Connor’s overcomplicated simplify everything gen 2

Well I have been picking away at the car, haven’t updated this in too long, life’s been a bit hectic lol. I will be making a proper post soon with a real update, but it’s mostly been smaller stuff, and working on other things that’s been needing to get done for too long. My new powdercoat oven was completed, and now I’m working out some bugs with it, I have started to use it though and it works good when it feels like it. A buddy also decided to do a pretty crazy engine swap in one of his cars and has roped me into doing all the fabrication on it, so I’ve had my hands full trying to figure out how to make a turbo ls fit under the hood of a 2013 sti with no hood modifications, while retaining the entire sti awd drivetrain. That’s been a process lol. Just today I’ve been putting a bunch of my interior back together, and I’m just starting to pick at my chassis harness so that should be going back in in a day or so. Haven’t forgotten about the car, and I have a date when it needs to be done that’s not too distant in the future, just kinda forgot about this thread haha.

 

This is pretty crazy! from not knowing about cars to basically an entire rebuild of the car, AND painting it is pretty nuts..

did you get worried about trying to figure out how to put it all back together?

also, how did you get the car from inside the garage to outside and back in, when it was just a shell?

maybe i missed it, but do you have power goals in mind?

this is such a fun build thread, please keep it going!!!!

 

Thank you! I worry all the time when I’m looking at the mountain of parts in my basement that need to be installed lol. I took a ton of pictures and videos of every step so that I can hopefully get it back together.
I have a set of wheel dollies that my rx7 sits on most of the time that I stole to use to move the shell around. Basically I just put one under each front corner of the car where the subframe mounts directly under the firewall. The back I ran a 2x6 across the rear “frame” section and rested the 2x6 on the other 2 dollies. Kinda a pain to move but it didn’t need to go far which is good. The shell isn’t crazy heavy so it wasn’t too much of a concern with it getting out of control.
On the basis of power goals, I don’t want to spew insane numbers on here and then not deliver, but I’m hoping for mid 600s at the end. I have a friend with a very fast sti that I’m helping to build that I want to beat haha. Have to see if that’s going to be possible or not, with traction being my limiting factor for sure.
I do have a small update I should be typing up soon, just want to make sure I have enough accomplished to make an update worth it.

 

I guess it’s time for a small update on progress. Unfortunately nothing too exciting has happened, but I am getting some of the smaller and less fun parts back together. I left the car to sit for about 3 weeks as it’s cold here and I wanted to make sure the paint wasn’t too soft when I started to reassemble. I also finally got my new powdercoat oven working so I could start refinishing the crusty old parts.


First order of business was supposed to be the entire fuel system going back in. I am unfortunately still waiting on a couple stupid parts to come in for it, so I only have the filler neck assembly back together. I was shocked to find how many parts made up the filler neck. These weren’t too bad, just a little crusty from daily driving the car for years. I did end up shaving off the one bracket that holds some sort of canister thing along with what I want to say is the purge valve? Not sure haha, but I’m deleting the entire fuel tank emissions systems and just running an old school vent to atmosphere setup with a rollover valve in case of the worst happening. In this first load of powdercoated stuff I also did my tank straps, along with the top hat retainer ring for the tank. Once I get my last few parts I’ll do a more detailed post on the tank itself. The filler neck rubber retainer piece that holds it in the car had to be the hardest thing to get back in ever. I fought with it for an hour before I finally got it to slip back in place. All hardware was replaced with some stainless bolts, that were liberally coated with anti seize so that hopefully I can get them out again in the future.


While I was at the back of the car I reinstalled a bunch of small rubber plugs in the rear of the car along with the clips that hold the taillights in place. The rear bumper brackets were snapped back in place, still missing the hardware because I can’t bring myself to put the crusty old hardware back in them. Have to get something fresher looking for that. The rear crash sensor thing also got the same stainless bolts and powdercoat treatment as the filler neck did. Obviously didn’t powdercoat the actual sensor, just the bracket.



The interior was my next little project. I powdercoated the little chassis brace pieces that go in the hatch and the ones that go between the roof and b pillar. These were just bare metal from the factory so some coating did a lot for them. I also got the curtain side airbags back installed making sure those were right and not wrapped up on themselves. All the plugs that were on the floor got cleaned and put back and then we were at the point where the chassis harness needed to go back.


