Archive for the Delays Category

Second Packwood weekend and Spring Nationals Leadups

Posted in Delays, Handling, Suspension, Traction Control, Wiring Harnesses on May 29, 2012 by David de Regt

It’s been an incredibly hectic two weeks.  I spent a couple days tearing into more of the electrics and found that the fuel pump wire down the driver’s side of the rear harness had rubbed through to the chassis, which is probably what started everything.  I ran a new thicker gauge wire and re-loomed/moved some of the harness, so it should hopefully never rub through again, and the thicker wire will be less prone to heating.  I also ordered a Deutchwerks 300LPH pump due to my decreased confidence in the Walbro, intending to use it as a spare if the Walbro died.  Finally, I moved the fusebox out from under the side of the engine bay into a spot near the intake with some airflow, in case it just needed some ventilation as well.

The subframe that we were told existed wasn’t actually the right subframe, which we didn’t discover until after close of business Thursday night.  We got to wake up early Friday morning and call every parts shop in the area to find a new subframe.  The only one we could get before Monday wouldn’t be pulled until 5pm that night, 2 hours from home.  So, we picked it up, got back home around 7:30pm, and spent the entire night swapping the subframe and front control arms.  Shaikh finished up the shocks Thursday night and overnighted them so those arrived Friday morning, and when we finished with the subframe, we got to also assemble/swap the new shocks (mounting canisters, etc.)  Around 11:30pm we finally finished with all the work, then spent until almost 2am doing a ride height set and string alignment.  We realized the alignment wasn’t going terribly well, and we couldn’t get enough camber out of the front anyway, so we called it good enough for a shakedown and went to bed.

We decided that waking up in 3 hours and driving to Packwood for the morning session was out of the question, so we went down for the afternoon, which was a nice dry day, and had no major issues at all with the car.  The car was pretty loose, but still drivable, and we settled into liking a RaceLogic setting of 20% slip and 5.0mph wheel differential.  Sunday morning we woke up to a wet ground and ongoing rain, and we ran a very wet morning session, where we got to throw on the Hoosier Wets (225/50/15 H2Os on 15×9 6ULs) and play with the RaceLogic to figure out a wet setup, which worked out quite well.  We tried 5%, which seemed pretty good, but 10% was really the sweet spot, if you had quick enough hands.  The car is remarkably drivable in the wet, which is good to know.  On a very representative course, I was only 0.4 behind the Hyman GT-R car in full wet trim, which is closer than I would have hoped to get.  We had no issues with the car in the wet either, called it a day, and drove home.

On the tow home, the alternator on the truck let go, though, adding some more insult to the existing injury.  Nothing is ever easy…

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Ups and Downs

Posted in Delays, Subframes, Suspension on May 15, 2012 by David de Regt

It’s been an interesting month.  Soon after the last post, I decided that nothing was coming in soon enough and that I should just bring the car in to get painted.  I had Showcase Auto do it, and it came out great (for a racecar — painting carbon fiber body parts is never fantastic unless you put 20 pounds of paint and bondo on it, hence removing the point.)

I got the car back a week and a half ago, just in time to try to put all the new parts that arrived on it.  The Ciro Designs wing came in, and we fabbed up a splitter (currently in revision 1, there’ll be canards and paint later).  The control arms and delrin finally came in, and we spent days assembling the car and finally, this past weekend, had a chance to bring the car down to Packwood for what was supposed to be a 2 day event, getting a ton of runs on the car in preparation for the Lincoln mini-nationals in 2 weekends.

Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.  We took a couple runs in the car, which were pretty good, but quickly started getting some nasty rubbing making the sharp turn to get to the start line from grid.  We ignored it, planning to look into it at lunch.  A couple runs later, we started getting something acting like the car being out of gas in the middle of my dad’s run, and then shortly thereafter it gave out entirely and refused to run any more.  Some quick diagnosing led me to find that the ignition lead was shorted to an always-on battery line somewhere, and it wasn’t obvious where.  In addition, when you shorted the fuel pump on with the diagnostic connector, the circuit main relay under the dash started buzzing heavily, and was rapidly heating up (to the point that the wire insulation was melting).  So, after spending a while with it, we decided to bail and head home to diagnose with more tools and time.

