The current rack in the challenge car is BUSTED. So i pulled it apart to see how bad the depower would be on the replacement rack.
When i went to start stripping the new rack down, i found the lines had been loiped, and somebody has been in there before. Got the rack used from a spec miata shop.
Grabbing the plined input eith two fingers i was able to easily operate the rack. No effort really.
So, tge question is: for a challenge car, and general track car after the challenge, would it benifit me to go into the new rack and depower per flying miata instructions if not done? Or is my finger test indicative that it already has been?
If you plan to keep the car long-term, it's better to open the rack and confirm that everything has been done properly, including welding/epoxying the flexible shaft in the control valve mechanism to remove that little bit of play.
Here is how I depowered my FC rack (same internals, just different width)
I did this in 2010 on a 160kmi rack that had blown seals so bad that the left boost was just plain gone. It is now 2018. I have almost 100k on this rack in this condition. I have rallycrossed the everloving heck out of it. It is still just fine.
Welding the quill is so far down the list of requirements that it's an imaginary number.
Ian F
MegaDork
6/15/18 9:18 p.m.
If you want a P/S rack, I have one I've been dying to be rid of. It's a functional rack that was removed from a car that was converted to "R" specs. I bought it for a project I no longer plan to do. It's yours for shipping.
I used this method on mine. No idea how well it works as my rack is sitting on a shelf and my miata is now a chinese washing machine.
https://www.flyinmiata.com/tech/depower.php
My FC also has a depowered rack, done the 'right way' per wvumtnbkr. No idea how many miles are on it, but it's really tight and I love it at road speeds. It's heavy at parking lot speeds and a bit difficult to keep up with steering inputs for auto x, but I've also got a lot more weight on the nose than a Miata.
After years of driving Spec Miatas with depowered racks I recently drove one with an un-modifed power rack and it was great. It still has the good feedback that's part of what makes a Miata a Miata but with lower effort. Almost like Mazda knew what they were doing. I still think depowering a Spec Miata is a good idea because you need every power increasing trick in the book (and any not in the book that you can get away with) to run at the front but anything with actual horsepower that's not being used where every fraction counts, I say leave it powered.
As a summary to this thread I took the rack apart and took the seal out. However I did not weld the input shaft cuz I couldn't figure out how to get the damn thing apart. I would have liked to have kept power steering on this car but there was no way to run a pump and keep challenge budget and keep the monster V6
In reply to APEowner :
Yea, I'm actually strongly considering swapping to a powered rack in the near future. The manual steering makes the car way harder to autocross than it should be.
