The more I learn about hood vents, the more I realize just how well designed the singular vents are. Gurney flaps (even if it is done with a sacrificial vent flap), excellent location (venting the high pressure/high heat areas while still covering things that don't like getting wet, and still managing to preserve a lot of the support structure), and they even look good!
I bought a set of the hood vents from https://www.rgr.engineering/ though, because they were cheap. *Shrug* $120 shipped for set of 5 small-ish vents in plain aluminum.
I found out about them from a one-line side reference made on Occam's Racer (https://occamsracers.com/ - I Love that site!) in a blog post about hood vents so I added them to the list of places to investigate.
Here they are.

RGR Engineering Hood Vents. Woo.

It's pretty obvious this set was designed to go after the high pressure areas while not disturbing the support structure, like, at all.

Pretty obvious where these are intended to go!

There's a picture floating around on teh intarwebs with a grid of under-hood pressures for an NB Miata and I guess folks figure the NAs are about the same - it shows the highest pressure areas are along the front edge of the hood, and right behind the headlights. So by that logic the intended placement of the RGR Engineering hood vents is reasonable. But there's more to it than that, as the Singular design shows. There's a good case for moving the middle-ish vents back a bit more to help pull air through the various cooling thingamabobs that are usually up there, and let's not forget the huge heat generator otherwise known as a turbo that many of us folks on this forum have. It makes a lot of sense to put a vent behind the turbo so air will flow from the high pressure areas, past the turbo to help cool it off, and then out the vent. Adding that nice vent on the side above the intake is great too because it would help drive airflow across there too and help cool down that area while still venting the high pressure areas. Brilliant! More than double what I paid, but definitely brilliant.
I'm considering placing the vents differently to try for similar functionality to the singular ones.
Maybe something like this:

Maybe this?

Once I get the car back I'll try to identify the best spots to place them based on where the various bits are in my miata.
"But John!" you might be saying, "What about the support structure?"
Or maybe not - maybe you're saying, "Man he's a cheap @#$$%@" or "what's taking so long for his car anyway?" or even "why is he even posting about this junk when he could be working on his other car parts?"
All this and more may or may not be answered after dinner. Hasta! ^_^

 

Pow! Back! Let's continue with my happy little imaginary conversation.

• Am I cheap? Well I'm trying to spend the correct amounts for the best effect. I'm not wealthy - just financially irresponsible.
• I stopped to post because my back hurt. I've been working on a lot of stuff (for the car of course) and I'm just not as young as I used to be. *Sigh*
• What's taking so long for the car? I got it back from the differential shop on Tuesday and promptly dropped it off with the guy who is lowering the seat and installing the brake kit. Once it comes back again hopefully I'll get to actually keep it for a while! I'll need to keep it since I've got 500 miles of micro trips with long cooldowns according to these differential break-in instructions. >.<
  And Finally...
• What about the support structure? Glad you asked! racelouvers.com has an interesting note about that on their site - if you don't want to completely remove the underlying support structure they suggest just drilling some holes in it and keeping it. The RGR vents lend themselves well to this practice since they don't have a particularly large presence under the hood - most of the flap goes up. I can't finalize the placement until I can do some measurements on the car, but I don't have an issue with leaving a holy version of the support structure in place under the vent. It won't vent quite as efficiently, sure, but it's still better than no vents at all and I expect it will work fine - the car doesn't have cooling issues as it is according to Sean. My primary goal for adding vents is to decrease the front end lift that's common with miatas with some nice secondary benefits like helping keep the engine bay cool and improving airflow through the radiator and oil cooler which keeps the coolant and oil cool. Cool, right?
• Bonus Bullet! The RGR vents don't have gurney flaps, but I can add those with a piece of aluminum angle at the front of the vent. Occam's says a gurney flap up to 1" tall is fine with this style vent (if I understand correctly at least.)
  Edited the above statement - that front flap on each of the RGR vents is bigger than the other flaps to the tune of 1" (see the statement above regarding gurney flap height) so the front flap may be intended for use as a gurney flap. (I'm still planning to use aluminum angle for the gurney flap though.)

