Another southern ontario guy! I recognized the car from the Kijiji ads, haha. The shell looks clean - what's done to the chassis so far? Did you happen to pick up the mounting kit from a guy in London named Lou?

Good luck man - if you have any questions I can PM you my number.

So this may not be the most intensive fab work shown in this thread, but this year I wanted power steering.

I'd already had my main belt routing set because I'd purchased the speedway alternator bracket and it's worked great for a couple years. I don't have plans for A/C in this car, so I decided to use the small belt drive on the crank pulley for power steering. I did some looking for a small steering pump that would have a 4 rib pulley, and found a ~2000 Hyundai Accent pump to be pretty small. I wasn't sure about the PSI the pump would run at, though made the assumption the assist on a car like the Accent would be minimal.

So using solidworks, I modeled the pump, as well as a stock GENIII truck AC belt tensioner. I took some measurements for clearance to the chassis and got a hold of a model of a GENIII block for the AC bracket attachment bolt pattern and started to model a bracket. Once I was done the geometry of the bracket, I ran strength, bolt slip and resonance simulations to make sure the bracket would be fine. I just used estimations for the loads of the pump/tensioner, and through work, I have an idea of what the boss stiffness's are on the block for resonance. The strength for FEA was fine through the initial model, though I needed to shave some mass to bump the resonance to where I wanted it to be. Once I got the bracket where I wanted it to be, I sent DXFs of the three pieces to a local laser cutter and got three sets cut for $60.

Once I got them back, I tapped the holes I needed, TIG welded the three pieces together and tried it on the car. A huge sigh of relief and a "f**k yeah" later, I was surprised everything bolted right up.

I used my model also to find the length of the belt I needed.

As for fluid lines, I looked through some catalogs and found a Geo Metro to have a line the was the best length and had the proper fittings. In the end I had to make a short hardline off the rack as there was a bit too much tension in the line for my liking so a little extra length was needed (story of my life...). 

I've run this since the beginning of the season, with multiple track days (with many trips to rev-limiter), and it has worked flawlessly so far. The assist isn't overbearing and road feel is great. Besides my time, I have about $150 invested.

Anyways - enough explanation, here are some crappy pics. The last image somewhat shows where I made a bracket to hold the reservoir (only pic I have of it).

Anyone have the ability to measure this up for me? If it works out, I'll send ya the .dxf files of the finished bracket and PNs of the pieces I used for a powersteering set up!

Are you sure it's the starter? If it still cranks, though just doesn't start, I would start looking to see if there's spark/fuel while cranking. Does it crank slower when hot? And a lot of people run the stock starter, with and without headers, and don't have a problem.

Sorry boys - the intake/TB should arrive on my doorstep in the next couple of days.

Thanks again Paul

so it's been a long.....long time between updates. I've been lurking the forum, though just never had mind to update my thread. Well...here goes. I apologize for any strange references to tracks/vendors/posts that I imply to be known, I'm going to copy/paste from a local forum where I somewhat kept an updated thread. I'll try to date the updates....

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Aug-23-2010

lol, I still have some work to do and some money to spend before it makes noise.

I got the Walbro in the stock sending unit and the wierdo TII fuel relay circuit better suited to be controlled by the GM PCM. I have the GM to Mazda wiring all sorted out too, now I just have to do it lol.

things I still need...
- alternator/starter
- fuel lines to be ran
- long 27 spline yoke/TII drive-shaft flange
- cooling system
- exhaust
- more hours in a day
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Then about a year goes by - it was in storage through the winter months. When I brought it out it was ready for exhaust. It was a bit of a pain to find someone to be willing to do exhaust on it. I trailered it to two exhaust shops. The first shop was known in the city for doing mandrel stainless, doing a good job, and at a fair price. He had a look underneath it and outright said no. It would take him too long to do it, and he was too busy. So I went to another place in the city, and he didn't even look underneath and said he could do it no problem. GREAT!......I thought. He then went on to supply me a quote. If I supplied ALL pipes (he didn't have a bender), flanges, gaskets, etc., he would do it for $2000. This brings me to the next post
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July 2nd 2011

long time - no update. Been a little weary of posting details of this car seeing what happened to my last. But....screw it.

Not going to go through all the updates, but it's damn near a car. I had posted a few weeks ago about finding an exhaust shop - kind of got the run around and said fuck it. I bought a TIG welder and went to town. I finished it this weekend, took me about 2.5 weeks and cost half of what I was quoted by someone in London....including the price of the welder and chop saw. Here's a couple crappy pictures of it.



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July 4th 2011

Found the welder on kijiji. AC/DC Tig, plasma and stick inverter combo with a bunch of consumables for 400.

Thanks for the compliments guys-took it out yesterday and it feels great. No vibrations, everything feels butter smooth and it's pretty quiet. The car gets pretty hot inside though.

