Cage is coming along great! Should be a fun weekend at PC.

 

Thanks Guys!! I do love the way the cage is turning out and with the drop floor in I fit soooo much better! That's why I keep telling Nick to take the time he needs. It's nothing I want to rush.

Podium Club will be fun, but I'm breaking a cardinal rule by driving something I can't afford to wad up and throw away. Well, technically I could, but I can't replace it and I'd be seriously gutted if it happened. So I end up only driving at like 7/10ths to keep from falling off of the track because the car is nearly pristine and bodywork is expensive, and I try to stay far away from everyone else on the track so I don't get hit. Again. >.< Whining aside, it's still fun to wind it up on the track - I'm just not very good competition without my beloved Miata.

Oh!! Good news from the shop about my Flex! It's the wiring for the steering angle sensor. They cleaned up the wiring and it looks like everything is happy again. Good thing too - Jeff said if the steering angle sensor ever really does go out I'll need to get a different vehicle because that part is now unobtanium. Can't even get them from junkyards. (At least the ones he knows)

 

Survived Podium Club with no offs (and no particularly amazing times either.) Got some good practice in with trail braking (Plan B car looooves trail braking) so it was a good, if stressful, weekend. I'll skip the details because this is all about my wonderful little Miata which Plan B car ain't.

Since the Flex tows my Miata around it gets a mention though - the Flex is home again. We ended up having to replace the left Headlight and fog light which decided to die during the wiring repair stuffs. I took the opportunity to freshen up the headlight covers which had gotten really cloudy again.

Uno

Dos
It looks much better now. Those headlights are soooo much easier to mask than my old girlfriend's Camry. It took forever to match all the curves on those stinkin' things.

As for the white Miata, LRB comes through again - the Dash should be at Nick's place this Thursday afternoon. If my math is correct that's 13 business days from the order date (which was late in the day), to delivery after shipping across the country from Florida to Arizona. Just like Fireindc said, they got it done a lot faster then the timeframes listed on their website. I have no objections to underpromising and overdelivering! I'm really glad they're around helping keep our miatas supplied with cool parts.

I went ahead and did the teardown on the original dash so I could have the wiring harness ready to put back in the car. First I took pictures so I had some idea of what came from where. I swear, the ability to take pictures and videos electronically using our cellphones is a complete game changer for those of us old enough to remember when that wasn't an option.

Before Left


Before Mid


Before Right

Then it was just a matter of plopping the unit on a workbench to save my back, and going to town with variations on a phillips screwdriver and pliers. Since I'm keeping the heater core I made a point of being as gentle with the vents as I could - we'll see if I end up putting them back in the car somehow. The vent still in the dash at this point turned out to be so brittle that the middle portion was disintegrating to the touch though - might have to get creative to keep the vents working the way I want.

Vents

The plastic dash cover was cracked in multiple locations so there was no point in babying it. It was making it a bit more difficult to remove the wiring harness so I went ahead and removed it before proceeding. Got to pull the VIN plate off of it before I do whatever I decide to do with it though.

Starting to remove the harness

Removing the harness was pretty easy with a small pair of pliers I could shove underneath each of the clips to compress the, um, clip-thingies. Yeah, those. >.>
Then I took a few more pictures of the harness laid out to approximate where it came from in an attempt to help Future Me figure out what each of those mysterious plugs was supposed to connect to. Sharp-eyed viewers will also note I have some repairs to do to the harness. Wiring stuffs. Woo.

Harness Left


Harness Mid


Harness Right

One of my fellow Miata-ites from the track is in the process of caging his NB and plans to leave out the dash entirely - he discovered he didn't even need most of his dash wiring harness to start the car - just the immobilizer portion which my NA doesn't even have. I'd like my gauges to work, though, so I'm putting the whole shebang back in the car.

 

The dash was delivered last Thursday afternoon. Nick was pushing hard to finish the car last weekend...

