What did you do to your ride today

No worse than other cars with struts just that I tend to start with recently performed work when looking for issues

You also have a higher opinion of mechanics than I do

 

well fak! I hit a massive pot hole and bent a wheel totally effed. Standing water in the road, knew there were pot holes in it, slowed down not enough apparently, smack. get home thankfully not to far away hear this hissing noise, check tire sure enough its almost empty ~10psi. thankfully its my steel winter wheel (was going to probably replace them for next season). tried to smack it into submission with a hammer, didnt work. best part is this week we're expecting 1.5feet or more of snow. Guess I'm taking the other halfs SUV in the snow while my car has the donut on. Figure I'll ride on the donut until I can put the summers on the replace all the steels before the next winter hit.

 

I don't think its ball joints because I have absolutely no movement on the wheel either up or down or side to side.

I've used basically 2 very good mechanics during my life and one recently retired so right now I am down to one but have to find another just in case I need something quick and my current mechanic is always busy af. He can only look at the car next week, supposed to call him Friday to nail down a actual drop off date.

 

@Awafrican if you put the donut on the back you would be fine to drive in the snow

 

already done, ground clearance is a an issue since they wont clear they roads... we shall see. But I did put the donut on the rear just in case

 

Is the spare that much shorter? It's been a few years since I had to use mine but I remember being impressed that the diameter was so big for a spare

 

Oh it's small and I'm already on 17" wheels, although it's probably okay BUT I'm expecting enough snow that I'll probably scrape my undertray regardless. Warnings for up to 80cm(Just shu of 2.5ft) of snow over two days. Doubtful they'll plow the road much I'm expecting huge ruts, gotta pick someone up from the airport at the tail end hopefully they atleast plow the main road...

I have run the donut in light -med before no issues, really this coming snow is stay the fuck home weather.

 

I feel your pain, sounds almost exactly to what happened to me in my E-Class last week. Fucked up sidewall, cracked rim and steering wheel noticeably off center. Alignment, rim repair (at least they were able to fix it), and two new tires as the other front already had close to 20k on it so swapped both front tires. Final pot hole cost $720.

On another note kid really got his hands really dirty today. Swapped out thermostat with Gates brand one, flushed system, filled with distilled water, flush again and then topped off with Zerex Asian Vehicle Red coolant. Went for a ride, got the coolant back into the heater core and then topped off again when we got home. Only issue he had was getting the clamps off and I must say they were a effing pain in the ass to get off, so I helped him there otherwise he is starting to grasp a few concepts and techniques. The coolant that was in there seemed a bit thick to me like it wasn't diluted properly but could be wrong. The stuff we put in was already a 50/50 mix.

 

It was the probably OEM FL-22 coolant (dark green), it is more viscous. Mazda sells it here premixed at 55% antifreeze/45% H20.

 

DM RMM came in today. Kid is at work until 9pm close so I’m worse than a child so I grabbed spare key drove to where he works, grabbed the car, came home, threw some jack stands under that thing and swapped out the RMM. My mechanic was being nice when he said the OE mount was on its way out it was pretty bad. Drove it back and quite honestly the NVH is really only noticeable at low RPMs. I must say this might be the best bang for the buck mod for the MS3. Curious to see what he says when he gets home later.

 

Wait does he know you swapped it or is it a surprise for after work?

 

He had no idea I had swapped it, he got home smiling. He said when he was leaving for work he saw the FedEx guy delivering something. He said startup felt harsh and vibrated more than usual at idle/warmup which got his attention, but then he said the gears were going in so much better and car felt more connected and that’s exactly what he read about the advantages of getting an RMM so he put one and one together. Very thankful and just asked which one I got and told him I got the DM. He replied “tough I was gonna get that one in gold with black.” I told him it’s black/black and he was like ehhhh it’s under the car don’t really matter, it’s feels so much better it could be purple with pink polka dots, I wouldn’t care.

