The engine is in! And it runs! I visited for a bit and got to rev it up a bit. There's plenty more to be done, but it runs! Woot!!
Sorry, but the Arizona Ice Tea catch can is being retired though. There's an Evil Energy one from Amazon over on the bench that will be taking its place.


Stage Left!

Center Stage-ish!

Stage Right!

 

Oh yeah, looks great!! Congrats!

 

Congrats on getting it running. Looks really clean with everything coated/painted.

As much as I love the AZT catch can, having an open can of oil in the engine bay seems like a recipe for disaster.

 

Looks more like a catch and release can to me.

 

Just in case some future searcher stumbles across this thread I feel obliged to point out that my Amazing Arizona Iced Tea Catch Can (Patent Pending) was only intended to help my car make the 15 minute drive to the shop so they could help figure out why the driver's side valve cover vent was puking oil all over the exhaust header. Now that was a fire hazard. Well, at least it was until I stuck a hose on the vent and shoved it in the tea can. Then it was only kinda a fire hazard... *Cough*

While I'm at it, here's a picture from the weekend visit to the car. It lost its lift slot to some silver minivan. I'm told work on the Miata will continue today. When they're done wrenching in the engine compartment I'll bring the vented hood over. Should be cool. Hopefully literally as well.

A Certified Mechanic will be with you shortly. Please Hold...

 

...

 

The proportioning valve with remote adjuster is in, the not-a-fire-hazard catch can is in, just waiting on the rear calipers and alignment bolt swaps and the car would be ready for me to take buuuut...

)@#)#$)@#$)_^+_@%!!!

...I am no longer allowed to park in front of my house. Which is where we need to park when the Miata comes home. I called the shop and told them the Miata was Very Much Not a Rush now.

 

Sometimes I'm reminded of how old I am getting to be.
I visited the Miata at the shop this weekend. It's mostly done at this point and drivable so I brought the passenger's seat, bolted it back in, fired up the laptop, plugged it into the Megasquirt, autotuned the idle, drove the car around a big city block, autotuned the drive, updated the ECU, held the replacement brake shields with brake ducts in place to identify fitment, discussed emergency brake solutions...did I take a single picture? Nope, not one. I make an effort to get pictures when I think of it, but when things get interesting it never even occurs to me.

Of note: The car was set to idle at 750rpm. It hates idling at 750, even when warmed up fully - it starts to dip, dip and stumble, dip more and stumble more, until it dies. It seems to be perfectly happy around 1k based on my highly scientific push-the-gas-until-it-idles-smoothly-and-note-the-rpm method, so they're going to excavate the idle screw and make the change in the next few days. I can make another pass through the idle advance settings too - the current settings are incredibly conservative.

Unsurprisingly there's a lot of oil and grease to burn off - the engine was generating a noticeable amount of smoke at stoplights and I actually had people changing lanes (while we were stopped!) so they could get away from the scary, filthy, hoodless miata smoking next to them.

Despite it's appearance, the car is wonderful to drive - either I've gotten used to the clutch or the newly installed one is easier to work than the old one was. Runs smooth, accelerates cleanly, has a nice amount of pep as the turbo spools up - I kept it at 5k rpm or lower until we're a bit further in the break-in period but it zipped up to 5k like it was nothing. Really, REALLY looking forward to when I can bring it home.

One wrinkle - I was looking at the engine compartment last week and noticed the heat shield was missing. "Um, Jeff? Where's the heat shield?" After a fair amount of digging it surfaced in a pile of parts off to the side of the garage, covered in grease and missing some of the silicone edging I had added. >.< Home comes the heat shield for refurbishment.

I did some research and it appears there is genuine benefit to putting an aluminized fiberglass or other thermal blanket layer with decent reflectivity on the business side of a heat shield. There are several companies offering adhesive-backed solutions for large sums of money. I of course bought a roll from amazon for $12.

