pin or something!!! Not ideal for precise boost control at all!

As a temporary fix, i salvaged a three port valve from the handy pile of mazda in the corner of the garage, whilst we wait for a MAC solenoid valve to arrive in the post. Im hoping that this will be a nice reliable alternative to the expensive amal valve.
There was also another issue with boost control, which i suspect may be the reason for someone dicking around with the Amal, i had no positive feed to the valve whatsoever, which would also explain why the idle valve was also doing nothing (they should both share a feed from the fuel pump relay) this was traced to a break in the loom and repaired. Full boost was back in the game, i promptly disconnected the idle valve again, as it is a little sticky in its old age, and wasn't really benefiting anything.

 

All sorted with that pal, im just a slow typer lol

 

Last friday was the big day for us, MOT time...

Astonishingly it went through, only needing a couple of cans of cat cleaner chucking at it for emissions test (dunno how that worked when the cat is in my bin, but im not arguing lol) and some play taking up in a wheel bearing.

Got it taxed and insured and legal to go on the road last saturday.

What a thing it is to drive It still handles and drives lovely, even without the front anti roll bar, and the LSD puts the power to the floor well, It can be a little hairy when its wet, spinning the rear wheels up all the way through 2nd if you really provoke it, but its still easy to keep control of and doesn't feel as though its waiting for the first opportunity to kill its occupants like the P100 did that the engine came from. Dry roads make for the power going down a treat. I drive a diesel 4x4 estate as a daily, so as you might expect, my sidewards driving practice has been limited, but it feels to me like i could powerslide this thing all day

 

Nice one!

 

Cool car this. Lol at the mot and cat cleaner.

 

we need some videos of it out on the road

 

Hopefully this will be our job for the weekend, we've just got a dashcam for exactly that purpose! Let's hope the weather perks up a little otherwise it might be some scary shit

 

Congratulations mate, been following this. I bet its a great car to drive

 

surely the mot emmisions should have been for a cossie not a mazda. so no cat would be needed. and if its below 3.5% co then its a pass.

Good job get some power for it now 400bhp would be a hoot.

 

Hi. Any update on the project? I am looking to fit a Ford 1.8 Zetec out of a Ginetta G20 170 +bhp (3hrs running) into my RX8. Looking into adapter plate & ECU link up problems.

 

Any body done this
Just putting bits together to swop my noisy t5 to rx8 6sp
Adding an atlas and few other mods

 

Any body done this
Just putting bits together to swop my noisy t5 to rx8 6sp
Adding an atlas and few other mods
Does the I/p shaft fit I go the crank bearing with a 6mm adapter plate for the bell housing ?

 

It's been running pretty well since we got it all legal, so we have got a fair few miles on it already, the gearbox has been holding up well considering the extra stress we are putting on it. It's now back in the garage for a few of the last bits of mechanical work doing, we're replacing the pipework to the oil coolers with ptfe as I didn't really trust the rubber hoses to last, and if they had split or leaked it would have been a major problem, then I've just got some fiddling around to do wiring the Sierra fan switch in and a strut brace to make up, I'm also going to be pulling the engine out again to check the input shaft, and to move the release arm pivot slightly outward to get a little more clearance on the clutch, as the biting point is on the floor and when the clutch is hot it occasionally struggles to clear.
If I remember rightly our input shaft was only a couple of mm into the pilot bearing before it got extended, but we're using a 10mm plate, so you will probably have around 6mm into the bearing, I reckon it's enough to get away with.

 

How long is the pivot yr extending ? The clutch fork standard ford type with cable clutch ? I guess the thrust bearing pushes about 8 mm to release the clutch plate
Any pics when u take it out again thanks fella

 

Got a few extra pics of the bellhousing and release mechanism:







I've measured the travel of the slave cylinder, which is 13.1mm from clutch pedal fully up, to fully down, and then had a mess around with some of the figures for the length of the arm out to the cylinder and how it will affect the stroke at the release bearing.




