1990 Mazda 626 - Off With His Head

My Auto looked cool on Nissan 16" alloys....


*photoshopped

Nice to see these pop up from time to time 👍

OVIMOR

Dad had one of these after a Mk1 626 (although his Mk1 was badged as a "Montrose")
I was always impressed with what a nice car it was,
Keeper if all goes well ??
Nigel

Managed to get a little time yesterday to drag the 626 to my work unit. First impressions are that it drives well enough, tracking needs doing but it goes and stops well.



I cleared out and hoovered the interior, and tried out all the switches and lighting. Surprisingly, everything worked well, even all the backlighting! I've still got to wet vac the seats (especially the driver's seat as it's a bit blackened), but the interior shouldn't need any work which is great.




The exterior and door shuts are horrendously grubby, will have to give it a deep clean soon.



Under the bonnet, it's also very dirty. Clearly it's not had any maintenance in a long time, so lots of new fluids will be going in for a start. The cooling system unfortunately has a small leak from the radiator seam, probably happened in the latest frost as they've used pure water. Serious flushing required, and I've got a radiator on order. The rusty water stains on the engine are from a previous leak, the shinier water outlet in the middle is the bit the previous owner replaced to fix it. A bit of a clean-up afterwards wouldn't have gone amiss!

Mine was 2.0 Carbby.

Those 'injector lookalike' steel pipes do some re-circ rubbish 🙄.... My tame mechanic looked into the car running poorly, at a service = chopped the lot out/capped/bentover the stubs 👍😉

..... Deffo fixed that one 🤣🤣

Loved the Lock-Up top/ O.D.

It's a FORD[Mazda] auto... US spec.


OVIMOR

Ah so you were the one that got there first!! Pretty sure if you'd messaged him 10 minutes later I would have been the one starting this build thread 😂

Car looks great, gutted I didn't beat you to it but very pleased it's ended up here and not on the banger track. Great find.

That interior looks smart, hope to see you with it at RRW!

The plan for today was simple - finish cleaning the interior (wiping down plastics and wet vac the seats), and then drive the car out of the garage, park it for a few days while I worked in my Lexus.

The car had other ideas.

It all started well enough, got the car cleaned up by lunchtime and was feeling pleased.



Went to start the car, lurched it half way out of the garage and it promptly stalled and refused to restart. Some experimenting revealed it would start if you gave it full throttle, but idle was horribly erratic. TBF this was an issue when I picked up the car, I was just hoping not to have to fix it for a little while until I'd done some nicer jobs.

Pulled the air can off, went through all the vac lines and found nothing wrong. Also checked all the HT leads, pulled the spark plugs (very sooty and somewhat wet), and checked for spark. Sparked ok, but seems to get less intense over time.

Then I spotted this, two loose wires by the distributor.



Looks like there was an attempt by the PO to bridge this wire with an extra length and some scotch connectors (yuck). I quickly connected them, no improvement, but the wires on one side look very corroded, water has wicked up them. I think this wire probably goes from the coil to distributor, which is likely to be kind of important.

Ran out of time today, but I'm going to remove all the wire and run fresh connectors and wire all the way through. Surprised that the car runs at all with this broken. Looking back at pics from the day I got the car, it was broken then too. I'm not entirely convinced that fixing one wire will solve all my problems, but it must be causing some problem, so let's start there.

So at the moment it's immobile and getting in the way of other work. Bummer. Still, interior looks good!

in an earlier post I think I mentioned, the thermostat outlet housing had leaked at some point, but the previous owner replaced it, in some of the pics you can see that it's the only silver part in a sea of brown 😂 it'll get cleaned up soon, along with the whole bay.

Suspecting a spark issue:

- compression is good across all cylinders
- plugs are sooting up and getting wet, and all cylinders seem to be affected equally
- spark seems to me to get worse as it cranks and become intermittent

I've ordered dizzy cap, rotor arm, spark plugs and coil as these all look past their best. Leads look like they've been replaced more recently, so I'll leave them for now (problem seems to occur on all cylinders, unlikely all four leads are bad).

Going to leave the car for a few days until parts arrive. Also it's too cold in the garage!

Signs pointing that way, fingers crossed.