Interested to see how that Pulsar does for you. That's the one I've been eyeballing as well. Where'd you source it? Pulsar's website looks like it adds something like $300 as a tariff fee, but that didn't seem to be the case if you bought it on ebay.

 

I cross shopped their ebay and site and ended up buying it through their site so I could setup an account with them just in case of warranty, etc. Prices were the same once optioned out the same. Price came to $730 shipped to the door after tarrifs and shipping. Still very affordable compared to a real GTX. I was able to sell my old Garrett for $400 so I'm counting this as a $300 upgrade.

 

Hell yeah!!!
I'm not showing any signs of hantavirus so you should be good to go
I'm (and mostly my wife) super happy that this is no longer sitting in my yard as a mouse hotel and it went to the best of homes.
Life plans change and sometimes miatas fall into and out of your lap, and into someone else's lap?

 

Thanks again! Logan cleaned several actual inches of mouse **** outta the back parcel area. He's been scrubbing on this thing for several days already and it has more to go, but he's motivated to make it his daily. The car will not go to waste, nor will the drivetrain!

 

You have enough spare miatas and parts you need to build one out for the BDR.

https://ridebdr.com/nmbdr/

 

I wish I had your luck on buying whole cars for the price of a transmission!

I've wanted a set of those twisted 5 spoke 16s for a while - unfortunately they were removed from my car before I bought it. The ones I see for sale are always way overpriced for narrow stock wheels, in bad shape, or both.

 

I've had some crazy luck buying NBs, but more because I have good friends not because the market value. The $1800 78k mile 10AE being the cherry on top, I'll never beat that. Thanks to my deceased friends wife for the hookup, I still know Robbie would be psyched that I have his car now. The thing was in terrible shape from sitting out in the desert after he passed but really cleaned up nicely. So nice I couldn't steal the trans out of it, which honestly was my original intent when I picked it up.

Anyways Tom is a real homie for letting it go under market value, even if it was a biohazard and sat for 6 years it has great bones and will live on!

 

We're just not gonna talk about the 323 GTX in the backgrouund?

 

@calteg That one I picked up during covid as a parts car for my winter DD. But I got it, and it's a complete car with rod knock, just needs a motor. It's on the back burner (way in the back) but the goal is to get it running with the spare miata b6 motor I have from my NA6.

This is my nice one. 140k miles, im the 2nd owner. Its from Tulsa OK.

 

This weekend we hammered out the driveline swap into the 00 SE. 6 speed +3.9 torsen is out, 1.6 5 speed +vlsd is in. This is gonna make a great DD for my buddy who is just getting into miatas, it drives super smooth. We put a fm stage 1 clutch in it that I had picked up back in 2021 off this forum, clutch had 3k on it and looked brand new.




Anyways the driveline should be going into SuperSmurf this weekend. The new turbo should be in this week as well. Exciting.

 

I finally got to sit in one at Radwood last year. The owner mentioned that a lot of them stay stock due to the transmission being relatively fragile and a lot of the drivetrain parts being NLA

 

The first one I saw in person was my black one. The second one was the white one, and I've still never seen another. Pretty rare nowadays for sure. And the drivetrain is often described as reliable, but not durable. I.e. big power, hard launches, slamming gears etc is best avoided. The 4wd system is actually really good though, I've been through snow thats deeper than the hood in it and never even got close to getting stuck

Mine has an exhaust, intake, chipped ecu, wbo2, and a manual boost controller. I turned up the boost from the factory 8 psi to about 12psi, when the stock clutch started slipping. Then back down to 10psi or so which its able to hold. Probably 180whp and we'll within gearbox limits. It's been a very reliable and fun daily for me. Of course I live in the country so a daily just gets me 4 miles to work on a twisty 2 lane country road. Nothing like city life, where I'd definitely want something wayyyy newer and safer.

 

Yesterday was a prep day. 6 speed and diff cleaned, poly bushings installed in diff housing. Tedious oil warmer lines replaced since I had to drain down the cooling system anyways. Also got the old turbo off and new one drilled out for m10 studs and clocked. Still likely going to port the WG on the new PSR as well, I have dreams of being able to make less power for certain classing reasons and could never make less than 12-13 psi on e85 it would creep.








Not pictured but also replaaced the rear main seal yesterday in prep of trans install

Im also going to re seal my coolant reroute since it has a weep and is easy to get to with the trans out. The back together with all this,!

 

Looking good so far! It’s funny, I thought several months ago that your build was pretty dialed and wouldn’t need/get many more tweaks once you started on the RX7, yet here we are lol.

Cant wait to see it buttoned up!

 

Whelp, I'm not as fast as Zak, but she's getting close. Trans is back on and diff is in. Clutch feels about as heavy as the old ACT XT but the FM clutch came with a way better throw out bearing which is a huge win

Re sealed the coolant reroute too. Really wanted to switch to the Supermiata setup but the scope creep on this project has already been pretty insane. Did a few other small jobs like wiring in the correct pigtails for the trans and replaced the dipstick o ring. Maybe I won't have any leaks this time around.

 

Also with the turbo off decided to boroscope the exhaust valves to confirm my suspicion that my oil burning is from there. It's never been terrible, but after lots of vacuum it likes to throw a poof. Doesn't use much between changes, maybe 1qt in 3k including track use, I usually change it before I need to add any.

All cylinders show clear signs of leakage but cylinder1 was pretty bad. Always kinda annoyed me that this rebuilt head smoked from the get go, they were new Supermiata valve stems but original guides that they said measured out fine. Maybe I'll do a mild built head on this thing one day and fix it. As is it's not bad enough I see tearing it down, and putting more seals in it seems like a silly idea unless I'm doing the guides, or at least that's my suspicion of the issue.

Cyl 234 all look pretty much like these pics:



Cylinder1 pretty swamped with even a wet spot still in the manifold.

 

Yeah, me too. Everytime this car breaks I take the opportunity to upgrade. I was hoping to have the rx7 running by now but this will be worth it. Scope has creeped a bit and things like the turbo upgrade could have definitely been skipped, it was more of a "while I'm in there'" thing since I had to fix a leaky turbo drain and had the downpipe off, etc. Plus I always wanted to try the PTX and my buddy wanted to buy my old turbo. A perfect storm!

 

Cars a runner! Got it thrown back together Sat night and was able to take it for a drive. Summary of work done:

Rear main seal + FM lightweight 8lbs flywheel + actually RTV'd the flywheel bolts this time (maybe no leaks?).
FM stage 2 clutch + 6 speed + miataroadster tall angled shifter.
3.9 Torsen + Supermiata diff mounts
Pulsar PTX2860 (.64), re-did the leaking turbo drain line. Re-snugged manifold bolts, etc. while in there.
Misc maintenance, includes, replacing oil "warmer" lines with silicone. Re-sealing my old BEGI style coolant re-route. Replacing dip stick O ring. Upgrading coolant system clamps to "constant tension" correct clamps.




I've got no exciting videos really, it's on 8psi wastegate and is already ripping pretty good! The sound of the turbo is borderline annoying, though it's cool AF to hear it spool up and whatnot, it's definitely more on the "rice" end of sounds. I am enjoying it but I could see this being very annoying on something more DD oriented. It's very loud part throttle and spools like mad.

First start/revs (ignore smoking things, very fresh start with grease burning off the flange).


And mini pull up the hill while trying to hold my phone. I'll get some better vids, this doesn't really do it justice but proof it runs!


So far I can confidently say the PTX is awesome. Spools like an EFR almost, I'm only targeting 8psi but I can hit that by 3000 RPM. Excited to see how that extrapolates with higher boost levels, but it's night and day more responsive than the OG potato I was running. Really enjoying it so far.

Then of course I tore the car back down for some more upgrades...

Which include full seq fueling (was still on OEM batch fueling, though my ignition is full sequential already). I shoulda snapped some pics but the old harness was a mess. Stripped all the old electrical tape, took it down to the joints, re-soldered and heat shrunk all the splices, added a second pigtail to use for the 2 new injector circuits, and then taped it all back up with fabric harness tape. Feels good. This was mostly done because @redursidae pushed me. I had left it batch since FOREVER because there are no discernible gains to be had at WOT/higher RPM by doing this. But I am excited for it, and appreciate him nudging me to do stuff like this, for refinement.




The harness is in, and injectors all tested, confirming all fire and match the defined firing order settings within MS:



Still to-do:

Wire in CAN input wire for @redursidae , he's bringing me a CAN wbo2 controller that I'm going to switch to. Of course the benefits of CAN are obvious, but less obviously that frees up an input that I can use for logging oil temp.

Wire in knock sensor. I bought a stud from @chuckieho so I can run the bosch unit (also on order w/ pigtail from ballanger). I've been ignoring this since switching to e85 just assuming I'm knock-proof, but again Ricardo always pushes for this "safety" bullshit. J/K, I love him for pushing me on things like this.

 

Awesome to see the solid upgrades! The car sounds fantastic imho. (I must be channeling my inner ricer.)

 

Now, while talking about firing order, riddle me this:

The firing order, as defined in MS is:


This is of course correct for a miata, 1/3/4/2. My coils are wired exactly like that, I.E. you trigger coil A it fires cyl 1, coil b fires 3, C fires 4, D fires 2. Confirmed. And working since I've been on Seq spark for maybe 6 months now.

Sure, that makes perfect sense. Now I start looking at my injector harness, which is batch, injectors 1/3 and 2/4 are pairs. OK, I can re-use output "A" to fire 1 (or 3), re-wire the other pair to have its own, and do the same with output "B". That's how I did my spark (IIRC). However, I tested the outputs within MS to have it fire the injectors in test mode and injector output A in MS fires inj 2/4, B does 1/3. This is backwards from anything I can make sense of in my brain. I actually don't understand how this works, and it's still confusing me. If anyone has any input here, It's gotta be something silly I'm not comprehending. But I sure would expect output "A" to fire 1/3.

This isn't a big deal since I already chopped up the harness and wired the injectors to match my coils, and the main firing order within MS (shown above) so I should be good. But it's still bugging me as to why trigger A is firing 2/4.