DanM's Westfield Miata

[DanM]

This is my final "catch up" installment. 

 

Coil Pack

The coil pack and bracket were a greasy mess so took some extra elbow grease to clean it up and paint.

 

Once it was all done it looked quite tidy installed on the back of the head.

 

 

Intake Manifold

 

The last thing that I did was to assemble the intake manifold assembly and install it on the engine.  Thankfully most of the hoses were still supple and in good shape so I was able to reuse the ones that I needed.

 

Assembled on the bench.

 

 New gasket

 

 

 

Finished (For now). Once I receive the Air Valve seal I will install that on the manifold and that's all I want to do for now.    Just FYI, the tiny Air Valve seal was no longer available from the Mazda part department, so I sourced mine from Rock Auto in the US.   It cost me about USD$1.00 for the part and then about 20 times as much for shipping and tax! That's how out of proportion things can get for us here!

 

 

I took a lot of photos throughout my engine dismantle and reassembly so if anyone needs to reference something down the line do feel free to private message me and I'll see what I can dig out!

 

Now back to the build.....

[DanM]

Wishbone Assembly...take 2 🎬!

 

So if you cast you minds back to May...you know, the days before Westfield went into administration, you might remember that I had some issues with my upper wishbones. Well it turned out they had threaded them the opposite direction and so I couldn't install the tie rod ends.  Well thanks to some members and a bit of detective work I managed to find a LH threaded equivalent of the standard part and could finally restart assembling the knuckles.

 

 

Steering Rack

In the Westfield Miata brochure, it says that you need to use the steering rack from the Donor, so last summer I spent a day disassembling it and making it a manual rack.

 

 

 

 

As you can imagine I was pretty surprised when I saw a brand new one in the kit!

 

To be honest fitting the new rack was not as straight forward as I thought and took a bit of fettling and taking some material from the red spacers with the belt sander so it would fit.  Once in position on the chassis I then needed to clamp it down so I could get enough of the bolts through to install a washer and get the nut to bite. 

 

I followed the manuals instructions to tighten but not torque, but it took a couple of tries to get a nut to hold without it deciding to shoot off elsewhere in the garage! 💨

 

With the rack in place, next on the list are the mazda thread adaptors and tie rod ends. My donor tie rod ends were shot, so I bought some new ones from Rock Auto.

 

The manual says to cut 25mm off the inner tie rods to fit the thread adaptor. However, after consulting the WSCC UK forum, I opted to assemble all the parts first to see how much I actually had to play with. Turns out I have plenty, so I will take it slow and carefully trim them down in two or three step.

 

[DanM]

Front shocks

 

After reading other build threads I knew that installing the front shocks was not covered in the manual.  I assumed that the front install would be similar to the rear shocks so I found the boxes on my shelf and went for it.  

 

The box labelling had me doubting myself at first, "Front Bike Rear!?".  What did that mean?  Was it front? was it Rear? Was it for a bike? I did some searching and found out that they were Gaz shocks supplied to Westfield, and the part numbers matched.  I made the assumption that since it had the word "Front" on it and the other box didn't, that's where they went.

 

I applied a little anti-seize on the threads to help with adjustment down the road and installed the coils.

 

After opening the brackets a little I installed them with the same 7/16 bolt and 4 washer sandwich as the rear. The only difference was that I decided to use a shorter 2.5" bolt.

 

Finally I added my refurbed and painted rotors that I salvaged from the donor.

 

[fastg]

I am amazed at your diligence with this build, it would put most pro shops to shame. I am not sure exposed anti-seize on the shock bodies it a good idea. It will attract dust, dirt and grit and turn into grinding paste.  It will probably make the shocks tougher to adjust in the long run. 

 

Keep up the good work

 

Graham 

[DanM]

@fastg Thanks for the Tip Graham. Do you know what people are typically doing instead?

[fastg]

I am going to adjust my coilovers this weekend and they are not been adjusted in years, so we will see what happens. But I will start with brake clean to clean out the threads before I try and move anything. I will let you know what happens. 

 

Graham 

[Austin David]

Mine always pick up sand.  I agree that keeping them dry is the way to go.  When they get adjusted it's a shot of silicone lubricant, then wipe em down when you're done so they don't pick up any more than necessary.

 

It sort of helps...

[DanM]

With a bit more time to spare before I had to go out, I decided to check the headlight bracket position.  positioning a straight edge between the brackets I used a standard ruler to check that they were equidistant from the the frame.

 

 

[Dave W]

Just tape around the lower shock adjusting threaded section to prevent nicks and picking up road dirt. Use your anti-seize on the countersunk screws on the disc.

[DanM]

Trimming the inner tie rods

 

Knowing that I had some length to play with I started trimming the inner tie rod on the steering rack.  Luckily enough, my painters tape was about 25mm wide so I taped up the ends as a guide, put my safety glasses on and used my dremel with a cutting blade to slice through it.

 

 

Although the dremel worked, it did take some time to cut through the hardened material and I thought the thin blade was going to shatter. for the rest of the cutting I used my angle grinder.

 

Finally, I got to a length that I was happy with for now.  I have left a little to play with and my need to take off a bit more later so that the outer tie rod can adjust in and out.

 

[MV8]

Having the nut on before cutting is handy for clearing the burr at the cut, after you've squared up and radiused the end slightly with light application of the side of the grinder blade to take the corner off.