Monday, my dad and I converged on the car and pulled the front wheel off, only to discover something really unfortunate.  The rubbing apparently was caused by the new front control arms pretzeling themselves under the stress of the Packwood bumps, or somethingorother.  I’m working with the EPMiata folks to try to figure out if we have a good answer, or if their arms are just not strong enough for SSM autocross duty.  However, that give us a bit of a major problem.  There’s one more weekend of events (19/20th) and then we have to hit the road Tuesday to get to the Lincoln events in time, which means we only have one more shot to test this stuff out, and it needs to be ready for this weekend.

As a result, just to have a prayer of making it to Lincoln, I’m enacting a fallback plan of using stock front UCAs.  AWR is overnighting me some delrin bushings for them, which come in Wednesday, and I’m putting the V8Roadster ball joints into them.  We’re going to bend them in a press a little bit to get the camber level we need, and run it as is for now to hopefully get some events under it before going with another custom solution of some sort.

I also pulled apart most of the electrics in the car today (pulled the dash, fuseboxes, and relay blocks) to try to figure out the problem.  The only issue I can find so far is that two of the wires in the main fusebox had melted together, which shorted the ignition (white/red) line to another fused always-on line (white/green).  I re-insulated them and separated them, and I will be moving the fusebox to somewhere with more airflow to keep it cool (the event this weekend was quite warm, and I think the splitter was keeping underhood temps higher than usual).  In addition, I should probably add some vents to the hood to let some of the air out, which will likely assist with front downforce as well.  I’m replacing the main circuit opening relay with another I had kicking around from a lower mileage car, and hoping for the best this weekend.

With any luck, I’ll have better news to relay soon.  Tomorrow I get a different used front subframe to swap mine out with (we had to drill the front UCA sleeve out to 5/8″ to use the EPMiata control arms) so I need to get another stock one to put the stock arms back onto, and the delrin bushings come in to reassemble everything.  The real DA shocks come in from Shaikh either late Thursday or early Friday, leaving me a few hours to get the car aligned for the weekend.  From there, hopefully our last minute changes here will keep it running long enough to abuse it all weekend, then head east to Lincoln a few days after that…

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Test Run – Phase 1 Complete

Posted in Delays, Handling on April 16, 2012 by David de Regt

The past several weeks have been on and off busy and not.  Even though the car dynoed, there were a lot of loose ends to tie up.  I had the car aligned and ride heighted while I got some work done the next day, and we had an emergency all day session on Friday trying to finish the car in time for going out to a karting track (that allowed cars that day) — seatbelt installs onto the firewall, custom bracket for passenger seat, fender and bumper cutting to fit the giant tires, front swaybar install, etc.  We decided not to bother going down to the kart track by the time we finally finished up all the last touches (weather/lack of daylight to make it worth it), but at least the car was drivable.

Instead, Brian and I spend Saturday doing a bunch of work.  We measured bump travel vs offset for the front and rear of the car, to plan the new uprights, and then took the car out for its first spin (turned out to be a gorgeous day, but with no autocross all weekend anywhere in the northwest).  The car worked great and we dialed in the Throttle Pump settings and had some fun.  The car was showing signs of being incredibly loose, but we didn’t care too much at the time.

Over the next week, I continued tweaking things.  I built a temporary intake out of cheap parts, we added some lexan panels to the hood to block water getting all over the headlights, I added a cabin-switchable intercooler fan, etc.  There’s so many little things to do building an SSM car.  The weekend had an event in Packwood, but it was going to definitely be rainy (100% chance of rain both days) so I ordered a set of 15×9 6ULs and some Hoosier Wets on Monday, which ended up having 3 come in Friday and one come in Tuesday (good job UPS), so I missed that weekend of events.

Fortunately, the following weekend had a gorgeous pair of events up in Vancouver.  My dad and I towed the car up and ran a PCA event Saturday and a VCMC event Sunday, where the car showed great promise.  It turned out to be at least as loose as we anticipated, but it was still keeping up with CSP cars on a non-power course (we checked the datalogs, and were both over 60% throttle for a collective less than 1 full second).  In any event, my dad signed on for codriving for the rest of the year, which should make for a smooth first year of towing to events.

