Taking a journey through pain and a misfortune. A speed6 saga.

Hey everyone, I've been lurking around the forum and some of the facebook groups for a while. It's been a number of years since I participated in any forums, but I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately. I've owned my Speed6 since 2021 and lets just say, this car has been a curse...



I haven't named her over the years, maybe that's part of why she's been a curse. This build thread isn't going to end well if you are here to see some glorious restoration, build project.. My long term plan is to use the car as a drive train donor vehicle for my 88 Mazda 323GTX project. The GTX project is still a long way out, so in the mean time the car has been my ECU tuning test vehicle and daily driver.

The price was right when I bought her. She's hiding some rust, the motor ran good but it had typical timing chain rattle issues. It's equipped with the Panda interior, but it's beat up. I never intended to spend a bunch of money on this car beyond basic maintenance and repairs.. but as you can imagine by now.. That changed in a hurry.. So where should we start??

 

First order of businesses lets tackle the timing chain rattle.. If you're one of those people who's looking through your oil cap trying to determine if you need to replace the timing chain.. STOP!.. You need to see how extended the timing chain tensioner is, to be able to know how worn things are... The chain isn't always the cause for the rattle either... As you can see.. My car had a broken VVT actuator lock pin..*Hinting to future posts, I blow the motor up, and go through a detailed 2.5L build where I show some really interesting pictures of timing chain wear*


My wallet was about $2,000 lighter with this load of parts.. Living in BC Canada, we get raped on parts costs.. I did speed extra buying most of the stuff direct from Mazda, but at the time it felt like the best course of action. I've seen lots of issues with counter fit parts over the years. (I've been an automotive tech for 25 years)..

Now when you are working with a turbo car, If you do happen to see oil build up like so... Don't jump to thinking the turbo seals are bad... The oil build up in these pictures was due to a different issue which I'll discover later on... For now I just cleaned things up and planned to monitor the situation.


Jeez what I mess I've got going on... The timing Chain wasn't my old order of business..


Yucky!... Check that carbon out on the intake valves...If this was a VW/Audi, a walnut shell blast would be recommended every 60-80,000km's...Don't get caught up in Seafoam, or other chemical solutions to this problem... Over the years I've experimented BG, Terra Clean, SeaFoam, and other chemical solutions.. 20 years ago there were products on the market that worked pretty good.. If you can get a hold a really old bottle of ACdelco top end cleaner.. that stuff worked really well.. But in the name of saving the environment, a lot of the harsh chemicals used have been removed.. Most of these chemical products will break down soft carbon build ups, but that's not what ends up on the back side of your valves... What you see here is after 2 rounds of BG treatment, done just to prove the BG rep wrong at the time...


And after cleaning up the valves...

 

With Round 1 of major maintenance and repairs complete. I drove the car for about a week. When I bought the car it was pretty leaky all over.. In order to narrow down the leaks, I had given the engine a solid bath while it was all apart.. So what did we find? Well shit! that's gear oil dripping from the PTO/Transfer case... It wasn't coming up top.. This was the case halves leaking.. That would have to go on the back burner for the time being and just make sure I kept it topped up.. I had discovered the sub frame and some of the associated suspension components were a little crusty and not ready to come apart... I didn't want to open up that can of worms yet..

Next up, The oil filter housing.. Did I have a bad o-ring from changing the oil? Or was it something else.. This one turned out to be the oil cooler seal...


At the time of doing this repair, I didn't know Mazda updated the oil cooler due to this leak being an issue.. This meant 2 different seals.. Wouldn't you know it.. the only one is stock happened to be the wrong one.. So my car was stuck at work on the hoist over night while I waited to get the other one... Thankfully at the time I lived walking distance from the shop.. The seal still in the package is for an early gen 1 oil cooler.. the other seal is for the updated/gen 2 oil coolers..

