My luce

[Babalouie]

Originally Posted by Matsuda 9

i was thinking of q-bonding those... but was thinking of filling the area under the bold too, just to give it more strength.

Yeah, you could also fill the inside of the bracket with Qbond too, which would make it extra strong.

Originally Posted by Matsuda 9

with coilovers, i was going to go with HotBits DT2s seem very nice piece of kit, but on expensive side (~1800+shipping(250)+customs) especially since australian dealer is useless for any sort of custom work (asked for ~4500 for matching the taller shock) as for malaysian guys just went bring it on

Well I only need one shock...I have a stash of shorter G4 shocks from when I was experimenting with getting the lengths right. I am thinking I could swap the rear shocks to the front...they are 1in shorter, but I could just run the car a bit lower I guess ...and then put the longest spare shocks in the back.

Originally Posted by 6929er

man i thought you sold this beast ages ago on jdmst. its great to see youve still got it.

Didn't have the heart to sell, and given that it had a few niggly issues (mainly the trans hold light) I didn't think she was ready for sale. I'm glad I hung onto her though, and she qualifies for historic rego this year (and she is already on an extreme limited use insurance policy) so I could keep the Luce at fairly low cost, if only I had the room...

[nine2nine]

Sweet mate, after following your skyline thread on pf, it will be great to see some of the effort put into this.

[Babalouie]

In late 2008, the HOLD light started flashing, and it started to act funny. 4th gear was locked out and the HOLD/manual shift function no longer worked. So Sim-RX3 helped me pull the fault codes, which said that I had a dud TPS.

So I went to Mazda to order an automatic FC TPS. When I got it, it looked quite different from what was in the Luce. But I managed to take everything apart, and make it fit. But if anything it made it all worse. Now the car had a weird surging at 45km/h, like you were hitting a rev limiter. And if you accelerated through it, you'd find that the transmission warning light would be going apeshit and so would the transmission's behaviour.

At around the same time, my Skyline project really started to soak up a lot of my time, so I reluctantly parked the Luce in storage (and that was 3yrs ago).

Here we go. I always get a kick out of popping the Luce bonnet and seeing that iconic FC intercooler there. It's such a part of the car that I never had the heart to fit that ARC top mount that I had.


Remove the IC, and you expose the throttle body, and the TPS.


As you can see, the TPS consists of two spring loaded fingers, which extend as the throttle opens.


And here is the first clue. They have different markings on them. One is for the engine ECU, and the other for the trans ECU.


And now we measure the resistance. The radiator-side sensor has very low resistance when the throttle is closed. 0.3Ohm.


And when the throttle is floored, it increases to 4.8Ohm...and how does this compare with the other one?


As for the firewall-side one, when the throttle is closed, it registers 5.8Ohm. Now, I have no idea which TPS handles the engine, and which the trans, but it's clear that they are quite different un output, and so it would be worth a try to swap them around.


I quickly swap the fingers from side to side.


And refit the unit into the car, and as you can see, the wiring is a little kinked and doesn't look like it's in the right order. All the while, I'm thinking...is it really going to be that simple?


Well, I guess that sometimes, it just is! It's FIXED No trans warning lights, the kickdown works, the manual shift works, the ECO/PWR button works, everything is as it should be, and the Luce is great to drive again.

Phew....now the next thing are new brake pads (and machining the discs probably wouldn't hurt) and then sort out the dud coilover.

[Babalouie]

Actually on second thoughts, I think my reasoning is wrong...the answer is right tho

I think the answer lies in the way the throttle works the two TPS fingers:

The TPS at the bottom of the pic works on a crescent-shaped cam, whereas the one at the top of the pic works on a lever/arm sticking out of the throttle spindle underneath. These will work differently on the two TPS's. So at say 30% throttle, the cam might allow its TPS to extend 5mm, whereas the other TPS is worked off a lever and might have extended 10mm.

Since both TPS's emit a different resistance curve, this would send conflicting messages to the engine and trans ECUs If, say both TPS's worked off the same crescent, then it wouldn't matter what order you installed them in.

But because the "gearing" of each TPS depends on which position they are in, you can't mix them up

[sim_rx3]

nice one for working it out..

ps if you had of given me your chassis number i could have gotten you the right part.. lol

[Babalouie]

Originally Posted by sim_rx3

nice one for working it out..

ps if you had of given me your chassis number i could have gotten you the right part.. lol

I just went and ordered the FC one thinking it was the same...d'oh!

[Babalouie]

Well flush with the relative success of the transmission fix, I confidently plunk the ass of the Luce into the air for the rear-to-front shock swaperoo. I have some spare shocks, but they're too short, so I had this hare-brained idea that I could swap the (relatively long) rear shocks to the front, and then install the short spares to the rear...and then just fudge around with adjustment until it was all vaguely driveable.


G4 is no longer supported by JustJap, so getting replacement G4s was out of the question. First the parcel shelf has to come out. It weighs about 8kg, since it has sound insulation on the underside that's about 2ins thick, plus all the gubbins for the air purifier and fridge. You'll also note that the aussie sun hasn't been too kind and there is some fading.


And with the shelf gone, you can see the innards of the fridge and air purifier, and of course the original champagne colour that the car was born with.


Grimy, but not leaking!


And this is basically the shock that needs to go in it. I had a vague recollection that the rear shock was one inch shorter than the fronts, and so the new shock should be one inch shorter than the existing rears. But they would still screw down enough into the lower part to be safe and strong.


The **** thing was pretty rusted on though, even with the locking collars loosened, I had to resort to the vice, and hammering with a punch to rotate the shock free from its base. **** crap G4 quality


And the result....FAIL. Oops, they're the same length as the spare one?


