berck's Journal: She lives!

miss miata's all back together and running quite nicely. Still in need of a wheel allignment, so I haven't gone for an extensive drive yet, but all seems well.

I got it all together at about 1pm yesterday. Smiled, sighed, and turned the key. It turned over and over. No fire. Damn.

Then I saw that I'd failed to plug the wiring harness back up to the crank angle sensor, so the computer never got the signal to fire the plugs... Riiiight. Pluged it in, turned the key and it started right up.

And ran like shit. With an awful clicking noise. I rotated the CAS back and forth and it steadied out a bit, but still wasn't running very smooth. And when I disabled the timing advance to check the baseline timing & idle, it nearly died.

I couldn't figure it out, so without any other choices, I decided to take the timing belt off and redo it. When I got all the covers off, I carefully examined the timing belt, and it looked to be lined up perfectly. Regardless, I pulled it off, spun the cams & crank, and lined it back up while fitting the belt back on. Spun the crank with the belt on, everything seemed to still be lined up. Put it all back together and turned the key.

It ran just fine, only smoked all over the place because of all the gear oil I spilled on the exhaust.

As Kevin of the miata list said, "Sometimes the autommotive gods just want you to do it twice."

Today I successfully installed an S2000 starter button. So I guess my car has some Honda blood now. Man is it a sweet switch. I had to refrain from sitting in the garage and repeatedly starting my car, it's so much fun now.

awesome!

[noell]

yay! so cool that your car is working. and that you took it apart and put it back together again. wow. i have to ask though, sorry for my auto dumb factor, what is a starter button exactly?

Re:awesome!

[berck]

Heh. A button, which when pressed, starts the car...