csgd

Hello all, I own a 1994 black Miata. I received this car in a trade 3 years ago at this point, and it had an old bucket seat, poorly mounted harness,
and a tired engine at 190k miles. After about a year of ownership, I decided it would be fun to have more power, so I installed a mspnp2 in preparation. I realized this power issue even more after I
drove at my first drift event, where I couldn't spin 2nd gear.

Fast forward to about 5 months ago, and I had acquired all the needed parts to make boost and put the manifold on.


After figuring out how to make the intercooler lines connect, and making all the turbo connections, it was together and running well. At this point the car felt amazing, and it felt like a huge
accomplishment to have done this.


Unfortunately, this engine was tired. At this point, there was about 210k miles on it, and I know they were very hard miles. The car was blowing blue smoke under high boost, and going through
about 1 quart of oil every other day of hard driving. The leak-down and compression tests both pointed to worn rings on the #3 cylinder. I felt defeated for a few days, but then luckily had enough
saved up to buy a new engine. I bought this 100k mile 94 1.8 engine from Redline, and proceeded to do all the regular maintenance like timing belt, cam and crank seals, rear main seal, spark
plugs, and I cleaned some gunk out of the exhaust valve ports.


At this point things were looking very good. All I had left to do was buy a Qmax coolant reroute, and a supermiata clutch. Unfortunately, my current engine had other ideas. The keyway holding
the timing gear and crank pulley on decided to give out, which left my crank pulley and gear with about a full inch of play to each side when wiggling. This also caused a metal knocking noise
when in low rpms, and when letting out the clutch. All of this combined with the oil smoking issue meant that I had to swap this engine in quick before an upcoming drift event (less than 2 weeks
away). Since it was such short notice, I was unable to do the reroute, or new clutch. So this engine went in without either of them, reusing my stock 1.8 clutch.


This was actually the hardest part, setting the engine into its home. I decided to pull the engine separate from the transmission, so it was a little more tough to line the engine up to the trans.
After a long day of working on the miata, the engine was looking good in the engine bay.


Sitting on stiffer engine mounts, new rad hoses, fresh engine seals, and having the turbo on it felt good. Fast forward to the next day, I had buttoned it all up
and gave it a first start.


It smoked a lot for a good 15 minutes, and was sitting at a nice 3k idle. Ended up forgetting to connect the brake booster hose, after that was done the idle sat at 800-900 rpm.
After a short cruise, nothing overheated, nothing leaked, and it didn't smoke any more. I've been driving it and touching up the tune for about a week now, and all is still well!
I'm very much looking forward to my upcoming drift event next week, crossing my fingers that it keeps going this well.






**Car is running at 10psi on an ISR T25 turbo, stock internals, and a homemade tune with a very conservative spark map, because I really don't want to blow it up. Thank you
to everyone that took the time to read this, I'm very happy with the car's power right now, I couldn't ask for anything more from a stock motor.

UPDATE: Have added flowforce 640cc injectors and tuned them, car now runs beautifully and the fuel system is less stressed. Plenty of fuel to go around

DNMakinson

iTrader: (3)

In what part of the country do you live? Looks like a nice little workshop.

Good that you finally started a build thread.

DNM

csgd

I live in mass, New England. Also thanks its actually my dads shop, luckily I get to use it since I work for him. I definitely should have started a thread sooner, but it's still far from done, so we shall see what comes next.