S15 Sold, Engine Delivered

Well after about five weeks and very few actual shoppers and plenty of time wasters I've finally sold my S15. And not a moment too soon, next week I need to make final payment on my clubman so everything is running smooth at the moment.

I also had the RX8 engine and parts delivered yesterday. This on the other hand was not the smoothest of deliveries. Firstly they tried to deliver it on Tuesday without calling me first so that I could arrange to be home to unpackage the 320kg box off the truck. So I arranged for redelivery the following day between 9-12am. It didn't arrive... So after about 5 phone calls to TNT the package arrived at 5:05pm. A wonderful day of daytime TV it was...

I've also been looking into how I am going to tackle the task of wiring everything up. I have the majority of the electrical components from the donor RX8 and I learned recently thanks to a blog named Madox.NET the some Mazda's (RX8 included) run a CAN network that allows all of the electronics in the car to talk to each other much like computers do on a normal network.

With some specialist devices such as OBDLink a normal computer can also talk on this network through the cars diagnostic port. This port will allow me to do two things, firstly I will be able to check error codes from the engine ECU which will help me to pass emissions and trouble shoot setup issues. Secondly I will be able to intercept signals that would normally go to the dash for things like engine revs, speed, trip computer etc

What I am proposing to do is instead of using a dash from a car or motor bike is to instead use an Asus EEE PC T91 tablet PC with the CAN hardware and some software I will develop myself to create my own dash. Because I will be getting data directly from the Mazda sensors, some of which isn't normally displayed to the driver I will be able to show all ADR required gauges and more. What's great about this is it will be far cheaper and easier than buying seperate gauges and having to install new sensors for them. Plus, if I can have a whole range of dash designs and flick through them with a touch of the screen and adding warning lights/buzzers will be a matter of a few lines of code rather than a heap of wiring/cutting etc...

Here is a sample screen shot of a RX8 style dash design written in .Net using Dundas Gauges, I also added a basic three stage shift light that lights up yellow, then organge then completely red when it's time to shift.

Price check on aisle RX8

I've just done some research on the RX8 motor for prices, weights etc...

Apparently a short motor (no bolt on's like A/C, Altenator and manifolds) weighs 107kg (as quoted by mazda), and the weight with bolt on's is about ~120kg according to the internet and the gearbox is 56kg (mazda). Add another 20kg just to be safe and this is still ~20kg less than a S2000 motor and gearbox.

I've been quoted $4,500 for an S2000 motor with ECU + loom, the gearbox would be roughly another $1,500 on top of that. Comparing these prices to the $4,400 I've been quoted for the RX8 motor incl gearbox, loom, ecu, drive shaft and engine test it looks like the RX8 motor is the clear winner here.

I still need to discuss this with my engineer but I am strongly leaning towards the RX8 motor at this stage.

Interesting, I might very soon be the owner of an RX8 power plant! Nice...