atotalpro

This is actually my second go and doing a turbo build. You can see my first go-around here. Long story short, I had issues with getting the car running properly on the MS2 that I had, and decided to throw in the towel.


About the car

My Miata is a 2000 LS, in emerald green mica over tan. I have owned it for about 7 years. Currently it sits with a bit over 93,000 miles on the clock.


Current Mods

• Meister R Zeda CRD coilovers: While I have very little experience with performance suspension, I honestly think these are pretty good for the money. I purchased them back when they were about $1,000 for a set and am very pleased with the way the car handles and rides. I had a set of Powertrix coilovers previously and they rode like complete trash. My wife hated riding in the car and I finally got sick of getting tossed out of my seat going over large dips on the highway. Part of the poor ride may have been due to the fact I didn’t relieve the bushing bind when I installed them. I doubt this was the only issue. They seemed way over sprung to me.
  
• Speedy EFI (Speeduino) PnP: I was super intrigued by the price of speeduino ECUs and decided I wanted to give one a go. So far, my experience hasn’t been too bad. It works, the car is drivable, and the majority of features seem to work as expected minus the out of the box ignition setup. (I’ll get to that later).
  
• 14point7 Spartan 2 wideband controller: This wideband controller is $75 and it works. Need I say more? I like the fact it doesn’t come with a gauge. I don’t really want gauges that don’t match cluttering up my interior. My plan is to have a separate display pulling data from the ECU at some point.
  
• Flow Force 640cc injectors: These should have plenty of headroom for my goals. This is my second injector kit from Flow Force and I am super happy with both. Just taking the guessing out of ECU settings is worth the price for these.
  
• Lotus Elise seats: These seats just feel right and they fit the car perfectly. I managed to find a set in “biscuit” so they match my interior. They are non-probax, so I will probably replace the foam at some point. The seats honestly transform the car.
  
• Flipside Customs elise seat brackets: These were a bit hard to get lined up on the tracks, but they seem to work well. The sitting position is pretty much perfect and maintaining the ability to move the seat back and forth was a must. Well worth the cost.
  
• DIY short cold side intake: Cheap, noisy, minimalistic.
  
• Jongbloed Racing 15x7 +25 Anthracite: Decent looking wheel, very inexpensive. If it’s good enough for spec Miata, it’s good enough for me.
  
• Raceland Header: Honestly a decent piece for the price. I did have to massage the transmission tunnel and grind a bit off the block to make it fit.
  
• ISR Exhaust (the **** your neighbors off, special): I recently swapped out my old, much milder setup for this with the anticipation of a turbo. Right now its stupidly loud and drony. The turbo should muffler it a bit. I plan to add a 100 cell cat at some point because I love the environment. If its still too much after that, I will probably add a j pipe resonator.
  
• Hard Dog Roll Bar: Such safe, much wow!
  

Goals

I’ve wanted to do some sort of forced induction build pretty much since I purchased the car. Its crossed my mind to move on from the Miata several times, but I just don’t feel like I can be done with it until I reach this goal.

The goal now is to build a turbo street car in such a way that it is simple, inexpensive, and as reliable as possible for the budget. To me, this means very low boost, probably just on wastegate pressure, a quality pre-fabbed turbo kit, and a tried and true quality turbo. I’m hoping to get away with the stock cooling system, and clutch for the time being. If I succeed and truly fall in love with the car in its new form, I plan to gradually improve the setup. Components

• Garrett GT2560R: o’ll reliable / don’t fix what ain't broke. Seems like people have been running these on 1.8’s for forever. There is a gray market seller on Ebay that I was able to negotiate down to $700 (before tax and shipping) for a brand new unit.
  
• Kraken T25 top mount kit: The Kraken stuff seems to be seriously legit and even with the recent price increase, still an amazing deal. I ordered it about a month ago, and it hasn’t shipped. Willing to wait for quality though.
  
• Mamba (Ebay) adjustable wastegate actuator: I decided to go this route over utilizing the stock wastgate and an adapter bracket mostly so I can change springs. I’m not 100% sure what pressure wastegate is on the turbo I bought, but I want to run as low of boost as possible. I believe there is a 7 pound spring in this kit.
  
  
  

atotalpro

As I mentioned before, I’m running a Speeduino from Speedy EFI. In my humble opinion, its an incredible value for the price, assuming it holds up. While I know the Speeduino doesn’t have all the features the more popular MS2 and MS3 have, it still seems to be enough to get the job done.

On this note, I think we need to probably start supporting the Speeduino platform here on the forum a bit better. It’s crazy to see how much the permanence mod options are still changing and developing with such old cars. Considering that one of the main appeals of the miata is its purchase price and inexpensive nature to mod, I think the Speeduino is naturally going to become a more popular option.

On to actually installing and tuning the thing…
Tune

Im using github to keep track of my Tuner Studio project and log files. You can check it out here if you are interested: https://github.com/atotalpro/2000-miata-tune
Wideband

I installed the 14point7 Spartan 2 by tapping into the patch harness between the miata harness adapter and the ecu itself. 14point7 says to ground the controller to the same ground and the “interfacing device” so I just used one of the ground wires in the patch harness. I also used the switched 12v from the patch harness to power the O2 controller. Insulated blade connectors were added so that I could connect the linear output directly into the patch harness, or connect the patch harness back up in its original form. Lastly I used an extra threaded hole in the dash support structure for the 02 heater ground.

This seemed to work well. In Tuner Studio, I had to manually configure the wideband, and the 14point7 preset is not correct for the Spartan 2. It should be 10 afr - 0v 20 aft - 5v.
Injectors

The injector config was super easy as well. I just used the settings from the Flow Force site and the flow rate given by the card that came with my specific set. After I realized that NBs were 4.0 fuel systems, everything worked as it should.
Ignition

I was unable to get the default ignition configuration in the base tune to work correctly. It was 4 degrees retarted whenever I checked it with a timing light and setting the “Trigger Angle” did nothing in this mode. I ended up setting “Use new ignition mode” to “No” and that allowed the “Trigger Angle” setting to work.

For my ignition table, I rebinned the table that came with the ECU base tune and then used the NB1 base map from trubokitty.com as a reference to add the positive pressure range since the SpeedyEFI base map only handled vacuum.
Fueling

With the AFR target table, I used a similar strategy to the ignition map, where I utilized the base map from SpeedyEFI for most of the vacuum portion of the table, and referenced the trubokitty.com maps for the boost portion. For the VE table, I believe I just used the interpolation features and my best guesses for fueling.
My road NA tune was completed using Tuner Studios Tune Analyze Live feature. This seemed to work well over several sessions gradually rolling into different RPM ranges while gradually adding more throttle each time. While I can see in the logs, that the fueling isn’t spot on, I feel that its close enough to be safe.
Lastly, I set up the O2 correction settings (ego?). I honestly don’t really know what Im doing here. I understand the concept, but I think the settings are probably aggressive and a bit ineffective. Although it did improve fueling slightly.

atotalpro

I've accomplished a lot since my last post. Mainly getting the car up and running with the Kraken kit.



The top mount manifold and downpipe with this kit are fantastic and I can't recommend them enough. Unless you need emissions compliance, im not sure why you would go with any other manifold considering the price. If I were to order again, I would go ahead and skip the lines and fittings. I ended up replacing most of them anyways, and im not sure at roughly $100 they are a good value. I opted to get a FM oil filter relocation kit since I wanted a better oil feed location for the turbo and I wanted a relocation kit anyways. The FM kit is great. In my opinion 100% worth the money. My only gripe is that I didn't find that the threat sealant that came with it worked very well. I only used their supplied compound on the block fittings, and used the Permatex white stuff everywhere else. None of my Permatex sealed connections are leaking, but one of the connections I used the supplied sealant with started to leak. I also wished they would have cleaned the billet aluminum parts out a bit more, as both still had lots of shavings in them. It was cleaned out easily enough, but still a little annoying.





I was extremely confused by the intercooler piping routing at first. I though since I ordered the generic T25 kit that I would need to clock the compressor housing downwards, but instead the piping runs from the top, horizontal and then down, utilizing the stock GT2560r clocking. Over all the intercooler and piping fitment was decent, but once I got it figured out. The cold side piping rubs a bit on some of the AC lines, which need to be addressed. I got so irritated with the maze of power steering lines and interference with the intercooler that I bit the bullet and went ahead and ditched power steering (which I was already considering) and bought a de-powered rack from MiataSource along with a stupidly expensive power steering delete idler.




The MiataSource rack was a "blemished" unit they were selling for $400, which seemed like a good deal. Over all it seemed decent, although there was way to much preload when i received it. I have ordered several items from MiataSource in the past and have always had good service. Because I figured it would be much less hassle than selling it, I decided to take them up on their offer of $80 for my core and covered shipping. Communication with Zack at MiataSource was spotty at best. I was unable to get him to acknowledge the shipping reimbursement. I eventually decided to just eat the shipping cost and sent it. It took them forever to actually refund me my core charge and I was never reimbursed for shipping.

I was initially shocked by how heavy the manual steering was with a de-powered rack. I lowered the preload and that helped a bit. After it still seemed unreasonable I dug out my last alignment spec sheet from good old Firestone and discovered that there was 6 degrees of caster. That probably has something to do with it....

I drove the car a few times like this and played with the tuning. Overall, but car ran well, not making a lot of power as it was seeing about 8psi max, the boost dropping off at higher RPMs and very conservative timing. Then I decided to take the car our of commission again to install some of the Black Friday purchases. For Black Friday I picked up an FM level 1 happy meal and an FM coolant re-route. These items lead me down the dangerous road of "while im in there". I found the re-rout was easiest to install while the trans is out for the clutch change and since I need to drain the coolant anyways, Im going to replace the 10+ year old timing belt and water pump. Since the valve cover needs to come off to do the timing belt, I figured I would go ahead and add AN fittings for my catch can.

SimBa

Nice build! Very similar to the path I'm on right now.

I agree, the speeduino's and specifically the plug n play variants seem like they'll become more and more common. Plenty of horsepower but lacking some advanced features.
I had the same issue setting base timing on my NB1. I was only about a degree off, so I'm just running it as is right now. I'll have try your workaround at some point.

Out of curiosity, are your IAC Valve PWM values higher than expected (like 80+)? I had to install a diode on my car to get a wider range of usable values.

atotalpro

Yes, very high PWM values. I ended up having to mess with the bypass screw (or whatever its called) to actually get any sort of usable range of control. I've had a few more issues with the SpeedyEFI PNP unit it and have decided to switch to an MS3. I was able to grab a great deal on an MSLabs Basic for $500 (assuming it works). I have a Spartan 3 wideband controller im going to switch to as well and run via can.

I think many of these Speeduino projects just aren't quite mature enough yet for road use, in my opinion.

SimBa

I suppose that's the downside of a less developed (and community developed) platform. I figure as people use Speeduino more and (hopefully) document issues/fixes then it'll become better and better.
I've been dailying my car on the SpeedyEFI for a while now and for the most part it I'm pretty happy. Cold starts are definitely a bit rough, and I haven't had to deal with AC yet, so I suppose we'll see if I make it through the summer.

Good luck with the MS3!

Panici

I like my SpeedyEFI and it handles daily-driver duty no problem. Have had minor issues but the price makes up for it.
Wouldn't have been able to turbo my car when I did if I had to save for a better ECU.

I did shell out some cash a year later for a TunerNerd Knock Monitor setup (which helped dial in my timing map).
I figure it cost about what a dyno session would to sort the timing, and I can use it on future vehicles as well.

Doing it again I would seriously consider running an MS3X with the per-cylinder knock control like I have in my E30. Also having knock and AFR safeties onboard is very nice.