Usually this wouldn’t be a difficult job, just lay the wires where they belong and plug them in. My car had trailer light wiring that was tapped into the taillight harness that I wanted to get rid of as I took the hitch off like 1 year into ownership of the car. There was also an aftermarket remote start in the car that caused me nothing but headaches the entire time I owned the car. Along with the fact that it never even worked. So I laid the harness out on the floor and started chopping out every wire that wasn’t original to the car. Once I was satisfied, into the car it went. Everything laid out surprisingly well and it was pretty easy to get everything back where it belonged. I haven’t attached much on the firewall as I want the dash bar back in so that I can connect stuff properly.



Last part of this update is just going to be tossing the carpet back in. This was by far the easiest part as it just laid back where it belonged. No drama which was very nice, and it’s a pretty big step towards the interior coming together.



I think my next update will hopefully be the fuel system getting completed so I can finally get the tank back under the car. I’m also very close to dropping way too much money on the rest of the stuff for my suspension to get the car to be a roller again.

 

Everything looks awesome! You are doing top shelf work. I am liking the idea of setting up a powder coat oven...if you were to start a "off topic" thread about it .

 

I definitely could make a post about diy powdercoating and how I learned, it’s a great way to get stuff done in a fraction of the time that it would take sending it out. Oven wise I haven’t quite figured out, just last night my control board just exploded so once I get a new controller in there then I can make a post about the “cheapest” way to acquire a 2x3x6 oven setup. And thank you! Just a side note, I can see a run in one of my pictures haha, that will be sanded out properly and buffed, I’m not just leaving paint runs on the car for anyone wondering. I like to wait a good few months before sanding runs as I’ve had it backfire where the paint in the run is still wet since I tend to paint stuff when it’s way too cold.

 

Well I’ve been slacking on the updates yet again, just seems I get too busy with other things to remember to post my progress. I’m going to try and prioritize posting a little more often, but no promises haha. I’ve been picking away in my free time and starting to get the car back together. Also have ordered a lot of parts so that’s good.


In unrelated to speed3s news, I bought another project lol. I picked up a barn find c10 pickup to build up into a fun little summer truck, and also plan to use it to tow my rx7 when it’s done. Along with all my future horrible purchases. Now enough with old 1970 rusty pickups, let’s get back to my nicely painted and fresh speed3!

Rusty old thing. It’s a single owner truck though and was my grandfathers. It’s been in a barn since 1978 and I have all the paperwork with it till it was parked. Definitely pretty roached but I think it’s cool and saveable. And hey I like a project!

I finally received what I thought was the final parts for my fuel tank, so it was time for that to get reassembled. Of course those little Philips screws holding the top hat in looked like an absolute nightmare to me, surprisingly all but 2 came out without stripping. The 2 that stripped just took some persuasion with a chisel and they broke free also. Yay no drilling required! The tank I just sprayed quick with some semi gloss spray paint, it was just a little dirty looking even after washing it and didn’t want to put it back looking dirty compared to everything else. I knew I was converting the fuel tank over to a return style system, so I drilled a hole in the top hat plastic to install a -6 fuel cell bulkhead fitting I bought. Original plan was to use this as the new feed and the factory feed line as a return, but I ordered a return bulkhead, so it didn’t have threads or a fitting on the inside to attach a hose to. My mistake, but it’ll still work as the return. Not a big deal as the stock line size will not be an issue as this is going to be purely for 91 octane, which will be for cruising around and idling. Power will be made with an ethanol based fuel in an individual fuel cell. And before anyone comments, yes I know that when you run a “stand-alone” fuel system for pi you don’t need a return in the tank. My plans are a little different than what most people are doing so I will need the return for tuning simplicity. I installed an aem 340lph pump in the tank, bypassed the factory regulator in the tank and tossed a hose just running straight off the pump out to the feed line. I also “Swiss cheesed” the bucket so that fuel could circulate through the bucket so that the pump doesn’t starve. Fuel slosh under power won’t be a concern again as power will be made with an aux fuel out of a different cell. This tank is purely to make the car driveable without costing me a fortune in ethanol if I’m not making power. Around me there are zero ethanol stations, so no option for pump e. Going to be buying barrels of the stuff. I had powdercoated the top hat retainer thing and the tank straps a while back, so just tossed the new fuel setup in the tank, with fresh stainless button heads, with lots of anti sieze, and put the tank back in the car. I never cut the floor of my car to be able to remove the fuel pump without dropping the tank, and of course I just missed the factory hole with the return line. Oh well, just need to clearance it a bit to make a fitting fit.


