Forgive me if I missed it from earlier in this thread, but is that piston from the cylinder that blew? Seems like theres not as much carnage as some others....

This was #4, on the other end of the motor.

Another question - how are the ring grooves for the 1st and 2nd compression rings? Rings move freely? Any buildup in there?

unless there are multiple failed engines in one place that have been examined at the same time with the results and findings of those failures showing a definitive pattern. this is all just speculation like everyother thread. but feel free to keep getting upset at eachother, me too.

mazda obviously decided to spend billions and billions designing a engine they know sucks, but at least they engineered it perfectly to throw rods everytime something goes wrong. haha

LOL at that, if it were that easy umm everyone would be doing it ?

a PI head will require machining to the oil passages in the block. I've looked into it.

Also requires a standalone.

Running a PI head is more expensive and more work than doing a built bottom end. Fuck PI.

everyone keeps asking WTF is with part throttle

IM not a genius or a person spending hours researching OUTSIDE of whats already posted here But Any idiot who logs and looks at thier logs can see the BIGGEST difference of part throttle is the a/f Ratio ... As displayed in this picture, at part throttle im at like 14.5 a/f r, when i step on it to go WOT it Spikes to 16, How is that a stupidly BLATENT difference between Part throttle and Full, You not full boost but u are in fact boosting when you step on it, realistically u want afr at 11-11.5 during boost period, for a safe level. Someone please explain how this is not Obvious as shit, the transition between not being WOT and going into WOT, sure it settles later, but what about that spike ?

AND how come noone has brought up the issue that if fuel is going down the wall and is leaving marks on the side of piston PAST rings, umm our fucking oil has umm fuel in it, and thats the reason lex is suggesting more frequent oil changes, or is there a different reason hes suggesting this ?

I shall now ask, if anyone would know exactly how our poor cooling with fuel is reflected by EGT or is it at all reflected by that, I dont think theres a way to determine how well the piston is getting cooled without tearing into the block. the EGT will only tell us how good of a burn the car is getting, rich or lean, but will not directly represent how each part in engine is being treated. VERY interesting find Lex.

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/8641/log3copy.jpg

mazda put out a service bulliten for the rx-8 and also the Mazdapseed 3 to NOT use ANY form of synthetic Oil NOR any synthetic blends what so ever, they put conventional oil in these cars. The tech even showed it to me on paper, the synthetic is supposedly bad for the bearing in turbo and causes them to spin, and damages the seals.

!!! I AM NOT SAYING ITS NOT GOOD TO USE IT, I AM QUOTING MAZDA !!!

I went to pay them to change my oil, i provided 6 quarts of Amsoil 5-40w the BEST full synthetic there is, they refused to use it, I was advised they only use conventional now.

Do not ask me why, i did not fucking say it !

That my friend is a SAFETY issue, Fuel is involved as a whole, raw gas exposed is a REAL safety concern over us losing an engine block.

Why would u assume it seized at the bottom of Cyl. Did I miss where Lex said he found piston at bottom of Cyl ? It coulda Seized TDC

I feel the easiest safety Measures for any one of our cars is Meth or water injection, LEX SAID:

The True Cause is Over heating piston, warping parts, un even fuel distro. spraying meth into IM is the same as relocating injectors to port injection, instead we will have both stock injection and Ports will flow with nice sexy cooling water/meth, before we even go too far about rebuilding and making engines forged, Who has blown with Meth ? Who has blown with a Richer Setup ? if we richen cars, its going to cool more, still unevenly BUT STILL BETTER. how many of these engines were tuned to a higher AFR ?

And for the record there IS a blown Engine Listed on our site here COMPLETELY STOCK, and leaning the Car causes MORE heat which is the Cause of our Fail, so um Leaning car umm bad idea ?

In the short amount of time the seafoam is in there, it wont even touch the carbon buildup on rings at all, like seriously wont even touch the cake behind rings that built over time.

Gtfo with your making more power, were trying to save an engine to make power with, make a new fucking thread and ask those questions, hes focused on something else

Are you truely surprised Lex is getting shit on, look at hwo everyone treats Jon from PTP performance, Yet more then half of us bought his windage tray, im spacer and BSD kit. He never came in here and said im god I know it all, and I can fix everything. He said hes onto something posted facts, and fucking hell tbh hes done more reaserch then ALL of u combined. IMO ....Like seriously just make Lex a Mod and see how much shit talking he gets then., show the man some respect, hes earned it. between PTP and Lex I dont recall anyone going thru blown motors and Actual say something intelligent other then the usual "OMG I BLEW A ROD FUCK MAZDA ENGINEERS, WEAK SAUCE !"

lol its fail? when this ecu adapts to most mods you can do to it, and when one of the highest whp ms6 adn ms3 were both stock ecu, its hardly fail, o did i mention they also didnt blow up?

