Headlights

Posted in Headlights, Lightening on February 29, 2012 by David de Regt

I figured I’d make a quick post about the headlights I whipped up.  I’ve been trying to order the ORACLE headlight kit from GoMiata for months, but they kept jerking me around saying it was going to be in stock in a couple days, order it now, yadda.  After that happening a few times I got tired of it and cancelled the order entirely.  It was an ugly kit anyway, and 600$ + shipping, so I figured I could do better, for cheaper.

I talked to The Retrofit Source and told them what I was looking for — a high and low beam real projector unit, as simple and lightweight as possible.  They suggested their Morimoto Mini H1 Bi-Projector, which is 120$ for a pair.  It’s made to go with xenon bulbs, but with a little shaving a normal halogen H1 bulb would fit, he said.  Works for me.  I ordered a pair of those, a 35$ relay harness to split up the stock high/low beam into the different wiring I’d need to power the bi-projector, and a pair of cheapo HELLA H1 bulbs off Amazon, and waited a week.

When everything arrived, I spent a surprisingly short amount of time snipping some extra metal off the H1 bulbs, removing one of the screws from the backing plate of the projector, and the projector went together and powered nicely off a 12V battery I had kicking around.  The relay harness arrived shortly afterward, and I made a simple bracket out of some strap steel (for now — I’ll make a real bracket out of thicker aluminum when I have some more time) and tested it all out.  Everything, surprisingly enough, worked perfectly the first time.

I bolted it all to the car to make sure it’d fit exactly where I wanted it to (below the stock roofline), and checked the lighting pattern.  Everything was great.  0.8 lbs per side for the projector setup, and I pared the relay harness down to 0.6 lbs, giving me a total of 2.2 lbs all in for the headlight setup, which is an excellent savings over the 19.2 lbs of the stock setup, and actually much brighter lighting with a better cutoff to boot.  As part of the carbon fiber hood (which arrives next week), I’m getting some lexan pieces to go into the stock headlight location to protect the headlights, and everything will be complete.

Leave A Comment »

It’s Alive!

Posted in ABS, Engine, Subframes, Wiring Harnesses on February 20, 2012 by David de Regt

Yesterday was an important milestone: the new engine fired up in the car for the first time.  I’ve been out of town a fair bit of the last 2 weeks, but I’ve been spending a ton of time on the car, so quite a bit has occurred anyway.

As planned, on the 9th my dad came over and we tore everything remaining out of the car.  The next day, I started working on the ABS changeout.  The first step was removing the old brick, which was pretty painless.  To keep from losing too much fluid, I just threw the lines into the new brick in the right places while I figured out what to do next.  The lines happily went in with the brick facing backwards, but that wasn’t really what I wanted.  I designed the wiring harness to have the brick facing the stock direction, so I needed to fix that.

Talking to Doug, the stock lines should take the amount of abuse necessary to move everything where I needed, so I spent a while slowly massaging the lines into where I wanted them to mount and was fairly happy with the result.  After the supercharger setup is in place, and I know where everything will be in final shape, I’ll cut into the lines and shorten them to be only as long as they need to be, but for now I’ve cirlycued everything to try to keep it as compact as possible while keeping stock line lengths in case I need to move it down the line.  I took the stock 05 bracket, lopped off some unneeded tabs, drilled some new holes into the bottom to utilize some existing threaded holes in the NA chassis, and mounted it up solidly.  This should be about as secure as the stock 05 mounting.

Next, I started on the NB subframe.  I’m switching to the NB front subframe for the better suspension pickup geometry and better steering rack.  Unfortunately, I didn’t realize just how many parts are involved with this.  I had the rack and the subframe, not realizing that a ton of parts changed compatibility between the generations as well.  So, at this point, I just swapped out the subframe and ordered a bunch more parts from Panic Motorsports and moved onto the wiring harnesses.