Now that i know exactly what effect it will have either shortening the arm or moving the pivot point i need to decide how to tackle this, obviously cutting a section of the arm out and welding it back together is the easy option, but the most i can shorten by is 10mm before bits start interfering with the bellhousing, this will increase travel at the bearing from 7.15mm to 7.86mm.
Moving the actual pivot point out 15mm will increase travel from 7.15 to 10.34mm, but thats going to mean making a bracket or something similar to move the ball pivot outwards, then cutting the socket out of the arm and moving that the same distance and welding everything back up. quite a bit of messing around, but it looks as though thats what will have to be done to get our clutch to clear fully.

 

I've also got the new oil cooler pipes made up and ready to go on once the engine goes back in, had them made up in the same type of braided PTFE hose as we got the turbo oil feed in, but in 1/2" ID, this stuff will handle oil at 200+ degrees and a couple of thousand PSI, so no worries there. It took a little back and forth having to order the tube, hose ends and adapters, then go back and collect it all to put it on the car, measure, cut and set the angles for the elbows before going back to get all the ferrules crimped on. I'd priced up for all the hose and fittings online to make these pipes up and it was over Ł300 plus delivery
Thankfully this lot came in at much less than that Ł85 to be precise

 

Something else i'm looking into is reducing the engines movement in the bay, as we are very tight for space around the downpipe and the plenum, I've got an engine damper to try which i am planning to mount between the old power steering bracket on the engine block and the subframe to reduce lift on the passenger side of the engine and hopefully reduce the slight bouncing feeling when coming off the throttle at low speed. I'm not entirely sure how this will perform, but they're cheap enough to give a try, and we want to keep this car feeling as 'normal' as possible, stiffer engine mounts would of course be the easier option, but i'm a bit concerned they will transfer a lot of vibration into the cabin.
While the engines out we're going to be changing the plugs for some denso iridiums on the recommendation of MSD which will hopefully last much longer than the motorcraft ones we currently have (already misfiring at cold idle) we need plugs that will last due to that pesky number 4 plug being a complete bastard to change. Ive had a check around coolant and IAT sensors to check they're reading correctly, and set up the TPS which was actually a little out so I'm hoping once the clutch is sorted and its all back together we should be good for a session on the rollers!

 

Strut brace to act as a 3rd mount to stop engine leaning over as it puts torque through it
Works well no harsh vibration goes well

 

Won't let me add pics typical

 

you will have to upload pics to something like photbucket etc and then copy and past the image tags to get pics up bud

 

this was actually my first thought, but i was a bit concerned it might stress the cylinder head or make a shitload of noise with it being closer to the cabin, might well be going back to that idea then

 

Hi. This is a great project. I am very interested as I am going to do my own conversion.
Any update?

 

We've actually got a fair few jobs done, but not had much time to update recently.... As it happens, I've just finished another late night rolling on the garage floor lol.
After poking around at the clutch etc, I chucked the engine back roughly in place to measure up for the strut brace and to have a final decision on how much more mazda to chop away (mainly the seams on the exhaust side of the engine bay)




Set up some spacing under the strut brace, so that I could set up some brackets to the mounts on the strut towers, just used the usual cut out cardboard templates to test fit, and then transfer them to steel plate and weld up. Took me a few hours, but it should certainly put back some of the stiffness in the front end, the box section is I think 20x40mm and around 2.5mm thick, and the plates to the strut top mounts are 5mm steel. Perhaps slightly overbuilt, but who cares lol.
Even after all the work so far on this, my welding still sucks, so a blast down all over with a flap disc and then a fingerfull of filler in odd spots just to make it look nice and smooth once its painted.

 

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

 

Hi Any update on this great conversion?

 

Had some slight gearbox related problems recently (occasional hard shifts and whining in higher gears) and it looks like It might be related to this:





Liquidized gearbox is not something I'd hoped for, and to be honest, I'm not too struck on dismantling another gearbox and messing around extending the input shaft again, so I dragged the old cossie box out of my mates garage.
Wasn't too happy when I found it was full of water which had leaked through the roof and filled it up, right to the seal where the prop goes in!
I pretty much expected it to be completely fucked, but once I'd cracked it open, I found absolutely no rust at all.... Result!



Gave it a good degreasing and blow out with the airline, then got the sealant out and set about putting it back together ready to get it converted to hydraulic slave cylinder