I've been conflicted regarding which hood I wanted to put the vents in since the junkyard hood turned out to be nicer than expected. However, in my quest to not spend unnecessary money I've ended up with a set of bare aluminum hood vents. Hmmmmm...bare aluminum...that sounds familiar...

Shiny!

The vents polished up nicely, just like a certain hood...

All done! At least as polished as it's getting for the time being.
I finished polishing the hood the other night, happily enough.

So I'm thinking I'll install my freshly polished bare aluminum hood vents in my freshly polished bare aluminum hood. There's nothing stopping me from going the paint/powder coat route later if I want. Uh oh...one of the other ongoing projects was lurking in the background. I guess I know what my next post is going to be about then.

 

Regarding putting a vent further back near the hotside of the turbo, don't. The topside of the hood in that area is a higher pressure zone and will defeat some of the benefits of the vents you have purchased.

 

Are those NB vents, or NA? As well as a set of Singulars, I have a set of those too ...

 

Those were labeled as NA vents on the site...

...and as pictured earlier they fit perfectly in the front spaces between the support structures so I'm reasonably certain they were shaped for use with NA hoods.

It's good advice like this that makes me glad I'm taking the time to make posts! I'm really just trying to do something similar to the singular placement, just on the cheap. I plan to stay far away from the high pressure zone near the cowl for certain though, and none of the placement is going to be accurate until I get the car back and can take some measurements. 2" back from the radiator edge and things flow from there.
Was playing around with placement last night - if I shuffle the side vents in ways they weren't intended I can bump up the openings behind the radiator where they'll do the most good and still get a little venting higher up but still in the low pressure zone like Singular does. Like this:

Playing with placement
The angled lines between the front vents don't exactly match but this is a track car, not an art piece. Besides, maybe the clashing lines in the vents will distract the OCD folks from the dirt stuck in the clearcoat on the rear deck... >.>

Oh! I do have a correction regarding gurney flaps. Upon closer inspection the frontmost flap of the RGR Engineering vents I received is taller than the other flaps. In fact, it's exactly 1" tall, which is arguably the optimal height for a gurney flap! So it looks like the RGR Engineering vents were designed with a sacrificial front vent to act as a gurney flap. I don't think I'm going to use it as such, though, because there are only four flaps in each vent anyway - I'd rather stick a hunk of aluminum angle in front and let the flaps all be dedicated vent-y...um...things. Yeah, that.

I'm also trying to stay away from the intake, not because of water concerns (I'm in Phoenix for cryin' out loud - we hear about that mythical wet stuff falling from the sky but personally I think it's an urban folk tale like jackalopes and people who use turn signals) but because I don't want to create a low pressure zone where the intake is. That seems counterproductive.
I do have a teeny-tiny little concern about that top right vent, though, because it might end up over the turbo itself. If I do end up driving in the rain, is it bad letting cold rainwater drizzle down on a zillion degree spinny hot doodad? I mean, I guess it can't be that bad or the car would blow up every time I drive through a puddle. I just don't know how the rest of the world deals with that mysterious water-stuff I keep hearing about.

 

Those are definitely the NA vents. I have the NB vents from RGR and they are shaped differently. The NB hood structure is more rounded and the vent shape follows that trend (I guess mainly just the front vent). I painted mine with some high temp enamel which has held up well enough.

 

I wanted to buy one of these Blackbird Fabworx Adjustable Lexan Spoilers because they can do everything I want a spoiler to be able to do. Having an adjustable spoiler is Very Useful. Like, Very.
No one had them in stock. Like, No one.
So I reached out to Blackbird/Aurora and after a few tries got in touch with Moti. Turns out he was (and is) having supplier issues so he didn't have a complete kit to sell, but he had a kit with everything but the quick adjusters he'd sell me for a discount! This was perfect in my book (and Moti is an all-around-Awesome person in general) so I sent him money and a few days later I had a box of nifty parts. I plopped them down on top of the junkyard decklid I had purchased for just such a purpose and here they are:

Spoiler Parts
I do vaguely recall Moti saying something about sending me instructions, but there weren't any in the shipping box or my inbox. I took a quick look online and found a copy of installation instructions on Good-Win Racing's website so I said, "Well that should be good enough" and started pushing the parts around to try to make sense of it all.
Thing was, the instructions assumed that the spoiler was already assembled. Mine wasn't. Now any intelligent person would have just gotten in touch with Moti and gotten instructions or at least a quick rundown on how to put the bits together to make a functional spoiler. Never let it be said I am intelligent. Remember a few posts ago where I said I was a Big Dumb Dummy? Yup, that's me. I dug up various pictures across the web and peered at blurry little long-distance shots that barely made sense. I took a close look at each component, grouped up the screws and nuts, etc, etc.

