This is a VERY touchy subject for me.
So after letting my girlfriend try and learn how to drive stick on my msp and kill it 10 times in a row i decided that was enoulf. The next day i went thru a drive thru and noticed this loud ticking...I remeber looking behind me and thinkin wow that guys car sound like ass. Later that day i walked around the front of my car to get some mail and was HORRIFIED! to hear that sound was me.
I always have my music way up so i couldnt hear, but now i know its there i can hear it from 20 feet away with the hood closed on a windy day.
ITS SO ******* LOUD!. I took it to the dealership and they said it was a normal "mazda tick". Disssatisified i took it to a couple people with speeds. Yes there did have a tick. But it was NOTHING like mine. I mean mine was easily 4 times as loud.
I took it to another dealership and they took it in the back to a tech, came back and said ya thats NOT right, we will take care of it for you. They called back later that day and said since i had a CAI that if they opened the block up and found it was somehow the intake's fault that i would have to pay. I made it VERY clear that there was no ******* way i was going to pay for something if they thought it was the intake fault and that they better not even try and stick me with a bill. The guy agreed that it would be insane to blame it on the intake. 4 hours later i get a call from a different guy saying it was normal, and that they would do some reasearch into it. !!!!! WTF WAS THAT ABOUT!!!>..
so the next day i take it to a friends shop. Rob says that its alot louder than the normal mazda tick.
I THEN take it back to the first dealership and explain that rob from pineapple racing, a very respected mazda shop said its not normal and that it should be looked at. I talked with the service mngr and the GM. I wanted to get it fixed. We had a "pow-wow" and it sounded like i was going to get everything fixed, or at least looked at this time. That was last week and i still havnt gotten a ****** call back... WTFBBQ!!!!!
so ya if you bothered to read that thanks, a load off my chest.
IF you can make a recoring of your tick and ill tell you if its the normal mazda tick, or if its something like mine.
o and btw, its comming from the block. Ihave had 6 people play with it and all agree its a lifter or something along those lines.