 

Long weekend, wife has covid so we had spare time on our hands since all our plans went out the window so today me and the kiddo got to the hpfp. Thanks again to @L337TurboZ for the internals. We purchased the rebuild kit so we rebuilt the pump and added internals. After that was completed we added mesh to the hood scoop he had bought and called it a day. Tomorrow we might get to installing the CPE Cat back exhaust and adding the Kahtec smart stop to the third brake light. My bother is away and he has those small lifts that raise the car about 30 inches which would make exhaust install super easy so I’ll either wait to install exhaust another day or see if putting it on jackstands gives me enough room to do it tomorrow.

 

Finally the clunk is gone after replacing defective rack and pinion with another rebuilt unit which lasts longer than a month. CP-e cat-back exhaust installed, new front sway bar bushings also completed. Now we have Pennzoil Platinum 5w30 on order along with a WIX filter to perform oil change over the weekend.

 

How are you / the son liking the cat back

 

Son sent me a text today..."yuhhh this is ittt" Im guessing he likes it.

 

Starting Monday, buttoned up / driving by Thurs night, and detailed Friday, I:

Installed-

Intake Manifold gasket (OEM)
Throttle body gasket (CS)
Added another catch can
PCV Plate (DM)
Sparkplugs (one step colder NGK's, my old ones were basically gapped that way from buildup anyway lol)

Replaced all injector seals (CS) and o-rings, and cleaned them
Oil change (Royal Purple + Mazda OEM LF102A filter)
Fumoto valve baybeeeeee

Checked on my Corksport oil pressure / temp sensor wiring (it runs under the pan back to the passenger side steering column hole for overseas cars) and it seems totally fine


Things I discovered that need to be / will be addressed:

In two weeks, I'm gonna clean the valves (pic to follow, they look fckn terrible), install corksport 3" turbo-back exhaust (of course there's a 3.5" now), install corksport intake, new bosch 3.5 MAP sensor, new hoses everywhere I can, flush coolant, replace tranny fluid (did it 1.5 years ago but I want to swap fluid anyway). Oh, and EGR delete. I have the CS kit, but discovered the compression nut on the intake side of the EGR was frozen to the tube, so once I had the IM / tube out of the car (as one piece) the 22mm open-end took the entire thing off by rotating the entire tube. Definitely need to drop it.

LMK if you guys can think of anything else I should do while I'm back in there next go-round.

 

You got a link for that mesh? Corksport's hood scoop looks amazing, but damn do I need some mesh to cover the fugly innards of the scoop's channels. Or was it a custom job? I imagine just buying mesh isn't a huge deal to do yourself but jc.

 

@MindTheG4p for some reason can’t get a link from Amazon but if you search car grille mesh 6x12mm rhombic it should pop up. We removed the grille got some poster board and trimmed it so that it fit perfectly into the grille. Trim the mesh to that shape and kind of mold it so it drops in and sits perfectly flat, takes some time bending here and there but eventually you get it perfect. Then we used clear silicone adhesive, ram bead on the inside of scoop. Pushed the mesh into the silicone, ran another bead over that, flattened with my finger put some little weights and let it dry for about 2 hours. HTH

 

Today we got started on the brake refresh. The brake line on FR came off beautifully with just some PB Blaster, the remaining three were a different story. I have the crows foot but it just wasn't working so ended up running over to Harbor Freight and bought a set of Metric flare nut spanners. Still wouldn't budge so today my kid learned the torch technique. After heating it quite a bit we were finally able to break the FL free but still not smooth. Had to heat it up some more, more PB Blaster and going in a loosen tighten until it felt smooth enough to get off, the rears also needed heat but once they broke free they loosened smoothly.

We were able to get the fronts put back together which involved cleaning, priming and painting the calipers and carriers, stop tech brake lines, Centric rotors and EBC Yellowstuff pads. Rear calipers and carriers are all painted so tomorrow is get the rears back in and bleed the system and all done. Quite the day but we did get a decent amount accomplished. We are about 80% done at the point. Can't wait to see the difference in braking tomorrow.

EDIT: All done. EBC recommends no hard stops during break in period unless necessary but noticeable difference right out of the box. Pedal feel greatly improved and you can just sense the stopping power will be much better than the OEM stuff.