The 3rd major leak I found happened to be one I had recently fixed on a buddies Mazdaspeed 3... The shift tower seals were gone.. With his car we changed the vent while it was apart. I can't remember why, other than the fact he ordered absolutely everything which included a new vent.. This proved to be a problem... We ended up with a driver side oil seal leak that we thought was unrelated, but turned out to be caused by the new vent.. It wasn't venting properly causing a pressure build up in his transmission.. After putting 2 seals in the car, we didn't figure it out until one day I went to top up the oil and have a look... when I pulled the fill plug, I heard/felt pressure escape... Something with the new vent cap wasn't manufactured right causing it to be plugged off.. I took a page out of an old school book, took the cap off. ran some vacuum line higher up in on the engine, looped it in U shape so that water wouldn't get down inside and the problem was solved..

With the main leaks resolved, back to putting miles some miles on the car and enjoying it..

 

You know you're getting old when.... actually wait... This next section is more about how I was tired of driving purpose built autocross cars as my daily drivers and wanted to have something with a few creature comforts.. Like a factory radio that worked properly, and the fancy key less entry bells and whistles... First up.. scan the car.. why doesn't the key less entry work? Well that's simple, one of the antenna's aren't working.. This code happens to point to the antenna behind the rear bumper.. Thankfully the part wasn't to expensive, took about 10min to replace and all was good in the world.. Or was it??


My drivers side power door lock wasn't working properly.. It was trying ever soooo hard, only moving about half the distance it needed to.. Sooo off comes the door panel.. The linkage didn't seam to bad.. I cleaned it up, made sure things were lubricated.. Put the door panel back on to test, took it off a few times...
Eventually I broke down and removed the power lock/latch assembly... when I looked at what this was going to cost to replace I shit myself... Soooo fuck it! what could I loose cracking it open? I even broke out the lab scope to test switch positions and command signals.. because of how expensive this part was..

Not much to it.. It was glued together pretty good, so it took a lot of gentle persuasion with a heat gun and various tools to pick and pry at the case.. If you ever do this, you've gotta be really careful not to have everything spring out and fly everywhere.. It took me a while to figure out how to get it all back together again.. I didn't see anything wrong.. The motor contacts were a bit "loose" so I adjusted them to make better contact and lubricated everything.. This did the trick... 3 years later it's still working good..

While I had the door panel off I took some time to fix some very very poor wiring that was done for the speaker and aftermarket cross over that had been installed at some point..

Not even a crappy solder or but connector attempt.. No wonder it was cutting in and out..


Wait, I lied.. this was an even bigger problem.. The pins in the factory connector were rotten, almost non existent..


Ok.. So now we've got a car that's leakish free.... maintenance for the most part is up to date.. music works, key less entry works, power door locks work... Time to sit back and enjoy driving it right?? welllllll not quite..

 

Looks like a restoration project to me...restoration from general public use, lol.
Car looks good for almost 20 years too, lucky BC car!
How many K?

edit: Welcome by the way, I always like to see another 6 around!

 

Coming along hopefully you get your fun commuter car soon.

One of the posts you made a comment about not assuming oil near that throttle body is failed turbos seals. You're certainly on point there typically on these cars it's from a valued PCV valve, reccomend a Damond Motorsports or radium PCV plate (they have baffles in them) + a new OEM valve. The other thing that Mazda did with the gen 2 was add a baffle in the valve cover and move the VC breather on the intake slightly different.
But yes crank case pressures absolutely do it on the speeds. There was a TSB saying use 5w40 instead of 5w30, can help but generally it's been found to be the be the crack case ventilation issue.

 

^--x2
My Damond catch can cured the buildup of oil that would regularly dribble out of my intercooler if I left it propped up on the bench. I dont get much if anything anymore.
OP, you have covered most of what this car can catch you up on. I too had some rear antenna and door wiring pin corrosion issues in the beginning, lol.
With the VVT in check, some good crankcase venting, clean valves, clean injectors and some good seals add some internals & any of the small aftermarket turbos (like BNR 3/4, CST4) and you will have a reliable helluva fun car.

 

This car has lived a ruff life... I got it for half of the market value.. I figured that gave me a decent budget to "restore" it to a good daily driver... I bought the car 190,000km's on it..

