I came down every weekend to see her and even took a Monday off and scheduled business trips so I could spend more time with her.  I knew things were a little rough in her life.  She worked a job that she wasn’t thrilled with but found a good friend in her boss and she had a roommate that liked space and could at times seem a bit overbearing.  But I didn’t mind, I even enjoyed being able to be there for her to open up to about her days.  When I felt like she was going to have a rough day I would try to find something to cheer her up a bit because I didn’t like it when she was sad.  One night I even planned out a relaxing time at a hookah lounge because earlier in that day she had some crazy drama come up and I just wanted her to be able to relax.  It was an incredible night and I couldn’t have been happier with the smile that worked it’s way onto her face.  And through all of this she warned me, “your going to fall in love with me,” she’d say and deep down I felt that she was right.

As time past I felt a bond grow between us and I became very comfortable with her.  I felt like I could tell her anything and I liked to believe she felt the same way.  She would tell me about the drama with her friends and the craziness with work.  She would go on about how she’d love to get out of the city and I’d tell her how I just wanted to run off with her back to NH.  I felt like she liked the idea and I had hoped to get to bring her up here soon.

But then the unthinkable happened, she asked if I’d mind if we could be friends because she didn’t think she could handle being in a relationship with everything going on in her personal life.  She told me that she just wants to get things in hand.  I do believe her and want to keep hope alive that things will work out in the end but I still can’t hide the bit of hurt because I think I fell in love with her.  I think I fell in love with the cute little nerdy girl with beautiful hazel eyes that are so nicely framed by her glasses.  Her beautiful smile and blushing cheeks that still pop into my head at the slightest thought of her.  I really hope this isn’t the end, but I can’t help but fear the worst.

I don’t think I can write anymore right now, but I will end with saying no matter what the outcome, this past month has been one of the most amazing months I’ve had and all I can do is hope now.  Hope for the best for her and hope that she feels the same way and that we may have another go…

So Tuesday morning comes along and what a morning it would turn out to be!  I woke up a little late (missed my own bed just a lil bit) then had a few car issues before realizing I was going to have to drive through Boston area morning traffic to get to the train station to catch the train to NYC.  I know I was running late, and had just planned on rescheduling my train tickets but in the little extra time it took me to get there both my train tickets were refunded and the prices had gone up.  Not only that but I would have had to wait another 40mins for the train then ride 3:20 into NYC.  At this point I just decided to drive straight to the office and lab for my meeting.  SO my 10am meeting turns into a 2pm meeting, but it went amazingly well (the first sigh that the day may not be all that bad).  Then after meeting with several others at Thomson Reuters and talking over the VDI project I’m architecting for them I got to grab my car and head to the Jane Hotel.

Now I chose the Jane Hotel for it’s unique look, interesting spotting history and cool location right on the Hudson.  They also may have the least expensive rooms in Manhattan.  With that in mind I should have known they wouldn’t have valet parking but that didn’t bother me so much anyway.  So I get the car tucked away and head over to check in (luckily their are plenty of garages right in the area).  As I walk up to the counter, I don’t initially catch how cute the girl behind it is.  That is until she looks up at me and asks my name and all.  A short conversation later and me not even making it to the elevator before forgetting my room number, I headed up to my room with her on my mind.  Not fully sure what to make of it I decided to go out grab food and go for a walk before returning to the hotel.

While on the walk I explored some of the old Meat Packing district including the High Rail.  It’s really quite a nice area with a nice mix of old and new.  What I really liked was how they took the old High Rail train line that ran through the meat packing factories and turned it into a raised park.  When walking through the park if you look carefully you’ll even see some sections of the old rails still in place.  As it got dark I decided I’d head back to the Jane since I was a little on the tired side from all the running around and lack of good sleep.  So as I walk back to the Jane I thought about how to best engage the nice girl at the counter in a conversation.

As I walked back I could feel the nervousness in me.  I went over a few things in my head and prepared to walk up and just say ‘Hey’.  When I got back to the Jane it wasn’t busy and she was just standing there behind the counter looking a bit bored.  Soon as I walked up, I felt the nervousness just go away and from the look in her eyes from behind her cute glasses I felt confident that she wouldn’t just blow me off.  We ended up talking for several hours during which she talked about not knowing what she wanted to do after she got out of work so I said if she isn’t feeling too tired we could go out and grab drinks.  That night turned out to be absolutely amazing!  We went to this little bar called the Art Bar just a few blocks east of the Jane and just had a blast.  In fact, we were out till almost 5am without realizing it.  The following evenings and nights I hung out with her just having a blast.  Then on Thursday night I took her up the Empire State Building since she had never been and I could just feel the connection.  Sadly Friday I did have to head home, tho I did so a bit later then I would normally have just to spend a little more time with her.

