Wow, I took a sabbatical from the forum and missed the start of a super clean build! I love the attention to detail. I wish the background of my pictures looked so clean! I guess I need to put more effort into that if I want actually nice pictures.

I've just completed a rebuild of my NB2 engine as well, and I've got an MK60 unit in front of me to reverse engineer some of the mounting details. Seems like we're on the same track in many ways.

If your username has any relation to ones you've used elsewhere, and you're local to NC, is it possible we met at VIR at that season opening event back in 2024 with the horrid weather?

 

Yep, that's me! That black car is retired to street duty and this blue money pit is taking its place on track eventually.

mk60: I recently picked up a Craftworks bracket and plan to attach that to my printed mount. Link to printed mount by Yani05. I don't remember if I've mentioned it in this thread, but I have the Happy Cactus conditioner and stock NB rear wheel speed sensors. The MR2 Spyder hubs for the Keisler setup have built in speed sensors up front. The last piece of the puzzle I'm trying to track down is factory NB brake hardline for the run to the back of the car. (fuel as well, I'm trying to convert from returnless to return style fuel system). I'm struggling on this one and may have to resort to doing it manually with bulk hardline.

As for the other social media websites, I got a weird notification from that orange "heart of the internet" site early last year that my account had been affected by bot activity and it was promptly closed/banned. I tried emailing the admins without any response, so I made a different account. I'm still active there but less frequently and with a different user name. Pretty annoying. Realizing how fickle that website is and how quickly all my build progress could be erased by technical glitches is a big part of why I started documenting here.

Anyway, be glad you weren't at VIR in 2023. We had snow!

 

Haha, I'm was there in 2023 as well! Just on Saturday before it snowed. The next day me and my buddy looked at the weather and were thankful we only did one day.

I'm planning on using the same bracket. I just reverse engineered the Craftworks bracket based on the Yani file. My stubborn insistence on being as cheap and DIY as possible keeps me from buying a very nicely executed and well priced bracket, at least for now while test fitting. You'll almost surely beat me to getting it in there so I look forward to seeing how it goes for you.

 

Thanks for the links on the MK60e5 brackets!

 

I spent some time reverse engineering the Craftworks bracket bolt pattern from that file before I found this remix that includes a replacement for the aluminum bracket. I haven't tried it yet. Also, Engineered2win was kind enough to post the solid file the other day at my request on thingiverse if you'd rather do some reworking of the original.

Miata Teves MK60 ABS Mount by Davidss | Download free STL model | Printables.com

Looking forward to seeing how you two handle the other parts of the install. I don't like the grinding down of a trigger wheel to press on the Chrysler tone rings, and based on the cleanliness of both of your builds, I don't imagine I'm alone in that.

 

Oh, I've beat you to that part. I already re-modeled that part by Davidss - you may find that their model positions the ABS pump just a bit too far towards the rear of the car. I moved the ABS pump 3mm forward to clear the stamped part of my NB firewall. I'm not sure about the NA firewall. If you look up a couple posts, you'll see it there in yellow holding up my ABS pump. Compared to the official craftworks bracket, craftworks mounts it another ~1mm forward of where I ended up. Nothing fancy, just overlaid my design on top of the davidss stl and moved stuff around until it fit where I wanted. It should take you only a few minutes, but if you want my fusion360 model file, shoot me your email address and I can send it to you as a starting point. I don't have any file sharing accounts because I don't feel like I'm a worthy designer for that.


wheel speeds: Fronts are easy; integrated into the MR2 hubs. Toyota seems to have used the same electrical connectors on many models - same wheel speed sensor pigtails as the Tacoma. I have pigtails for those already. For the rear, I have the Volvo tone rings suggested by Keisler, Dorman p/n 917-553. These press onto non-ABS axles and are only a few dollars each. For brake lines, I was planning to get another factory rear hardline but as I mentioned before, that is proving difficult. I think I'm just going to run all new line myself. That shouldn't be too bad, I don't think. I have new fuel lines on the way now so I'll tackle all my plumbing items at once.

I emailed HC to confirm that their box is safe to mount in the engine bay vs being inside the cabin with me. I'm still waiting on a response from them. If it's okay to mount in the engine bay, I think I have space to rubber mount it over the fender on the two threaded mounts where the factory evap stuff was previously mounted. I'd like to mount it on the firewall, but space over there is filling up fast.

 

I didn't do the hard work of modeling it, I just spent too much time searching the internet while enjoying a beverage one night!

Thanks for the tractive force calculator. That has been uh... a dangerous enabler already.

EDIT: spelling. I'm are an engineer. I don't spell things gud.

 

Long overdue update here. As always, please don't judge my horribly disorganized garage. This car has really fueled my ADHD bursts of hyperfocus/clutter and it's showing badly.

My sloppy engine refresh is "done". The head is finished and installed on the block, engine is timed, valve clearances adjusted. I got a big batch of accessories delivered which I need to mount, then it's ready to go into the car whenever I get around to it. The head is completely stock porting and cams with very gentle valve lapping to confirm good contact - nothing fancy at all. I did add some Volvo valve springs while I was in there and I removed the accessory water port/blocked it with a big pipe thread plug.






I've been iterating through a couple concepts for mounting my Happy Cactus ABS signal converter and have finalized that. This is ASA with compression limiter sleeves and heat-set threaded inserts. It bolts to the factory threads for the washer bottle, it also bolts through an existing firewall hole with the removal of a small grommet. Very sturdy, very happy with the result. The blue also looks quite nice with 10AE, IMO. The HC box is tilted a few degrees away from the firewall and the wiring sockets are just barely in the gap between wiper motor and relay mounts/fuse box. Like a glove. ASA softens around 90C, so this will be fine. No need for fancy carbon-nylon here.

Did I mention I upgraded my printer situation from my old Monoprice Maker Select 2 to a lightly used Bambu X1C with AMS, AMS HT, and EIBOS heated AMS lid? No? well I did. No regrets, it's a fantastic machine and I should have made the jump long before now. It's wonderful and I've been having a ton of fun with it.


I'm still messing around with the mk60e5 mount, so that's still PETG. I've modified the Yani file with more threaded mounts - I'm debating using it for mounting other things since it's a known quantity. Fusion is pretty good at modifying stp files and that's really convenient.


Final item; I don't remember if I mentioned this yet or not, but I had a friend weld in some Mazda Motorsports reinforcement gussets on my front subframe for cheap insurance long term.

 

I can't say I have experience with anything else, but the user friendliness of the Bambu units is the reason I have a 3d printer. That mounting bracket looks so nice!

Those welds look a lot cleaner than mine, done upside down with the subframe still on the car.

 

Yeah, those brackets look really nice. I'm still plugging away with a refurbished Ender 3 KE, which for $150 has been pretty great. A bit of tuning for some filaments, but overall pretty easy to get usable parts from.

Have you had any warping/sagging with the PETG in the engine bay? I've had a couple small brackets warp, but I think they were too thin and in locations that were too hot.

 

It's night and day difference! Even the simple stuff like leveling and Z-offset and flow calibration. All is taken care of. The printer went from being the hobby to now being a tool.
90% of the time, it's effortless. The occasional failures/issues I've had have all been related to filament feeding/changeouts when a roll is getting low. A 1.5" ball bearing in each spool for some weight seem to help significantly in that regard.

My old monoprice was a similar bed slinger to your Ender. Yours probably has better firmware and build plate than mine had, but even then... the new generation of printers are what happens when you take cellphone nerds and fund them for making a printer. Automation, consistency, correction for system vibration, etc. is all taken care of. I never have to level the bed, adjust the Z offset if the previous part was too aggressive during removal, etc. They even go so far as to run the steppers out of phase to reduce NVH! If you have any thoughts of upgrading, the $500-600 price point is really good right now. If I hadn't fallen onto this used X1C, I would have been getting a P2S, FWIW. And if you're the type who is concerned about the Chinese government watching your prints, you can use LAN mode and Dev mode to keep the printer from reporting back to the mother server (only a few drawbacks to this, but it works well). The speed from a core-XY system instead of a bed slinger is also incredible. 3 months in, my brain is still getting used to how fast this thing runs without sacrificing quality, and I've slowed it down from all the stock material profiles a bit!

RE: PETG in engine bay. I wouldn't recommend it. A few years ago before I had an enclosure, I made a PETG mount to fix my racebox mini to my roll bar with a rubber strap. The literal first day in summer where I forgot to remove the mount and drove to work and parked the car in the sun, the mount bent. Combination of soft PETG and loaded part with the stretchy rubber mounting straps. I made it in ASA immediately after getting an enclosure and that ASA mount has handled southeast summers ever since. Picture of the mount in question. This is the ASA version, printed on my old enclosed Monoprice. It's been here since about 2023 in full sun and heat.


The only reason I currently have PETG parts anywhere on the car is because it's cheap for prototyping and the Bambu makes decent parts with it, despite the annoying stickiness. I used to avoid it like the plague, but it's currently a few bucks cheaper than PLA so I've been using it for prototyping and don't feel bad if I burn through several revisions of a part in the process. Just to make that happy cactus mount, I made about 6 rev's each of 2 different design concepts, plus several modified Yani mounts for my ABS unit before that. I've gone through just shy of 2 spools of filament in the last 3 weeks ...for a total of $20, lol.

Random thought for other peoples info; when I was designing these parts, I used compression limiters for the first time. I used this design guideline from Spirol and found it helpful. They call out diameters, chamfers, base circles for distributing stress in the part, etc. I found 6x10mm compression limiters on ebay, but you can also find them various places on the internet.

 

Thankfully I haven't had to deal with Z offsets or bed leveling either. I've heard the terms in reference to the older printers, but this one seems to do all of that automatically. I run a calibration on it ever once in a while (when I forget to disable it), which I assume is the same as bed leveling, but aside from taking a bit of time it's pretty seemless.

I've had pretty decent success with PETG in the car, but not really with loaded parts, just some small brackets and housings. I've added some new parts recently though (camera mount and a gauge housing), and I'm curious to see how they hold up being in locations that will be exposed to more direct sunlight.

Once I start seeing more of the limitations of the filaments I can currently print I'll upgrade. Thankfully with PETG it doesn't seem to snap and fail completely, just warp a bit. Not ideal, but probably better than complete failure in most cases.

 

Saving that for future reference. I used some ABS for a coolant hose support on my reroute in a worst case scenario - mounted right on the engine, with no compression limiter. I knew it would fail eventually, but I didn't have time to figure anything else out and wanted a proof of concept. I'm surprised it held on as long as it did (less than 2,000 miles, including 1h45m on track)

 

That's not bad for a quick trial. if you want real test data from 3D printed filaments, check out Igor over at the mytechfun youtube channel. He has a patreon and one of his membership benefits is access to his material test data. I am a member for $1/month just to have access to his spreadsheet of every material he's tested. He tests deflections, impact tests, softening, etc. etc. etc. for everything he can get his hands on. For contact with the head, At minimum I'd want annealed PET-CF or PPA-CF. Or just... send your design to a cheap China-based machining supplier and have it cut out of aluminum and never think about it again. Igor's Patreon account

 

I need some feedback from the brain trust. I'm thinking through my cooling system. I made some doodles to help communicate my thoughts.

I'm planning to use an oil-water heat exchanger. So far I'm looking at Laminova cores and OEM Porsche cores because those are relatively known quantities thanks to coworker experiences. Laminova can be spec'd for either the main 1.25" hose or the heatercore 5/8" hose. Porsche is only intended for a 5/8" hose, IIRC.

Here's the two options I'm considering. I have not yet messed around with any estimated flow rates or temps. Assume bleed nipples wherever needed to purge air. Assume radiator will be at least minimally ducted and hood will be vented. Assume I can extend wiring for coolant temp sensors, etc. All that good stuff. I've come to these two options because they allow oil heat exchanger placement to minimize how long the oil lines will need to be.

• Before anyone suggests an oil-air cooler; thank you for your input, I'm not interested.
• Before anyone suggests oil-water heat exchangers don't work; thank you for your input.

Option A
Kia neck, remote thermostat housing with 11/16" bypass loop, bypass loop goes through both the oil heat exchanger and the defrost, then joins back up with radiator return house and/or mixing manifold

Option B
949 housing, laminova inline with the main 1.25' hose. Bypass loop goes through defrost only. Normal coolant routing other than maybe an aftermarket mixing manifold to get the heater core return hose away from the header.



A Benefit

• oil cooler is active for 100% of operation.
• only 2 total hoses attached to the engine. Would be much easier for engine removal in future.
• would make for some screaming hot defrost
• can work with either an OE cooler or laminova unit
• could maximize the ratio of "controlled loop volume" relative to the total system volume. I suspect this would help with fluctuation across all operating conditions.
• thermostat easily accessible if needed

A drawback

• some extra hoses to route.
• oversizing the oil heat exchanger might result in reduced d_T across the head? But my planned radiator ducting will likely be acceptable for total heat rejection here. I suspect it's a wash between these two layouts and this isn't a real issue.

B benefit

• Known quantity
• simplest hose routing
• I already have a qmax housing on the shelf
• no downside to oversizing the oil heat exchanger. Would make a bigger d_T across the radiator for efficiency and wouldn't complicate the T_in for the engine

B drawback

• oil heat exchanger only active when thermostat is open
• thermostat still annoyingly on back of head if it ever needs replaced

 

I would vote for B; much simpler/cleaner, proper t-stat heat-up times, proper coolant flow through the oil heat exchanger, and far more benefits than drawbacks as you already listed.

 

I want to challenge this statement. The entire factory bypass will be taken from the thermostat housing. The amount of time for water to flow from the head to a thermostat 16" away through a ~5/8" hose is what... 4 seconds at most? We aren't talking about the old M Tuned remote thermostat which relied on a 1/8" cheater hole to get hot fluid to the thermostat.

Also this part:
You're counting total benefits and drawbacks as if they have equal weighting.
The oil heat exchanger only being active when the thermostat is open in B vs active 100% of the time in A is a really significant difference that I need to wrap my head around.

EDIT: To be fair, you are right. The known/solved solution is worth a lot. I think I can run a little extra hose on the defrost loop and get a hybrid setup between A & B with the hardware I already have. I'm converting to COP and removing EGR, which opens up a good deal of space behind the head for such things.

 

Fair points! Somehow I did not get that "the entire factory bypass will be taken from the thermostat housing", my bad. I am designing my own reroute/t-stat housing (that places the t-stat on the intake side of the head for serviceability) with that exact design principle in mind. Goal is to aid t-stat heat-up, as a dead head column of water with a tiny bypass will take significant time to warm up. Then again, I tend to overcomplicate things even when not needed, so don't be me

 

What I did. https://www.miataturbo.net/engine-pe...1/#post1675774

 

Hey! I've seen your posts about your laminova cooler in my research, it's cool to see you chime in here. If you don't mind, I have some questions:

• Just to confirm, you're using your cooler on the "cold" main hose?
• that looks like a C43, but what's the length?
• are you willing to take some more photos of how everything fits? that corner of the engine bay is awkward with the steering/hose/sway bar
• what do your peak water temps look like vs what temperature is your thermostat?
• what does your oil pressure drop look like and what size AN hoses are you running?
• how did you select a size? what flows and temps did you use for estimation?

I was thinking of mounting on the "hot" main hose pre-radiator and going up a size because

• that would let me shorten the oil lines to minimize pressure drop
• easy access to the 1.25" hose up there
• I am switching to return fuel system which means the mess of NB fuel dampers is no longer taking up space inside the shock tower. Plenty of mounting points on that side.