Fasteners

Maybe like this?

With the hinge like this?
And once I'd had a good look at everything I started putting it all together. I quickly realized that I was having one of "Those Days" where nothing, absolutely nothing, was going right the first time. But I also realized that this spoiler was a Fantastic, Brilliantly Engineered, Intelligently Implemented Solution. As I was getting ready to screw the hinges on I thought, "Man, it would have been nice to have the holes in the lexan chamfered so the screws fit flush." Then I discovered I had every piece of lexan backwards...because on the other side all of the relevant holes were chamfered! I had no idea why some of the holes on the hinges were bigger than the others. Much later in the process I discovered the bigger holes were specifically intended for the slightly larger diameter screws that hold the spoiler on the deck lid rather than holding the hinges on the lexan. Yes they were backwards. Yes I had to take the spoiler apart and flip them the right way. Ok, I did exaggerate a bit - I think I got the orientation of the raised hinge correct - I believe it goes on the top of the spoiler joint to better fill the gap between the lexan pieces in the highest-pressure area, and everything functions properly with it oriented that way. But I managed to put the support bars on the wrong piece of lexan the first time and had to take them off and move them to the little triangular parts instead. Really having a senior day that day.

Finally got the bar right. The hinge is still backwards here, but I didn't discover that until later.
I had a bad scare when I had marked where to drill the holes in the decklid and decided to do a test fit before drilling. Good thing I did because the holes weren't lining up with the spoiler! I read through the instructions again and discovered that the first picture had the correct dimensions for both NA and NB miatas, but the second picture was only correct for NB miatas. The dimensions for NA miatas was different, but you had to catch that in the paragraph before the picture. I'd probably label the picture a bit more clearly and include a separate picture of with the dimensions for an NA miata as well, but who knows? Maybe in the copy of the instructions I never bothered to get that's already been done. Happily my recognition that I was doing everything wrong with the spoiler already, combined with the fine practice of measure-twice-cut-once saved me from punching unnecessary holes in the deck lid. Which is fine by me, since it has a bunch of unnecessary holes already from that old rack that was long gone by the time I bought the thing.

Whew! Almost screwed that one up

Finally I had the spoiler fully (and correctly) assembled and properly bolted to the deck lid.

Finally!
Now...what to do about adjusters? I had already talked to Moti about the general size and range of motion so I just needed something that would work in that range. I could just make a few differently sized rods and swap them out depending on the angle, but where's the fun in that? So I spent tons of time scouring the internet for turnbuckles that would work, and finally found one that looked like it would fit the bill: Some random word-salad Manufacturer's Turnbuckle on Amazon
Once they came in I held them more-or-less in position and it looked like they'd suit. Unfortunately the hardware to attach the adjusters wasn't included in the kit, so it was off to Ace Hardware with a turnbuckle in hand. Funny (to me at least) story - I walk in to Ace Hardware, a fellow walks up and asks me how they can help and I say, "I have a challenge for you." He immediately turns his head towards the back of the store and yells, "Paul! I've got someone here for you!"
You know how some folks really know their stuff and can figure out how to make things work the way you want? That was Paul.

Turnbuckle Complete!
60 minutes and $30 later, I had all the bits I needed to cleanly fasten the turnbuckles to the lexan including a perfectly-sized eye bolt, aluminum bushings to hold it steady in the lexan, wide washers to help distribute the load across the area around the bolts, nylon locknuts to keep everything together, nylon spacers to keep the eye bolt from sliding around in the turnbuckle jaw...not exactly simple, but very clean and secure.