 

sweet ride over there lol

 

Heard back from Nick late Sunday - 46 hours into the project so far, doors gutted, drop seat installed and seat adjusted, new dash trimmed and ready to go in, steering column mounted, he will finish welding the last of the cage components in this week, and then it's the bits and pieces like the back attachment for the seat, dash final fit, door panels, mirror brackets, final touches, etc.
Should be really cool once its done!

 

Got the Miata back last Wednesday. Picked it up after work, drove home, taped plastic over the holes where the windows used to be to try to keep the neighbor's cat from anointing the inside, threw a car cover over it, and spent the next two days prepping the Plan B car for Chuckwalla last weekend.

And there it sits...
It is frustrating not having enough time to work on my car. I probably won't even be able to pull it off of the trailer until later this week and there are still a ton of things to do to the car before I can put it on the track again...

 

The car sat on the trailer until the following Friday, then got dropped off at the shop and it's been there ever since. It took Jeff all of about 10 minutes to figure out why it wouldn't crank - the ignition cylinder wasn't plugged in. Lots of other issues to sort though. Spent an hour last weekend sitting in the car with Jeff leaning in through the passenger's door figuring out where some of the wiring goes for the switches and dash connections the cage builder pulled. No labels on anything and the previous owner didn't seem to follow much of a color convention when choosing what to wire where. Amazingly enough we were able to get the tombstone wiring completely sorted despite all of this. Unfortunately the gauge panel powers up but none of the gauges work - still have no idea what's going on with that.
Oh! I fit sooo much better in the car with the drop floor. I brought my helmet with and determined I fit nicely inside now, and my helmet can ping-pong back and forth between the roof bars. Got to get some roll bar padding up there - hopefully there's still room for my head once that stuff goes on.
Just got the LRB aluminum dash back this afternoon from getting powder coated in black - I'll go visit the car tomorrow to see how I'm going to handle the assembly with the cage. I really should paint the cage first before doing much else, but that involves getting the car back, pulling the top, masking off a bunch of stuff, etc, etc. There's certainly motivation, but no time.
Also the alternator appears to have completely died while the car was away. Jeff got a new alternator installed and that took care of that.
In other happy news the muffler shop I chose because they're a short drive away from my house has closed and all of their other locations are many miles away. Jeff has kindly volunteered to remove the front resonator from the car since the cage builder warned me it was hitting the new drop floor. They're going to weld in a straight pipe for that section. It'll be louder, but I'm not running on any tracks with sound restrictions and I'm trailering the car to events now so it's a workable solution. I was supposed to get the car back two weeks ago, then it was going to be the beginning of this week - now it'll be the beginning of next week. I'll go ahead and prep the Plan B car for the upcoming track weekend, just in case.

Dropping it off at the shop. Again.


Grabbed some interior shots of the cage while I was unloading the car


Moar Cage


Yup, that's a cage and a drop floor


Door detail


Back in the regular spot at Carmel Automotive


Here's the wiring we got to figure out.
Jeff has gently suggested I "remove the rest of all that garbage" from the dash area to clean up the car and save weight. I like having a heater so the garbage is staying, at least for now.

 

Looks good!

I highly recommend painting the cage before putting the car back together. It will never be less work than it is now. And even in AZ, you'll get some surface corrosion down the road which will double the prep work. Just use Rustoleum rattle cans in your preferred color... easy to touch up later if you get scratches or need to modify something. 3M clear PPF over the heavy touch surfaces (entry points).

 

Paint shops can also put your preferred color in rattle cans if you have a fetish for an odd color. Mine was Nissan B17 blue, also known as Daytona. I never painted the car, just the cage.

 

Definitely paint the entire interior. I'd also highly suggest adding footwell intrusion protection first though. Your feet are completely out of the cage in that design, and I've definitely seen ankles saved with a single bar going to the firewall.

 

Turns out the gauge cluster likes to short out and pop a fuse whenever it touches the cage. The initial solution was rags and then later upgraded to cardboard and zip-ties. Cardboard and zip-ties pretty accurately describe the car's condition for last weekend's event.

Pre-cardboard and zip ties


Alllllmost done at the shop. For now.