Yes I tossed some jb weld around the fitting. I’m just a little scared of it seeping because the hats just plastic so I couldn’t tighten the bulkhead as tigh as I would have liked to to ensure the Teflon washers are sufficiently crushed and sealed. Just a little added insurance.

I think to end this post I’ll show what I’ve been playing with lately. The dash bar wasn’t exactly something I had plans to do much with, but it was looking crusty and rusty so I couldn’t help myself and decided it also needed the powder coat treatment. My sand blast setup is nowhere near big enough to fit this, so outside I went with a tarp and got myself all suited up and blasted it outside. Then inside the garage to be coated. This unfortunately didn’t turn out 100%, it was really hard to move from the bench where I coated it to the oven and I touched it on the end a little and rubbed a little powder off. Overall it looks better than before and ultimately no one will ever see it anyways so I guess it doesn’t matter too much. In a couple days once I get my clutch pedal stuff all sorted I’ll post another little update on that.

 

It’s clutch master time! I was planning on posting this along with my brake pedal setup and throttle pedal, but the throttle pedal is proving to be a massive pain, and I haven’t gotten it sorted yet. Going to just focus on the clutch pedal stuff for this post.


I’ve been reading stuff with stiffer clutches and people blowing masters and slaves, and honestly just want some adjustability for engagement. The stock speed3 master is kind of a joke, it’s completely plastic including the pushrod which was pretty surprising to me. I decided to run a wilwood compact master for the clutch. The first order of business was to figure out how to connect the rod of the new master to the stock clutch pedal. The stock master uses a plastic clip, which won’t work with the wilwood master. I decided to fire up the old lathe and turn a chunk of 1/2 square bar stock of aluminum I had laying around into a little pivot thing for the end of the pushrod for the master. It turned out pretty good, and has a decent amount of adjustability to fine tune the clutch engagement.



To mount this to the pedal, I drilled a hole through the boxed section of the pedal and then used a dremel and ground the braces of the old mount down just a bit to allow the new pivot to move freely for the entire stroke of the pedal. For mock up stuff I just sent a bolt through the hole to hold it, and used a nut on the other side. I’ll revisit this bolt a little later.


Now it was time to get the master actually in the car. I patched part of the old hole in the clutch bracket that held the old master to allow enough meat to drill the lower mounting hole on the wilwood master. I just welded in a small piece of 11 gauge steel over the hole and ground the welds back so that the master sits flush against the bracket. Then into the car it all went to mark where the master should sit. I wanted it to have decent clearance in the hole in the firewall but I also needed to have the push as straight as possible. I got it sitting good, drilled 2 holes and just used bolts and nuts to hold the master to the original clutch bracket. Lots of loctite was used because these will not be fun to have to tighten in the future.



The only thing I wasn’t super happy with was the bolt that was holding the pushrod to the pedal. Just kinda looked janky and would be a pain to work on once the dash and stuffs all back in. I just turned a small steel pin on the lathe and grooved the end to accept a small e clip so that it doesn’t fall out. Last order of business is just to powdercoat the pedal and bracket, and throw it all together. I’m pretty happy with the way it all turned out, just have a couple small issues I’ll have to figure out for the future. One being the weird line exit on the master, thinking maybe a banjo would be the best to keep the line away from the firewall and not look ridiculous. The other is the super odd shaped hole in the firewall. Not sure how I’m going to seal that up. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I thought about foam, but I’m kinda trying to keep flammable stuff out of the engine bay just in case I decide to track the car in the future.
Pictures of the finished product.

 

You might need to just make a two piece cover for the hole with some rubber stripping around where it touches the master

 

Been a while since I’ve been on here, got more progress done, just been too lazy to make a post. Trying to decide how much detail I want to put into this stuff. I took lots of photos of this step so I’m going to try a slightly more in depth post about building something, and see how it goes.