Spoiler fully assembled

Once it's in place and ready to use I plan to run a loop of safety wire through the hole in the middle of the turnbuckle body and one of the jaws to keep everything from moving/untwisting when stuff starts vibrating. Oh, and I got to rebuild two of the turnbuckles so they all rotated in the direction I wanted to make the spoiler go up. Because I had to do pretty much everything wrong with this spoiler the first time. *Sigh*

Then I took the spoiler off of the trunk lid. It'll need to be disassembled again to take the protective film off of the lexan, and...well, that's another post.

 

Some say the universe presents you with the same challenge repeatedly until you have learned what you need to. By that logic apparently I need to improve my skills with painting miata trunk lids because here we are again. >.<

Nice spoiler, now do something about that trunk lid!
Before I finish the installation for the spoiler I really need to sort that decklid at least a little more. *Sigh* Pull the spoiler off, take the taillight out...

New gasket time...again
...order another new gasket.
Drag it out to the the paint booth, aka the back yard...

Oh-my-rust-what-a-shock
...hit the rusty bits on the underside with a wire brush and shoot it with some rustoleum. Then...

SANDED
Sand the SNOT out of the trunk lid. Then hit it with some handy paint prep cleaner spray stuff, let it dry and then...

Primered
...Drown the puppy in filler primer. I used oil based rustoleum filler to match the oil based rustoleum I was going to spray it with. Hit it with a light sanding to take off the high spots and then...

Better. Far from perfect, but better.
...Shoot it with Gloss White Rustoleum. Messed up on one of the passes in the middle, but the rest is decent and I can sand everything level once the paint dries. In a week or so. Man this stuff takes a while to dry. Anyway, it still has a few dings and dents but so far this trunk lid paint job is turning out considerably better than the last one. Now to wait a week for wet sanding and clearcoat. *Sigh*

 

I got my car back. It has Very Impressive Front Brakes. It has a slightly lower seat. It has a rear differential that needs to be broken in by not driving over 50mph or over 30 miles at a stretch for the next 500 miles. Oh, and Phoenix, which never gets rain, is predicted to get lots of rain over the next few days. Guess I'd better sort the side striker plates and install the hardtop.

Return of the Miata


Guides!
Mine has the guides showing what to remove on the backside of the panels. Handy.

Screw you!
And that's what we're going to screw into.

Starter holes
I found the midpoint between the guidelines, marked that, then measured up that same distance from the bottom and top edges, marked that, and presto! The spot I needed to hit with the step drill bit. First a few starter holes...

Bigger!
...huh, better make those a little bigger. The step drill bit is pretty chunky.

Better!
Much Better.

Drilled
Yup, that's a good start.

Jigsaw!
Open up the edges with a jigsaw...

Files

Finally, clean up the edges with my limited selection of files.

Side Striker Plate in Place!
Screwed the side striker plates in (added a few washers behind the driver's side one to help prevent the latch from popping), plopped the hardtop on, adjusted the latches, and...

Hardtop Secure!
...the hardtop is securely fastened. The side latch by the driver's side still likes to pop - I taped all of them down with painter's tape for the time being. We'll see if everything settles in after a few days. Otherwise I may do the screw mod or a latch rebuild kit. We'll see. I've got the metal brackets to bolt in for racing too, but there are times I'd like to have latches.

 

I'm taking the miata on random 30 mile loops on surface streets around the city to finish breaking in the differential. It's kinda nice when the weather is good and the top is off; it's cramped, noisy, rattly, and hot when the hardtop is on. Not looking forward to long roadtrips to tracks. I freely admit a light trailer to haul the miata around would be the Intelligent Solution, but my Flex is capped at 4,500lbs for towing which means I'd need a light trailer to keep a safe weight buffer. That takes money. And space to store a trailer. Pretty sure I've discussed this before. *Sigh* Back to driving.
All this driving takes time so I'm not getting as much done on the car as I'd like. Plus I worked flags at Arizona Motorsports Park on Saturday so very little else got done that day.

Flagwork at AMP
It's the last day I'll be at Arizona Motorsports Park since they are selling it to a development company. I believe it is turning into warehouses. And no, that isn't me in the background. I still have some hair left.

Other minor items I've been working in:
- Removed the original speaker from the passenger's side - weighed it this time before throwing it out. That sucker weighed over a pound! Both speakers are now gone for massive weight savings. I expect much better lap times now. Yeah. >.>

Fat Speaker!