I pretty heavily modified the transmission harness.  The stock harness runs a battery cable all the way down the PPF to the trunk.  I’m switching to a 2.5 lb LiFe EVO2 battery, and there was more than 2.5 lbs of wiring in the harness that I could eliminate by simply moving the battery up to the engine bay, and also remove the extra native resistance of the super long cable run, to maximize the starting effectiveness of the tiny battery.  As a result, I removed everything rear of the reverse sensor hookups and ran just a couple feet of the battery cable up to by where the stock fusebox goes, where I’m now mounting the battery.  I made some quick battery and ground cables and I was good to go.

Next the front harness went in.  I wasn’t sure how everything was going to line up, so at this point I just threw it in the engine bay, to make sure it lined up with the transmission harness, that it could reach the ABS unit, and that I didn’t miss anything obvious.  Surprisingly, everything seemed fine.  Wiring is everywhere, but who cares — it’s run, and, more importantly, so far everything’s happy.  I tried hooking up the ignition switch, turning the key, and everything made the appropriate relay noises it should have, and nothing blew up.  Taking that as a good sign, I moved on.

After everything was done in the car that I wanted with the motor out, I finished putting the 1.6 sensors I need (coolant temp, fan switch, oil pressure) onto the 99 motor, added the clutch and flywheel, and put it in the car.  Corky still hasn’t finished the radiator, so for now I had to ghetto rig up some radiator lines to get everything to line up temporarily.  I got that all working, hooked up all the sensors, filled all the fluids, and tried test firing the fuel pump to see if the fuel system would hold pressure.  Then I got a face full of fuel…

I’m using the M-Tuned dual feed fuel rail, anticipating vastly increased fuel flow over the itty bitty stock rail (on the supercharger setup, not right now).  It comes with a bunch of lines and fittings and adapters.  I was hoping that them being NPT would be good enough to seal, but I was very wrong.  So, on the first spot that leaked, I tried sealing it with Permatec high temp thread sealant, as suggested by several people on multiple message boards.  I let it cure for 24 hours, per the PDF on Permatec’s site, then tried firing the pump again.  That spot sealed up just fine, letting the fuel gush forth from 3 other spots simultaneously once pressure built up.  Talked to a few more people and read more online, and everything pointed to getting yellow double-density teflon tape.  Went to ACE Racing, picked up a roll of it, and re-built the entire rail setup using three full wraps of it on every fitting.  Reassembled everything and fired the fuel pump.  Everything sealed!  For about 10 seconds.  Then it started pouring forth through the spot that I sealed with the Permatec goop.  I pulled that fitting out, cleaned everything off, let it dry, and then resealed that spot with the yellow tape.  Test fired the pump again, only to realize that, now that everything was sealing, the pressure gauge on my adjustable fuel pressure regulator wasn’t moving because I had it hooked up backwards.  I hooked that back up the right way, started the fuel pump again, and was able to actually adjust my base fuel pressure to 50 psi and sit there and watch it pump.  Next.

At this point, new steering rack supplies showed up.  The weirdly sized stock M12x1.25 fine thread bolts and a hard line and power steering pump from an NB arrived from Panic Motorsports, and I quickly installed it all, hoping to put the steering issues to rest.  I got the power steering lines all hooked up and swapped the pump to the NB pump, and the whole system sealed and hooked up properly.  However, I then learned that the NB rack has a bigger steering column output pinion.  More research showed that I needed a new U-joint and a new intermediate steering shaft off the NB to go with the parts.  A call to Panic got those on the way, and, lacking any more drivetrain stuff to do, I went back to the motor.

I’m using the AEM plug and play EMS for 90-95 Miatas.  I bought it for several reasons, not least of which because Emilio touted its ability to run the 99 crank and cam angle sensors, allowing me to run sequential injection and direct fire sequential ignition.  However, it has no out of the box ability to do any of these things, as I quickly discovered.  I spent several hours saturday and sunday hunched in the driver’s side of the cabin, laptop on my lap, swearing at the internet, and periodically causing ear-splitting backfires as I tried to make the damn thing work.  Finally, sunday afternoon, after trying several combinations of things that sounded like it kind of wanted to start, I tried doubling the fuel map (I’d scaled it up from the stock injectors to my new injector sizes,) and suddenly the engine roared to life at 3000 RPMs for a second or two and shut off.  After futzing with the fuel map for a bit, I was able to get it to reliably start and idle at whatever idle value I wanted.  The next step with the motor is road tuning the fuel map, which is going to require waiting until the steering components get in this week, but I’m glad that everything is running exactly how it should.