Not a lot of race prep left to do with no car yet - no one appears to have modeled Firebird West in Assetto Corsa yet so I couldn't learn/practice the track on the sim rig ahead of time, and with no car I couldn't prep the car of course. Everything else I could do to prep I'd already done. So what to do? Race smaller stuff instead.

Yup, that's me - consistently dead last in Real Life and in, um, real (smaller) life.

There's a surprising (to me at least) amount of carry-over between slot car racing and throwing full-size cars around the track. Drive the track not the other cars, slow is smooth / smooth is fast, fuel management is A Thing, look ahead, maintain good situational awareness at all times, etc, etc. Only with slot cars I get to drive a Porsche 917k in Gulf Livery, lose it and crash spectacularly, and not die.

The amazing thing is people really did crash spectacularly in the Porsche 917 and DIDN'T die.


Not a lot of material there in front of the driver...

But I digress.

I got the car back last Wednesday evening, with about a day and a half to finish race-prepping the car while working full-time. Oh, what fun. And yet, the following Friday afternoon...

Setting up the paddock spot


The car passed tech with flying colors! Mostly because it's self-tech for time trials and HPDE. Wheel to wheel is a different story.


Pay no attention to the staggeringly expired belts. Or the complete lack of rollbar padding.

I'm happy to report that the car ran well and I didn't end up dead. Or even maimed. Clearly a Win.

Oh look! It turns corners too!


I was legitimately faster than that other car. Primarily because of the turbo, but hey, faster is faster.

Here's a video of my fastest lap of the weekend that shows off my dire need for additional driving instruction:


It also shows how hard shifting gets with my 6-speed when it gets hot. Eventually I'll lose the ability to shift into 5th or reverse until it cools down again. Happily this appears to be different than when it's failing internally - this gets better once things cool down, and it's really nice to shift when it's cold.
What it does not show is how staggeringly, blisteringly hot the transmission tunnel is getting, or how the engine was getting really hot - later that session I ended up hitting some of the temperature-based limits I had put in place when the coolant temperature hits 235'.
Incidentally the real star of the video is my "that's no moon" ornament - most folks who watch the video say it's the most interesting thing in the entire video. I really need to add a little more weight to it so it doesn't bounce around quite as much - it's supposed to be a ghetto-grade G-force indicator, not a jackrabbit.

The cool part was I made the podium for HL2 (the Time Trial series for the organization I drive with) for both days and it was a double-points weekend.

First Place on Saturday!


Third Place on Sunday!

It would have been considerably more impressive if I hadn't been the only one running in HL2 on Saturday, or if there had been more than three people running HL2 on Sunday, but hey, a win's a win, and points are points.
I asked the organizers why the HL2 group is so small when HL1 and HL3 are huge - was I missing some sort of unwritten rule that HL2 was reserved for kids in the short bus or something? Apparently that's not the case and historically HL2 is usually pretty big since stock Camaros and Mustangs fall in that class, but this season everyone souped up their cars and all moved up to HL1. I'm not complaining - it's nice to go home with schwag after all of the time, effort, and money spent to get there and compete.

Well there's no shortage of stuff to take care of now that the car is back home! I've already told Jeff he can't have the car back for a week or two while I try to sort the car out more including...
1) Tearing everything back out of the car so I can paint the freaking cage! Rawr! Jeff is still leaning on me to pull the rest of the climate hardware out and considering the vast majority of my track days involve hellish amounts of heat, I'm probably going to cave and pull out the heater and assorted ventilation bits.
2) Getting my belts recertified. The G-Force ones I have in the car now were purchased here on the forum and have always intended to be placeholders while I send off my Omni Shield belts for rewebbing. They're in a box on the way to Texas as we speak. (Well, as I write this.)

We can neither confirm nor deny the presence of a Bear in the upper left-hand corner of this picture.