Sunday mid-morning was spent using my high-dollar garbage-can workbench to clean up and revamp the heat sheild. Pulled off the silicone edging I could salvage.

Salvaged Silicone Strips - how alliterative!

A bunch of degreaser, scrubbing, rinsing, then a bit of detail spray to get the stuff I missed with the scrub brush so the bare aluminum heat shield was clean and ready for sticking on the thermal blanket.

Applying the additional thermal blanket

Once the blanket material was stuck on, flip the heat shield over and trim it with a box cutter...

Ready for trimming

...and voila! One heat shield ready for edge guards. Now technically I could probably have skipped the edge guards since the reason I put them on originally was to cut down on vibration noise (it rattled like a ****) but hey, most of the strips were already done and I thought it might help hold the thermal blanket in place if the adhesive decides to fail on my high-dollar amazon solution.

All trimmed up and ready for the edging

So after strategically smearing silicone, stuffing silicone stripping on the sides, and wrecking the shirt I was wearing at the time, the heat shield is done and ready to go back on the car. Good thing I wasn't wearing one of my favorite shirts, but then again I know better. >.>

Heat Shield 2.0 ready for use!

We should be able to put the vented hood on soon! Looking forward to it.

 

I made a point of grabbing a few pictures while I was dropping off the heat shield yesterday afternoon. Here is the car as it sits currently. I'm toying with the idea of making minor tweaks to the colors using plasti-dip to see how I like them - minor stuff like blending the silver roof and the headlamp covers in a little differently, maybe adding pink kitten silhouettes in strategic spots...you know, minor stuff.

The Car

Here's the engine as it sits currently. The new catch can is in, it'll get the heat shield and idle adjustment done and then a few more tuning/pressure/leak runs before the hood goes on, but it's getting closer!
I'm fighting the urge to get a repaired oil dipstick and an aluminum coolant expansion tank. The ones in there work fine and figuring out which expansion tank is good without spending a fortune is a headache anyway. Must...resist...

The Engine

Here's the interior as it sits currently. I have to fabricate some sort of hood for the new warning lights - right now the sun shines through them and I can't tell if they're really lit or not. I don't have a 3d printer so it'll probably be some old-school solution involving scraps and obscenities.

The Interior

And for those who actually bothered scrolling through the rather boring post above, a Reward! Actual Content! Well sort of.
An unexpected wrinkle has popped up with the new rear calipers - they're not compatible with the emergency brake. Should I have though of this? Probably. Did I? Obviously not.
Here's a pictorial recap to remind you, dear reader, of what I have:

Secondhand Rear Calipers

They're probably originally from V8Roadsters who have a kit that includes rear parking brake compatibility. I reached out to them, they had me send pictures of the calipers, aaaaand they're not compatible. Apparently the ones that would work have a slot machined in to the calipers themselves. No Bueno.
Plan B: Flying Miata has a rear parking brake kit that has a separate set of calipers for the parking brake. I talked to Ethan over at FM and yup, the NA/NB rear parking brake big brake kit would work, and they even have an option on the website to omit the main calipers! For about $800. *Sigh* And it's out of stock. *Deep Sigh* Until Christmas. Like...Literally...CHRISTMAS.
At least I'll have plenty of time to save up the money to buy the kit...

Ho Ho Holy $$!&...

 

Good stuff man.

haha we're both in the same predicament with the parking brake. I wanted to retrofit the cables to my wildwood calipers only to find out I don't have the slot in the center. I'm glad I asked FM before ordering those. I had not realized the new option was that expensive though... Might have to bump into the garage door a few more times before I pull that trigger.

 

You can get a whole lot of wheel chocks for $800

 

Or I could just sell the current rotors calipers (assuming I can find a buyer), buy the kit with the slotted rotors calipers from V8R for around $700, save weight, keep things simpler-ish, and they'd probably get me the goods before Christmas. Probably.
*edited to use the right part! I think the word "slotted" made me think of slotted rotors, even though that's not what we're talking about.

Another option...