I spent this morning cleaning up the spaghetti wiring mess, fixing the tach (required soldering in a 1k resistor between power and the tach lead), making a bracket to hold the fusebox into the corner where I want it, and generally zip tying everything down to keep it tidy and from moving.  This afternoon I’m going to work on installing the AIM EVO4 data system and getting it to talk to the AEM EMS, then replace my dash with the AIM.

The race transmission is being rebuilt as we speak at Advanced Autosport, and should ship to me by the end of the week, so I’m using the transmission that came in the car until the new one shows up.  Doug is still working on the rear end swap (putting the diff/ring+pinion in, and adding abs rings to the non-abs axles), so I’m on the stock diff (haven’t even looked to see if it’s a VLSD) until that’s done as well.  Axis Power Racing has sent the seats to the upholsterer and should be getting them back in a day or two, at which point 2 seats, a hood, and fenders will ship out to me, and I should probably end up with them early next week.  So, as things stand right now, next week is looking like when the car will take on semi final shape.  At that point, I can also take the car out on the road and see if this new ABS craziness actually works or not…

Leave A Comment »

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…

Leave A Comment »

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.

Leave A Comment »

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.

Leave A Comment »

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.

Leave A Comment »

General Progress and Engine Harness

Posted in Lightening, Wiring Harnesses on December 23, 2011 by David de Regt

The last couple weeks have largely been spent organizing, cleaning, and selling parts from the old black car.  That took an unexpected amount of time, though I’ve been pleased with the results.  I’ve recouped around 1800$ from parts selling, the frame is gone from my possession, and I still have a couple shelves of stuff left to sell.  The time setback is annoying, as it’s going to be 2012 before I even get into the new car, but everything always goes slow in a car build.  I keep reading Jason Rhoades’ STX build blog and seeing how much worse it could really be.  I’m still waiting on any word back from the Oregon DMV, so the new car’s now just sitting untouched in my garage, waiting for some sign that I do legally own it.

At least some things are still moving forward.  I dropped all of the motor parts off at the machine shop a week ago, so I’ll have a built 99 motor ready to go sometime relatively soon.  I also managed to stumble upon a great deal for Quaife gearsets, so I’ve ordered a set of the wide ratio Quaife gears, which are going to go straight to Advanced Autosports, who will rebuild a 94-97 tranny with them, and I should only be out around 2700$ for what should be a brand new bulletproof gearbox when all is said and done.  The 1.8 rear end is at Chase Race getting the OS Giken differential installed onto a 4.3 ring and pinion and he’s pressing the ABS rings installed onto the axles as well.  So, the non-supercharger-related portions of the drivetrain are coming together nicely.

While waiting for some long-running SQL queries today, I decided to dig into the wiring harnesses a bit.  I have the 93 LE California front harness spread out on the floor, I’ve bought an 05 MSM front harness (for a number of useful connectors), and the 93 LE engine harness is also there.  The front harness is going to be a giant hassle, as I need to tear apart both front harnesses, remove a bunch of wiring from the 93 harness, add a bunch of wiring from the 05 harness, and add more custom wires yet for the coil on plug conversion I’m doing.  I’m still waiting on a shop manual that I ordered to know what the 05 wiring harness consists of, but I thought I should get the ball rolling on the engine harness.

The engine harness usually runs along the intake side of the engine, all the way down the transmission/PPF, into the trunk, where the battery is.  In the factory configuration, there’s a big cable (~6 gauge) that runs the whole length (~10 feet) to connect the battery from the trunk to the electronics in the engine bay.  I’ve picked up a tiny 2.5 lb lithium battery to use for the car, so it seemed silly to bother running a cable that weighs more than that just to run it to the trunk. So, I tore into the harness, removed all the various clips and such, the one airbag sensor wire, and cut off most of the battery wire to the trunk.

