I just noticed that my last update was way back on Christmas day....
Work has definitely not stopped during that time, and in fact there have been some really big updates.
Since it’s difficult to find specific information on what works/fits these cars, I’m going to be including part numbers where I can to help others in the future. It can be assumed that most numbers are Mazda part numbers.
First up, as noted previously, longer wheel studs needed to be done to fit the new wheels. I had a couple of different choices since I will need spacers to fit the wheels. First up would be the ARP studs that have a great reputation and the nice bullet noses. The second choice was to get the Ichiba wheel spacers that come with longer studs. The nice thing about the Ichiba spacers is that they are hub centric vs. normal spacers being more of a one size fits all. Initially I decided to just get regular Gorilla spacers and so I chose to go with the ARP studs. Again, they have a great track record (sorry for the unintentional pun there...) which was important to me. After a bit of research, I determined that the correct ARP part number was 100-7719 for the studs.
Since I was replacing the studs, I also ordered up the 2009+ RX-8 front hubs. The RX-8 reportedly has beefier hubs than the MX-5, so this was a no brainer. There are two different options for the hubs for the RX-8, one with DSC and one without. I had previously ordered the one without DSC since my car didn’t have it and I assumed that would be the correct part. As it turned out however, the ABS sensor mounting was incorrect on this one. The correct part number is F189-33-04X. I had already replaced the right front upright with the 2009+ MX-5 part, so I ordered one for the left also. The geometry had been updated on these newer ones to help with bump steer, especially when the car is lowered. This updated upright/steering knuckle is NH42-33-030.
To replace the rear studs, the hub would need to be pressed out of the carrier, so I also ordered new wheel bearings for the back. These are quite spendy, but now I have all new bearings front and rear, and as I found, these too are very beefy. The part number for these are is FB01-26-151E.
Pressing out the “old” studs in the front was easy since the hubs just bolt to the uprights, so there is easy access. The rears obviously are more challenging because of the need to press out the hub. Since my car is a full on dedicated race car, I didn’t want to keep the brake backing plates, so I also removed those. I cut them off prior to any of the press work which also made things easier when it came to pressing the bearings out and the new ones in.
The Gorilla spacers were out of stock when I ordered the studs, so now I'm rethinking what to do for spacers. I may get the Ichiba ones after all unless I can find something else hubcentric that isn't as expensive since I won't need the studs that come with the kit.
After the intial fittings of the wheel from Real Racing Wheel, I decided to send my wheel back to get the backspacing increased from the 6” I had initially ordered to 7”. I want to keep the wheels tucked in as much as possible, and with the need to run spacers to clear the brakes, I figured that it was easier to play with spacer thicknesses to get everything where I wanted it. I’m going to wait until I get the suspension on the car before doing all of the final measurements, but I’m thinking that I’ll probably go with 15mm spacers front and rear with the 7” backspace. The guys at Real were very accommodating in helping me with this. A big shout out to these guys!
The next big thing I needed to do was to refit the carbon fiber doors and get them aligned correctly. I also needed to figure out a way to secure them in the closed position that would allow for easy opening.
I’m keeping the stock hinges on the car, and the alignment is mostly determined by the way the hinges mount to the body of the car. The holes on the door side of the hinge are only big enough for the bolt. This required pulling the fenders to get at the bolts on the body side of the hinge. I was able to get most of the adjustment I needed by doing this, but the fine tuning required some grinding and dremeling… I ultimately had to grind down part of the lower hinge to allow the bottom of the door to tuck in like it should and also had to enlarge the lower hole. In stock form, each of the hinges has two bolts that go into the door. Since the carbon fiber doors are WAY lighter, I chose to only use the top and bottom bolts. Two bolts don’t really save much weight, but every little bit helps.