The car’s waiting for several things right now.  The shocks are taking a little longer than originally anticipated, the wing pushed out a couple weeks longer than they thought, and the EPMiata upper control arms are also being pushed out a couple weeks.  As a result, even though there was an event this past weekend, I didn’t figure on there being much point in running it, as the car’s current handling is largely a result of the temporary suspension setup on it.  So, instead, I brought it into the local body shop to start prepwork on painting it, and over the next week or two it’ll get painted while I wait for the rest of the parts to come in.  I’ve abandoned my San Diego entry and I’m aiming at the Lincoln double now, which should actually be doable…

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Dyno Attempt #1

Posted in Delays, Dyno, Engine, Wiring Harnesses on March 19, 2012 by David de Regt

On 3 hours of sleep, I ran down to get some 100 octane race gas, threw some more 92 into the SSM car, and we loaded it up into my dad’s trailer to haul down to the dyno (the car still doesn’t have a hood or fenders, and it’s an unknown drivetrain, so towing seemed to be a good idea — this proved to be a good decision).  We unloaded the car, I quickly wired up the TPS while Andre (of Pina Motorsports) started laying in a base tune and configuring anything I’d missed on the car, and then we loaded it onto the dyno.  We made it about 1/3 of the way through the base fuel map when suddenly the motor backfired lightly, cut out, and refused to even pretend to start again.

We debugged a bit and found that the cam/crank sensors weren’t syncing properly, and were in fact syncing largely randomly.  We tried messing with it for a bit, but to no avail.  We did a quick compression check on #1 and found no compression, which implied something far more serious was wrong and decided to call it a day.  We loaded up the car and brought it back home, tail between our legs.

After getting some sleep (I was a zombie at this point), the next day I tore the valve cover and the timing covers off the motor and started toying around.  I quickly realized that while the cams were in sync relative to each other, and the crank pulley was correctly marking TDC (verified), they were nowhere close to correct relative to each other.  I assumed the Gates belt I’d used stretched and the belt had slipped, so I ordered a new timing belt and tensioner spring and started messing with other stuff in the car.

The next day, I figured I should tear the rest of the front of the motor off so that when the belt got there, I could just throw it on.  While I was disassembling, I realized that I could spin the crank and the cams weren’t spinning.  When I got the crank pulley off, I realized the issue.  I’m using a bolt-on 6 rib pulley from Fast Forward Superchargers that mounts into the stock 4 bolts on the front of the pulley.  What I did not notice, however, is that the hole in the center is about 1mm too small for the crank bolt to pass through.  So, while everything torqued together properly, the bolt was over 1cm too far out from where it needed to be, so the woodruff key was no longer held in place.  After running long enough, it managed to vibrate its way out of the timing pulley and let it spin freely on the crank, while holding the normal crank pulley in place.  With that mystery solved, I properly reassembled everything in the correct order, and went back to finishing up some rewiring while waiting for the coil that I left at the dyno to be mailed to me.

I’m using this delay to redo some wiring in the bay that needed to happen — moving things like the TPS, IAC, IAT, etc. around in the front harness to properly reflect where they’d moved to in the final configuration, which should clean up the engine bay quite a bit and make the car easier to work on.  I’m also installing a console-switchable fan onto the intercooler for waiting in grid.  Tomorrow the coil should arrive and I can try firing the car up again, and then take it to the dyno later this week to try again, hopefully with more success…

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Finishing the Drivetrain

Posted in Delays, Engine, Radiator/Intercooler, Supercharger on March 19, 2012 by David de Regt

Since the day that I got the Manifold (March 9th, over a week later than it was supposed to be), I’ve been working pretty solid on the car every spare waking moment.  As it turns out, after taking 4 months to work on the project, Corky ignored all of my measurements and schematics that I sent to him, measured a random supercharger he had on the shelf, and designed the supercharger mount and collector based on that.  So, essentially every measurement on the manifold was wrong, not to mention that the collector output ended up being directly into the alternator bracket, as well as contacting the live post of the alternator.  So, after opening the package and a few minutes later realizing these lovely things, I’ve been constantly fixing the stream of problems resulting from this.

I first fabricated a new alternator bracket out of crap I had lying around to get the bracket out of the way, and tried several different slightly shorter accessory belts to try to move the alternator ever so slightly further over so that it would clear the collector output.  I then had to modify the alternator live stud to point further down so that it would clear the collector as well.  After all that, the manifold would actually bolt onto the engine.  At this point, it was time to put the stock manifold onto the car and get the car back to Doug’s so that he could make the final exhaust and we could work on the rest of this fab.

