Project Sipster Part 6 - Faster Sipster
by Dave Coleman
If you want a Diesel to make more power, you just have to squirt in more fuel. If you've never tuned an engine before, this is the most obvious thing in the world. But if you're used to tuning gas engines, this is the most preposterously naive and wrong-headed thing we've said in at least a week. Diesels, it seems, are a bit different.
UPDATE! I just found the dyno chart!
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Project Miatabusa Part 7 - Mounting the Gauges
Last time we looked at cramming the Hayabusa's instrument cluster into the Miata housing, it proved to be a shockingly good fit. There was a very large unresolved issue of how to actually secure the Hayabusa cluster's circuit board, though. Here's how that project was finished:
Project Miatabusa Part 6: The Wiring Job From Heck...
By Dave Coleman
Yea, well, it wasn't really the wiring job from Hell, but it was damn near the wiring job from Purgatory, considering how long it took me to get around to mostly finishing it. Surprisingly, nothing about the complete de-wiring of the Miata's engine control system and the integration of the Suzuki Hayabusa engine harness was really all that complicated.
Wrench Tips #22 - Making a Clean Splice
Splicing two wires together is the most basic of wiring tasks, and yet most people seem to do a crappy job of it. Those standard insulated butt connectors are crap. They're bulky, offer no strain relief to deal with bending and vibration, and it's hard to tell when they're crimped enough not to fall out.
Technobabble: The Garden Sprayer That Won 2 Championships
That free garden sprayer still travels with me to every race, and topping off the coolant with it is a standard part of every Eyesore Racing pit stop. The procedure is simple. Just pump it up to 20 or 25 psi before the stop, then plug it into the radiator hose when the car arrives and open the valve. The 20-psi water in the bottle flows into the 12-psi cooling system, blowing the relief valve on the radiator cap.
Project Sipster Part 5 - Safer Sipster
We are not the manly men that inhabited the earth back in 1981, fearlessly cruising the streets without airbags, side impact beams or any hint of structural integrity; in all honesty, driving around in this little box kinda scares us. Since making an old car actually crashworthy is beyond even our powers of exaggeration, we're avoiding the whole crashworthiness issue by making the car easier not to crash. Handling and good brakes are our airbags.
Wrench Tips #21: Always Use Lube
Project Sipster is full to its bare metal roof with luggage, disorganized boxes of Rabbit parts and a full Cabriolet body kit; fender flares, side skirts, front bumper and all. To the untrained eye, it looks like a homeless camp. Our Editor isn't helping with the image problem. In the 30 minutes he's been stranded, hoping somebody, anybody will drive past this desolate stretch of Canadian nothingness, Jared has put on two pairs of pants, three sweatshirts and a sleeping bag. He hasn't slept for days and his hair… actually, his hair always looks like that.
Wrench Tips #20: Tape Your Nuts
If you’ve never had to start a bolt that was out of reach, you’ve probably never owned a wrench. Here’s a simple trick to make those hard-to-reach bolts easier to start...
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