More story telling to come.. So far we have covered the first 3 months I owned the car...

 

With a car that was now fairly leak free and comfortable to drive I started putting some miles on it.. This is where my big troubles began..Part of me must be a descendant from Niki Lauda.. God blessed me with an ok mind, but a really great ass.. I feel things going on in vehicles most people don't.. For example, I had no issues jumping into a 2005 S2000 at autocross and drive it at the limit, with VTEC kicking in attempting to send the car for a spin cycle, mid corner.. But jump into a 2006 when they switched to DBW, and all I did was spin out due to the lack of response in the DBW system.. If you've ever been blessed with racing an S2000, you'll know the dangers(or should I say fun?) of mid throttle VTEC..

So what does that mean for me? Well little issues, 90 - 95% of the population wouldn't notice drive me NUTS!! My drive to work now included 2 rather large hills.. flat land the car was good, but tip in on the throttle to maintain speed when climbing the hill and I would get a light hesitation/misfire... Before the advice pours in, don't worry I've got this. Sit back and enjoy the ride... my specialty for 10 years was diagnosing problems like this..

Lets start with basics...

Check your dry flow air filters... They wear out over time.. This car came with a Corksport TIP and Power series 2 intake on it, but it was still on the factory tune..



Something I learned a long time ago... Air flow restrictions on the intake side of turbo car have a major effect on spool up and how well the turbo works... The 2nd Mazda 323GTX I owned was setup with a bunch of bolt ons and chipped ECU.. I had my manual boost controller set to 10 pounds of boost.. One day I upgraded the OEM intercooler, to a bigger 626 intercooler, upgraded the piping and built a new intake pipe up to the VAF (old school MAF sensor for those of you who don't know).. First test drive with out touching my boost controller, the car hit 18lbs of boost...

I don't like K&N filters/oil filters.. So why the *beep* would I used one?? Well locally it was all I could get with out having to wait for a custom order.. I wanted something larger... I didn't pre-plan replacing the filter, so I took what I could get that day...

Part of my testing path, was to have scan data.. I was hoping I'd be able to make a post with evidence around cleaning your MAF sensor". When I saw how bad the stock filter was.. Cleaning your MAF sensor in order to "fix" a problem is wrong... It doesn't work.. When a MAF sensor gets dirty enough to cause a problem, it's developed a baked on crust that skews it's calibration.. This will show up as slightly negative fuel trims at idle, positive fuel trims under load, that gets more positive the more load you put the car under. Plus lean with knock issues during open loop/WOT conditions.. You can "improve" the maf sensor enough to get a check engine light to turn off and reduce these issues by cleaning it... That's why it's sooooooo heavily recommended...

So why isn't this a good "fix"... Well you can't totally get the crust off the sensor.. The crust slows the sensors response time down.. Scan data isn't fast enough to catch what goes on during quick throttle transmissions.. You need a lab scope to catch this... With the Mazdaspeed platform, you wont hear it... But on other vehicles, you'll get "pinging" during throttle transitions. Despite how dirty my MAF sensor was, it wasn't causing problems..I've got some of my pictures tucked away on a hard drive somewhere, I'll come back and update this post if I find them..

Cleaning a MAF sensor in order to maintain it and prevent the crust from building up, is ok.. It's not a bad thing to do.. Generally when you do this, you wont see any changes in your car. If you do see a change, if it does make the problem better, or go away.. Replace the sensor...

A tip in, hesitation/misfire (Something to understand is different types of misfire and what they feel like, mine was "soft" subtle.. plugs,coils, and some of the quick "go-to" advice isn't the common problem in this case.).. A MAF sensor issue that's got a bunch of built up crust on it as I've talked about is a likely culprit.. It's also the easiest and quickest to test...

 

If it was made in October of 2006, 100% from the same demonic assembly line as my Christine. Pure evil.

 

I mentioned, this car was going to be a dive into a ECU tuning... So in the back ground I put an order in for a COBB access port..