I've got sport rear brakes currently so I don't have to do anything either, but I really like having as much stopping power as possible on the track. You're fine with less until you need it...

 

I snuck over to the shop yesterday after work and before class to squeeze in a hurried tuning run. The heat shield is in! It looks spiffy. Can't tell if it makes much of a difference until I get a hood on the car. Then I guess I can drive it hard and see if my brakes fade/brake stuff melts. >.> Here's hoping it works.
I also came across the hose Sean was using to route high-pressure cowl air over to the intake back before the car got a turbo. (Sure is useful reading through his build thread! I've have had no idea what the hose was for otherwise.) The hole from the cowl was still there, and the hood is going to be vented anyway, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to direct the air back to the intake again. Really got to fasten the hose down though. Probably when I can take the car home and have access to my tools and scraps.

Heat Shield is In!

The shop got the car aligned again too - these are the specs Sean documented in his build thread, so hopefully they're good. It's a starting point at least.

Latest Alignment

This part was not planned. No, not the garbled license plate. That's intentional because I'm old and paranoid-ish. *Cough* I'm referring to the LRB rear finish panel. The vanishingly small number of people who have actually read through this thread attentively will recall that my original rear finish panel got some significant cracks when I was notching it to make room for bolts I used on my awesome blackbird fabworx spoiler. I had made an entry on the punchlist to take it off and glue/reinforce the piece before it broke completely.
Then the car got shipped off to the shop for the engine rebuild. They push the car all over the place to keep it out of the way. I guess I should be impressed that it took a few weeks before a hapless mechanic pushed hard on the rear finish panel and it gave way completely. Jeff the owner pulled me aside at my next visit and started apologizing and said they'd pay for a new rear finish panel. I told him all about the pre-existing cracks, said it wasn't their fault and I'd pay for it. He was pretty determined to pay for it but ultimately we agreed on going in halfsies on the cheapest one they could find, which turned out to be the LRB aluminum one. It looks surprisingly good and follows the completely unintentional theme of gradually replacing portions of the car with bare aluminum.
Now I just need to track down a nice 3" exhaust tip. And maybe cut the rear bumper. Or find one that someone else already cut for cheap.

LRB Rear Finish Panel

And Again, the actual content is totally hidden here at the end of the post!
They made manual adjustments to the idle so it now idles at 1krpm. In anticipation of this I fiddled with the Idle RPM Timing Correction Curve a bit - gave it some higher timing values to work with, and tweaked the Closed-Loop Target RPMs to properly reflect the new target idle of 1000rpm. Burned the update to the ECU, then took the car for another auto-tune loop around the big city block. The car still pulls fine, runs fine, doesn't smoke as much since most of the oily stuff has already burned off, etc.
BUT
When I pull up to lights and take my foot off the gas, the RPMs tank and the engine promptly dies. I have to restart the car when I want to go again. No stress there which all of the traffic behind me, of course. >.< This would happen occasionally before the engine rebuild, to be honest, but it's much worse now - It's pretty much a given the engine is going to die at lights at this point.
I will research the issue as much as I can today since the only time I can really work on the car is tomorrow afternoon. I've attached a copy of the current tune. I don't think the changes I made affect this - I'm just trying to figure out where I need to go in TunerStudio to tackle this. *Sigh* And the phones are exploding at work and pretty much everyone else is off today. Lovely.

*Edit* Hmmm, initial research indicates...I need to tune the car! Huh, who'd-a-thought. And logs would be handy. Guess I'll have to generate some of those too. >.> Well at least I've got something semi-productive I can do tomorrow afternoon - auto-tune it some more and grab some logs.

