| MIATA BUILD |
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 | |  | January 18, 2009 - Out of the garage!
It's been a long hibernation, but the combination of sunshine and warm(ish) temperatures meant that I was able to pull the car out today. It was the first ride with the new spring setup and new bumpstops. I wasn't impressed at first, but after a couple of adjustments of the AFCOs I got my supple ride back. Next step is to find a place to open it up and see how it works at high speed and high bumps.
Before it went out, I spent a bit of time fixing little things like the air temperature sensor and the fans. For the latter, I started by hooking up the laptop and changing the fan "on" temperature to 10C. As soon as I hit enter, I could hear relays click underhood. First, that's cool! Second, that tells me that all of the difficult-to-reach wiring was working fine.
Next step, I decided to trace the power. And voila, one blown fuse. I'm running both my fans in parallel, and the startup surge must have been just too much for the fuse at some point. The Hydra has the capability to trigger them one after the other, looks like I'll have to take advantage of that. The car was getting warm while waiting to start the second stage in the Prologue, I wonder if the fans were out then? For most of the race, cooling wasn't a problem.
Boy, it's nice to get back behind the wheel. It's such a fun car.
entry 647 - tags: suspension, fans | | |  | February 24, 2009 - I investigated the blown fan fuse a little more, and check this out.
That's some crispy wiring. A wiring expert was trying to tell me I'd used too small a connector, but I reached down and tried to spin the fan by hand. No go. It was seized solid. I figure the motor must have locked up and the resulting load melted the wiring and tripped the fuse. Based on how the car was behaving, I suspect this happened right about the time I got to Newfoundland.
There was nothing to do but to replace the fan. Luckily, Flyin' Miata has them on the shelf. A new fan, a couple of new connectors and it's sorted.
I've been driving the car to work the last couple of days. It was raining today - I'd forgotten just how happy the car is putting down power in the wet. The suspension's working pretty nicely, so it's all just about ready for the long trip out west. I just need to fine-tune the toe settings on the car, and I might give it an alignment just to make sure nothing got battered out of position during the race.
entry 658 - tags: cooling, fans | | |
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