The throttle pedal seems like such a simple thing, just toss it back in and done right? Well it’s not quite that simple. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the wiring on the factory throttle pedal, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out, and neither could my friend who’s really good at the complicated wiring stuff. For normal e pedals there are 2 separate tps sensors inside the pedal for redundancy, and these are very easy to meter out on a multimeter as it’s just a change in resistance. The throttle pedal in a speed is something strange that does not use an obvious 2 separate tps sensors. I only had 2 wires that even seemed like they were connected inside the pedal somewhere. Now I’m not going to pretend that I’m the smartest guy when it comes to electronic things, so this isn’t saying that there isn’t an obvious way to make this pedal work, but for me it was simpler and more fun to use a known good e throttle pedal out of a different car.


Now I’m sure you’re wondering at this point why this even matters. Just plug it in, there’s no reason to figure out how it works. I haven’t posted on here a full plan of what I’m doing to the car because things could still change, but I’m going to be running on a traditional standalone (most likely haltech because me and my friend are both reasonably knowledgeable on haltechs as both our rx7s were/are on haltechs).


So the easiest thing in my mind being an rx7 guy, was to use the rx8 throttle pedal. It’s a commonly used throttle pedal for rx7s, and the wiring is very simple and I have a wiring diagram for it. I also happened to part out a rot box of an rx8 about 2 years ago so I had an rx8 pedal just sitting in a box in my basement. Obviously this requires an adaptor bracket to bolt into the car. The rx8 pedal is also a funky shape, and the pedal doesn’t land anywhere near where the stock pedal landed. Mine is also the plastic pedal as it came out of an auto so it doesn’t match my other pedals at all.

Factory vs the rx8 pedal.

The easiest way I’ve found to build something like this pedal, is to first make a jig of the important parts of the factory pedal. I welded some nuts to a piece of 1x3 steel, and then bolted the pedal to the steel


Then I made a sort of “frame” around the factory pedal, to capture its location and also its angle. This is so much easier than trying to make something that floats in open air, also makes test fitting basically pointless. As long as it bolts to the nuts I have welded in the plate, and the pedal falls inside the frame I built then it will bolt right into the car and sit in the exact location as the stock pedal.



Since the rx8 pedal is all plastic I chopped the pedal arm off to allow me to make a new arm that fits where it needs to. I made a super quick adaptor bracket that allows the pedal to bolt to the factory bracket. This wasn’t supposed to be the end result, just a quick bracket that allowed me to build the arm, but it ends up becoming permanent because while it doesn’t look super pretty it works well and has zero flex.


Next step was to make a plate that would allow me to bolt the factory aluminum pedal cover to. I traced it out on cardboard first, then transferred it to 1/8 steel, and then put a curve in it to match the factory pedal shape. Easiest way to do the next step was to tack this steel plate directly to the jig, allowing me to just connect the dots to get the perfect new pedal.



I made a little bracket that would bolt to the nub of the rx8 arm I had left, and then bent up a piece of steel rod to bridge between the rx8 pedal and the new steel pedal plate I made. To get this shape I just bent up a piece of filler rod, and then transferred it to the steel rod.


Now it’s just as simple as bolting the bracket to the rx8 pedal, and then welding the rod to the new pedal. Everything lines up perfect because of the jig.


Now this could very easily be done, but I wanted to add a little gusset between the pedal plate and the rod, just in case I get a little excited and stomp the pedal super hard. Don’t want it to have any chance to break off.


Now it’s just the normal powdercoat, and then bolt into the car. It looks great, there’s no way to even tell it’s not the stock pedal without looking under the dash, and it feels awesome too. Exactly the same as the factory pedal. Now the wiring is simplified and I can make this work with hopefully no more hurdles. Let me know if you want to see more in depth posts like this, or if you prefer the quicker overview posts.

 

I for one enjoy the rediculous overcomplication of everything. I would never have the time to do it myself so it's nice to live vicariously through someone else

 

lol!

 

Lol I wish I had more time to work and less time to think! Thinking always gets me in trouble and leads me down the path of most resistance.

