Author Topic: The rest of the fleet...  (Read 12631 times)

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Offline ~Groll69~

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #15 on: August 30, 2015, 09:27:05 PM »
dam that was a good number you did on the brakes.  sounds like should upgrade calipers and get better pads installed.  maybe cross drilled or slotted to help reduce some heat on them.  anyways, glad no one was seriously hurt with brakes going out like they did.
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An RX-7 is like having a slut as a gf! She will love you, but she will also screw around with the guy at the parts store, most of the local cops, your insurance agent, your apex seals, your bank account and your credit card!!!

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #16 on: August 31, 2015, 07:43:07 AM »
The calipers themselves held up fine for the first track day, I think it was trying to get 2 events out of the pads that caused most of the problem. They started out thinner and already a little worn, and maybe already had some fractures in the material which accelerated the crumbling. Plus, if the pad material is thinner, more heat will get through the pad to the piston & caliper, weakening the backing plate, deteriorating the rubber dust seal around the piston, and causing more problems.

We definitely got lucky that they didn't cause any big problems or that we didn't lose the brakes altogether at any point.

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #17 on: September 10, 2015, 12:34:28 PM »
Last weekend I got the new calipers swapped onto my Saab, had the front rotors resurfaced & reinstalled the DD brake pads - the brakes feel much better now!  On my sister-in-law's Saab, we replaced the front springs & strut mounts since both springs had rusted a coil off, as well as replaced a front brake rotor (one was 302mm dia, one was 285mm dia... someone messed that up previously!) & finished up with some other maintenance.

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #18 on: September 22, 2015, 04:55:19 PM »
Ah, rust... the brown cancer, the slow death, the bane of 2000's Mazdas' existence. And of course the microvan has it. I haven't done much with the wheel wells yet (which are getting pretty bad), but last weekend I started to take on what I could find underneath. Most of it was just surface rust, but when I pulled the passenger's side rocker panel off...




Just look at all the debris removing the rockers!

Anyhow, after a lot of wire-brushing & cutting away the worst sections, everything got coated with primer & rubbery underbody spray, the rocker panel got repaired a bit (most of the plastic clips & arms they attach to were broken off), and it all went back together. My arms are killing me after laying on my back with the wire brush and cut-off wheel all day. No pics of the finished product, since I was just tired out & forgot, but I get to do it all again on the driver's side this coming weekend. Yay...

Offline ITSWILL

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #19 on: September 22, 2015, 05:49:23 PM »
Gross.

I hate rust.  I'm pretty much done buying used cars from Michigan or any rust state.  It's worth the investment to go south.
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Offline ~Groll69~

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #20 on: September 23, 2015, 05:50:45 AM »
that rust spot looks to be in the same location as we have on the mazda 6.
"Long Live Rotary"

An RX-7 is like having a slut as a gf! She will love you, but she will also screw around with the guy at the parts store, most of the local cops, your insurance agent, your apex seals, your bank account and your credit card!!!

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #21 on: September 28, 2015, 10:35:23 AM »
Yea, it's not pleasant. I still have to do the driver's side & the front subframe. This weekend I replaced the front LCAs, sway bar links and tie rod ends to cure a clunking going over bumps. Both ball joints were pretty loose in front, and i needed to cut off the sway bar links, but the car is aligned and feels tighter now.

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #22 on: October 10, 2015, 09:23:01 PM »
Yay, more rust!







All over the wheel well seam! The only connection between the outer fender panel and the inner structure was about 2" of intact wheel arch. Unfortunately, everything around that 2" was rotted, so the whole thing had to get cut out


Plastic patch panel for the giant hole in the wheel well


Holes drilled through the remaining metal & plastic panel, with doubled-up zip ties to hold the bulk of the panel in place. Plus, another coat of primer just to make sure all exposed metal back there is covered...


Ya know... I'm kinda a fan of zip-ties...


All the zip ties tightened up, with the remains of the outer fender panel bent over to hold the outer edge in place


More paint to try to seal stuff up


Bending up the outer edge & trying to seal up the rust there


And the trailing edge.

I also coated all the primer with 3 coats of bed-liner, but it was too dark at that point to get photos - that'll have to come tomorrow.

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #23 on: October 12, 2015, 07:49:14 AM »
Anyway, I finished up the job yesterday... and the results are interesting...


This is the only place on the driver's side rocker panel that was really bad - the passenger's side was much worse despite having the better wheel arch.


