Rear Spring Pads and Some Serious Camber

I noticed that my rear wheels seemed to lean in quite a bit, giving me way more camber back there than I need. Since 1600s and 2002s have no camber adjustment built into the suspension, I was informed that ride height was the only means of adjustment. Grice had a good used set of "2 dot" spring pads, so I swapped tehm to find that my existing spring pads were really thin and kind of torn up. I also found that my existing pads had no "dot" rating.

Before:

After:

No more ridiculous camber and no bottoming out when backing out of a driveway.

Trigger Wheel Blues

A few weeks ago, the car started runnng horribly. Backfires and stumbling at idle pointed to a timing issue, but EDIS is known for being all but bulletproof. After rewiring the ignition system and swapping out the ignition module, coil pack, plugs and wires, I moved onto the carb. After two carb rebuilds, a few new fuel filters and a strong consideration of the use of goat's blood, chicken bones and a witch doctor, I was at my wit's end.

As a last resort, I pulled the crank pulley off to check the trigger wheel up close. To my surprise, I found that the wheel was loose.

The JB Weld had finally let go. I readjusted the wheel and added a nice, thick filet of JB Weld to resecure it.

After weeks of poor idling, the car now runs smooooothly again. On to air conditioning and EFI!

Battery Mount

Tom Rafalski made this great underseat battery mount. the battery is a Miata-sized WestCo dry-cell unit. The cable is made to mount the battery on the passenger side, but I only figured that out after I already grounded the batter on the driver side. The mount is really nice stainless steel with a CNC'd hold-down and it came with all the cabling and hardware. Watch for these at http://www.02again.com/ soon.

Readying for Another Roadtrip

A few weeks ago, the car developed a pretty serious misfire and idled like a drag car. I mean that in the worst possible way. Every symptom felt like a timing mishap, which meant that my distributorless ignition system would have to have a fault somewhere.

So, Jay and I dove in.

First, Jay rewired the entire EDIS harness. I originally wired it in another car and the harness looked like a third grader's science project. Jay did a great job replacing it and, though I'm glad that it's really solid now, the car retained it's Rain Man-esque stutter. After buying a new coil pack, we again saw no change.

Finally, we noticed that the clear fuel filter had about a teaspoon of bottom-of-the-tank rust. After some advice that a lean condition can cause a backfire, Jay pulled the top off of the carb and gave the jets a quick cleaning. Instant improvement. I ordered a rebuild kit for the carb and cleaned the whole thing out this afternoon. The result is that the car runs as it should; smooooooothly. I can only imagine how electronic fuel injection will run. Stay tuned for that.

It's good to know that the electronic distributorless ignition system (EDIS) hasn't skipped a beat in three years of operation. Even with a carburetor, it's really worth running.

UPDATE: Roadtrip Fail.

About 20 minutes into a roadtrip to Wisconsin, the car began overheating and running rough again. I cleaned the carb twice before conceding defeat and packing everything into the Toyota. I am currently working with a few local guys to root out the problem.