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New exhaust stud installed. I also went super ghetto and just sealed the flange with RTV instead of waiting for a new gasket
Torsen getting all cleaned up.
One thing about the CSF radiator: The top right threaded boss for mounting the AC fan is too shallow. As you can see in the picture there is a metal bracket there that is thinner that the other mounts. The screw bottoms out in the boss. I ended up cutting about 3mm off the length of the bolt to get it to work. No big deal really, but something of note.
Radiator dropped in ezpz. I was a little worried the fans might hit my Racing Beat tubular bar, but they cleared. It is VERY close though.
I was fighting with the stupid coil that goes inside this hose for a while until I tried lubing it with hand soap. Slid right in then. I cut about six inches or so off the hose.
I'm not sure if I did something wrong de-powering my rack, but it is much tighter than I was expecting. Everything I've read and heard about looping the lines like I did suggest there's barely a difference in effort once you get moving. That is not the case for me right now. It takes a lot of effort to turn more than 30 degrees or so, regardless of speed. I'm gonna need to look into this further.
The clutch is gonna take a little getting used to. I gotta dial in the engagement point a little, but it bites much more aggressively than my stock clutch did. I feel like I'm relearning how to drive at the moment. Just a matter of getting used to it I guess. As advertised the pedal effort is barely more than the stock 1.6 clutch. I get a little chatter from the clutch moving from a stop, but again I think I just have to learn how this clutch engages. It seems like its just from the stiffer clutch springs.
Anyway, I'm very happy to have my car back. Hopefully I can figure out whats going on with my steering, or maybe it's fine and I just need to stop being a little babby.
This is a 1.8 comparison. 2554 with a 2.25" exhaust and hydra 2.7, verse an mkturbo setup.
That's a nice looking torque curve. I'm assuming black and pink are MKturbo. That really hits home how important the bigger exhaust is! If I do end up going FM I would for sure get a 3 in exhaust made for it, obviously that cost is piled onto the cost of the kit. I guess it comes down to how much I'm willing to dump into this car. I've already spent close to 3k getting to this point...
Now that my car is ready for more power, I'm really gonna start weighing my options.
All you did was loop the lines. That only makes steering more difficult. You have to properly de-power the rack.
Yeah I guess. Like I said, pretty much everything I read suggested that looping the lines was almost as good and once you got moving it was barely more effort than power steering.
Anyway, I went on a few good shake down runs and I'm already used to the feel of it. Maybe in the future I will de-power the proper way, and I'll probably go for a bit less caster next time I get it aligned. I do like how easy it is to tell when the front gets light. The feedback is nice. I could use some arm exercise anyway.
Honestly the car feels pretty great. I got the clutch engagement dialed in just where I wanted it. The torsen is doing it's job of chirping my tires on low speed turns. I have a feeling my car is gonna start eating my star specs rapidly, but I'm happy.
So I have kind of a crappy problem. Since I upgraded the cooling with the radiator and the reroute, the car takes forever to warm up, and if it's at all cool outside it will never reach normal operating temp . If it's below 50 and I'm just cruising, the gauge will barely go above like 10 o'clock. I figured it was something with the thermostat, so I went ahead and bought a stant 195 degree tstat to replace the 180 degree one that was supplied with the reroute. Installed it yesterday (about 50F) and now it seems that the cooling system is so efficient that the 195 degree tstat wont stay open during normal driving. On my test drives my gauge would start going hot as soon as I got stuck behind someone and had to cruise. When I was able to get on it, the tstat would open and the temp would be normal. Likewise if I leave the car idling it overheats.
Basically my new radiator works so well that my car overheats...
I guess I need to put the 180 degree back in and try blocking part of the radiator?
I'm honestly not convinced that is the issue. I do have a vacuum purge coolant filler system that I can use to make sure, but the way the car was behaving doesn't indicate an air pocket to me. Like I said it will run fine as long as I stay on it. It seems to me that when the tstat is open and allows coolant through the radiator, and the engine isn't producing much heat (cruising), the radiator is cooling the system back to below 195. The remote tstat housing is allowing the head to overheat before the heat reaches the tstat. Maybe I'm wrong but if there was air in the system I don't think that driving harder would cause the temp to go down.
It's like a extremely under-damped system. Maybe if I drive it for longer it will eventually reach equilibrium, but obviously I cant be going around overheating until that happens. Maybe I'm overthinking this and it is just a bubble...