My tuning experience at this time was with HPTuners, Megasquirt and Link ECU's... In the back ground, I was building this beauty for my boss.. The body work and paint had been done 15 years ago.. It was a completely restored numbers matching 67 Camaro SS... During covid he got bored.. He was tired of the stock motor and power glide, leaking oil ect.. Sooo a 525hp LSX crate motor got ordered, with a bunch of other goodies.. Ride tech suspension, willwood brakes, vintage air a/c...



Since I wasn't familiar to tuning the Mazdaspeed platform and information isn't as available like the GM or stand alone world.. I also ordered a tune from a reputable tuner, with my COBB access port.. I did this knowing how sensitive these cars can be with mods... I didn't have any of the stock intake pieces to put this car back to stock and rule out a possible calibration issue causing the misfire/hesitation I was chasing.. Plus since I was going to dive into tuning myself.. Why not right??

 

I'll have to go check the build date on the car... It is a 2006 model year...

 

Pictures are a hidden away in a "safe keeping" folding somewhere on an external hard drive.. Hopefully I can find them so that I can fill these posts in a little better...

With the COBB access port on the car, using the stage 1+ OTS tune the car felt pretty good.. The misfire/hesitation issue wasn't as prevalent.. This told me, that my issue was likely a tune issue.. but there was more to go over/check on the car.. I can't remember why, but there was something that made me think about checking the by pass valve for leaking issues.... I think it had to do with inconsistency issues my buddy was having when logging his Speed 3...

Just above atmospheric pressure there was a small leak.. at 10psi, it was a fairly big leak.. I wish I had the pictures, because it's important how you perform this test... You need to make sure the reference line is hooked up so that it see's pressure... If you leave it unhooked, the you'll get a false leak situation.. The stock valve uses boost pressure to help close it.. My buddy brought his car down on a weekend when I was tinkering on the car and we tested his by pass valve... His was worse..

So the two of us put in an order for a couple of TiAL recirculating by pass valves... Edgeautosports at the time showed the valves in stock, but we were quickly told that wasn't the case.. They were on back order.. We weren't in a rush so we decided to wait.. After 3 months, we had no word on when the valves would show up, so we changed our order up.. The two of us ended up with COBB LF valves..

The by pass valve helped the inconsistency issues my buddy was having with his Speed 3... He logged his highest ever power numbers on the torque app he likes to use.. Both our cars felt more responsive, boost felt like it was stronger more stable.. buuut I still had some hesitation issues..

 

Time line wise, there was a bunch of over lapping things that took place... At some point before I got serious with tuning the car I decided to do a health check on the motor.. You remember all of that oil in the intake from earlier??? Well this was the cause of it...

Cylinder 1... Compression test.. That's good..

Cylinder #2... Not horrible... but not great.. 175psi..

Cylinder #3 Well now, this is a problem... 159psi...

Cylinder #4... This Just as healthy as Cylinder #1...

Ok let's explore further shall we? You should always back up a compression test with a leak down test...

Cylinder #1.. to be expected for a motor with this many miles on it...

Cylinder #2... Not good..

Cylinder #3.... YIKES!! That's bad...


Cylinder #4... Well that's better than expected..


So now what??? This motor isn't doing well.. Some oil poured into the cylinders confirmed the issue was rings/piston/bottom end issues... The blow by on cylinders 2 and 3 is why the intake was full of oil... So this has been going on for a while now... At this time, I had bought a house, was preparing to move an hour away in 3 months... Sooo fuck it! run it till she blows up and worry about it later...

 

Save up for a build, jdm motors do not last.

 

I have a feeling this build thread isn't caught up to current day.

 

You would be correct... I discovered the motor issues in June of 2021... So there's still a fair bit to come as I get this written up..

 

Despite the motor issues, I didn't take it easy on the car... I was getting a remote tune done on the car, running the COBB OTS maps and starting to play with AccessTunner despite the motor being on it's way out.. I figured at this point if I fucked something up while I was doing my own tuning experiments, oh well....