Since that week I’ve gone down to see her on the weekends and am planning on dragging her up here since I think she’ll just love the area around NH.  The most interesting part is, had things not gone a little wacky on that Tuesday morning I may have never met her.  It is one of those things that just feels like fate intervened to bring us together and I couldn’t be more pleased.

I started with reviewing my options for a replacement engine, many I had to discard due to turn around time, since the 8 is my primary mode of transportation.  Luckily my best friend and his wife offered me rides to and from work for the duration of the swap process so that I wouldn’t have to have a rental for weeks on end.  I decided to go with a rebuilt engine from Atkins Rotary since I’ve worked with them before for seal kits on engines I rebuilt with my dad and know that they have a good history of building and modifying Mazda rotary engines.  With the engine on order I got the car cleaned up and setup on jack stands in the garage.  The initial tear down wasn’t bad and with the help of a few friends had the engine just resting in the engine bay, waiting for the shipping confirmation before complete removal since I only have a single bay garage.

In the time that would pass while I waited on the engine to ship out of Washington I took it as a great opportunity to do some clean up and maintenance on her.  I started with a couple nice orders from Mazdatrix and Racing Beat.  Soon I had a stack of boxes waiting at my door consisting of a radiator, break lines, gauge pod, cleared corners, sensors, spark plugs, and the list goes on.  Then it was time for the trip to my local Robbins Auto Parts for other small parts and painting supplies including a custom can of 22V, Mazda Sunlight Silver.  In the following weeks I spend my free time cleaning up the engine bay, sanding and painting my rocker panels, cleaning up the wheel wells and under carriage and just overall making sure that she was in as good of physical shape as I could, since she did have 153k miles on the ticker.  Toward the end of May I was informed by Atkins that the last shipment of parts had arrived from Mazda and a couple days later I had a shipping confirmation and it was time to get the old engine out and make sure everything was ready.  The engine arrived at the warehouse only 4 days after it was picked up from Atkins and that night I had it home, TGIF!  The weekend that followed was both exciting and frustrating as I switched into reverse and began to reconstruct the car.  Though I was optimistic, reconstruction took a little longer than expected but I kept telling myself there was no need to rush.

By the end of the following week I was ready, and with that Friday off from work I finalized everything, completed a “pre-flight” checklist, sat down behind the wheel.  Feeling like my heart was going to explode, the lights of the dash shining in my face and the short labored buzz of the Walbro signifying that I was up to pressure and ready, I took a deep breath and turned the key…  It took a moment, which didn’t help the anxiety of the moment at all, then with a cough and rumble she came to life!!  The smile on my face must have looked like a small child on Christmas day, she runs!!  As I sat there, working the throttle a bit to keep the revs around 2000rpms as smoke plumed from the tail pipes as the assembly grease burnt off, I couldn’t have been happier.

It took a while for her to run right, and initially I was plagued with hard starts and a cloud of blue smoke on startup.  I also experienced some odd running behavior and a lack of throttle response.  This concerned me but I felt that with how smooth the engine ran overall it must be something else.  I soon found my primary injectors had their nozzles gunked up with only small spots shining through, so those became my first part to replace.  In the following week I would replace the MAF sensor, the O2 sensor and eventually the throttle body (which had a nice rattle coming from under the plastic cover).  With all of that, she finally felt right but I still had a odd idle at times and a hard start with the nice cloud of oil smoke, reminiscent of the old carbureted rotaries of the 70′s and early 80′s.

At this point I decided to test the vacuum in the upper intake manifold.  Mazda spec for manifold vacuum at idle is -19.6inHg to -16.6inHg, when I measured with an analog vacuum gauge I showed 21.2inHg.  This was a pleasant surprise, much more vacuum then Mazda factory spec and began to explain my odd idle issue among other things.  I decided at this juncture that I would start the process of re-tuning the car.  I began with generating huge amounts of log data from start-ups, to idling to varied throttle runs in different gears.  While pouring over all the data, I noticed that my OMP settings were quite high at startup and idle and so I readjusted based on some forum reading and examination of the OMP map.  This smoothed my idle, eased my starts and put me down the path of creating a complete custom tune.

It’s now been about 5000 miles, the tune is coming nice and the car is running rather well.  In fact a new project has cropped up that I’ll be blog about more later.  Stay tuned…..

