Alright, so a lot has happened in the last ~5 months so this will be a long one to try to fully bring this up to date. So not strictly car news, but the reason getting this car together took so long was a good bit of time and money was going to our wedding! I am now officially a married man and I had a great time at the wedding, but it is also nice to be able to now "go back to normal" and focus on the car again haha

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Having the car and horses there was her idea and created a bit of a crunch getting the car back together as I was getting down to the wire, but I made it happen and everything went great. We got to show off both of our dumb expensive hobbies for everyone haha but everyone thought it was really cool. BUT, enough of all that as you are here to see past me scramble to put my car back together in time for all of this. So when I last left you all the car still had the 'sploded engine in the chassis and I had 50% of an engine I wasnt sure I was going to use on a stand. As I was debating what to do, I found another engine for sale up in Michigan but this was a full, unopened longblock out of a running car. It was a pretty good deal and would be the fastest path to getting this car running again and you can't have too many BPs laying around so I went and picked that up and gave it a quick cleaning and paint. I also replaced all the gaskets, seals, timing belt, wather pump, etc as you do while its out of the car.
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I also grabbed this nice SuperDamper from @Twibs415 which will hopefully help keep this engine happy. I got the other engine out of the car and this gave me a great opportunity to clean the hell out of the engine bay as it hasn't been cleaned in years and had gotten very grimy from years of track abuse. Some degreaser and power washing later and it was cleaner than I had seen it in years.

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Yum

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I forgot how blue it was under there haha

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Also I forgot I got the front cut out for the airflow bar which should hopefully help a lot with cooling on track. I don't seem to have any pictures of actually putting the engine into the car, but I'm sure you all can imagine. Here I bought a small auto trans cooler that I made into a power steering cooler. The stock big looped line had no where to be mounted to now that I cut the front core support, this will hopefully not only keep the fluid cool (not that I was having any issues with it) but it also got the lines out of the front of the car. I will duct air over to the cooler from the mouth and it will just vent into the wheel well.

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After this it was just throwing everything back onto the car to get to the first start. My work has a car show during their yearly summerfest and I wanted to take my racecar as it gave me a good goal of a solid date to have the car running by. I got everything buttoned up without any major hiccups. I did some other non-engine work like rebuilding the rear axles, some exhaust work, and fluid changes. I will made a separate post for the axles which can hopefully provide some good info to other owners of mazdaspeed axles who want to rebuild them as I had a very hard time getting any info on what boots do or dont fit. I got the engine charged with oil and coolant and then had a successful and uneventful first start. I got to this point the night before the car show and since I A. had plates multiple years out of date, B. not driven the car at all yet, and C. could not get my laptop to connect to the MS so I was just rocking the exact tune I had on the last engine with no changes, I decided to just trailer the car like the racecar it is. We do this parade around the center before parking for the car show and it drove alright for having zero new tuning for this "new" engine (even though its just another stock internal BP05) so I was happy enough with that for its first drive.

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The miata was definitely a little out of place against all the other classic muscle cars and vintage crowd, but there was at least one other roadster friend.

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And that brings us mostly up to date. I figured out my MS connection issues, it was just a matter of finding the right drivers as I updates to a windows 11 laptop which started my troubles. The car now runs great, still on ~10psi to try to keep the stock internals happy while I hopefully have time/money to do a forged build on one of the bottom ends I have. Hopefully we can get some decent weather for a bit longer up here so I can put a few more miles on it before the snow comes, then focus on getting the car fully ready to go back to the track next year. ALSO.... since I didn't have enough to do I ended up selling my mariner 1.6 and buying an '03 Shinsen as my new "daily" miata. Maybe I will make a build thread for that car too, but it will just become a basic bolt-on street car that *may* see a track day, who knows....

As I bought it a few months ago:

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How it sits now (Konigs, Vmaxxs, Harddog Hardcore, RS Lip) :

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I'm NOT a big fan of this for multiple reasons:

1. The hose lines are routed where your RB Sway Bar Mount Reinforcing Blocks and Bolts should be - you SHOULD have these because the OEM bracket is prone to shearing off, starting at the leading edge just under the 2x OEM bolts.

2.It looks like your mounting Alu L-bracket is just bolted onto the chassis rail by those top 2x bolts on the right, the bracket has been cut to allow the bend and you've zip-tied the cooler to it.
There's a LOT of weight hanging after that Alu bracket bend point and it will be vibrating constantly, stressing the crap out of the bend point.
If it's a 3mm Alu L-bracket you MAY get away with it but less than that is a time bomb that you MUST check every time BEFORE you get on the track.
Remake the bracket from steel OR make sure that the L-bracket section that holds the cooler is also mounted securely to the chassis (you could use zip-ties for that section through the chassis rail, it just needs to help hold the weight of the cooler so that it's NOT all bourn by the ALU bracket at the bend point)

3. The location of the cooler is wrong too, it's parallel to any airflow, even at low speeds, so air will just flow around it front to back, NOT through it.
If you want to mount the cooler here, you need to create a duct for it that fully seals to the cooler and the other end is exposed to a good input-air source so that all of it is channelled through the duct
I mounted my oil cooler in the wheel well on the opposites side - consider doing something similar (see post #5 of post-pictures-your-oil-cooler-routing-65000)

FYI: in the first picture of post#5 in the link above, you can see my sway bar mount's reinforcing block and it's front-most bolt

Keep up the DIY fab-work and posts, it's always good to see what others think, especially if they spot problems or have improvements (that's what I do, I DON'T want my shit to break and I DON'T know everything - yet :P ).

I appreciate the feedback Lokiel,

1. I didn't know this was a huge concern. I have heard of the reinforcing blocks but I don't personally know anyone who has had this failure, and I have been tracking this car for ~7 years and also haven't had an issue. But maybe I have just been lucky. I will certainly look into it though as it seems like cheap insurance against a potential failure.

2. This I totally agree thinking about it more. The cooler itself is extremely light, but that is not considering the weight of the fluid in it as well, but my thought when I made it was that it would be fine considering the light weight of the cooler. I think the bar would be adequately stiff in the horizontal axis but it will probably bend/vibrate in the vertical axis quite a lot. I will attach the front of the bracket to the frame rail and then monitor it. If it seems fine after each session like that then cool. If not I will redesign the bracket entirely.

3. Very aware haha. If you look at the other picture of the cooler you can see where the air path will be. In the pictures I hadn't reassembled any of the front of the car so none of my ducting was in. I was going to run a small naca duct off the side of my radiator ducting and feed directly onto the inboard side of the cooler which will then just vent into the wheel well. I have the Track Dog oil cooler that is going in on the other side that is mounted just like yours is and will get ducted from the other side of the rad ducting. I didn't have any issue with boiling p/s fluid with the stock "cooler" line so I don't think I will have any issue with this setup, but worse case I can make a copy of the oil cooler setup you/I have.

I appreciate the well thought out input, and totally agree that I also don't want my shit to break either and definitely welcome the feedback! :likecat:

It is good form to give a cat to someone who provides helpful advice.

The sway bar bracket shearing is more prominent in NBs with larger sway bays so you might be OK in an NA - it is cheap insurance though.

You are 100% correct, my bad haha
Gotcha, but yeah I agree, for ~$50 it seems dumb to not do.

Great updates. Are you me? Turbo NA miata dual duty car with a street wang and NB daily driver? Sweet!

It's just a great combo. You can't just have one Miata... right?