The Slow Lane

A popular thing to do for STS2 Miatas is convert them to “Base Models” that did not have power steering or radios or power windows. This is done to make the car lighter. And the absence of a power steering pump frees up a horsepower or two. I have been debating whether or not to do this “conversion” on my car. The only downside to converting to a manual steering gear is that they have a higher ratio. That means you have to turn the steering wheel more to make the wheels turn a given amount. Not good when you are trying to hustle the car through a tight slalom. But auto racing is all about compromises.

I had been hearing from the top runners in other parts of the country that the steering ratio wasn’t that bad. But I heard over the winter from another competitor local who had driven a CSP Miata with manual steering that the steering “was a lot to deal with.” He had bought a Miata and was going to move into the STS2 class as well and suggested not doing the conversion. Since I really didn’t want to spend the money I thought that was reason enough to change my mind. He ended up changing his mind and and doing the swap. He did it a few days before our annual banquet and I ran into him there and he starts telling me how the steering is easy to move and the ratio really isn’t that bad. After ribbing him because he had me convinced not to do it it comes out that the CSP car had a power steering rack with the power steering pump removed. And the “lot to deal with” was the amount of effort it took to turn the wheels because you were fighting the friction of the seals and still pumping air & fluid from one side of the rack to the other. Grrrrr.

Now I was back to my original question, to spend the money or not. I decided it was worth it because while I don’t have the resources right now for an all out effort I shouldn’t leave something such as this on the table. Getting this done, with the other stuff should bring me up to about 90% of “full prep.” Most of the rest of what I can do involves trial & error testing of different spring/swaybars and shock/alignment/tire pressure settings. That is when it starts to get real involved time & money wise. That’s just not possible right now and I’m OK with that. I can still win locally and may still be able to grab a low trophy spot at the national events if somebody has an off day & I’m on.

My car started life as an “A package.” That means it came with power steering and leather wrapped steering wheel & shift knob. Technically I have to remove my leather wrapped steering wheel & swap it for a base one. Uuummm, NO. I’m usually all for following the rules but there is no advantage to the leather steering wheel so go ahead and protest me. Now the challenge is to find a manual rack. I was hoping my dad could hook me up since he works at an autoparts wholesaler. Having worked in that industry when I was younger I knew that you could by re-manufactured steering racks, even manual ones. It’s just a matter of if someone made them for this particular application. Apparently one company does, but they have none in stock and no idea of when they may make some more. Booo. So my choices are to find one at a scrap yard or recycler, find one used through a private party, or buy from Mazda which ain’t cheap even with my motorsports discount. So on the hunt I go. Kinda related to the manual steering conversion is the front crank pulley which will be the subject of my next post.

I should have written this post back in January when it really was the off season since there has been a few test & tunes already. None that I’ve been able to go to though. Typically the winter is spent planning what you are going to do to the car, or I should say planning what you are going to spend on the car. Since I sunk a lot of money into getting the Miata to it’s current level of prep last year and I’m saving for a wedding and honeymoon I’m on a limited budget for this year. Fortunately there is not a whole lot of stuff left to do to the car. Since the season is right around the corner I started ordering parts last week.

Some small stuff I had to take car of is replacing stuff that is broken on the car. That meant ordering a new gauge hood from Mazda Motorsports. While there I picked up some new spark plug wires to hopefully address the occasional rough idle I get. I also ordered some NB style upper shocks mounts from Fat Cat Motorsports. There is a lot of conjecture about if these mounts are better or needed. But I purchased them to solve a very specific problem. I wrote before about how the perches on my coilovers are dangerously close to the axles, especially on the left side where the axle has rubbed against the perch. These FCM mounts are 1/2″ shorter than the stock mounts. Normally they lower the car by 1/2″. But since I have coilovers I can raise the car back up to where it should be, and this will move the perches away from the axles.

The only other thing I’m going to do is convert the car to manual steering. The manual rack could turn out to be hard to find and not exactly cheap. I’m still looking around for this item and something that goes with it, a lightened crank pulley. More about that stuff in my next post.

I had to write a custom function in Excel for work. So I had to use Visual Basic for Applications. Using that language feels like the going back to the stone age after getting pretty familiar with PHP. I kept thinking “I could do this in five minutes in PHP.” You have to worry about type casting, or rather type conversion, constantly. I had CStr and CDbl everywhere. And you can’t easily do a dictionary array. And it was the lack of sensible type conversion that did me in. My function kept complaining about incorrect types. I ended up finally finding code for what I needed to do online. I didn’t see any obvious differences that would have caused the error. So be glad for PHP being as good as it is.

Last weekend I rolled out an upgrade to phpBB3 for my local SCCA region’s discussion forum. That includes a theme customized to match our region color of yellow. I have added on several extra features to extend the functionality of the software. One of which is a Topic Preview that show you an excerpt of the first post when you hover over the link to said post. I am now actually the developer/maintainer of that MOD. I could and should write a few blog posts dedicated to that subject. I place of blog posts you can read about it in my discussion forum.

The conversion went well. We convinced our host to move us to a server with PHP 5 and MySQL 5 prior to the conversion. The old version of MySQL that was used didn’t have UTF-8 support and the developers had to do a bunch of kludging to get UTF-8 support. Although we really don’t need the UTF-8 stuff that is the way the software is written so everything should be on the same page. And unless you’ve been living in a cave PHP 4 will be de-supported in August. So I wanted to start this version of the forum off right instead of having to convert a kludged database. That meant creating a new database. I wasn’t sure if I could do that though. I was under the impression I had to do the upgrade in the old database. The documentation or info in the support forums didn’t help me find the answer I was looking for.

Well after starting the install based on doing it in the old database I figured out that you could make a new DB and still transfer everything over. So I killed what I was doing and started over with a fresh MySQL 5.0 DB using MySQLi drivers. The overall reaction has been positive. There was of course some growing pains just because it was new. I found a problem with my Topic Preview MOD in that it has a flicker in IE (I knew about that) but also in IE sometimes the preview box covers the topic link so you can’t click on it. That I didn’t know about, but I realized I should be doing more cross browsing testing. I have done a lot of searching for a solution to this problem but can’t find anyone with the exact same issue. I finally recently found someone with a similar situation who figured out the issue happens when text has to be wrapped in the preview box. I consider this a bug in IE because Firefox handles it just fine.

I also found an issue with posted images. There is a section of the Admin interface that allows you to set a max width for images. I thought that the board would use CSS to resize images to a the max size. But what it does is check the dimensions of the image and prevents you from posting if they are larger that the max. That is inconvenient at the least and with so many computer illiterate people on our forums unacceptable. I pretty much have a solution mapped out that involves assigning a class to all images in posts. But after modifying the phpbb template file that deals with bbcode the changes aren’t showing up. And phpBB.com hasn’t been any help so far. I’ll be posting up in my discussion forum once I gt it figured out.