*Ninja Edit 2* Wow, as I dig deeper it's disconcerting how much negativity historically there has been regarding putting effort into a 1.6 engine. Admittedly a lot of the stuff is from years ago when availability of parts was different, but folks apparently have stacks of fully functional 1.8s lying around just waiting to toss into their car over the course of a weekend if the urge hits. I'm...not that person. I don't have those skills. I just want my car to go around a race track at a reasonable speed without breaking so I can try to be a better driver...*Sigh*

 

After running around like crazy all morning doing class, chores, etc, managed to get over to the shop an hour before they closed today with the laptop in tow. Took care of Important Things like washing the windows so I could actually see out of them and made a quick run over to to the local Circle-K to gas up the car so I didn't have to worry about running out of gas while I was pootling around with auto-tune running. It's a clear indication of the neighborhood the shop is in that I could pull up to the gas pump in a hoodless, filthy, smoking, rattling miata and none of the other customers even blinked.
Went back to the shop, fired up the laptop and logged a few start/stalls, then turned on auto-tune and let it do mysterious stuffs. Watched scary Air Fuel ratios drop from 17s to 13s and after a few minutes the car stopped stalling. Played with different RPMs, watching stuff drift towards stoichiometric levels. Took the car for a drive on fast streets and slow neighborhood streets and darned if autotune didn't eventually drag everything to functional levels! Went back to the shop, tested and logged a startup which no longer leads to stalling, burned everything to the ECU and the car seems much happier. Jeff is ready for me to bring the hood over next time too.

Today is a Good Day.

I'm virtually certain the tune isn't done yet, but at least it's headed in the right direction! Tune and startup logs attached if anyone is interested.

Oh, and did I take pictures, or videos or anything? Heck no. It didn't even occur to me until after I was leaving. Well, and when I bought gas so to help me remember how much gas I put in. >.<

Fill 'er up!


I'll take what's behind the door on the left, Wink...

 

In your idle ignition table, I'm pretty sure the +8 is supposed to be -8. Fan on/off temp could use some tweaking, there's no way fans will bring down the temp 8 degrees, so I feel like that's just set to "always on". In fact while idling in the "aftertune" log, you're just at 206-211, so it was just always on. Is it a 205 thermostat? Really hot day?

EGO isn't set to function at idle, only above 1400rpm. It also has way too much authority IMO at 20%. I'd turn the authority tables on and actually tune how much authority you want where. I typically do 10% in idle and cruise, 5% or less in boost. You also have a 10 second delay after start, widebands typically take 20 seconds to heat up and begin reading. Looking at that log, your idle AFR is between 14.7 and 17, with a target of 14. RPMs look stable, so I would target 14.7, give it some EGO, and make sure that portion of the fuel table is fairly even, and it looks like it is at around 38-39. Try 42, which is around 10% more.

 

Wow! Thank you Curly! I was more posting my stuff for general interest and to provide additional facepalm material for the knowledgeable types - this is Incredibly Helpful! Definite poscat material and if there's a way I can send you a six pack of your favorite beverage please let me know. I've been furiously researching between tickets to try to get a better sorted tune to burn this afternoon between work and class.
Yes, that was clearly the wrong value on my idle RMP Timing Correction table - I was tweaking it in the car and missed the negative sign on that one. Corrected and ready to burn.

Pulling the negative sign from his sweater...

Regarding fan control, I'm still researching that since I don't know what the proper values to put are. I'll have to ask the shop what temp thermostat is in the car since it's probably whatever Sean put in there - and yes it was hot Saturday afternoon - 110' Sure made driving an A/C-less car around to auto-tune a hoot, let me tell you. At least in the short term I'm assuming it isn't a Bad Thing to have the fan running pretty much all the time anyway, right? At least back in the old Chevy 350 days the fan was pretty much on all the time anyway...

I kicked EGO authority down to 10%, the Active Above RPM to 1000 (my current idle), and pushed EGO delay up to 20 seconds....

First this...


Then I figured out where the authority table is so I turned that on...

...then this!

and...sort of guessed my way around what the EDO authority table should look like. >.> Here's what I've got.