With that said, removing the nice plastic retaining ring that holds the pump in the car was a huge pain in the rear.  I don’t know who was the genius that thought such high torque is really needed but seriously I want to jab you in the stomach for your effort.  First off, the universal tool, which did fit across the pump, would bend as I tried to apply the appropriate amount of torque to break it free.  This lead me to a more barbaric but effective way of removing it, a hammer and a large flat-head screwdriver.  This process still took hours, probably about 3 in all to get it loose and off, tho the time was not spent consecutively but rather with breaks in between.  During one such break I decided to swing by my local Mazda dealer to check the availability for a replacement ring should I choose to just break it off.  Well I came to find out, not only did they not have any, but for me to order one they told me flat out I’d be charged the price plus several other fees to get the retaining ring to me within a week or two.  I then asked about speaking to a tech that has a Mazda tool for removing it, and it turned out that the dealership only had one such tool and the tech wasn’t there.  So once more the dealership I used to enjoy working with has shown me just how far they have fallen.

In the end I got it all apart, slightly modified the assembly, put the new Walbro pump in with new o-rings so everything fit and sealed nicely.  I was a little thrown off with how the pump just sits in the tank with the wires and such submerged in either fuel vapor or fuel itself, which did make me feel a little on the uneasy side as I preformed the initial startup with the new pump but since I’m writing this obviously that went well.  Since the replacing the pump the car starts smoother and runs much better then it has in a while.  The power is now much more consistent through the RPM and I don’t experience any issues on hot days or during extended periods of running.  Feels nice to finally have the car back running like it should, now I get to just enjoy the summer with nothing but normal maintenance.

I’d taken the class back in the fall, procrastinated, got distracted with other projects and just kept putting off taking the part 2 exam.  The first exam took me a couple tried because I wasn’t use to this style of an exam, one that can’t be fully prepared for by going through course books.  This time around I used the same study technique I used for the time I passed the part 1 exam and crammed for a little more then a week leading up to the exam date, April 22nd.  This was also the first exam I didn’t have a free exam voucher for so I had to pay the full $300 for the exam, granted as far as tech exams go that’s not too expensive but I still had my worries about it and having to take it a second time.  But… the new study techniques I learned and that cram time I had worked perfectly as I passed the part 2 exam on my first try and now I am officially an Oracle/Sun Certified Solaris Administrator.

Next up I will be looking at a few CompTIA exams, namely Network+, Security+ and Linux+ as well as the Oracle/Sun Certified Network Administrator.  I may pursue the Oracle/Sun Security certification as well but that is undetermined.  I do know that I’ll be starting down the IBM AIX certifications on Power hardware which may also include specific Power Series certifications as well.  In the immediate future I’m looking at getting into a VMware VCP 4 class to get finish off my basic set of VMware certifications.  From there I don’t know what I’ll be pursuing next but at least I have a road map for future training in place.

Now when I went to put them on the car I decided, since I’ve got everything to get the swaybars on now I’d go ahead and hook them up too and that is where the fun began.  Due to the size of the new front swaybar I need to drill out the wholes in the swaybar and on the control arms to fit the reinforced endlinks, which thankfully Racing Beat includes a drill bit with the endlinks to achieve just this task.   This sounds simple enough right?  Well so it seemed right up till the drill bit stuck into the swaybar and the trigger on the drill stuck on and I thought the damn thing was going to kill me.  Luckily it decided it’s own cord tasted better then my flesh.  In the end I had to repair three (3) breaks in the cord but I got it all done and in and after a nice test drive it proved to be well worth the effort.

So far everything feels amazing, and I do apologize that I only have a shot of the car with wheels, no install shots from the sway bar (but really it’s just a sway bar).

Then we have a few smaller projects that focus on the OS itself being a type of server-client system like MINIX and HURD.  Here we see a truly different model for how an OS should run, the idea that a kernel should be nothing more then what is absolutely needed to boot a machine, everything else is a separate module/API/daemon that then runs outside the kernel.  With this model you never have to worry about a reboot unless it was a kernel change, everything else could be restarted without down time. But the complexity goes up and that’s what many don’t like. It also requires more of a team effort amongst developers at least from my point of view because each part of the OS becomes it’s own entity. This can both help and hinder security since there is more talk going on between the parts of the OS leaving space for injection of malicious code. A well implemented OS of this type would fly, absolutely fly on modern hardware due to how it would be stored in memory, but that also means a very intelligent and streamlined memory manager would be needed in the base kernel. Imagine only needing a kernel footprint in memory of like 5MB or so everything else is a module of the OS and can be swapped out as needed to keep physical memory available for applications. In many servers this may be a moot point because often they only have a few simple tasks but in a desktop this would be a head turner. I mean you could have Netbooks with a gig of ram that would fly simply because memory would always be available for a running app and not filled with the monolithic OS kernel. I could also see this fitting well with modern virtualized deployments since it would allow a greater density due to better resource allocation. Hell this kinda modularized OS would be a perfect fit for a hypervizor since it could bring the footprint down to near nothing and lower the over head for running guests.