The shop I was working at was getting pretty involved with Malone Tunning and CTS Turbo. I was getting to do a bunch of installs, and remote tuning work on Audi's, VW's, BMW's, Mini's... I was getting a reputation for being willing to take on all the custom work.. The shop service advisor was getting confident bring in jobs that hadn't been done well at other shops... I was getting lots of experience with the world of remote tuning.. This is important because I was quickly learning how much short cutting gets done in the world of remote tuning.. WOT stuff is pretty easy to sort out.. but if you are like me.. it's all the mid throttle driving that's most important when it's your daily...

The remote tuner I was working with on the Speed6 didn't impress me.. I had let them know the motor wasn't in good shape.. I was mainly concerned with the misfire/hesitation issue I had been chasing.. I wanted something conservative.. After 3 revisions, I didn't feel confident running the tune.. I am not going to bash who did the work.. They are one of the commonly recommend tuners in the community...

I took the car to the local 1/4 mile track one night.. When street tuning, you are always worried about speed limits.. I wanted to get some good WOT data.. The car ran horrible.. I didn't launch it.. The remote tune had knock issue I could hear.. I didn't even complete a full run with that tune.. The COBB stage 1+ tune worked the best... I hadn't done much yet to create my own tune.. I was still busy data collecting..I must have hurt the motor worse at the tack.. On the way home I was doing a proper WOT pull to get a data log to send off so that adjustments could be made... Well there was a small pop and whole lot of SMOKE!.. The car stalled out but I was able to get it up and running again, but it wasn't happy... It was midnight, I was 20km's away from the shop.. A little bit of a fuck it attitude, I drove the car to the shop..

Oil was seriously pushing past the VVT solenoid seal...


Passenger side of the car was soaked in oil...


I did a quick compression test that night and found Cylinder #2 said FUK YOU! I AM DONE!.. No external holes in the block, but 0 compression... Using a scope to look inside the cylinder I could see part of the piston was missing.... Thankfully it was summer time and I had a car that had been hidden away in storage for a number of years.. I was looking for an excuse to bring it out of hiding, so I guess now was as good of time as any...

Here's was the replacement daily while the speed6 was down... My 1990 Mazda 323GTR.. Some cosmetic upgrades, but 100% stock drive train.. This was my best friends car.. He had passed away in 2018 and left it to me.. This was the first time the car came out of hiding since 2018..

 

Time to dive in and see what kind of damage was done..

Well that looks pretty bad... I'd say the block is junk at this point... No rebuilding this motor..


If you are going to blow something up.. Make sure you don't wimp out.. blow it up good! This piston will find it's self a nice home on the sacrificed parts in the name of stupidity shelf.. I've got another piston on that shelf from a 1990 3.1L Cavalier... I was testing a custom e-prom chip (This was back in the true "chip" tuning days). I forgot to put the stock e-prom chip back in the car after I installed a ZEX Dry nitrous kit.. 100 shot later... I killed that motor quickly due to how lean the custom e-prom chip was running..



Remeber Cylinder #3 having issues?? Well here we have it... Cracked ring land... This would have been the issue with Cylinder 2 as well.. oil pushing up into the cylinders, a hot tune up, lots of cylinder heat = guaranteed to end up with pre-ignition.. Which is exactly what you see with the cylinder 2 carnage..

Talk about some heat issues with some of the other cylinder walls.. I might have caused that when I drove the car back to the shop after it blew up.. But I have also torn down 3 more motors that were all "good" running motors.. They all had similar heat patterns.. just not as bad..


I did a quick solvent/gas test to see how bad this damage was.. The valve seats/valve faces are shot.. So I sent the head off to a local machine shop to get it refreshed...

 

The picture doesn't show it, but the cylinder wall on #2 has a pin hole in it.. So this block was trashed at this point.. When I called around to see about getting a good used motor, the prices I got were scary.. $4500 - 5,000 for a used motor I knew would need be refreshed... I took a step back and started doing some researching... My buddy pointed me to a bunch of the 2.5L swap information..

For $900 I got a complete running 2.5L from a 2011 Mazda 3 with 60,000kms on it... Let the fun begin..