ID? EGO? Superego?
The AFRLoad of 30kpa line is 0 because...the original table was at 0. I dunno why. It also peters out above 80 because same reason. The reading I did made it sound like that was a Good Idea for a track car anyway because the O2 sensor could go bad and screw things up at race-y times. Following an idle/cruise block of 10%, I guessed that ran up to about 3k - I'm guessing the car is in boost above that so everything above that drops to 5% per Curly's suggestion. I figure this table as I've configured it is a fine indication that I have no idea what the heck I'm doing. Hopefully my sturdy little 1.6 survives my learning curve.

Based on the AFR numbers Curly was discussing, I think that's in this here Fuel VE Table, so I went and changed all of the 38-39ish values to 42. The 10kpa line wasn't anywhere near those values so it didn't get changed. I think Douglas Adams would be proud. Not so sure Curly will be but I'm trying at least. All of my ex's seem to agree that I'm very trying, in fact.

VE Day...I know what that is! This table, not so much.

As mentioned earlier in this post I'm going to try to run over to the shop after work and before class to drop off a shiny vented hood, burn this modified tune, and hopefully not blow up my shiny new engine. I'll watch temps and AFR to try to make sure nothing gets all explode-y.

Shiny!

 

Bolted for the door at closing time and ran the vented hood and updated tune over to the shop. Dropped the hood on the miata for fitment - no idea where they put the bolts to actually attach the hood, but it's in place at least. Jeff knows it's not bolted down and they aren't driving the car anywhere anyway. Still touching the wastegate actuator a bit - if Jeff and crew don't chop the offending substrata back a bit more by the time I get back there then I'll do it. Looks like a more complete car at least!

Shiny!
Fired up the work laptop which had been co-opted as my tuning system and pushed the updated tune down to the car.

I can tuna fish pretty good. Cars, not so much.

I couldn't drive the car anywhere since the hood wasn't bolted down, but I could start it! Gave it a go and it started right up! Jeff said, "That's the first time it's ever done that." Of course I completely forgot to take a video, so after a minute I turned the car off and went to start it again:

Yeah, of course it wouldn't start then. Must be warm enough that the cold start thingamagummy wasn't, um, thingamagummy-ing.

Gave the gas a few pumps and feathered it a bit on the next attempt:

Thaaaat's more like it. Looks like the afr went too lean at the higher no-load rpms though - I wonder if that's because I left the 30kpa line in my EGO authority table zeroed? I have no idea because as mentioned previously, I have no idea what I'm doing.
In any case, that's all I had time for since I had to run to class and the car isn't drivable until the shiny hood either gets removed or gets trimmed and bolted down properly anyway.
Current tune and a log file of the second (slightly more successful) start attached since I know people find train wrecks interesting to watch. >.<

 

Oh, I asked at the shop and apparently the mechanic building the engine specifically had Jeff order an 180' thermostat because turbo. I have noted this in the monstrous maintenance document I keep in Google Drive as well.
(Curly had asked a few posts ago.)
I did squeeze a visit in to the shop between work and class again yesterday - trimmed the bottom layer of the hood above the wastegate actuator back a bit more - I was using a case nibbler since it's not my shop and I didn't feel like swiping power for a Dremel or angle grinder. Jeff walked out with a battery-powered grinder and handed it to me. Jeff is Good People.
I'll bring a file on Saturday to smooth the edges if they haven't already and then the hood will be ready to bolt down. No pictures of course because as usual I don't think of that. Besides, you've seen the hood on the car in previous posts.

They're almost done with the road destruction in front of the house! The Miata can come home soon. Hopefully. Here, I can take a picture of that at least...

Done, Great, now GO AWAY

 

Replaced the hard drive on the shop computer over the course of the weekend (slooooow copying the data off of the original drive, but hey, that's why it was being replaced.) Jeff says his computer is 100x faster now. As it should be.
Not much else was happening on the car front other than Jeff repeatedly commenting on how much easier the car was to drive after the tuning changes, so Sunday afternoon I was out on my back porch looking at the 48" wing I got from the 9Lives Scratch & Dent auction. Oh, and sweating my backside off because it was a million-billion freaking degrees outside.
Since I was switching to endplate mounts I didn't need the wing mount plates. I debated just leaving them on, but where's the fun in that? Besides, they were welded to the business side of the wing and I figured I could use all the downforce I could get.