This isnt like everything we know from other turbo cars, tuning is of very little issue.

i think it may be another theory but im not to sure if hes onto a flaw or something that caused a few engines to blow.

Very true, and to the people about why don't cx7s blow, well i was at the dealer about a year ago to get a motor mount fixed, went into their service area a cxy was there with a blown motor and the head on the ground, to say that they don't blow up is bs because the only reason we don't think they blow up is because the people that drive them don't know what a forum is.


My biggest question for this thread, can lex explain how this would tie into the effects of p-t boosting, and why if you stay in vacuum or wot you are safe.

What? is tuning a very little issue?? When u start changing your manifold/downpipe/exhaust then u have to get a tune thats match these mods! Only if u get an intake or a catback system you shouldn´t have to tune. The ECU should adapt for that. (Or maybe this ECU doesnt) I Think we know to little about the ECU in this car just now. For thos who havent blown with downpipes/manifold etc and still on the stock ECU tune.. congrats! maybe thier ECU was better programmed or something..

Trust me! i would also like to tune/mod my car, have done it to all my previous cars without problems, and i work with tuning cars... but when reading all this problem people having when tuning, i wait. The car is still faster than many in this price class. :biglaugh:

Well I always plan for the worst, hope for the best.

I'm gonna change over to Valvoline Oil, because they now have a 300,000mile guarantee on your motor, if you use their oil.

Valvoline Engine Guarantee

I saw that and was thinking about it, until I read rule #8

"We can’t guarantee an engine that is poorly designed, built, or maintenanced."

Need I say more? That guarantee has so many outs for them I bet they never have to pay for an engine. Great marketing, but doesnt fool me.

Since our engine is poorly designed, i guess we are not eligible by default.

Read what i posted above you about part throttle .... its said DI engines run alot leaner simply because(this is why we want 1800PSI to fuel) the way the fuel atomizes and "evenly" distributes into chamber, even tho it hits cyl wall, it still is the perfect mist, which allows us to spray the minimal amount of fuel, ever wonder why carbureted Engines drink so much gas? they dont even pressurize the fuel, they dump into top of carb, then left the vacuum of engine suck it in, while it does this it twists and turns and swirls and mixes with the air, and gets sucked into the runner, continually mixing and becoming a better mixture to burn, it has no fuel control at all, vs PI or DI its a fine Mist spray, requires fuel pressure, normal cars only use like 200 psi(random #) but thats hella closer then 1800 fucking psi. out cars run like shit under 1400 psi because its no long a fine mist but dumping fuel like a carbureted engine except without the carurators rised location and mixing properties, dumps plain unsprayed fuel right into cyl, it does not evenly distribute and thus burns like shit, does not burn it all, runs rich, u get back fires and a huge loss of power, BUT thats why its still safe when it does this its richer, access of fuel is left over, so I dont think u gotta worry about blowing engine just because you lose fuel pressure, unless it directly causes a huge knock or something. So you might ask me now, If thats so then how come the MS3 uses so much fuel? well 2 things one, we dont if u compare to a V8, unless your scaling cyl:cyl. twice the cyl twice the displacement, we are way more efficient then say a PI Mustang, But due to us using Boost, it requires More fuel to go with that extra air, really not a big deal, it uses more rescources to get more power out of less cyl, and truely I mean seriously its not even bad unless your WOT ALL THE TIME!

Its the gas efficient Cruise mode thats killing use most, High a/f r, and little fuel for cooling, the fuel is gonna sit in cyl jsut so slightly longer then say if ur holding 6k rpm in a race, while WOT pretend the fuel never hits cyl wall, I mean it may not at all, it gets compressed and ignited so quickly, but when cruising ....get the point ?

Alot of carb engines add Huge Huge spacers between the Carb and the IM, to allow MORE time for the fuel to mix and become a better even mix to Burn.

lex, can u come up with any ideas or theories flow charts on how the Gas is flowing inside chamber as our 15 psi of air flies into chamber, is the fuel already sliding down wall, are we losing fuel b4 it even ignites, whats the behavior like at 2k rpm cruising? does it turn into a tornado and swirl around till ignitied, is it forced against cyl wall, how does that work.