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Still running stock stat. Stock temps for the fans aswell - 226 for low fan, which is crazy to me. The fans never came on when driving it so that will be one of the first changes when I get HP Tuners.

When I was out with it, I filled the thing up. Found out today i have a leaky gas tank when filled past half, so that's the next thing. I bought Lou's old rx7 for parts-hopefully the tank in it is alright.
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July 10th 2011

I put the good tank in, no more fuel leak. I put the coilovers in this weekend as well as the oil pressure sender (now all the stock Mazda gauges work with the GM drivetrain). Did a few other little things too, to make it more livable.

I had an appraiser out on Wednesday and that is now the only thing keeping this thing off the road. I hope by the weekend to hang a plate on it!
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July 11th 2011

I called the appraiser today to make sure he knows I need this done.

The car isn't much to look at, but hell if it isn't a go'er.
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July 21st 2011

I'm driving this thing to work tomorrow - I can't beleive it. Maybe head to Sparta in the afternoon aswell.

So jacked.
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July 23rd 2011

Drove for a good four hours last night and a couple this morning and have had no issues. Damn is this a fun car to drive.
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July 26th 2011

Originally Posted by Wagoneer View Post
Did I miss something, did the car in your sig get stolen??

yeap, it was stolen over a year ago - all I got back were the plates.

and as for pictures - the thing looks like a bomb, not really picture worthy. I'm going to try and make it out for the meet tomorrow though, so come take a look if you'd like
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August 4th 2011

It has been just about three weeks to the day after I've got it on the road, and I broke it. A shift into 2nd gear ripped not just the diff mount apart but the floor is now dented and the cross member, where the mount bolts, has ripped off at the welds. I have my parts car cross member all cleaned up already and am ordering some new bushings tonight. Going to do some research on a solid front mount and make something up.

I was planning on hitting sparta tomorrow....guess not
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With this, I ended up welding some plates to my spare crossmember, installing a comp-mazdatrix front diff mounts and installed a snubber to limit snout's movement
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August 27th 2011

Thanks for posting the video - my best for the night was a 13.1 at 110mph with a 2.1 60'. Hopefully with a tire it makes its way into the 12s. I'm pretty happy with it -a couple weeks earlier i pulled 29mpg, so I can't ask for much more.
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May 5th 2012

so it's been a while....

last year, the car worked flawlessly until the drive to it's home for the winter, when it decided it didn't want to hold coolant anymore and the waterpump started puking. That was the biggest breakdown, including a visit to a couple tracks (Sparta and Grandbend Speedway), which were a blast. Have a look



Throughout the winter, I gathered more parts. What I got was a G5X2 Cam, 243 Heads, wideband, HPTuners, and of course, a new water pump. Before putting the heads on, I ported and polished them myself, which was enormously time/beer consuming. This is at a couple points through the swap, which was about a month ago.




The swap was relatively simple, and I had it finished in a weekend - but I had to wait forever for the special length pushrods, that could only be ordered after the entire engine was assembled.

The hardest part of the swap was to get the tuning started. I tried to use a shortcut and download a tune from HPTuner's "tune bank" for a car with the same mods as mine. Thinking it was that easy, I threw the tune on and started driving. The first couple hours went well, then I started getting some leaner AFRs and decided to go home. Tried starting it the next morning, and it didn't even try to fire - just smelled like pure gas. It took a week or so, compression test and injector test to find out all it had done was wrecked a set of plugs. So I threw a new set in and started tuning from scratch. I did that for about a week and started getting closed loop tuning pretty close - 14.7 under normal driving and ~12.5 for WOT. So I decided to go to the track. Here's an incar of my best run - dont bother watching after the run, I never edited it.



12.6 at 117 MPH - obviously traction was an issue, and if you did happen to watch the whole video, you may have noticed I was coasting pretty slowly on the return lane. That was when I was REEFING on the shifter to get it out of fourth. I finally did, but when leaving sparta, it would not come back out of fourth after shifting into it one last time. So I took the trans apart - this is what I found



those are synchro keys - mostly from the 3/4 synchro assembly strangely enough. So as of right now this is how the trans sits.



I'm now trying to find a vendor who will ship to Canada and has the parts I need to get this back together. I also have a set of new RPF1s waiting for tires - but that will come after I get the trans back together.....
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May 30th 2012

My parts should be arriving in port Huron tomorrow. Hope to be back on the road by next week.
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September 26th 2012



car's working awesome. real rubber/brakes are pretty darned cool. needs an alignment.

There's one more GB track day on Oct. 6th - I'm going to try my best to make it out. I will post GoPro videos if I do.
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And this is how the car sits in winter storage. I have a couple more short videos of some track visits that I'll post.

TTT with this one - I'm also in the LS6 market.

If you have one and are willing to ship it to the great white north (Ontario), shoot me a PM!