After bending in the outer edge of the fender at the bottom to hold the plastic panel, it's significantly shorter than it used to be. I've lost the rear mount for the side skirt, so until I can build something to replace it, its zip-tie time.


The semi-finished result. The plastic sill extension isn't reinstalled here (those pictures came out poorly due to an old phone & low light), but it sticks out a good 2" past where the fender now ends. I need to look into fender flares, maybe from the CX5 or a Subaru Outback or something to cover up the gap.

Offline ~Groll69~

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #24 on: October 13, 2015, 08:44:30 AM »
nice work so far.
"Long Live Rotary"

An RX-7 is like having a slut as a gf! She will love you, but she will also screw around with the guy at the parts store, most of the local cops, your insurance agent, your apex seals, your bank account and your credit card!!!

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #25 on: December 22, 2015, 08:33:25 AM »
I picked up a bunch of fender flares off of the front wheels of a late-90's ... Pontiac Montana or Chevy Uplander or something like that? It was GM's minivan in the 90s. They look like they'll work well, and I grabbed 4 of them so I can experiment a little, but I haven't had a chance to do anything with them between traveling, house stuff, and more pressing car work.

Some of that more pressing work was installing adjustable rear camber links, since the Mazda5 tends to have too much negative camber, which will eat through rear tires. When we got it aligned, the rear was at around -2.5 deg, way too much! First step - purchase adjustable rear camber link
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The first step was to drop the rear subframe down to get access to the inner bolts. I had tried to swap them out earlier in the winter, but these bolts can only back out about 2" before hitting an exhaust hanger welded to the body on one side, and part of the fuel filler on the other.  Put a jack up under the center of the subframe to support it as you free it from the body. The rear subframe is held on with 6 bolts, and then the top nuts for the rear shocks.  Remove the rear-most bolts (in the middle of the spring), remove the inner front bolts (located off of the towers that the upper camber links bolt to), and loosen but don't remove the outer front bolts.


Once you unbolt the top of the struts from the body, you can then tilt the back of the subframe downwards, getting access to the heads of the bolts holding the inner end of the camber link to the subframe.



Support the hub on the side that you are working on, since as soon as you remove that bolt, the hub will want to flop outward, tugging on the brake line (which you DEFINITELY want to avoid. Having brakes is good!). The wheel & tire from that side can work, as could another jack or jack stand. Before removing that inner bolt, break loose the outer one while it's still held to the car so that you can just un-thread it without applying too much force later.


At this point, you can just remove the outer bolt, then the camber link.  Now, time for some math!  I had 2.5 deg of negative camber, and wanted around 1 degree, so needed to add 1.5 deg. A rough measurement from the approximate lower axis (lining up the bolt for the lower arm with the bottom spring perch & the toe control arm's bolt) that the hub pivots around up to the mounting point for the camber link was 190mm (green in drawing), and the existing length was 285mm. Adding 1.5 deg of camber meant that I needed to add 5mm to the length of the link. This is also end-to-end linear length, not additional length of threads in the adjustment, since the link itself (purple) is curved.


So, move the adjuster on the new linkages to get 290mm between the bolt holes (measure from the middle to middle, left-edge to left-edge, or right-edge to right-edge of the bolt holes). Tighten down the lock-nut and the allen-head to hold the adjustment.


Remember to use loc-tite on all the suspension mounting bolts, and I used anti-seize on the subframe mounting bolts to make sure that they wouldn't stick next time. I cleaned off the spots where the subframe touches the body to keep from trapping dirt & grit in there that could later form more rust, and could possibly allow some misalignment.

Overall, this took about 3 hours total with basic hand tools in the apartment parking lot, although some of that time was finding the inner front mounting bolts - i forgot about them initially.

5mm actually took out about 1.2 degrees - some of this is because the lower axis that the hub rotates around isn't flat, so some adjustment of the camber link actually changes the toe slightly. Also, I was estimating a lot of the angles involved in the math, so things could be off a little bit. However, 1.3 deg negative camber in back isn't bad, and now that I know that 5mm = 1.2 deg of change, I can go back in and readjust.