I like the diagram you posted with ford eco boost pistons, and when u said they "Learned" Who did they learn from do you know or did ford R&D spend more time and money making the ecoboost engine to come up with new piston designs ?

Why hasnt anyone just tapped a bung to hold a single 50lb injector into the cold pipe yet and run a injector controller? SDS EM-4: EIC

I ran that one on my 240sx with 4-550lb injectors in the rail and 2-550lb injectors before the throttle body. That would help atomize the fuel way before it hits the head. Total investment for 2 injectors and this controller with injector bungs would be about $700.

How are you reading 16 AF? AF on that graph is the teal/light blue color of which you don't have a scale shown. The purple scale is for spark advance.

I agree with the oil rings being bad in some engines but I don’t agree with the cylinder walls being unevenly cooled. When fuel is injected into the cylinder the piston is fully up and the angle of the injector would cause the fuel to be sprayed directly onto the piston, not the wall. The pistons are indented causing the fuel to stay in the center. Correct me if I am wrong.

Because everyone is doing that with methanol and it only costs a couple hundo.

We still pop with methanol... we'd still pop with additional gasoline injection.

nitroengine,

mazda changed and said of course we can use Ful syn. oil.

the reason why they didnt allow it in dealerships before was b/c they didnt want techs making a mistake putting full syn oil into the Rx8. you arent supposed to put full syn in rotories.

but you do for turbo piston engines. so stop using dinno and go full syn. mazda service now carries and uses full syn for the mazdaspeed's

Fuel is sprayed in when piston is down...

Not the wall being unevenly cooled as much as the piston crown.

The piston from thestaplegunkid's picture looks a lot healthier. From the picture, I could pick out 2 possible areas of concern.

1. Nicks in the top compression ring but this can be from debris in the bore after the blow
2. I have to confirm this with a better picture but it looks like there is some carbon buildup on the second compression ring which is kind of odd since it really shouldn't be seeing much in terms of combustion down there.

Can someone perform a rockwell hardness test across the top of the pistion? I feel that the uneven heat cycles will eventually lead to stresses and fatigue within the metal as well as cause uneven thermal expansion that could lead to a failure somewhere along the lines of what Lex is investigating.

Then wouldn’t all engines have this problem? FI engine are not perfectly distributing fuel onto the pistons either. Take a look at this video I found. Look at the 2.0 direct injection video first, it shows DISI vs FI.

MAZDA:Direct injection gasoline engines | Environmental Technology

if someone could get me a piston i could do that

It's really too bad we seem to have to do all these 'little' things that add up to a large expense just to potentially have our engines last X miles longer (BSD, CC, Spin-on, PCV fix, etc), and now the flawed design and engineering process has laid itself upon us and there's nothing we can do about it unless we throw a plethora amount of money at it.

Some of us baby the shit out of our cars, while others hammer on 'em from the start. It really doesn't seem to matter. The paranoia has slowly inched its way into my head. It really made me take a step back and re-prioritize things. I realized long ago this wasn't the platform to make the power I desired, but it still had so many advantages over an STi or EVO, not to mention I enjoyed the subtleness from others, especially cops.

Lex, I for one appreciate the work you've done with this platform. I don't voice much in these threads, but you really have done great work and your efforts should be applauded.

For me, I think it's time to move on...

This doesn't really gaurantee even distribution amongst all 4 cylinders, does it? There is still a chance for one to go leaner than the others.

I'm still a proponent of using thicker weight oils, like 5W-40 or 10W-40. I wouldn't go any thicker than that. We all know this car is evil on oils because of heat and the DI. We've seen 5W-30's sheer down to <20 in 3-4k miles on oil analysis. I like the diesel formulus like Rotella T because they've got lots of detergents in them to handle the heavy soot/carbon that diesels inheritently produce. Is this a bandaid? Of course, but as many have said, there's not much of a choice around this issue with this motor. This motor needs a lot of fucking maintenance.

DI fuel injection is much more localized and under higher pressures (and for shorter duration) in DI engines which is not shown as well in the video. The fuel spray pattern on the piston top shows this well. Good video though, thanks for posting.

I'm heading down to the garage soon Lex, I'll get more shots to answer your questions.