- Braided Line Isolation
- A stray comment on the board here (maybe from Sixshooter?) talked about making sure braided lines aren't touching rubber lines or they'll saw through them in time. Makes sense, and if you look juuuuust above the turbo here...

Random Engine Bay Shot
...you can barely see the braided line is bundled with two non-braided lines. When I pulled the metal ziptie off of the hose piece used to bundle them I could see the braided line had a piece of hose around it to try to prevent friction, but the piece had slipped down. Everything was still good at that point, but I figured I'd pull it out of the bundle just to make sure.

Rearranged hoses
Done. Not quite as pretty, but everything should be secure and still shielded. I didn't have any metal zipties so I used some safety wire I had lying around. I love that stuff. I figure the wire won't cut through anything since the hoses are all wrapped in hose...piece...things. Yeah, that.

- I also was tired of the heat shield rattling like cans tied to a getaway car so I threw some silicone edge guards on there.

Silicone Edge Guards
So far it's completely stopped the random rattles, and despite the bottom edge being really close to the exhaust system it still hasn't melted, caught fire, etc. Tentatively marked as a Win. For now at least.

- I tried on the polished-ish hood

Yes it's in the garage, no it doesn't get to stay there.
It doesn't look too strange with the silver hardtop on, but sharp-eyed viewers will notice the hood is too high on the driver's front side. It's hitting the wastegate actuator, which sits a bit high. Sean ran into that issue with the original hood and solved it by taking a hammer to the hood.
I tossed together a garbage solution to try to make sure that's what was hitting by taping a piece of tinfoil to the hood, closing it, opening it again and examining the tinfoil, and that definitely appears to be the contact point. Stlll not quite ready to break out the hammer, but something is definitely going to have to change before that hood can go on.

Cheesy way to try to find where it's hitting.

And finally, I started cautiously venturing into the tune. Very Cautiously. As in, double-checking with Sean and then turning on boost control in the tune again. It was off.

Boost Control was off

I also enabled the Idle RPM Timing Correction Curve with some pretty conservative values to try to help smooth things out since the car doesn't have an Idle Air Control (IAC) valve any more. It doesn't seem to have hurt anything at least...

Conservative (I think) RPM Timing Correction Values

 

Well no Anti Hair Hairdresser Club sticker for you then.

Looks good. Idle Ignition correction should help a ton. IIRC the Link's default was to allow the ECU to add or pull 20 degrees. Assuming your idle settings are decent you should be able to give it more authority without issue.

 

It wasn't me that mentioned the braided line making a great sawzall blade, but I am familiar with the phenomenon. They cut quite well.

 

Awesome work man. Lotta fab time there. I like a little contrast on the hardtop, and the silver looks good.

Just waiting for the completed photos of the hood vents and your glowing review so I can pull the trigger on them.

 

Thanks! The PO did most of the Real Work but I'm doing what I can. Mostly abysmally bad bodywork. >.<
I'm close to starting the cutting on the silver hood - I just need to finalize the positions. I'd really like to mimic the singular positions as much as possible because I think they've really got it right. If I had the money lying around I'd have just bought those. They have a nice template and everything. The RGRs will function - heck, like Occam's says, just hacking a hole in the hood would actually be an improvement - I just think it's a bit ironic that after researching hood vents as much as I have I'm really just trying to do a poor man's version of the singular vents.

 

Trying to push through on a few items while getting as much driving in as I can. (213 slow, fragmented miles to go before the rear differential is broken in.)
Got clearcoat on the rear decklid:

Clearcoat complete!
Got the parts together for the second decklid, including another gasket. (Obviously I hadn't cleared off the old gasket yet in this picture)

I swear I've been here before...
Aaaaand finally the Blackbird Fabworx spoiler is installed. I had clearance issues with the bolts on my homebrew adjusters so I went to notch the rear finish panel...which cracked like a M*&(^(* F%&^&*^&$ because that's what they do. Replacements are stupid-expensive so I have a new item on the punchlist - take off the finish panel and glue/reinforce the breaks in the back using some plasti-weld I have lying around. *Sigh* Stupid brittle plastic...

Spoiler installed!