Mount Plates

Oh, hey, they're all decorated and stuff! That's neat. I almost feel bad cutting them off. Almost.

Purty Plates

Broke out my dremel. It appears to have died after my hood vent adventure - I have to squeeze it at the contacts for it to run. Dig out my dad's old dremel instead. It gets hot and doesn't sound as happy as mine did (before mine broke at least), but at least it runs.

Dremel

Start cutting through the welds aaaand...

Reeeeeallly well-attached mount plates

They really don't want these suckers coming off. Even with the welds cut/weakened the plates aren't budging. *Sigh* Been down this road before. Out come the Big Guns.

The Big Guns

And with far more destructive work and repeated hammer blows...two loose wing mount plates.

Plate 1

Plate 2
Six days later I had time to work on the wing again. Yes, there were other track-prep related items that happened during those six days but it was expensive and I didn't want to have to deal with it and I don't want to talk about it. *Grumble*
Anyway. Six days later I got back to work on the wing. Since I didn't trust that I could clean up the welds with a dremel without beating up the wing, I just took a hand file to the welds instead and smoothed them down.

They look better in Real Life

These too
They're not perfect, but they're actually smooth and don't stick up too much. Good enough for now at least.
And then it was the 9th. Homecoming!
Here's the miata, waiting to be picked up at the shop. They did a final fluids, idle, and leak check.

Last Day at the Shop

Open Wide!
...and then I drove the miata home. It was stupidly hot because Phoenix and the car has no A/C. I was running the tuning software on the laptop, auto-tuning and watching the gauges while trying (successfully, I am happy to report) to avoid getting in an accident. Manifold temperatures were within a degree or two of ambient - about 108'. Engine temps were worrisome - as far as I could tell it was peaking at around 203 - 207'. It was really hard to tell because the lettering is white and the background changed to yellow as an alert. Guess what? It's REALLY hard to read white on yellow in a laptop in the passenger's seat in a moving car. I take some issue with that design choice. When i parked at home I left the car idle for a bit longer while I peered at the laptop screen and confirmed that the incredibly-hard-to-read-yellow-and-white-blob was engine temperature and by then the temp had gone up to 210'. The dash gauge still showed above half but not scary levels of heat, but I believe that's normal.
The miata's current cooling solution includes:
A Supermiata Cross Flow Radiator - clean and in good shape - the anode doesn't need to be replaced - I asked.
Fresh Asian Green Coolant - yes, I could have been running distilled water and watter wetter, but for now it's the Asian Green stuff
Sean's DIY coolant reroute - like all of his work, it's great
180' thermostat - new
Setrab Oil Cooler - Sean did that install of course.
The ebay intercooler identified by deezums as acceptable. Sean installed of course.
Some sort of radiator fan backing the half of the radiator that doesn't have an oil cooler behind it. More Sean work.
Lots of ducting/panels/foam to force air from the hole in the front bumper through the radiator. Sean's work again.
A spiffy, shiny, bare (on the outside at least) aluminum hood with five hood vents and gigantic gurney flaps. My contribution.

I'll have a look for gaps in the ducting as time permits but it looks good so far.
Another interesting note - that bare aluminum hood is HOT! I parked the miata in the garage when I got home (no, it doesn't get to stay there) and the hood was still too hot to touch almost an hour later. The painted fender immediately next to it? No problem. The hood? Ouch. Is it really radiating that much heat an hour later? It might be a Very Good thing it's bare metal rather than painted if it's preventing it from acting as an insulator. Or maybe it's just a bare metal thing. I dunno. I don't usually have that much bare metal on my cars.

In any case, here's a picture of the miata in the garage. No, it doesn't get to stay there.