With DISI isn’t it like a really high pressure mist, triangle spray? When air and fuel are sprayed into the cylinder, the piston moves down and back up to compress the gases. Wouldn’t the fuel pretty much be gas by the time it is compressed and you have your spark? That’s why I am have a hard time with the injector location being our problem.

The marks on the piston top I posted earlier indicate that at some point (perhaps high load) the fuel is injected when the piston is close enough to receive it in liquid unevenly distributed form. You can see the cone pattern on the piston top.

What if that cone pattern is from cold starts when the fuel doesn't properly atomize from cylinder temps?

Do you think the burns on the piston are just a result of oil coming in through our intake valves and settling on our pistons, causing it to burn? And maybe the oil is starting a mini fire causing misfires or who knows what else. That would explain the different temps on the piston and maybe causing it to become weak.

Talk to socks, he might be willing to part with one of his old pistons. They don't have a lot of miles on 'em though.

Do you happen to have the correct tools to measure the cylinder bore?

I have a dial bore gauge set and mics! but I'm on the other side of the country... lol

1. They appear to be detonation marks, and they are on approx 2/3 of the ring, but I can't be certain of the rings original orientation as per intake/exhaust valves. I checked the other pistons and #3 had fewer of these marks, in the same pattern though, and # 2 had none.

2. No carbon build up on the rings

3. Rings move freely in ring grooves

4. Ring grooves are free of any debris or buildup

Any det marks on the second compression ring or just the first?

Just on the first, second is clear.

Lex, comments on post #166 ?

Like I said earlier you guys are looking way too deep into this and are over looking the obvious as to why these engines blow. Lex, even though the effort is appreciated by many including myself you're wasting your time. You're looking at the bottom of the ocean for answers when the answers right underneath the surface.

I'll organize my thread about why these engines blow so that it's easily laid out so that it's easy to read and understand why these engines blow. Even though I have a feeling some people will still refuse to believe and still look nowhere.

Bottom line there's nothing wrong with these engines; but you guys are looking so deep into it as if you really want to prove that there's something wrong with the engine out of the factory- but there's nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if LEX was trying to get some recognition if he thinks he's going to figure it out- believe me people it's not about helping out the community- there's always a personal stake.

A lot of engine failure is contributed by the end user and common mistakes and IMPROPER HANDLING/MAINTENANCE of the engine (and I'll tell you what exactly is causing the failure and why when I make my thread).

Like I said earlier you guys are looking way too deep into this and are over looking the obvious as to why these engines blow. Lex, even though the effort is appreciated by many including myself you're wasting your time. You're looking at the bottom of the ocean for answers when the answers right underneath the surface.

I'll organize my thread about why these engines blow so that it's easily laid out so that it's easy to read and understand why these engines blow. Even though I have a feeling some people will still refuse to believe and still look nowhere.

Bottom line there's nothing wrong with these engines; but you guys are looking so deep into it as if you really want to prove that there's something wrong with the engine out of the factory- but there's nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if LEX was trying to get some recognition if he thinks he's going to figure it out- believe me people it's not about helping out the community- there's always a personal stake.

A lot of engine failure is contributed by the end user and common mistakes and IMPROPER HANDLING/MAINTENANCE of the engine (and I'll tell you what exactly is causing the failure and why when I make my thread).

Contributed to the end user, like driving their car? I don't get it, people build fast cars and then go around preaching that they're supposed to be babied? Fuck that, I've owned quite a few quick cars. I beat the piss out of all of them(300zx, turbo civic, 350z, speed3). If driving it hard is the reason it is blowing up, then it's a POS motor.

As far as maintenance goes, what is there to it? Routine oil changes usually get done in the tuner community, other than that, what is there to maintain? These cars are practically new. We're not talking about 15 year old DSMs here. My car has less than 30k miles on it. It should require ZERO maintenance other than oil changes.

While there are plenty of dumb owners, I am sure, but that should not count towards the percentage of failures seen here.

There is one (or more) design flaw that is introducing this...It COULD be something simple(like a shitty PCV), or it could be something major, like the fundamental theory of Direct Injection.

EDIT: BTW, my mazdaspeed3 sees 5.5-6k RPMs EVERY day

trickytwelveinch "I'll organize my thread about why these engines blow so that it's easily laid out so that it's easy to read and understand why these engines blow."

Ok there are a LOT of people waiting to read your thread, when can we expect it ?