Making sure the cooling system is burped properly is the easiest thing to start with. I use a Lisle funnel, and when everything is up to temperature I squeeze and shake the hell out of all the coolant hoses. I can almost always knock a few bubbles loose.
If that doesn’t work, perhaps you could go back to the 180 thermostat but drill a small hole to permit some coolant flow through it while it’s closed.
So I have kind of a crappy problem. Since I upgraded the cooling with the radiator and the reroute, the car takes forever to warm up, and if it's at all cool outside it will never reach normal operating temp . If it's below 50 and I'm just cruising, the gauge will barely go above like 10 o'clock. I figured it was something with the thermostat, so I went ahead and bought a stant 195 degree tstat to replace the 180 degree one that was supplied with the reroute. Installed it yesterday (about 50F) and now it seems that the cooling system is so efficient that the 195 degree tstat wont stay open during normal driving. On my test drives my gauge would start going hot as soon as I got stuck behind someone and had to cruise. When I was able to get on it, the tstat would open and the temp would be normal. Likewise if I leave the car idling it overheats.
Basically my new radiator works so well that my car overheats...
I guess I need to put the 180 degree back in and try blocking part of the radiator?
Oh also I bought this
Hmmm, something seems very off. You should always be able to get the coolant up to 185 or 195... Did you get a decent brand T-stat? I know many have like 1-2 brands they trust, maybe yours is sticking?
Hey everybody, So unfortunately I did not get a chance to do anything further with the miata before old man winter forced me to park it for a few months. Though on the plus side it seems like the issue maybe fixed itself? When I drove the car to it's hibernation den it seemed fine, and since I parked it I've gone and let it run until it gets warm a few times. It hasn't overheated on any of those occasions. So maybe it was just air in the system that has worked it's way out. I still don't understand why it would be fine if I drove it hard, but overheated when I was cruising. I'll have to wait until spring to find out for sure.
This winter I'm planning on doing some suspension refreshing. I'm considering switching back to rubber bushings because I'm starting to get sick of how harsh the poly ones ride, or I might buy new polys and shave the ends so they dont make the control arms all stiff in the subframes like they are now. I'm sure that's a big part of why my car rides like ***. I'm also gonna fix the ride heights which have been totally screwed up for a while. I'm kinda tempted to paint my control arms something flamboyant while I have them out. I was thinking red or orange.
I've actually read through that before, but thanks for the link. I might consider doing that in the future but honestly I was just being a babby about the steering when I first did it. I got used to it pretty fast.
I think the turbo is getting pushed back another season, but we'll see. I dumped a decent amount of cash on this S60R I bought, and I'm not sure I want to drop turbo kit money at the moment. I will say driving this turbo car around has only reinforced my desire to turbo the miata. This Volvo pulls pretty hard for a 4000lb sedan. The miata feels downright anemic compared to it, and I never really felt that way about the miata before.
Hey everybody, So unfortunately I did not get a chance to do anything further with the miata before old man winter forced me to park it for a few months. Though on the plus side it seems like the issue maybe fixed itself? When I drove the car to it's hibernation den it seemed fine, and since I parked it I've gone and let it run until it gets warm a few times. It hasn't overheated on any of those occasions. So maybe it was just air in the system that has worked it's way out. I still don't understand why it would be fine if I drove it hard, but overheated when I was cruising. I'll have to wait until spring to find out for sure.
This winter I'm planning on doing some suspension refreshing. I'm considering switching back to rubber bushings because I'm starting to get sick of how harsh the poly ones ride, or I might buy new polys and shave the ends so they dont make the control arms all stiff in the subframes like they are now. I'm sure that's a big part of why my car rides like ***. I'm also gonna fix the ride heights which have been totally screwed up for a while. I'm kinda tempted to paint my control arms something flamboyant while I have them out. I was thinking red or orange.
I've actually read through that before, but thanks for the link. I might consider doing that in the future but honestly I was just being a babby about the steering when I first did it. I got used to it pretty fast.
I think the turbo is getting pushed back another season, but we'll see. I dumped a decent amount of cash on this S60R I bought, and I'm not sure I want to drop turbo kit money at the moment. I will say driving this turbo car around has only reinforced my desire to turbo the miata. This Volvo pulls pretty hard for a 4000lb sedan. The miata feels downright anemic compared to it, and I never really felt that way about the miata before.
(Emphasis mine) It's not a matter of just 'getting used to it'.There's a ton of slop from the torsion bar in the power steering valve assembly still being allowed to twist; (start at 30 second mark)
09-09-2017, 09:06 PM
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