Garage for the day

 

The next day it was Wing Time!
I'm continually surprised at how manufacturers don't seem to include instructions any more. Instead there's often a link on their website saying something to the effect of, "Here's how this guy did it. Try that."
So, tape to help protect the (leprous) paint and one removed rear decklid. I pulled the decklid because I'm now a Complete Pro at removing rear decklids since I've done it so much over the past few months.
Oh hey, you can also see the fire extinguisher clamped to the rollbar. I have mixed feelings about that location - it's easy to get at, and in a pinch I think I could even pull the retaining pin and grab the unit from the driver's seat, even while bucked in. The bracket is just aluminum though - it's one of these from amazon: https://a.co/d/e03Bwd2
My paranoid self worries that if I'm in a shunt the bracket might fail and I'll end up with a fire extinguisher flying around the cabin. Not good. At least it's low enough that I can't even see it in the rear view mirror. That's something at least.

Tape and lidless. Oh look, a fire extinguisher.
Anyway, back to installing a cobbled-together 9lives street ****. Measure up 3 1/2" from the back which is a total pain on a curved surface with a metal tape measure. Much easier to measure 19" from the front of the trunk instead.

19" from the front
I was going to use the spacers to mark the holes, but I wasn't entirely sure I needed to use spacers in the first place. Why were they there? I researched them on the web and couldn't find any explanation for them. There's a slight, slight taper to the spacers but no clear indication of how they were supposed to be oriented, and for the difference in angle between the front and back it hardly seemed to be worth the effort. I ended up just grabbing the upright/endplate assemblies and maneuvering them around until I was happy with how they sat, and then had my youngest son mark the drill points with a sharpie. Since the transition from the side to bottom of the trunk lip is slightly curved, and since the bottom edge of the upright isn't precisely the same shape as the trunk lip anyway, there's a bit of interpretation available there. I opted to plant the front edge of the upright down as far as possible and which left the unavoidable gap between the upright and the trunk at the back side of the upright. That way I'll get maximum rake on the wing. It's only a degree or two, but hey, extra rake. We don't have really high speed tracks here in Arizona anyway so I'm not worried about extra drag from that small a change in rake.
In any case, marked the holes, whacked 'em with a punch, and started drilling. Used smaller bits, and worked my way up from there. I didn't jump straight to the biggest target size because my cheapo drill bits didn't have enough bite. Baby steps worked fine, happily. I did end up temporarily pulling the rubber stripping off in spots because it's super-tall and was getting in the way of the drill bit. It went back on easily once I was done drilling.

Little Holes

Bigger Holes
Once the holes were done I went ahead and pulled the tape off. Along with paint, because leprous paint. Big shock there.

Tape. And Paint. Because of course one comes off with the other.
Bolting the endplates and the wing on was really easy - I didn't even need to press gang the kiddo into helping which was nice of me because it was a million degrees in the garage, even with the portable swamp cooler. Just fed the bolts through the holes, stuck the upright on the bolt, threaded the nut on and bam. Wing for lunch. Measured wing height in relation to the car and the ground - it's level to both (thank heavens) and the front/back alignment between the sides is within 1/4". Considering the mounting method (and the age of the car) I'd say that's as good as can be done.

Bolted up!
I left the spacers off to see what would happen. Nothing appears to happen. It all bolted together fine. No spacers for the time being. Once I'm sure everything is good I'll throw some blue loctite on to keep things where I want them.

Look ma, no spacers!
I suppose I could have continued using the spoiler underneath the wing. Per Occam's if I set the spoiler level then it would act as a...something good. I forget the word. One of the Good Things it would do would be to increase the effectiveness of the wing. And it would also make it impossible to open the trunk very far once the wing was screwed on to the uprights because the spoiler blade would hit the wing.
Thing is, I don't want the street **** to work that well yet. They bill it as a good wing to put on when you don't have a splitter, which I don't currently. It reportedly generates front downforce as well as rear downforce as-is, so I don't want to mess with the wing too much until I get a splitter on the car. Then I'm slapping a giant gurney flap on that sucker and seeing what else I can do to beef it up. For now, though, it's getting a regular rear decklid. And considering what a pain it is to cut up the decklid and how much of the decklid is covered with my spoiler, I seriously doubt I'll ever put it under the wing.