Hmm...serves me right for not having a build thread that was detaailed enough to note things like this (no, wait...). But the end result is that I had no choice but to put it all back together again....hmmm.

[Babalouie]

With a couple of weeks over christmas, I really had to pull my finger out and start fixing the Luce. So it starts with picking off the massive pile of leaves and twigs on top of her and giving her a good tub. I really am a bad custodian of Luce, the paint was actually mouldy in parts


But while the paint is chalky as **** to the touch, it still does look ok. When I detail the car for real, my claybar is going to get nuked into the D-dimension tho


The main thing I have to do is fix the front coilovers, but while the nose is in the air, I figured I'd use up some of the spares that fell out of the woodwork when I did the garage cleanup a few weeks ago.


An oil and filter change...FUN LUBRICATION FACT: the 13B uses the same small oil filter as MX5.


Then new plugs. I don't always drive a rotary, but when I do, I prefer NGK B8/9EGV.


The plugs are buried on the side of the engine, which might have been easy to reach in an RX-2, but in the Luce, there is aircon and all kinds of crap in the way. On the right you can see the MX5 oil filter, which is quite easy to reach, with enough space for you to just grab it and spin it off by hand.


New plugs are sorta like platinums in appearance, but are normal copper plugs. Normally, rotary plugs are bespoke to the 13B and cost $50ea, but when the engine was rebuild John Edwards machined the rotor housings to accept normal sized plugs. These are $12ea.


Old ones were in good shape with little wear (they are normally really worn away by 10,000kms). Heaps of crap on them though, which speaks of not enough long hot drives and too much starting and shuffling around the driveway. My schedule is that I change the plugs every 7500kms, so I think these haven't done more than a few hundred kms.


The battery was also in poor shape, so I figured I'd treat the Luce to a new one.


The Luce's engine has got good compression, I think, because even with the old dead battery that could only spin the motor weakly, it never had an issue firing up, so with a brand new battery, it's all good.
http://youtu.be/XTEkTcF2ePI

The other thing I found were a set of pads, so on they go...


Which is a good thing, because the old ones were pretty marginal


And then we bleed. The Luce has speedbleeders, so this is easy to do by myself...and it also seems that I have run out of the cheap stuff, so the Luce gets Trust Dot 4.


One snag though...on one side the caliper has evidence of a leaky seal


So off it comes, and I'll get it rebuild at Chatswood Brake and Clutch.


Once the brakes are sorted, I'll hop onto the coilovers...

[Babalouie]

The passenger side caliper seemed to be ok, but I decided to be safe than sorry, and so I dropped both front calipers at Chatswood Brake & Clutch for rebuilding.

So that left me some time to work on the coilovers, which you will remember are shot at the front. I'd taken the dead shock and the spare shocks to a shock rebuilding joint to see if the guts of the spare could be put into the dead one. There was a notion that I might be able to disassemble them, and extract an insert that lives inside, and just swap them over. So the first step is to try to prise off the end caps to the old dead shock.


Turning them with a stillson/plumbers wrench didn't do ****, so I made this handy dandy tool, out of a strap of steel, with two bolts tapped into place to act as lugs on those holes in the end caps.


But the caps were screwed on so tight that the lugs sheared right off. Hmm...could be that they are corroded on. The coilover bodies are steel, whereas the end caps are aluminium. So over the years I think there has been differential corrosion and that powdery corrosion has built up in the threads of the end caps. So they are not coming off for nobody.


The idea switched to maybe using the longest of the spare shocks, which is a whole 4ins too short, but if I screw the shocks into the blue bit halfway, then it's only a 20mm ride height drop. Hmm...nah. Seems dodgy.


So I moved on, and one of the things I've been dreading, is to check the cowl area for rust. The Luce is actually remarkably good for rust, but it's been sitting for a very long time with a pile of wet leaves and twigs built up over the wiper area. So there's bound to be wet crud under there. So off comes the wipers and I'll remove the plastic cowl panel for a look see.


First sign...hmm, actually very good, no rust at all under the cowl panel. The paint under there has held up perfectly.


And poking inside the cowl box where the wiper mechanism lives, is good too. No signs of rust.


I could only check the driver's side, because there isn't an opening hole on the passenger side. Then again, leaves shouldn't be able to fall into the passenger side, so that's prolly ok too. This is the view looking towards the a-pillar on the driver's side. Any water falling into the cowl box exits through drain holes at the a-pillar, so this is where you could find build up dead leaves and hence rust.


With that pleasant surprise out of the way, the wipers get sanded and hit with etch primer, while they're off.


And a fresh coat of VHT roll-bar black to make them nice-nice again.


The front wheels have been dropped off to get some 205/50-17 Michelin Pilot Sports I had lying around mounted on them, and the rears will get some new 235/45-17 SP Sports I had stashed away, so the Luce should have 70% tread rubber all the way round soon.


There still is the question of what to do about the coilovers though. Gotta think about it some more, but I reckon those shocks are rusted solidly together and I won't be able to get the apart anytime soon.

[Babalouie]

The rebuilt calipers came look great!


The reason for the sudden fluid leak was pretty obvious, one of the pistons was badly corroded. The seal (ie glorified rubber o-ring) is fitted into a groove in the caliper, and the piston slides in and out of it. So as I pushed the piston back to accommodate the new pads, the corroded section pushed past the seal and the jagged edges tore it. Hence the fluid leak. But we got 2 new pistons now.


I also got me some new rubber boots to fit into the caliper bracket.


After a good bleed...I got 99 problems, but brakes ain't one (suspension accounts for about 92 of them tho)


Another little bonus...as I was fitting everything back up, the ABS sensor on one wheel just fell off The wiring was toasted...and now I think I know why the ABS hasn't worked for years (it worked for most of 2006, tho!) It'll be easy enough to solder on new wires in place.