I’m not positive where I’m going to mount the battery yet in the engine bay, so I wanted to leave myself a little wiggle room.  There’s probably another half pound that can come off it if I put the battery where I suspect I will (near the fusebox), but that’ll be easy down the line anyway.  The harness went from 5.22 lb down to 2.46 lb.  Easy weight reduction, and simplifying the electrical system while I’m at it.

The next two projects are the front harness and finalizing the radiator/intercooler/intake manifold setup so I can get BEGi started on the fabrication.

Leave A Comment »

Because I Enjoy Making Things Difficult

Posted in Uncategorized on December 7, 2011 by David de Regt

I was really hoping to have interesting, substantive, things to post on the Miata build by now, but unfortunately I really don’t yet.  Things are progressing, but the Davin car episode kind of set everything back a bit.  Hannah says people want to see what it looks like to strip a car down to the frame, so I can show a little of that, for those who haven’t done it before.

Having decided that Davin’s car was toast, the only thing left to do was make what I could of it.  It’s a 93 Limited Edition car (or at least it has that interior and options package), so it has a silly red interior that lots of people seem to go crazy over.  As such, parting it out seemed like the way to go (instead of re-selling it as it sat, that is.)  So, I posted out some feeler threads, and a day or so later found myself with people buying most of the red interior for 650$ + shipping, nearly what I’d paid for the car.  From there, it was time to pull apart the rest of the car and see what we could make of what’s left.  It’d be useful to have a full set of spares for the new build, in addition to lots of extra stuff to measure/futz with in the name of science.

So, last Thursday night, Brian, Duncan, and I suited up and spent a few hours tearing down the car.  After a few hours of work, we had a lot of the important stuff done.  Somehow half the garage was full of crap, but the car didn’t feel much smaller.  We learned some stuff that we weren’t really all that sure of before.  For example, the doors are, in fact, absurdly heavy.  Also that the car’s frame is even more toast than we thought.  When we pulled the stuff out of the front right of the car, it exposed the fact that the frame rail is bent by a good 5-10 degrees off where it’s supposed to be, starting just in front of the wheel centerline.  That’s bad.  In addition, with the rest of the interior removed, Brian noticed that the unibody was bent all the way up the back left side into the passenger compartment.  I guess this poor car had hit some good stuff back in the day.

I spent a bit sorting through stuff and trying to put it all in piles to make room for the next round of parts removal, and then we retired for the night.  Sunday, Brian, Duncan, and I resumed the tearing apart, and actually finished up this time.  Having never torn a car all the way down to the frame before, it was a somewhat interesting experience.  Now a basically blank car sits on jackstands in my garage waiting for Doug Chase to take it away for scrap recyling on Monday.

On the other side of things, I bought a new Miata on Saturday.  As per my usual MO, it’s not actually a cherry, but the car seems really straight (I inspected everything I could, lifting up the car and everything, the VIN checks clean, and all the body panels have original VIN stickers on them).  It also has factory ABS, which will save me a ton of pain in the butt.  The original red paint is pretty faded, but it drove 380 miles back from Roseburg and got 32+ mpg the whole way, without so much as a peep of trouble aside from the nicely out of balance wheels (there was a nice sweet spot around 68-69mph that the vibration disappeared at!)  I’m now in the process of trying to get the title transferred from Oregon.  There’s some annoying nuance here — I bought it from someone who bought it from someone who died and her heirs lost the title, and these guys have been trying to track down the paperwork to get it registered, then had to move to Canada with no warning due to a job relocation.  So, I’ve now submitted a good 15 pages of paperwork to the Oregon DMV today, most of which is notarized death, estate, and inheritance paperwork from the trustee.