I have a little voice inside my head that warns me of impending doom. I'm assuming everyone has one of those - we just don't listen to it very much. As I've aged, I've discovered it's a really good idea to listen to that little voice. I call it my spidey sense so people only think I'm kind of crazy, rather than the full-on bat-dropping variety.
Anyway, the little voice was all like, "You really want to pack that spoiler decklid carefully before putting it in storage."
It's a bazillion degrees in the garage.
I'm tired.
It's hot.
I want to chop up a rear decklid and finish this bloody wing project.
So what do I do?

Packed Properly!
I pack up the spoiler wing properly because I know better, darnit! What's the point of having a spidey sense if I ignore it?!?
Anyway it's in storage now, all nice and safe and packaged properly. No idea why I couldn't just throw the darn thing in there as-is but at least I don't have to worry about it.
Then it was throw-the-other-decklid-on-the-car-and-chop-off-bits-until-it-fits-nicely.

The fitting begins

No room. Chop off more. Repeat until it fits.
This necessitated repeatedly removing the rear decklid and making multiple trips to the angle grinder in the back yard, but it ended up being trimmed the minimal amount and, well, sort of straight. Happily it's hidden by the uprights most of the time.
Then I had to hit the rear decklid with touch up paint. Oh, and cleaning compound when the uncured black header paint from weeks ago on the sawhorses decided to stick to the decklid. I switched back to the white-coated sawhorses. Stupid paint. *Grumble*
The paint job is even uglier than before, but it looks Ok at 10+ feet as usual.

White sawhorses and ugly touch ups. Oh, and some water drops because I rinsed it.
Let the paint dry until it was only moderately tacky, lost patience and bolted the rear decklid to the car. Then spent half an hour fighting with the decklid alignment, wondering why the darn thing wouldn't latch until I finally figured out I'd put the latch hoop on backwards back when I repainted the decklid the last time.
Well there it is. Looks good from the side at least.

Wing complete. For now.
Apparently I wasn't done completely cooking myself in the garage because I took some additional time to fasten down the hose that Sean ran from the high-pressure cowl area to the intake. Considering how not-awful the manifold temps were compared to ambient I'm highly motivated to feed the car as much cool(er - relatively speaking) air as possible. And the hole is already there for cryin' out loud so I might as well route the air somewhere useful. Glad I've got vents nearby though.

Hoser on the upper right, eh?

Threw on the magnetic numbers I had lying around, then took them off again - They clearly need meatballs behind them to keep them from looking weird. I'll see if I can find some appropriately colored plasti-dip to spray some. I'll also probably put a dab of hot glue behind the numbers to keep them from blowing off. Eventually.
Considering it's 100% accidental, the car's color scheme is pretty cool though! Silver roof, hood, wing, and rear finish panel, white body, and black thingies here and there on the lower bits. It works for me at least.

Numbers and Colors

And FINALLY I tried out the kinda-sorta-cheapish-but-still-more-than-I-wanted-to-pay car cover I got on amazon for fitment. The car doesn't get to stay in the garage, remember?

Car-mostly-cover
I knew it was going to have the street **** on the back so a properly fitted cover wasn't going to fit. I picked one that had vaguely similar dimensions but was made for a hatchback and...it's not bad at all. I could maybe munge it around a bit more to cover the airdam and maybe still get it over the side view mirrors, but it was hot, I was really sore and tired at that point, and it was plenty Good Enough for a test. It also has straps that I can run under the car when I'm actually using it.
I'll need to chop up a funoodle to make edge guards for the street **** endplates so they don't wear through the cover in short order, but that's for another day.