Corky was also supposed to create a radiator and intercooler from cores, which, for the last 2 months straight he said he was going to ship out at the end of each week I emailed.  When I finally pressed him “now or never” last week, he said he had no idea when he was going to be able to do it.  So, that night I spent a bunch of time measuring the radiator opening and browsing the net for substitutes and ordered a 3-row (2.5″ thick) 92-00 Civic radiator and RX-7 sidemount intercooler from CXRacing, which seemed to get me the best combination of what I needed at the measurements I needed to make them fit in.  I ordered them up, and they arrived just in the nick of time.  Doug had made the exhaust all afternoon Wednesday (March 14), and the parts arrived midday Thursday, aiming to make a Dyno session friday, and then autocross all weekend.  So, the race was on.  I came over at noon Thursday to Doug’s and we started working.

The next step was getting the supercharger to mount to the manifold.  I had to grind away a bunch of material from around the supercharger mount so that there’d be enough room to get a wrench around some bolts, grind away a ton of material from the collector inlet and intermediate plate, so that some air could actually get from the supercharger all the way into the collector, and replace the studs with bolts, since studs wouldn’t clear the SC at all.  After several hours on the floor of Chase Race with wrenches, a sharpie, and a die grinder, I finally was able to attach the supercharger to the manifold.  Not exactly a light pile of metal, all assembled.

There’s a very careful order of operations to install everything.  Off the car, the supercharger and intermediate plate must be attached to the manifold.  From there, the manifold must be attached to the car, and only after that can the fuel rail squeeze around the supercharger and nestle its way into its home.  Bill Freiheit did a great job making me a quick supercharger to throttle body (I went with a 75mm Mustang 5.0 BBK throttle body, the BBK-1503) adapter, which nicely dealt with that portion of the setup.  I’ll deal with the intake later on, but I’m hoping we can make something that curls down by the passenger side wheel well to pull fresh air out from under the car.

While I finished getting the manifold together, Doug had been working on making custom mounts for the intercooler and radiator and finishing up some other stuff (exhaust tweaks, etc.)  As it turns out, they work fantastically and fit great in there.  I was originally planning on getting custom ones made down the line, but it’s possible I’ll be happy sticking with these for quite a while now — 100$ intercooler and 70$ radiator, can’t beat that.  We finished those at about the same time, so I turned my attention to the intake piping.  Doug was new to welding aluminum, so this was a new game for him, and I’d never designed intake piping before, so I had a fun challenge of trying to fabricate legos that played nice with each other.  In the end, the assortment of stuff I got from SiliconIntakes worked great for really cheap, and we ended up with some functional piping.  Neither of us are particularly proud of our work, but it did get the job done.

The last major thing was the SC belt.  I’d managed to find the shortest belt that would go onto the setup (required forcing it over the crank pulley while turning it with a wrench), and then found a 6-rib Gates auto-tensioning pulley (usually used in mid 90s GM cars) and come up with a harebrained scheme that I figured just might work.  I did some hackneyed “measuring” with a sharpie, staring at the engine bay, and formed a plan.  We cut out a chunk of aluminum, drilled a bunch of complicated holes in it, welded on a bracket, attached it to the manifold, and, much to both of our surprises, it just worked.

Finally, there was a ton of other cleanup/finishing work — doing some rewiring, fabricating a throttle cable bracket, running vacuum lines, etc.  Around 4 AM, we finally got the car fired up.  Remarkably, it basically fired right up without any fuss.  I spent some time futzing with the fuel map so that it’d be drivable, we identified 2 coolant leaks (one was easy, one was a total pain) and after celebrating with a quick beer I managed to finally get the car home a little after 5 AM.  It drove perfectly, and it was really hard to keep my right foot from squeezing out some more whine, even though I’d zeroed out the on-boost timing map and made the on boost fuel map super rich, just in case.  Even pushing just a couple pounds of boost on the drive home (really really light squeeze),  I could tell it was going to be fast.

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Tightening Schedule

Posted in Delays on February 29, 2012 by David de Regt

Despite the massive number of delays I’ve been through in the last couple months, the project has still been steadily moving forward.  At this point, I’m actually caught up with everything that’s arrived, and I’m basically waiting on the last parts to show up (and for Doug to have enough time to do some fab work) for the build to finish.

After getting the car to start up a week ago, I’d barely run it at all.  It has been rainy out (and the car didn’t have a hood or a top or anything to keep the water out), and I haven’t had much free time, so I was working on the headlight project and cleaning up a bunch of electrical loose ends.  I didn’t want to run the engine much since the worst way to break a race engine in is idling it in the garage.  Tuesday, though, I needed to get the car over to Doug’s to get a temporary exhaust put on (connecting the stock exhaust to the Racing Beat header) so that I could street tune the car without getting arrested on noise complaints.  That meant I actually needed to get the car to drive, so I spent a few hours futzing with the tune, debugging some issues (the traction control ECU was left connected but not set up, so as soon as I went above 2250 RPMs with the car in motion, it started fuel cutting — that took me a while to figure out), and working on a base map that’d get the car to drive.  Eventually I got it all worked out and drove a very loud open-header Miata 20 minutes over to Chase Race, while trying to break in the motor and not rupture an eardrum, and the car made it over without any issues whatsoever.

The car comes back to me tomorrow, with cut rear fenders, a real battery bracket made up (the battery has been loose in the engine bay), and a working exhaust.  From there I can debug the traction control ECU and test out the 99 ABS unit (and the brakes in general) and finish breaking in the motor.

Tomorrow (thursday), the new intake manifold/supercharger mount arrive in the mail.  I can start test fitting that to the car and figuring out a tensioning system as soon as that shows up.  The radiator/intercooler ship out of BEGi on Friday, the carbon parts (hood, fenders, and seats) ship out of St. Louis tomorrow (thursday), the new throttle body and connectors all shipped out today, and some miscellaneous stuff (boost gauge and hood pins) will ship out tomorrow.  As such, the supercharger hopefully gets mounted and tested late next week, Doug can do the full custom 2.75″ exhaust on the 13th, and I can then immediately get the car tuned on the 14th.  This puts me ready for the Slush #1 event on the 18th for the car’s first event.  This, of course, assumes that nothing goes wrong between now and then…

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And Then Things Sped Up

Posted in Delays on February 8, 2012 by David de Regt

In the last 2 days since the Timeline post, I’ve heard back from Axis and Corky Bell.  Corky says the manifold is done and he’s starting on the intercooler and radiator later this week.  Axis just finished the hood, which is 4.7 lbs, and sealed a deal with an upholstery guy to make the seats, which will be done in a couple weeks.  Suddenly things are looking up.

Yesterday, I swapped the seat in the KLiata to get it back to stock seats and seatbelts, and hence I’ve stolen the harness bar and 4-point harness out of there to put in the SSM car.  I ordered a new 5 point camlock harness to go with it for when the seats arrive, and will decide whether to use the boss frog harness bar, have Doug fabricate a new one, or simply bolt them to the rear deck.

Today, I finished the wiring harnesses.  I’ve stripped out the dash and interior of the car, and I’ve been going through the dash and rear harnesses, removing everything allowed (radio, speakers, etc.)  The car is now on jackstands, fluids drained, and my dad’s going to come over and help me pull the motor tomorrow night, along with the front end and the rest of the interior.

From there, I can put the new front harness in, followed by the motor and the changed interior, and start teething the EMS/motor combo while Corky finishes the supercharger setup.  This will give me a couple weeks to try to get everything in the car running naturally aspirated before the rest of the setup arrives.  From there, I can add the transmission, rear end, and supercharger as things show up, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have a car, albeit sans aero, ready in time for the beginning of the season.  I’m suddenly pretty excited about this, and worried that I’m going to be limited by my free time, not by parts arrivals, over the next couple weeks here…

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Timeline

Posted in Delays on February 6, 2012 by David de Regt

At this point, I need to start thinking about when the car will first be ready to turn a wheel in anger.  The motor is built, but many more pieces need to fall into place before the car is usable.  I’ve stripped out most of the interior of the car, replaced the rear finish panel (the one on the car was broken), and pulled everything out of the trunk that I’m allowed to (since the battery is going in the engine bay).  Hopefully by the end of this week, I’ll have the full drivetrain out on the floor, the dash out, and the rear and dash harnesses lightened (removing radio wiring).  However, I’m still waiting on a bunch of things:

  • The gearset for the transmission just got to Advanced Autosports late last week.  He says he’s going to start on it Wednesday and that I should have that back to me sometime the week of the 20th.
  • Doug is still getting his shop together, but he can hopefully get the OS Giken installed onto the R/P and into the pumpkin (and install the ABS rings on the non-ABS axles) by about the same time as the transmission gets here.
  • Axis Power Racing is currently making me a CF hood which should be done and to me sometime the week of the 20th as well.  Once that gets here, I’ll need to get Doug to fabricate 2 hood pin mounts for the rear corners.
  • Axis Power Racing is also making me 2 seats, which are going to take at least a week longer than that (he’s still trying to find a new upholsterer), so that date is still completely unknown.
  • I’m talking with Axis Power Racing about making some custom CF fenders that are cut out to clear the giant wheels, and to not bother going widebody.  Date unknown.
  • I need to figure out a harness solution by the time the seats get here, but I think it’s just going to be getting two 4-point harnesses and bolting the harnesses to the rear deck.  This will require more light fab by Doug as well.
  • I’ve bought some double adjustable custom shocks (and springs) from FatCat Motorsports.  He’s not sure exactly when they’re going to be done, but there’s a remote possibility it will be ready by early March.  I also need to buy some spring rubbers from him so that I can tune the spring rates on the fly.
  • I have no idea when Corky Bell is going to get this manifold done or when he’s going to even quote me for making the radiator and/or intercooler.
  • I have emails out to Ciro Designs and Don Nimi for some more information on availability of some next gen twin element wings.  When I last talked to both of them (last year), they were hoping to have stuff shipping by March-ish, but who knows how much their goals will have slipped in a couple months.
  • Given that the motor isn’t even in the car yet, who knows if I’ve messed something critical up with the massive wiring harness changes I’ve made, or with the ABS, so I’m sure there’s a bunch of teething to go on there.

The first event of the year up here is March 11th.  Looking at the above, if lots of cards fall into place, it’s a feasible goal to have the car running in basically extended CSP trim in time for that first event of the year and start a bit of teething.  However, it’s contingent upon Axis getting me seats in time and FatCat getting me suspension.  The car can then improve incrementally once it’s in basic running shape, and hopefully by mid April I’ll have a supercharger and aero and can start testing the car for real.

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Motor Build

Posted in Delays, Engine on February 6, 2012 by David de Regt

The motor build ended up, like everything else on this project, taking longer than expected.  Mazda Motorsports sent me some wrong parts, I kept deciding to replace more parts (hoses, o-rings, etc.), and then the M-Tuned rail didn’t fit right.  Every step of getting new parts is another week down the hatch, and waiting for a decent response from M-Tuned took a while too.  Last night, though, I finally made the final necessary modifications (read: liberal application of angle grinder) and bolted the last things to the motor.  It’s now basically ready to go in (sans needing a few sensors off the 1.6 motor that’s still in the car) so I should probably talk about it a little bit.

The motor is, actually, a somewhat mild build.  It started life as a running-but-smoking 99 motor that I got from Panic Motorsports (who are awesome, by the way.)  I was planning on just throwing the motor into the car as it sat so that I could start figuring out the EMS/wiring harness situation piecemeal, but as the schedule continued to push back, I decided to just go ahead and do the full build straight off the bat.  So, I gave it to Eastside Machine, the guy who’s done all my motor work for the last several years, and got it back with a bunch of nice new goodies installed.  I had them assemble the short block and head separately, and I took it from there.

For the block, I replaced the oiling system with 2002+ parts.  The later motor has a better windage tray/support plate, and the later oil pan fits it without modification, so I just used both. The new oil pump theoretically flows a little better as well.  I got some unnamed H-beam rods from 949 Racing and paired them with the crazy Wiseco pistons that Flyin Miata sells.  I’m using a stock crankshaft, wrapped in ACL Main and Rod bearings, held in with ARP main studs.  The full rotating assembly was balanced, then the clutch/pressure plate were balanced to it separately.

The head is pretty mild as well.  I’m basically just using everything Supertech sells.  1mm oversize valves all around, with their spring/retainer/seat combo pack.  Stock cams should make the wide torqueband I want, but can be reevaluated later if necessary.  I’m keeping the 99 puck-on-bucket shim system for now.  I’m only planning on spinning this thing to 8000 RPMs (for now?) so nothing too intense is necessary on that end of things under the current plans.  My main question is if the head will flow well enough without doing any other major modifications for the amount of air I’m going to be cramming through it, but there are several other people on MiataTurbo that are making similar power, with less built motors, so I’m hopefully safe.

I’m doing a coolant reroute (using the BEGi kit, flipped around), so I’m using a 99 head gasket (which has the fully spread-out coolant passages), and holding everything together with ARP head studs.  I’m going to be using a half-width radiator on the driver’s side, so I’m running the coolant re-route down the hot side of the motor, which will keep all of the cooling system on that half of the car.  The intercooler will be on the passenger half of the radiator opening, so that can keep all of the forced induction goodies on that half of the engine bay.  Hopefully this will keep everything as clean as possible in what I’m sure will be a crammed full engine bay…

For fueling I’m running the M-Tuned dual feed fuel rail with 725cc Injector Dynamics injectors with an adjustable rising rate fuel pressure regulator.  The M-Tuned rail intersected the valve cover, so I had to grind down the tips a few mm so that it would clear.  I also had to grind away a bit of the third rib of the upper half of the 99 intake manifold so that it would clear the rail.  Nothing too major, but it all needed to happen or else it wouldn’t bolt in and tighten.  Finally, I’m doing the standard Toyota 1ZZ coil-on-plug conversion (you can see it in the picture of the motor at the top of the post).  I got the very nicely designed mounting plate from Trackspeed, which made mounting easy.  These will be sparking through the NGK race plugs that Flyin Miata sells.  I’m trying out gapping them at 0.030 to begin with, and we’ll go from there.

As you’ve probably noticed, for the first phase here, the motor is going in without a supercharger.  This will let me try to work kinks out of the wiring harness and get the EMS up and running happily without also dealing with forced induction.  Corky Bell is fabbing me up a custom intake manifold with integrated supercharger mount (see pic at right), but it’s unclear how long that’s going to take before it’s ready.  That’s the vision, though.

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Delays and the Front Harness

Posted in Delays, Engine Conversion, Lightening, Traction Control, Wiring Harnesses on January 17, 2012 by David de Regt

The story of this build has mostly been things taking longer than I thought they would.  I was expecting problems like things being more expensive than I thought they’d be, but I wasn’t actually expecting so many things to just take exponentially more time than I was hoping.  Almost every part of the project is a month behind at this point.  Some of these things aren’t a big deal, but others are.

  • The Quaife gearset I ordered still hasn’t left the UK yet, and won’t until at least friday of this week, despite that it should have been in the builder’s hands almost 2 weeks ago according to their initial promises
  • Scope creep attacked the uprights project like a banshee.  We kept wanting to measure more things, causing me to order new subframes, uprights, control arms, etc.  We finally got everything bought and in my garage, and at this point Brian has most of the parts measured, but we were hoping to be engineering the manufacturing process by this point.  This has also delayed figuring out the shock/spring/bar package that we’re going to use, but we have plans to powwow Wednesday night to determine the CG of a stock Miata as well as start doing the math on the suspension package.  This may be further delayed by the impending Snowpocalypse, though.
  • Corky Bell is an awesome old guy who knows way too much about superchargers and Miatas in general.  Unfortunately, he’s also busy and very very slow.  So, I’m still in final stages of discussing/negotiating what he’s going to fabricate for me.  I think we’re nearly done, and he can start making stuff soon, but I was hoping to have an intercooler/radiator/intake manifold setup by now, instead of them all still being discussed.  It means that I’m going to be getting the car running again on the 99 motor on the stock intake manifold before I even start messing with the supercharger aspect. (not the worst thing in the world)
  • Getting all the right parts together for the motor took a while.  The bearings didn’t come with thrust washers, so we had to source those; then we had a debate over what to do for valve locks; the windage tray didn’t quite fit right and needed to be modified; etc.  Mid-build, I decided to switch to doing the coolant re-route, so I had to order a new head gasket.  Fortunately, the builder says he’ll finish the motor sometime today, so I can hopefully pick it up and finish the assembly today or tomorrow.

The biggest fairly unexpected delay so far is how long it took to do the front harness correctly.  The front harness in the Miata is what manages the vast majority of the electronics in the car.  It connects the ECU to the fusebox, the dash, the engine sensors, etc.  The pictures to the right shows its extent.  It’s huge, heavy, and invades every portion of the front half of the car.  As it came out of the car, it weighed 17.76 lbs.  And, as it turns out, I was going to change a huge portion of it.