I think it’ll all work out, but it’ll be an annoying couple of weeks to wait and see if the DMV balks at my packet.  I’ve called them and they think I’ve submitted everything that I need, but it’s still up to the whim of some poor IQ 80 public servant to wade through the paperwork (with instruction sheet from me) and issue me a new title, which I can then transfer to WA and register the car with.  As soon as that happens, we can tear into the new car with aplomb.

Most of the parts for phase 1 of the build have shown up at this point.  I’m going to bring the motor parts to Eastside Machine this weekend, and he’ll get me a built motor back in a week or so of that.  By that time, hopefully we’ll have the title situation worked out and can swap motors into the new car.  After doing a bunch more research, I decided to switch to an AEM EMS, and sold the Megasquirt for a small loss to do the upgrade, for reasons that I will outline in more detail when I get to tear into the wiring harnesses and explain what all I’m doing in there.  Some of the last stuff I’m still trying to figure out is exactly how the intercooler/radiator arrangement will go, how exactly to mount the supercharger cold-side where I want it, and what transmission/rear end combo I’m going to use.  I still have a few emails out about the last one, whereas the first two mostly need to wait until I get the 99 motor into the car to figure out for sure.

The next update will probably be about the motor build, when all the parts show up in a few days…  Hang in there, something interesting will happen eventually, I promise…

Leave A Comment »

Bent Frame

Posted in Uncategorized on November 27, 2011 by David de Regt

There’s been no updates in a bit because shortly after the last post, while measuring the radiator area for planning the intercooler setup, I noticed that something wasn’t quite right.  More careful inspection revealed that a frame-bending accident had been concealed by a previous owner.  The car had hit something pretty hard with the front right at some point.  The rad support is bent pretty good (how did I not notice that? sigh.) and looking under the headlight reveals pretty extensively crinkled metal.  The lower rad support is bent inward too — the radiator is visibly slightly torqued.  Having found these things, I looked around more and found a pretty malformed area in the left of the trunk as well.   Well, crap.

Having bought it from Davin, I neglected to even bother carfaxing it, but a quick Autocheck report showed terrible things in the car’s past.   In 97 it was declared a total loss, and somehow came out of it without a salvage title, and then had another accident in 04.  I thought briefly about trying to get the important part (front corner) fixed, but quickly decided that was a terrible plan.  Miatas are cheap enough that I might as well get one in definitively good shape to start the build with.  I’m going to be adding enough metal stress to this poor car that I don’t need to start with one that’s been through 2 accidents and a frame jig.  The search began.

The days surrounding Thanksgiving were mostly spent searching all over the country for Miatas.  At this point, if you’ve posted a Miata for sale west of the continental divide anywhere on the net, I’ve seen your post and have probably emailed you for more info if you’re remotely in the right price range.  I spent the first several days narrowing down what I want to one of three things:

  1. 93 CA-emissioned ABS-equipped car — The Unicorn Car.  Very rare combination of equipment.  However, it would mean I would need to transplant zero wiring harnesses from the current car to the new car.  I tracked down several leads only to find people with wrong-year cars or not knowing what ABS was.  At this point, I’ve basically given up on this idea, not that I’d ever placed much hope in it in the first place.
  2. 91-93 ABS-equipped car — Much easier to find.  Preferably with manual windows/mirrors and power steering, but at this point I can drum up the parts to make any option package work.  This means I don’t need to transplant the ABS system, rear body harness, or dash harness.  The front (hard) and injection (easy) harnesses off the current 93 car will need to transplant to retain the sequential injection that I’m using with the RaceLogic traction control setup, but that’s a lot less work than all 4.
  3. Failing that, any light, correct-optioned 1.6 car will work.  However, at this point I’d rather spend a little more money on #2 to save myself a lot of effort and time, and after looking at Miatas, I’m not convinced that the options I’m looking for increase the value of the car at all anyway, so I might as well wait for the right one.

The last few days I’ve been narrowing the search for details on a few cars I’m interested in.  Up until late tonight I had been tracking down one last possible Unicorn car and waiting to hear back from a couple local ads, but then tonight, somehow, everyone got back to me with the info I needed, and I think I found the car I’m going to buy this week.  I’ll update more after I find and purchase a car.  In the meantime, I’m stripping Davin’s car down to the frame and disposing of what’s left.  At least I’ll get a bunch of spares out of this, and I should be able to sell enough parts to break even.  He with weak mind has strong back.  And empty wallet.  Or something.  C’est la vie.

At least research on the project has continued.  I’ve bought a bunch more parts (RaceLogic Traction Control, OS Giken, AIM Evo4/MyChron3, and the rest of the internals/valvetrain for the engine build).  I’ve collected almost all the  subframes/uprights/etc. that we need for the drop spindles project, and that will kick off in the next couple weeks here with measuring everything and generating CAD models to play with geometry and see what the factory gave us.  I’ll post in more detail about some of the choices I’ve made as parts start showing up and they start going onto the car.  For now, I’m focusing on trying to find the right car to keep the project from getting too far behind schedule while also doing whatever research I need to keep that flowing as well.

Leave A Comment »

Cleaning/Lightening Session One

Posted in Lightening on November 19, 2011 by David de Regt

With Hannah off performing maid of honor-type wedding dress moral support duties, I had an afternoon to tear into the car. It had been drying in the garage for a few days, and the disturbing stench had not yet abated, so it was time to dig in.

First step: out came the seats. The car is a 93 LE, so it has all the fancy schmancy leather options and headrest speakers, so the seats were not light (36 and 39 lbs), in addition to vast quantities of free spare change. With the seats out, a cornucopia of delightful things were revealed unto the world. Davin, you are a dirty dirty man. Half an hour later, I’d managed to vacuum the 10 square feet of carpet mostly clean, and recovered around 4$ of spare change, and probably accidentally vacuumed up almost that much again.

Next step: off with the soft top. The top had been pushed through at the base of the rear window, so it wasn’t doing a very good job of sealing the car. Having secured the broken (but sealed) hard top from my rolled Spec Miata car, I no longer had any need to keep the top on it anymore, and so it was time to see what the car was actually going to weigh. Off it came, revealing a soaking wet carpet and insulation layer, so out came all the removable carpeting from the rear deck and behind the seats to hang up to dry. By the time I finished weighing the car, the puddle under one of the pieces had spread to a river flowing under the garage door. I think I found most of the smell (I hope).  Time to let the car continue to dry out for another few days.

After that, I did some little stuff: pulled the A/C expansion chamber box from under the dash, pulled the airbag sensor next to the horn in the engine bay, and then completely emptied out the trunk, which yielded another plethora of oddities (including a few dollars more coins and a pair of warmups).

Not a bad haul for a couple hours of tooling around.  Hannah got home, so I decided to call it quits for the day.  The next steps are going to be a lot lower yield, and require removal of the entire dash (removal of radio/airbag wires from the loom) and probably parts of the engine bay, so I’ll hold off on that for another weekend day with Brian and beer.  The moment of truth had arrived — it was time to weigh the car.  Time to see where we were at.

The corner weights are going to need some serious work.  Not surprisingly, without the soft top and the seats (all of the rear weight) and with a nearly empty gas tank, we’re at 55 frontward weight bias.  Fortunately, most of the remaining weight removal is going to focus on the front half of the car, so we’ll chip away at it.  I realized that was without the steering wheel, so taking into account swapping to the final race wheels/tires and the steering wheel, we’re at 2006 lbs.  This gives us a good starting place for continuing to remove weight for the inevitable weight gain from the supercharger.  Our final min weight is going to be around 2050 lbs, plus or minus a few pounds, depending on final displacement.

A bunch of parts are on the way, but the most important parts are the Megasquirt and the 99 motor, which are both around 2 weeks out.  When those get here in early December, I can get the car running on the full 99 setup and see where we really sit on weight and bias, since I can tear out the current AFM-based intake tract, among other things.  Until then, I’m just going to be working on little weight saving things and gathering random parts on the shelf as they show up.

Leave A Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »