Yesterday I wrapped the heater return hard line with DEI Reflect-a-Gold tape to hopefully help a bit with heat radiating off the turbo manifold.




I also started replacing any orange fire sleeve with black DEI fire sleeve. My OCD wouldn't let me have the extra mix of colors in there.



I pulled my extra MSM 6 speed transmission out of the shed and degreased it in preparation for seal replacements. I didn't finish replacing the front seal, but did replace the rear seal.






I finally got the engine off the engine stand and installed the rear main seal using the handy Flyin' Miata RMS installer tool.




Last thing I got done was install the 1.6 Fidanza flywheel and a ACT HD clutch kit.





Now I am just waiting for some NPT to AN fittings to arrive so I can finish this up and put back into the car. Should be driving this soon if all goes well!

 

WTF? Who is powdercoating your stuff locally? Everyone I talked to wanted a billion dollars to do something a simple as a valve cover.

I need to unsub this thread. You've done everything I wanted to do but didn't have time.

Also, Mocal sandwich on the left:



If you don't already have oil temp, I'd recommend finding a solution for that now, before you get too far. After the turbo install my temps skyrocketed on track and there are only a couple of oils (Amsoil Dominator 15w-50 for example) I'd trust at the temps I'm now running without a cooler.

 

I took my parts to Monterey Peninsula Powder Coating. They took twice as long as I was promised and the job was decent to say the least. I paid them $225 to get the intake manifold, valve cover, turbo compressor housing and VVT mechanism powder coated. I haven't gotten anything else powder coated so not sure whether that's a good price or not.

I looked into the Mocal sandwich plate and at the moment, not sure that I will be needed one since this car will be primarily a street car. As far as oil temp, I do have a 1/8 NPT bung welded on the passenger side of the oil pan for a sensor, but not sure which one to use. I was trying to tie it into my Megasquirt PNP Pro ECU, but I'm a little confused about which sensors will play nicely with that ECU. Guess I have to do a bit more reading. I did read that I can use a GM temp sensor and that the calibrations in TunerStudio will already work fine for it, but I could only find that in 3/8" NPT. I might end up just running a standalone oil temp gauge and not integrating it into my MS ECU. What are you doing for your oil temp monitoring?

 

I picked up these Bellof headlights a few weeks ago. Not sure whether I'll be installing these on this Miata or the 93LE.

 

I installed the Transmission and the starter.

 

Next up was finally putting the engine/transmission back into the car. I installed it back with both the motor mounts already attached to the block. It took me a little bit of moving the engine around and jacking up the transmission side to get it lined up into the motor mount holes on the sub frame.

 

Once the engine was bolted up, I proceeded with connecting all the electrical connections and vacuum lines. Also got my Koyo radiator installed with the coolant reroute and last thing was plumb the inter cooler piping. I redid the hot side for better clearance around the sway bar and lower radiator hose.

 

Here it sits waiting to be filled with oil/coolant so I can do the first start and break in the engine.

 

This is the first idle. It started on the first crank with out any issues. Sorry about the potato cam video. Didn't realize my phone was recording at such a crappy resolution when I took this.

 

This past weekend my buddy helped me get the TSE down pipe connected to my 3" exhaust from the MK turbo kit I was previously running on this car. We mounted the pipes, measured, cut the old flanges off and installed the new stainless steel v band flanges I bought. It turned out pretty good.












After the install the exhaust was much quieter, I can actually hear myself think while driving.

 

Since I hadn't noticed any leaks after a few hundred miles, I decided to put the bumper back on. Also washed it for the first time in months.

 

I've been having a problem where my Spal fans are stalling the car when it is idling. I have been able to tune it so there's a small dip in RPM when my lights are off, but if I have the lights on and the fans turn on the RPM will drop so low that it wants to stall. I want to say that half of the times this happens, the car does stall. I have messed with closed loop idle and got it to the point where everything idles fine. I can power on the lights and heater fan motor and the car does not stall and it reacts pretty quickly. From doing some research others have also had problems with large spal fans, it seems to be the high load that the fans put on the engine. I have tried swapping out to a 100 amp RX7 alternator, running a 30A spal relay to each fan, put in a new Marathon AGM battery purchased on Amazon, I even added a 1 farad capacitor to see if that would help ( it didn't seem to make a difference). I can even feel it while cruising on the freeway, there will be a slight sudden buck when the fans first turn on. Datalogs show that there is a 1.0 spike in the AFRs for a split second, but the battery voltage does not show that it's dropping neither do the pulse widths or anything like that. I can post logs and my tune later if that helps. Any ideas? I know my tune still needs some work, but I don't think it should be this bad when the fans turn on. Today I switched back to open loop idle so I can better tune my idle without IAC changes. Then I will switch back to closed loop and continue trying.

Fan information:

SPAL Fans (30101522)
12” Medium Profile Puller Fan
Curved Blade
For use w/ 25Amp Fuse @ 13V
Airflow (CFM) : 1328
Size : 13.19in x 12.56in x 2.44in

Part# Description Length Depth Width CFM Current Draw
30101522 12" Medium Profile Fan - Curved Blade - Pull 13.19" 2.44" 12.56" 1328 13 Amps

 

Post tune

 

Here is my tune as of 20 min ago. I messed around with my VE table, it needs some work. I changed it around and then did a bit of auto tuning during lunch time. The spark table is actually copied from your build thread after you dyno tuned since we have very similar setups.

My setup is a 2003 VVT engine with 84mm 8.6:1 CR supertech pistons/manley rods. Supertech +1mm oversized intake/exhaust valves, Supertech double light valve springs, MMD SUB lifters, BE oil pump, ID1000 injectors, stock VVT coils, Fidanza 7 pound light weight flywheel, koyo 37mm radiator, two12"spal fans, (but only one is currently connected), coolant reroute using begi spacer.

 

Turn on idle RPM timing correction. Increase the fan idle up delay, and idle up duty.

See if that helps.

 

Turned on idle RPM timing correction. adds 12*@-300rpm, 10*@-200rpm, 8*@-100rpm, 6*@-50rpm
Increased fan idle up delay from 500ms to 1000ms (that's the max it lets me raise the delay)
Increased idle up duty from 3.1% to 6.3%

Will try this out after work and take a data log, can post results soon after. I've already tried similar settings though and it didn't help much. I will try this though and report back.

 

Fan no longer stalls the car when my headlights turn on. I ended up having to add more fuel around the regions where I would idle while the fans turned on and that looks to be what helped the most. It's not perfect, but at least it doesn't stall the car anymore.

 

I was able to make it to Miatas at MRLS this year and the car was running pretty good. I didn't take it on the track, but still had a blast. Before the day of the event, I worked on ducting the radiator/intercooler and adding some Singular Motorsports hood louvers. It took a lot longer than I expected to make the ducting. I used PVC sheets from home depot to make the ducting. So far I ducted the bottom and sides, but will also be adding some ducting from the top of the intercooler to the top of the radiator.


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I noticed that I was getting oil in my intake charge pipes. It was coming from the compressor side of the EFR 6758. I had read about this issue which other people had also experienced. What I did was step up the drain line from -8 AN to -10 AN. I made the line a few inches shorter to avoid any kinks/sharp bends. I also used a treadstone -10AN fitting instead of the -8AN that screwed into the drain hole on the CHRA. This seemed to have fixed my issue. I was getting oil all over the intercooler pipes and surrounding areas since it would jizz out the Forge BOV. So far things look clean.


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A Few more pictures of the ducting


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Last week on Monday, I drove it 9 hours from Salinas, CA to Yuma, AZ. It drove very well, however the coolant temps did rise a bit higher than I'd like them to when I was driving up the Grapevine. The ambient temperature outside was about 90-95 F and while driving up the mountains, I saw coolant temps go up to 227 F. I didn't worry too much because I needed to stop for gas, and let it cool down for a little bit. Besides that the car was mechanically fine. However, about 15 miles away from my destination I ran over a damn pallet. It was already dark and they were doing construction on the road. I had no space to swerve around it.


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I was able to get a replacement overnighted from Good-Win Racing in San Diego. They were awesome and got to me quickly for no extra charge.

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On my way back, ambient temperatures were a lot cooler and coolant temps never went above 215 while driving. Also I drove under a rainbow while I was on Interstate 5. Snapped a pretty cool picture.

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