As for securing the doors, I had been thinking on this one for a few months. Early on I thought about going with the Aerocatch latches as those would allow me to open the doors from the outside and they would definitely have a cool factor. However after taking a closer look at the doors and the door frame, I decided that while it might be doable, it would take a lot of work. I finally got an “a-ha” moment while at work. I’m a UPS driver by trade, and while doing my morning pre-trip, it suddenly dawned on me that I could do something similar to the way the hoods are secured on our trucks. It’s a basic rubber strap hard mounted on the bumper with a ball at the other end that mounts into a receiver that’s attached to the hood. I went to Lowe’s (our local big home improvement store) to see if I could find something similar. It turned out that they didn’t have what I was looking for, but one of their associates suggested I try a 4 wheel drive place since Jeep Wranglers and some of the Range Rovers use something similar. Unfortunately it was late on a Saturday and we don’t have any 4 wheel drive places close. In explaining this to my wife, she suggested we try our local Arctic Cat/Kawasaki dealer since they were close by. That didn’t make much sense initially, but all the sudden a light bulb in my head went super white! During the winter months I spend a lot of weekends snowmobiling. For anyone that’s ridden a snowmobile, you know that the hoods on those are held down with a very similar setup to what I was thinking of. Why this hadn’t popped into my mind earlier, I don’t know. In any case, we hopped over there and explained what we were looking for to the parts guy and he brought out a few different options. One of them looked like it would work, so I purchased the parts for a whopping $15 and brought them home. I drilled a hole in the door frame for the fixed end and then drilled two holes into the door for the receiver bracket. I used rivnuts in the door to make the bracket easily removable, plus the rivnuts are probably a little stronger than using regular rivets.
Speaking of rivnuts, I’ve been using them a lot. The main thing I’ve used them for is the routing of the wiring. I was able to shorten a bunch of wires and reroute some to minimize the number of locations where I have wires running.
The coolest thing just happened this past Saturday though. We took the car in to Pacific Auto Body and got it painted. We went with a two color scheme utilizing some GM colors. The inspiration for the paint scheme came from a European race series. Initially when thinking of what color to paint the car, I had intended to just do a single color and then add graphics. I wasn’t sure what color I wanted until I saw a new Camaro in Synergy Green Metallic. At that moment, I knew that was the color for me, but for awhile had changed my mind and was thinking of going with Mexico Blue, which is a classic Porsche color. I was set to go with that, but then we attended the Seattle Auto Show, where they again had a Synergy Green Camaro. Sold!
After determining the paint scheme we wanted to go with, the next decision was what the second color would be. Since we were already using a Camaro color, I decided to see what gray colors were available on the Camaro/Corvette. I saw pictures of a few Corvettes in Cyber Gray Metallic and it looked like a great second color. We then went to our local dealer to see if they had touch up paint in the two colors. Unfortunately they didn’t. They did however have a Cyber Gray Corvette. Beautiful! As luck would have it, I went to another Mazda/Chevrolet dealer to look at MX-5s and the difference between stock and appearance package side skirts. Guess what was there? Two Camaros parked right next to each other, one in Synergy Green and one in Cyber Gray. That made the final decision easy.
Pacific Auto Body is a Seattle shop that specializes in BMW, Mercedes, and a number of other cars. They did an incredible job on our car, and I wouldn’t hesitate to send anyone there for paint and/or body work. A lot of work went into getting the car painted, as all of the existing paint had to be sanded down, the plastic rear bumper had to be specially treated to allow the paint to stick, etc.
The car was originally black, to which I added carbon fiber doors, a white front bumper, blue front fenders, a black primered rear quarter panel, and a black plastic rear bumper. Obviously a lot of different colors were going on. After sanding everything down and primering the carbon doors, a base coat of white was sprayed to allow the green to “pop” correctly. The car and parts were then masked to do the gray over the top. What you see is the finished product! Again, a big thanks go out to Pacific Auto Body, and especially Jerry and Kyle who did the work.
So that mostly catches us up. Next up is to get the suspension on the car, order up the other wheels, and get a few other items.
Talk soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment