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This thread is about Brad, my special little beater who I beat a little too hard.
Sorry about the sideways pictures, blame mt.net for not uploading them right
Meet Brad. I originally named him that after a salesperson at a dealership I was working at who was a douche. My friends and I decided on that name because; he was old, he was ugly, and we were gonna beat the **** out of him. Also don't be fooled by the pictures, his paint is fucked. It's peeling all around the back and is super faded. The original plan was to rallyx him, but since the nearest rallyx events are kinda far I never really got around to it. I lifted him for a while and just used him as a reliable daily. (Just as a heads up, lifting a miata with stock suspension will **** all your bushings) His engine came out of my donor car for the ls swap. Fast forward to recently and I had noticed his engine was starting to eat a lot of oil. This probably wasn't helped by the fact that early on when I first owned the original car, the engine ran pretty low on oil due to a filter partially backing off. So I started thinking about buying another engine (obviously a 1.8) for when the 1.6 finally **** the bed.
A few months back I bought a 99 engine with 90k on it. Hopefully it's a good engine. Then a while later, I bought a 2002 nb to part out. I thought about keeping the vvt engine but it had 167k on it and I decided to take my chance with the 99 and get extra money out of the 2002 engine. I sold the engine, trans, and some other little parts and made a few hundred over what I paid. I got to keep the whole front subframe assembly, brakes, steering shaft, master cylinder, rear subframe assembly, ds, axles, diff, etc. Also got a free set of Eibach sway bars and an aluminum radiator (mishimoto or koyo, don't remember) as well as some other fun aftermarket parts. Then I bought a torsen since the 02 came with an open diff. So the plan is to put the rollerskate of the nb under Brad.
Brad currently has 15x8 s1s, budget msm bilsteins with 450f/300r springs, those eibach sway bars, and a hard dog roll bar I stole from one of my other cars. He's pretty basic, but pretty fun too. Circumstances prevented me from taking my LS car to the track last weekend so brad got taken instead. And proceeded to start knocking in my last session. Hence the separate build thread for him. Turns out, he's really fun on track and kinda embodies the idea of a miata, low power and easy to toss around. The LS is fun, but realistically my skills nowhere near match the car. Taking brad to more track days I think will allow me to grow my skills as a driver more. So my goal is to take them half and half.
Right now the engine is getting a little once-over. I got an Rb header for it, a q-max, timing belt, seals, supermiata clutch/fw, and an ms3x that I need to finish assembling.
At the end of the day, my goal with Brad is to have a fun, capable car that I don't think twice about taking to work or the track.
Last edited by Scaxx; 08-14-2018 at 01:27 AM.
Reason: spelling
Worked on some of brad's stuff yesterday. Depowered the steering rack (welded pinion) and got the 4.3 open pulled out of the subframe I'll be using. Also got the torsen I had bought pulled out of the 4.10 I bought and I'll mix them together at work this week. Been working a little on the engine as well, waiting on cam seals to button stuff back up. Did the Qmax reroute and water pump. Also cleaned up the internals of my flattop and got a new gasket for it because I lost the original, doh. Once I button the front of the engine back up I'll probably drop it off the stand and put it onto the subframe to do the clutch and stuff.
That's all for right now, I'm hoping to swap the engine in in the next month or so. But that depends on how greedy Audrey is with attention. Also house stuff is gonna make it hard.
Depowered steering rack, seals gone and pinion welded
Diff bits, ready to be taken to work and put together. 4.30, t2 torsen, new bearings and seals
Did some more **** today. Trying to get any non-engine stuff buttoned up so that when I go to swap the engine it's not a crazy big deal. Or at least a smaller deal with less little bullshit going on.
Swapped in the nb master/booster. Swapped in delrin diff bushings.
Hell yeah! Red NAs that identify as NBs are the best!
Got diff bearings installed on my lunch break as well as getting the diff into the carrier. Nothing torqued yet, I'll do that tomorrow and then adjust the backlash and pre-load. Not sure if I'll get it all done by tomorrow but I'll try, if not I'll probably finish it on Wednesday.
None of our bearing pullers were small enough for the miata diff so I had to use a jaw type puller
Got the diff set up this week, yay for 4.3 torsen. Also got the engine buttoned up. Timing belt is back on along with cam/crank seals and waterpump. Started pulling the whole drivetrain. Still need to unhook a couple things like the starter, but pretty soon the whole body will lift off. Hoping to get the drivetrain removed and the new engine/old trans bolted together today and maybe under the car. We'll see. Katy also had a trackday yesterday. Pretty bummed I didn't drive cause it was suuuuuper empty, her group had maybe 10 people in it.
Got some work done on Brad yesterday and a little after work today. Got the diff installed into the rear end today, also got the ppf attached. Yesterday I got the whole drivetrain pulled, then brought out the new engine and set it into the nb subframe. After that, I started on the clutch. Supermiata little 1.6 aluminum unit. Should be almost as revvy as a 1.6 Got the trans put back on and I'm buttoning up some small stuff like ignition and fuel. Got the 1.6 regulator on the rail but discovered one of my injector o rings was basically gone. So I need to replace that. Also need to modify the nb1 coil bracket for the 1.6 coils. I Have delrin rack bushings showing up for the steering rack as well, going for max feedback I know it's still gonna be slow but I'm looking forward to Brad driving again.
Got a tiny bit of work done yesterday, had to run some errands after work. Got all the seals for the injectors in, they were definitely in bad shape. Also one of my spacers decided to run off at some point but I found out that the spacers supplied with the 949 endlinks are the exact same height as the stock spacers. Still need to modify the coil bracket to fit the 1.6 coils and then I think the engine is ready to bolt up. Oh, need a na8 alternator as well. But that one car be put in after the engine is in the car without any difficulty.
Been working on Brad the last few days. The whole drivetrain is back in the chassis now and I'm mainly working on the wiring. Got a bit confused when I realized the engine had a CAS. Then I noticed the throttle body was a 4 pin throttle body and off an na8. Then looking at the wiring harness I had gotten with the engine I found the ecu to be from an na8 as well, so it looks like the engine was swapped into an na8 at some point. Might have some questions when I get to vacuum lines/water lines but we'll see.
Put the rb header in for mock up and to see how close the na6 exhaust is, it's real close so I'm gonna modify it a little bit and run the stock exhaust until I have some time to build a new one, probably sometime this winter or next spring. Honestly not very high on the priority list for me. Also need to weld a new bung onto the rb header because they weld them on in a shitty location. Under horizontal so condensation can collect in the sensor...nice. Oh and here's some cute pictures of Albert.
House closes in just over two weeks so I need to get this car done. It's coming along but I was really hoping to fire it early in the week which I doubt will happen.
Brad's being a little bitch. He's all back together but refuses to run right (idle). Had some problems with plugs being fouled to **** and plug wires in the wrong location early on that was preventing me from actually starting the car. The car now starts but refuses to idle, I can keep it alive with the pedal but falls on its face as soon as I let off. Still kinda feels vacuum leaky but I've checked everything except the intake manifold-block nuts. Forgot about those until last night when I was reading a guy's post who basically had the same problem, but didn't feel like getting out of bed. I'll check those as soon as I get home. It'd be nice if that was the problem since I did take the manifold on and off a few times. But I doubt it, that'd be too easy
To give background on how it's "running." I was having troubles with crank/cam signal on the MS and since things have been thrown together a little faster than I normally do stuff, I probably made mistakes somewhere so I decided to go the archaic way of swapping in a 1.8. Since the engine already had a cas bolted to it I decided to run the engine off the stock ecu to get it on the road. Unfortunately it hasn’t been as cut and dry as I was hoping. So it’s using the 1.6 throttle body with tps/iac, 1.6 coils, 1.6 injectors (engine came with DW315s) and a CAS on the stock ecu.
I have verified the timing belt is correct, as well as a few other people. Played around with timing on the cas and it helped initial start up a little but without the ability to idle it I can’t actually set timing correctly. As of right now it’s sitting around the middle of the range of the cas. Other than checking the manifold-block nuts and tps/iac I’m starting to run low on ideas. I can recheck my wiring for the 10th time but it’s not like it was super involved putting it back the way it was supposed to be from the factory.
House closed this Wednesday and I haven’t even got to go over to it yet because I’ve been trying to get the damn car running. Need to move the garage and my **** this weekend though. So hopefully I can get it running correctly tonight/early tomorrow.
Engine doesn't exactly sound healthy. Sounds like the sounds are coming from inside the block. So I guess I'm looking for another engine now, pretty cool. Also, no idea what the high pitched noise is.
Oh and for reference, it was a vacuum leak. The throttle body adapter was binding because I didn't get the holes 100% perfect when drilling for it. (This is why you design bolt holes with wiggle room) So I enlarged the holes a tiny bit and then it actually sat down correctly.
Well, on my way back through California from WRLS I stopped by an engine importer and picked up a bp5a+6speed. I had wanted a 6 speed for a while for that 6 speed + 4.30 combo, so I'm looking forward to driving it once it runs well. I started noticing a small tick when we pulled up to the importers, this turned out to be a rocker arm bearing in the ls3. I'll go over that in my main thread but I had to tow the car back home which was...fun.
Last weekend I got to swapping everything over. Still fighting a vacuum leak on the stupid throttle body adapter. It turns out that's what that small whistling in the other video was. Engine sounds healthy, just kinda runs like trash. Hesitates really badly if you blip the throttle, won't idle if you turn on the headlights. I tried to drive it yesterday but as soon as I turned on the headlights it would stop idling and wouldn't make it out of the driveway. I'm hoping if I fix the leak it'll at least half fix the issues and that it somewhat runs, I'm not expecting great things with the stock 1.6 ecu. I just need driveable for a couple weeks while I find time to get the ms3x figured out.
07-13-2018, 11:53 PM
Brad gets beat
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Got the trans put back on and I'm buttoning up some small stuff like ignition and fuel. Got the 1.6 regulator on the rail but discovered one of my injector o rings was basically gone. So I need to replace that. Also need to modify the nb1 coil bracket for the 1.6 coils. I Have delrin rack bushings showing up for the steering rack as well, going for max feedback 
I know it's still gonna be slow but I'm looking forward to Brad driving again.