Since the car is destined to be an Outside Car, the completely-unused-because-there's-no-radio-antenna-base was nothing but a hole for dust and water to get into the trunk. So I pulled the base off, added it to the pile of unused car parts, and put in one of the ubiquitous antenna delete plugs.

Antenna Delete Plug

Much Better

Quieting things down - the Sequel
The guy who did my brakes and seat said the Vibrant resonator I bought wouldn't fit. So back it went. Happily I made the return window by 2 days or something.
I swung by a muffler shop that was actually close to my house (unlike virtually every other car shop I go to) and the guy running the place said, "Yeah, buy a couple of the Vibrant bottle-style ones and I'll see if I can fit them both in.

More, slightly smaller, resonators
I have an appointment on Monday to (hopefully) have them installed.

It's a good practice to have an extra set of brake pads (fronts at least) when you're at the track so I ordered another set of Porterfield R4s from Good-Win. I battled mightily with their website to ensure I ordered the exact same pads as before. Precisely the same.

First order on the left, second on the right.
I double-checked my order. Yup, definitely ordered a set of Wilwood 7812s in R-4. I looked up the ones I got - they're the Wilwood 7912 shape, not the 7812. That certainly sounds wrong. I couldn't get through on Good-Win's phone so I've got an email in to them now.

 

I stumbled across the reference again - it was Blkbrd69 in the Oil Cooler Tech thread. Your post was the one just above it and your avatar makes every post of yours stick Very Well in my mind - Probably why I associated you with the information.

 

Wow! A FedEx guy showed up this morning to "Pick up some brake pads" (!) I gave him the box of Porterfield Powerlites, he stuck a label on it and off they went! That's staggeringly fast service. Chalk a Big One up for Good-Win!

 

I like the master heat shield - covers the heater hoses too.

 

That heat shield was put together by the PO Sean - he does Fantastic Work! All I did was add the silicone edge guard which I'm happy to say has completely resolved the rattling issue.

So the day after Fedex showed up to pick up the wrong brake pads they showed up again with these: (Product ordered on the left; Product received on the right)

Different...but The Same!
Back to Porterfield's website to look up yet another product label aaaaand...this is, in fact, the same product. Porterfield's 4" Stockcar DPs are the Wilwood 7812 shape. Success! Heaven only knows why the labeling is so confusing but it's all good and now I have my spare brake pads.

As I mentioned previously a chunk of my spare time has been devoted to breaking in the rear differential so I haven't had time for anything major on the car. I am squeezing in a few minor items, though, including...
My cheap chinese turnbuckles were starting to sieze up after a whopping few days of use so I disassembled them, threw some anti-seize lubricant on the threads, put them back together and ran safety wire again to keep them from self-adjusting. They're back to working perfectly now.

Lubed and Wired, Oh My!

I replaced the window bushings on both sides so I didn't have to hire a weightlifter to turn the window cranks. While I was at it I installed these nifty new lower door cards I got from Charles Hall: https://www.hallroadsterparts.com/pr...age/doorpanels
They come as a set of two and include the lower door cards, the RS Style door pull, that pretty molded piece to dress up the pulls, and these Awesome, heavy, chunky screws that thread right into the holes that the push to lock fasteners use. He even included a screw to attach the pull! (it uses one of the armrest screw points.) I'm quite happy with the results - there's definitely more room with the armrests removed and the RS style pulls are just plain fun. (You can get the pulls in other colors - I'm just boring and chose black.)

New Door Cards
Staggeringly slow progress on the hood vents - I'm still pushing them around on the hood to try to find the best position. I've got some additional measurements from the engine bay so I think everything may end up scooting a bit further back, although I'm going to run into the hood-bump-thing if I push that center vent any further rearwards. I'm trying to scoot the top two vents a bit more to the side as well. Work continues, and any input from the Hive Mind is gratefully accepted.

Getting Close

In the trivial-but-not-trivial department, I changed lanes the other night and discovered I had just massively cut off an SUV with one burnt-out headlight. I thought I had checked my blind spot, but somehow I missed an entire vehicle. So! Off comes the hazy old blind view mirror...

Old blind spot mirror
...and on goes a nice, new, glass, frameless blind view mirror. Will it help? Well you can't fix stupid, but you can at least help him see. >.>

I spy...

 

Have you tried this? It would match up closer to the Singular positions.