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #26 on: May 09, 2016, 09:43:03 AM »
Two weekends ago I got to the source of a metallic rattling noise coming from the back of the 5 when going over bumps - a piece of the driver's side rear spring had rusted/sheared off! It was trapped between the rest of the spring and the lower control arm, free to rattle about. To remedy this, I ordered 2 new rear springs (replace them in pairs to avoid uneven ride height due to spring sag & fatigue, especially in rust-induced cases!) as well as the rubber spring mounts & the rear sway bar links. I decided to replace the sway links because I don't know when they were last done, and because I typically have to cut them off to remove them due to rust.

First, jack the rear of the car up & support it on jack stands. You want both rear wheels off the ground since you're doing both sides, and having both sides at full droop takes the load off of the sway bar and links. Then, I removed the rear sway links - in theory, you should be able to remove them like so:


with a box-end wrench on the nut, and an allen key inside the stud to keep it from turning with the nut. I was able to remove 1 of the 4 nuts this way (thank you MI rust...), one of them with the box wrench and some vice grips when the allen key stripped, and the other two required some destructive removal with an angle-grinder & cut-off wheel. Yay sparks!


That last image is slightly out of order, since I was able to remove one nut per side of the sway bar, I could disconnect it from both arms and swing it down & out of the way of the lower control arms.


At this point, I raised the jack underneath one of the knuckles, making sure that the jack pad was supporting the outer end of the control arm and the knuckle. You need to support the knuckle and outer end of the control arm since the spring is still under compression when the suspension is at full droop, meaning that if you unbolt the arm from the knuckle, the spring will try to force the arm out of the knuckle, potentially injuring you in the process.

Now its time to remove the lower control arm - to - knuckle bolt, and once that's out, release the jack slowly and the lower control arm should get pushed out of the knuckle by the spring. The knuckle is held up by the shock absorbers bump stop, and the binding of the other control arms, so it can't fall far enough to dislocate any other components or stretch the brake line. At this point, the spring will just fall out from between the subframe and the lower control arm.


Repeat this process on the other side of the car. Once the springs are out and the lower control arms are hanging here, it's a great time to cut off those sway bar links if necessary.


In addition to the broken piece of spring that I fished out two weekends ago, there was another broken piece on each side, meaning that I had lost a whole coil on the driver's side, and about half a coil on the passenger's side. This is why you plan on replacing suspension components in pairs - if one side has broken, the other likely isn't far behind!


Since the bottom end of the spring was so rusted, I took some rubber tubing and cut a slit along the outside of a coil's worth. Then, I coated the inside with lithium grease and slid it on to one end of the spring (they didn't seem to have dedicated top & bottom ends). I coated the top mount inside & out with the grease too, as well as the outside of the tubing. This should help prevent rust & squeaking in the future.


Then, as they say in the manuals, installation is the reverse of removal. To compress the spring and line up the lower control arm and knuckle bolt holes, its helpful to use the jack on the end of the lower control arm. Make sure that you put some anti-seize grease on the various threads so that next time you need to do some suspension work, they aren't as difficult to remove.

Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #27 on: January 01, 2017, 09:51:39 PM »
Well, more rust repair and suspension work has happened on the mazda5, but that's not the point of this post. This post is... Clutch on the Saab. 190k miles will do that. I wrote up a how-to on the Saab forum that I frequent - the job was not only replacing the clutch, but getting a new solid flywheel to replace the worn-out dual-mass flywheel that can't stand up to a mild tune. Basically, the front subframe and transmission needed to be removed, and everything in the way had to come out too... Ah FWD, what a love-hate relationship we have... Overall the job went well, but was a solid 14 hours across 2 days, and I got sick in between disassembly and re-assembly which didn't help matters. She's back together now and feeling remarkably normal, which is a very good thing.

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Offline toplessFC3Sman

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #28 on: January 09, 2017, 10:57:27 AM »
Of course when doing the clutch, I managed to damage a wheel bearing and missed spotting a very loose suspension bushing, so the Saab took up residence in the garage again this weekend. Now it has all new front wheel bearings, control arms, and tie rods as well. I should have just done all of this when it was apart before, access was better without the subframe in the car.

Offline ~Groll69~

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Re: The rest of the fleet...
« Reply #29 on: January 13, 2017, 06:01:22 AM »
I know the feeling on love hate with the FWD vehicles.  personal love is RWD.  glad you got it together right now.
"Long Live Rotary"

An RX-7 is like having a slut as a gf! She will love you, but she will also screw around with the guy at the parts store, most of the local cops, your insurance agent, your apex seals, your bank account and your credit card!!!