 

So I’m back again, haven’t forgotten about this thread, not giving up on the car lol. Things are taking a little longer then I would like it to, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast. I’m pretty busy and don’t get a ton of time to work on the car, but I have been making some good progress. I actually have the brake master cylinder setup now, chassis and factory engine harness modified and installed, along with the fuse box that should be in the engine bay is now relocated inside the car. The front suspension is fully installed, and the rear suspension is well on its way. The car is almost a roller again! I’ll post a more detailed post about all of those topics here in a little while, when I have time to sit down and type up a whole post. For now I’ll just toss up a picture of what I’m working on currently, there will be lots more info about this job here in the next little while once I catch this thread up to where I am.

 

Oooh, do tell...I was just wondering the other day how you were doing with the project!

 

Going back through my old photos it looks like the next thing that was done was the brake master cylinder setup. Again, something very simple that I had to make complicated. From the get go I had planned to delete abs. Main reason is just room in the engine bay, while I’m not shaving this bay or doing anything too crazy, I still like the look of a nice tidy tucked engine bay. Part of the reason I painted it nicely is because I’m hoping you’re going to actually see some of it. And speed3 bays are kinda ugly, so I want to see what I can do to make it look nice. The other reason for no abs is that the last 3 years of daily driving the car I didn’t have abs working, and never found a time where I wished I had it again. When I changed the left front wheel bearing all those years ago I supported the knuckle wrong in the press and bent the brake tabs. I bought a new knuckle, but couldn’t get the old sensor out, so never ended up having a working sensor. Knowing I planned on upgrading the brakes I was a little nervous about having no abs and a very touchy brake pedal with the power booster, leading to an unpredictable or easy to lock up setup. I also like the feel of properly setup manual brakes so I said why not try and devise a manual brake setup.


I’m quite certain you could pretty easily get the factory speed3 brake master to work in a non abs and no brake booster setup, but the pedal ratio is not ideal obviously for manual brakes. People recommend 6:1 ratio for manual brakes, while 4:1 is the common power brake ratio. I find that 6:1 doesn’t have a heavy enough pedal feel to feel right to me in a track car/ sport car application. Works great for old trucks though. The factory pedal ratio on a gen 2 is around 3.8:1, so pretty hefty for a manual brake setup. There’s 2 main ways to relieve pedal effort, either change the pedal ratio, or move to a smaller master cylinder diameter. Me and a friend both have/had rx7s with the same master cylinder setup, and different Calipers, and the combination we both liked the best was 4:1 pedal ratio (so factory rx7 pedal ratio) and a 7/8 bore master cylinder. Brakes are firm, but not rock hard, and have excellent modulation and control. All this to say that that’s kinda what I’m aiming towards with the speed3 as well. Obviously there’s some great equations to actually find out what master cylinder size you should have for your specific Caliper and pedal setup, but honestly the information you need to know about the braking system is just stuff that I don’t know/ am too lazy to figure out. I figure if the brakes feel awful I can always change the master cylinder bore till it feels decent.


I started out by making a mount to delete the brake booster and mount a master cylinder to the firewall. I whipped up a quick mount out of some plate steel I had laying around and some tubes to increase weld area around where the master mounts so that if you really shove it you won’t ever be able to separate the 2 different pieces of the brake mount. Some pictures of the process.



I also redrilled a new hole for the pivot point, effectively changing the ratio to right around 4.2:1. No way of knowing how it’s going to feel until it’s done but this gives me a good starting point.


Since I’m making my own mount, I could use any master cylinder I wanted to, and initially planned to use a wilwood master cylinder. Honestly the price of one was kind of insane, and too much for me to justify. So I went with what I know. A series 4 turbo fc rx7 master cylinder is a 7/8 bore, truly separated reservoir, aluminum master, and comes in at like 70 Canadian dollars. Plus I’ve used this before with great luck on other builds, so this is the route I took.


The only thing missing when you delete the abs pump is you now no longer have a bias control between your front and rear brakes. Wilwood has a nice affordable manual bias adjuster that I purchased, and will be mounting somewhere in the car once I start running brake lines. Final thing to do was to slap some black paint on the master, so that it matches the clutch master and bolt it all up. Everything feels smooth and I get full range of travel with the pedal so everything should be good.

And yes, where the reservoir ends up is going to be a nightmare for filling, so I’ll have to come up with a sneaky method of filling it up that doesn’t involve taking half the car apart.