Rollbar padding has been specced out and purchased. It goes on after the cage is painted. It would have been fitted and zip-tied in place temporarily this past weekend if I'd actually remembered to bring the appropriate implements of destruction to the track. Happily it wasn't required, but I'll feel a whole lot better (and a whole lot more cramped) once it's in place.

Rollbar Padding - both large and smol

It's time for some Serious Effort in heat management too. We flat-out don't have time to pull the exhaust and have it ceramic coated before the next track event but maybe over summer break. What we can do is get some heat shielding on the underside of the transmission tunnel, change out the fluid in the transmission for something that's more heat-resistant, and throw Koolmat or some less expensive alternative over the driver's floor and transmission tunnel. That should help stop my electronics like the GoPro from overheating as well.
I also need to make a pass through the engine compartment like Gee Emm has been after me to do for, what, a year? and seal any and all gaps in the ducting to force all incoming air through the radiator. I've had at least some of the materials since last year but haven't had the car long enough to do anything about it until now.
I tried cranking up the Water/Methanol mix as the sessions got progressively hotter - I can keep the car happy when it's idling at grid (which is a significant improvement) but it just can't keep the car cool under heavy acceleration. I'm sure it's helping, but more needs to be done.
Also making sure the coolshirt system is in good shape - I'd be toast without it!

Coolshirt system maintenance! This thing is a lifesaver!

I'm going to have to give the car back to Jeff at some point in the near future though - there's a (comparatively short) list of mechanical things for them to sort on the car as well.

 

We definitely need to talk about your hands!

HL2 is where I've been running since I did the K Swap, and yes, it's usually Mustangs/Camaros, etc.

 

This!

Also the car setup has an incredible amount of push, so lots of improvement there too!

Glad to see you out there getting after it!!!!

 

Jesus ******* Christ. Your arms look reasonably jacked, and yet you're still pre-loading your understeer with that hand on top of the wheel. Fix the ******* car (that's mean, ignore that). Granted that's a tight course, but you shouldn't be much over 90*. Is that a manual rack? ****. You were like: BRAKE-IMEDIATE 180-GAS. Somewhere in there you should have spun. ****. You had zero counter steer in that video. ****. Tires? ****.

 

LOLOLOLOL!!! You guys are GREAT!!! LOLOLOLOL!!! Cats for Everyone, and Curly, I'd give you triple cats if I could!!!

Oh, on the Curly-input-topic the car's punchlist now includes adding footwell intrusion protection. Unfortunately since I don't have easy access to a competent welder and since there's absolutely no room for a pipe near my big feet I have no idea how to make it happen, but it's on the punchlist darnit!
I should also mention that Firebird West was completely repaved a few months ago and the new surface makes everyone's tires shriek like a cheerleader. That being said, all I had to do is move the wheel a few degrees off center and the screaming commenced - definitely not normal behavior.
Regarding the steering rack, I know the PO removed the power steering pump and I know it's really hard to turn the steering wheel unless the car is moving. That's...about all I know. I was really wondering about the steering last weekend because the advanced driving instructor was talking about how people should be driving with their pedals and the wheel really shouldn't need to be turned beyond 30'-ish in each direction and I was like, "WTF?!? I couldn't make a sweeper with that, much less a sharp corner?!?"
And for the record I'm using a rather tired set of 225/45R15 Continental Extreme Contact Force tires on 15x9 wheels.
Sooo, it seems like you all have some suggestions for improvement?
(And don't worry Curly, I'll be happy to fix the car and that's not a mean suggestion at all - I'm just a complete idiot and don't know what's wrong because the car has pretty much always been that way. I think.)

 

The Miata footwell is a tight spot... when I added a footwell protection bar to my cage, I modified the clutch pedal to move the pad about an inch closer to the brake pedal to provide more room between the clutch and cage tube.



The tube itself is pretty simple to add, it's just really tight working in there, especially around the fuse box, which was why I didn't add it when I initially built my cage.



Here's my size 11 even with the clutch pedal height to show how tight things are, though I've never had any issues when driving even with street shoes. It would be a different story if I hadn't modified the clutch pedal.



Finished product...

