I just finished Winter session at school. Condensing a normal 4-month quarter into 2 and a half weeks meant long hours in class… especially so because I petitioned to take an extra, second class.
Well, with that over now, I had a whole 3 days off before work and Spring quarter starts again. To catch up, I did plug away at a few things whenever I had a spare minute or two.
I finished up the Apex’i PowerFC inside the cabin.
I have the Commander unit mounted to a windshield holder, because that was all I could figure out. A “perfect” mounting solution does not exist, the other alternatives are equally as bad or worse, so this will do for now.
With the A/C’s evaporator removed from under the dash, the non-A/C duct arrived from Mazda to fill the gap. Installing the duct was painful, I was nearly in tears by the end of it. The duct was fairly rigid and the openings needed to be pushed on precisely. It didn’t help that its placement was in the upper cavities of the dash. I’m glad that’s over with. The end result does at least free up space significantly.
Moving back to the engine bay, I cleaned up the LIM, stuck on some heat tape for good measure, and reinstalled it with a fresh OEM gasket. This should have been as easy as it sounds, if it weren’t for the old paper gasket that was glued to the irons. It appears that Mazda used this green, paper-type gasket early on. The new gasket I bought from Ray @ Malloy Mazda is black and made from better materials.
I was forced to slowly razor blade off the old gasket. I spread this task over a few days. It was scrape, soak with Permatex Gasket-Remover, scrape some more, and repeat. At the end, I was able to clean everything off with a brass wire wheel.
I also applied gold heat tape to the chassis. I might add more later, but I’m running low on the tape – and that stuff is NOT cheap.