There were several main goals with the harness modification:

  1. Remove everything allowed to under the rule set to save weight/complexity
  2. Convert from the 90-00 to the 01-05 ABS system
  3. Convert a bunch of sensors from the 1.6 motor to the 99 stuff (cam/crank angle sensor breakout, knock sensor) and other applicable sensors too (adding wideband oxygen sensor)
  4. COP (Coil-On-Plug) ignition conversion
  5. Convert to speed density air metering (MAP/IAT instead of AFM or MAF)

I figured, “how hard can this be?  It’s just a bunch of soldering.”  Well, kinda.  Mazda kinda makes their harnesses like tanks.  Most wiring in the harness is covered with a thick layer of electrical tape, most of which is then covered in a plastic stretchy loom protector, which is then coated in a final layer of electrical tape to hold the slide-on loom together (and presumably to further protect it).  Good for the car, bad for making it easy to hack apart.  It took a couple hours alone to safely remove some of the coating for the first parts I wanted to attack.  From there, the scope of the problem laid before me became more clear.  Once the basic stuff was stripped, I laid the harness out in the general pattern that it sits in the car and got to work ID’ing wires and sensors.  The picture at right is the middle of that process.

After spending at least 20 hours on this damn thing, my conclusion is that either the harness was designed in 4-5 successive stages by a bunch of people as they added more things to the car and moved them around, or the one person who designed it all at once is an idiot.  There are multiple large gauge wires that split off from a source and then run the entire length of the harness, only to split somewhere else again and go to 2 different sensors, there are wires that go long distances only to split and then come back another long distance.  So, just when you think it’s safe to snip a wire out, because you’re near the end of a harness strand, and you don’t need that sensor anymore, make sure to unravel the coating all the way up the harness to the end.  A distressing amount of the time, the harness will split further up, and a smaller gauge wire will share the signal and travel back out the harness to another place, and you would have hosed that other poor sensor.  After realizing all of this, things went much slower.  On the bright side, it meant that anything open under the rules (anything powertrain-related, and some other stuff) I could tear apart and redo properly.  I have a crate half full of just wires I tore out of the original harness that I don’t need anymore.

It pretty much just took forever.  There were hours of researching, poring over and comparing parts diagrams for a 91, 93, 99, and 05.  I had to make some executive decisions that may come back to bite me.  For example, the 01+ ABS unit just has some power leads that don’t exist on the old car, and aren’t really documented where they come from on the wiring diagrams I was able to find, so I guessed.  It also has a bunch of large gauge ground wires that go into the main harness on the 05 that have no counterpart at all on the 1.6, so I decided to do what the 1.6 ABS unit has and made a giant ring terminal out of all the grounds, which will bolt to the chassis, and I’ll just go ahead and pray.  I also realized, the day I needed some sensor connectors, that the 05 front harness didn’t include most of the engine sensors, so I needed to buy new connectors in a hurry.  Flyin Miata then sent me a wrong connector which took a little while to sort out.  Lots of little delays like that happened.  In the end, I learned a lot, and I tried to be really careful with all of my connections, since, once this is all in the car, debugging anything that I may have screwed up is almost impossible without tearing the entire front half of the car apart again and starting over.

The harness is almost done at this point, as the picture to the right shows.  The loop of whiteish wires at the center are the cam/crank sensor wires, and the coiled red/black wire are the IAT sensor, since I have no idea where I’m going to put it yet (we haven’t finalized an intake manifold setup.)  It’s 12.2 lbs right now, which is probably the lowest it will be.  I’m waiting to get the motor back from the builder so that I see exactly where the cam and crank angle sensors are, so that I can measure how long to make the wires to get to them, but the wires are run to approximately where they need to go, and are several feet longer than they could possibly need to be, so it’s only a few minutes more soldering from here.  The Race Logic traction control box just showed up today as well, so that needs to be spliced into the harness, but that’s pretty straight forward as well.  Once that’s all done, I’ll re-tape and loom everything again.  There’s lots of ways to interpret the rules, but I’m trying to take the conservative route and will probably end up massively over-looming it.

It feels really good to finally have the hard parts done, and I actually have a decent amount of confidence that I did it correctly.  I’ll still be white-knuckling it when I go to start the car, as I rewired almost every single sensor that the engine uses to run, and the fueling and ignition systems will be completely different than stock as well, all running on an AEM EMS that I’ve never touched before.  I’m sure that will be a delightful evening of swearing.

Updates should be coming more fast and furious-style now.  Things are finally falling into place in a more rapid fashion.  I get the motor today or tomorrow morning, tomorrow we measure the CG of the stock car for some suspension calculations, and once we do that I can tear the new car apart.  I got the car to pass emissions, which was a lot of fun since the car came with an exploded catalytic converter and a dead O2 sensor.  Finally, I got word from the Oregon DMV that they’ve “processed” a title and it’s in the send queue.  Between those two things, I’m good to dig in.

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