[fastg]

Reporting back: I adjusted my coilovers this morning,  I don't think I had ever adjusted the rears, so that would be 10+ years. I hit them with brake clean, with the tube making sure I got under the spring.  There is a set screw in the collar, backed that out and the collars moved no trouble at all.  Gently retightened the set screw.

 

Graham

[DanM]

16 hours ago, fastg said:

Reporting back: I adjusted my coilovers this morning,

Thanks for the update Graham! Appreciated.

[DanM]

Differential mount bushings

 

Another one of my other issues back in May was that the factory had installed my differential mounting bushings on the wrong side of the chassis.  After a call out on the UK forum a member kindly sent me some spares that he had, and after they were reamed out to M12 by a friend of mine at his shop they were finally ready to be installed. 

 

I wasn't sure of the best way to go about pressing them in because of the limited access, so I made myself a simple compression jig out of some M12 bolts and a selection of washers.  The biggest washer was sized so that it fit around the outside of the center hole and the others gradually reduced in size to M12.  I also had 2 lengths of bolt which I swapped half way through to get the bush was seated where it needed to be.

 

After soaking the inside of the chassis hole with dish soap I assembled the jig and went to work with a spanner and socket wrench.

 

After about 15 mins I had both of them in place! Very happy with the result which finally opens me up to making more progress at the back!

 

[DanM]

Painting the Valve Cover 

 

So, I'm following Stu Falkner's Turbo thread which gave me an idea to paint my valve cover.  With a bit of Iron paint left over from painting my block I decided I'd spend the morning giving it a few coats to see what it would look like.

 

As always I started with a good prep. sanding and cleaning.

 

Then, I blocked off the Mazda 16 Valve writing with some Vaseline so that it wasn't covered up with paint.  

 

Prior to laying down my first coat of primer, I wiped off the Vaseline residue from the main surface with some brake clean and shop towel.

 

After 3 coats of primer and 3 coats of Dupli-Color engine enamel, it looked like this.

 

Next thing was to see see if the Vaseline trick had worked. I scraped it out with a Q-Tip.

 

 

It's not show quality, but looks good at 5 feet away!  Good enough for me! 🤪

[DanM]

The last couple of days have been a real mixed back. I feel like I accomplished a lot in a short period of time, but amongst all that progress I had a few set backs, made a few mistakes and lost my patience a few times.  After this I think I need a break from the build for a short while...

 

Differential Install

 

With my new differential bushings pressed in I moved on to installing the diff. First things first, trim off the metalastic buffer tabs. My buffers were in terrible condition when I pulled them off the car and after cleaning them up they had each separated in to three parts. I put the three part sandwich together and draw a line around the rubber parts to use as a stencil for cutting.  Then I clamped the metal part to my work bench and used my dremel cut off wheel to remove the tabs.

 

 

Finally I ran the part through the belt sander to smooth the edges.

 

Next I put a load of cardboard strips around the chassis to protect it from bumps and scratches when I first put the diff in.

 

 

Unfortunately, there was no-one around when I wanted to lift the diff in so I put on my big boy pants and went for it.  I'd like to say that I lowered it in, in a controlled methodical fashion, but that wasn't to be.  I think I basically threw it in there on to the cardboard and then figured it out from there... Not particularly elegant I'm afraid.

 

After getting it in position I seemed to enter missing hardware hell.  Every time I wanted to move forward with the install the advertised bolt was missing.  First the repair washers for the diff mount, then the M12 120mm bolts for the diff hanger and went from there.  Total waste of an afternoon making trip after trip to the store. 

 

Once I had what I needed I pulled out my pry bar and went to work lining everything up and securing the parts.

 

With my buffer in three parts the bottom part had nothing to secure it in place.  Any ideas if I actually need it? If so I'll somehow glue it together.

 

Edit: Thanks @MV8 for pointing out that the bush is upside down.  It should look like this.

 

Edited August 7, 2022 by DanM

[DanM]

CV axle refurb

 

Before installing the uprights I need to refurbish the CV axles.  I had bought new boots from Rockauto and disassembled the axles to clean and re-grease.

 

I don't have many photos to share because once the grease was out there was no way I could touch anything other than the parts.  That stuff managed to get every where...another T-shirt in the trash

 

Grease went in next.  I packed it in there a little at a time in stages, moving the piece and letting the grease get sucked in.  Then I moved the boot in position and clamped it down.

 

The finished product.

[DanM]

Upright Install

 

The final part to bring you up to date, was installing the CV axles and assembling the rear end suspension and uprights.

 

 

One side complete, I'll have a go at the other side tomorrow.

[MV8]

The diff mount lower cup washer is upside down. Yes, you need the toothed lower mount insert to work with the oem upper in properly isolating and locating the diff without binding. No need to glue the lower back together.  If it were still bonded together, the tabs would keep it from rotating during tightening. You can hold the lower and torque the upper end of the fastener if that is a problem, but I don't think it will be.

[Croc]

I quite like how Westfield did the design for the rear end.  I have never seen it pictured that way before during assembly.  Quite a few compromises to make the Miata pieces fit and not the greatest of packaging but they get kudos given the mission was to reuse as many Miata parts as possible which is a brilliant concept for a seven kit.  

 

Keep up the great work.  Its ok to walk away from the project and take a break.  There have been times when I could have happily set one of my cars on fire with my frustrations.