Hmmm, good food for thought here and maybe I’m a little off in my view of this but it does seem like the way things should be moving.

The combined performance of the intake and the exhaust has changed my air flow through the engine from 25lbs/min to 30lbs/min as measured by the MAF (mass airflow sensor).  Small gains can be felt below 4000RPMs, with a nice pull as low as 1800RPMs.  The biggest change is above 4500RPMs, as the car pulls much stronger then it did prior and continues to pull for an additional 200-300RPMs over stock, bringing the usable power band up to 8700-8800RPMs.

Anyway, I’ll finish the post off with some pictures I took of the exhaust, both under the car while they were just finishing up and after I picked the girl up.

First I will say for me the improvement was more then immediately noticeable since my old Mazda coils were in the icy grip of death lol. It was a wonderful feeling have the car fire right up with out a single miss-fire. On top of that, I was able to notice an immediate jump in my gas millage. On fresh OEM coils and plugs I could get about 20.5mpg. As those coils were dying it dropped as low as 14-15mpg. Now with the coils on (and before I could swap out my plugs with almost 30k on them with the fresh spare set I keep in the garage) I was able to once more see 20mpg. On top of that, yesterday I went out with some buddies on a drive up through the White Mountains here in NH. Through out the trip the throttle response was absolutely wonderful and she felt good all the way through the RPM range (mind you I have 149k miles on the engine). We headed out from Littleton, freshly fueled up at around 1pm and drove the mountain roads aggressively till about 5:15pm, during this time I barely burned through a 1/3rd of a tank. I’m changing the spark plugs today, so will see how a fresh set of plugs feels in the car but it’s hard to imagine it could get even better.

All things said, the guys at BHR seem to be on top of their game and I’m curious to see what else they put together to offer the community. Kinda wish they were around for the RX-7 community haha, would like to see what they could do for my old 83 :p

Next up for my baby is a full custom exhaust and some retuning, which may include some more indepth tweaks (almost forgot how much I hated my Assembly classes in college) but more on that later.

Oh, and for those interested about the history of the car, here is a little brief.

Acutally use the same process for the 8 that I use with my 7 that has 232k on the original engine, figured it worked well for the lil 12A in my 7. I use 5w-30 in the winter, 10w-30 in the summer and check my oil regularly and I only run Castrol GTX. I have also been running Slick 50 in the engine for a long time, I add 1 bottle every 50k miles or so. For warm up, I give the car about 90s to get oil up to pressure and flowing, then keep the RPM’s low (below 3k normally) till temps are above ~110*F, then below 4.5k till completely warm. For the first 125k miles I ran 89 octane fuel, when the coils began acting up I switched to 91. When the car had 55k on the motor (running 89 octane) I was at a show and got a free dyno run (friends parents were there with their dyno-pack dynometer) and she showed a solid 184hp uncorrected on the dyno. I installed the AEM intake around 144k, before that I was running a K&N drop in.

The only issue I’ve run into was my SSV valve had stuck closed for a time. I corrected this by removing the UIM and using a long screwdriver, hammer and B-12 Chemtool. The valve freed and the engine blew a little smoke but that was about 30k miles ago and I’ve yet to have it even feel hesitant since. I also suffered a failure of the Secondary Air system, which I have left removed with the vacuum line plugged (borrowed a friends airpump to pass inspection), along those lines for more then 30k miles I haven’t run a CAT on the car and it hasn’t thrown a code.

I am currently running the N3Z2EU00013H60 calibration on the ECU, only issue that has been noticed is a rich mixture between shifts (11.2afr) resulting in little backfires or puffs of black smoke. Timing is -5 to 44 depending on load and throttle position. My idle sits right at 800rpms on average with a near stoich AFR.

I really haven’t had to do anything special to keep her running nice, I don’t launch at stop lights and tho I do at times redline her about once a week, normally I see no reason to go above 8k RPMs, just no power up there, esp in the higher gears. I also keep the RPMs about 2.5k while driving.

There, I think I covered all the bases.