 

To beat a dead horse, hand position was the first thing that I yelled at my screen. I called a couple novices out for that at autocross last weekend when they decided to make me an instructor for some reason.

The sim rig is a great place to practice that, especially if you have a formula style wheel (IE, no real ability to shuffle the wheel around). The wheel has those little pockets to lock your thumbs into at 9 and 3

Regarding trans fluid, I'm running 50:50 Lightweight shockproof and MT90 and have the opposite problem, mine shifts like trash when cold, but is better as it warms up. I mean... it shifts like garbage all the time, but less like garbage when warmed up. The lightweight shockproof is pretty damn thick, so it might be worth trying out.

Glad to see you and the car back out on track! Looks like a blast!

 

Ahhh, thanks for the explanation - I wasn't sure exactly which part of John's Patented Terrible Hands Technique™ was triggering people because there are so many things wrong with it including:
1) Position
2) Absolutely no hand shuffling (I understand the concept - I just despise hand shuffling - too much fiddling around, too slow, too easy to lose reference - you'll note my left hand is usually the anchor that helps me reference how much the wheel has been turned.)
3) Arm crossing to get around corners (due to #2)
4) Way too much tension in the hands and arms
5) No gloves
6) My bad habit of leaving my right hand on the shifter if there's another shift coming up soon
etc, etc.

As Curly has so astutely pointed out, in order to hit the (potentially incorrect) steering angle I'm after I have to really crank the wheel. Since I hate hand shuffling, that means I "have to" (note the quotes) move my right hand to the top of the wheel so I don't have to hyperextend my right arm/wrist while maintaining contact with the wheel. Am I doing this intentionally? Heck no. I'm just trying to point the car in the right direction - I'm a classic dad "whatever works" driver.

That's what I'm talking about - Purple for the win!

Incidentally there was one time on Firebird Main making the 180 on to the main straight in my old Adams Aero where I literally did steer with my knee - I forget what the exact reason was - right hand must have been shifting, left hand...I dunno. Maybe flipping someone off.

I can really relate to this sometimes

So if I'm understanding what people are saying, the Real Solution is to fix the steering on the car so the wheels turn more when I turn the wheel. I'm totally down for that. I have no idea how to do it, but I'm sure the answer is out there - I'll start researching.



Next topic! Footwell intrusion thingamagummy! This is going to be fun. I have size 13 feet.
Here's my street shoe:

Flush with the metal on the left side, and literally extending under the clutch pedal. I have to do this weird movement with my foot if I want to get under the clutch pedal to use the dead pedal

And here are my racing shoes:

At least now I can get to the dead pedal without hitting the clutch!

[img alt="I don't left foot brake, but if I did...
(good for showing clearance at least)"]https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.miataturbo.net-vbulletin/2000x1504/20260423_092821_e695ac02e47d60ed26b3daa42427b84532 3d0f70.jpg[/img]
I don't left foot brake, but if I did... (good for showing clearance at least)


I don't have much room down there - I have to be carful not to push two pedals at once as it is.

Maybe there's clearance to cut a hole in the wall of the floorpan itself and weld the brace in there? (To both the wall and firewall, you know.) This is the sort of thing I hand to a competent person and say, "Make it worrrrrrrk" while crying. (Do we not have a cry emoji? I would totally use that all the time.)

 

Well nuts. It looks like depowered racks have the best possible steering ratio - I popped out to the garage (sure is nice actually having the car home for a change) and checked how many turns to go from lock to lock - it's just a smidge under 3, which is probably the 2.8 of a depowered rack versus the 3.3 of a manual one. If the car's issues stem from alignment and/or suspension setup then I'm facing a significant learning curve to put it nicely.

Oh, I was pretty much booked solid yesterday but I did manage to finally pull the hardtop off around 11pm as part of the preparation for painting the cage. That cage is so pretty and looks so good with the rest of the silver on the car I almost feel bad painting it! Maybe I should clearcoat it or something instead...
*Edit* Oooh, Rustoleum comes in clear too...

Purty!