Car in question?? I don't remember what it had for a rollbar...

 

Yep, that's the one.

 

I can't remember what rollbar it was. But you could definitely creep Anika's IG or send her a message and she'd get back to you. She was psyched to talk about that car and knew everything about it when I talked to her.

 

Dang guys, thanks for doing the investigative work for me haha. Forgot you guys got to see that fastback in person at FMSC.

I'm pretty past the idea of doing the CCP fastback for the foreseeable future (there's one or ten other things out there with a better cost to benefit ratio), but I'll ask her what bar she's running for future reference. Can't hurt to know if it's a viable mod somewhere down the road.

 

Sh*t man, I guess we're doin' this.



I grabbed the cams on Sunday and installed them into the backup motor on Monday. After playing musical chairs with the buckets, and scrounging the shop for spares, I was able to get the valve lash correct for five of the sixteen valves. Had to order the other eleven buckets from our parts distributor in Detroit. No big deal. They were slated to land here on Friday. I figured I could finish everything up next week and pop the backup motor into the car next weekend to make sure it runs, etc.

So I was planning on going up Mammoth this weekend for some bike riding and camping. Monday night one of my buddies hits me up saying he's gonna head up there next weekend with a few of the guys. Shortly after, one of my close friends who just moved to NorCal texts me saying he has next weekend off and is gonna head down to Mammoth too. Ok, maybe I'll head to the mountains next weekend with everyone instead and throw the motor in the following weekend. Wait, no. I'm pretty sure I'm booked that weekend, and maybe the weekend after...

F*ck it, motor's going in this weekend. I preemptively pulled everything I could from the engine bay before work this morning and removed the transmission, clutch, and flywheel on my lunch break. The trans removal was a personal record for me, roughly 28 minutes from lifting the car to placing the flywheel on the workbench lol. The rest of the cam buckets/shims should arrive tomorrow morning. I'll set the valve lash on the engine tomorrow and drop the engine and subframe at lunch or after work. Hopefully I'll be able to drive the car home on Saturday but I'll finish buttoning up everything on Sunday if I have to.



Initial valve lash measurements. The Ford/Mazda buckets are all conveniently stamped with thickness indicators on their underside. There's a couple nifty calculators online where you can punch in your lash measurements and bucket ID's and get the exact part numbers of the buckets you need for each valve location. Mine were almost all on the loose side so quite a few buckets were needed. Shooting for .008" intake clearance, .010" exhaust clearance as I did per my current engine.



I also grabbed another $70 eBay aluminum valve cover as the exhaust side crankcase breather on the 2.5 cover interferes with a coolant hardline in the Miata. Chopped and plugged the breather port and drilled/tapped an AN10 fitting. Then gave this valve cover the same stupid stencil treatment as my last one. Don't want anyone looking under the hood thinking I take this car too seriously





I also grabbed another Radium block breather plate for this engine. I'm running both of my breathers VTA and the OEM breather includes a PCV valve that becomes a restriction if you modify it to run a VTA breather. The Radium plate also includes an extra baffle, and a whole extra port if you want to run a second breather.

Still not sure if I bit off more than I could chew this weekend. Stay tuned for either glory or massive agitation

 

This is all very simple, I see WAZ 2 5, and I give a cat

haha, you never fail to impress with how you can get things done in record time. Interested to see how the power band changes with the different cams on this one, if at all.

 

Damn, good work. Knowing how you work I'll be surprised if it's not done by this evening

 

Oh, to be young again! Here I am going into week three of a turbo install, and @Z_WAAAAAZ will complete his engine swap over the weekend...

Once, very long ago, I had a 5.0 Mustang that was scheduled for a magazine photoshoot the following Monday. I thought I needed to step it up a bit, so I pulled the engine on Friday, trailered the car to my buddy's paint shop where we painted the engine compartment and under the hood on Saturday, trailered it home and re-installed the engine on Sunday. No effing way I could do something like that today...

 

Jesus man. I just did a full driveline swap-out this weekend and that was a pretty good haul. I'll be hitting another pretty good wrenching session this weekend as well, but clearly Zak is a pro (like actually) so that explains a lot of this. When you work on modern cars all day long a miata is so easy.

 

Lol, thanks all. I might not bring the most technical knowledge to the table, but I plan to earn my keep here by working nonstop on this car until my eyes turn red

Ricardo, the different cams are a good part of why I wanted to throw this motor in. It looks like peak power should hit closer to 6,500rpm, as opposed to my current cams which seem to make more power past my current 7,200 redline (that I'm not willing to increase lol). Also interested to see if these cams get rid of the torque valley I currently have at around 5k rpm, or if that's some combo of my intake and exhaust setup. Either way, new and different is exciting!

Sim, Getting the job done before even receiving the parts to do it is a lofty goal. Would be quite the accolade, though. Gonna have to ask Neil Degrasse Tyson about that one.

And I wouldn't attempt anything like that today with the current temps you're having in your shop! That's a serious weekend pull right there. To my benefit, nobody's lining up to shoot photos of this car on Monday, so I've got that going for me lol.

That driveline swap was no joke! I saw your post earlier this week and thought "damn that's a serious weekend" as well lol. I'm not gonna claim to be a pro, just someone who happens to do it day by day. But yeah, Miatas are straight up fun to wrench on after working on modern cars. I've replaced fuel filler necks that took longer to complete than swapping out the clutch on this car lol.



Engine bay's a mess currently I don't want to have the car plugging up part of my work area all day tomorrow, so I pulled everything I could in the parking lot after work. Intake manifold, oil filter perch/sensors. and fuel rail/injectors are mounted on the new motor. The wiring harness drops out easily with the engine and subframe but I'll probably try to finish removing it tomorrow morning since it's almost completely disconnected anyways. Engine and subframe should come out pretty quick and easy at this point.

 

She's alive!




Yesterday was a bit of a rollercoaster. The valve buckets were supposed to show up in the morning, but they didn't, which means they wouldn't be slated to land until Saturday. Damn. That's a bummer. I kept tearing stuff out of the engine bay before work, then right before my lunch break, my CCP hardtop showed up. I started taking a look over the hardtop and milling over the prep involved, and then the buckets showed up. F*ck it, gig's back on. I dropped in the valve buckets, which thanks to the handy dandy calculator I used, were pretty much spot on.



Esslinger says to run .006" on the intake valves and .008" on the exhaust valves. Factory manual recommends .008"-.011" intake and .010"-.013" exhaust clearance. Most of the guys building 2.5's recommend .008" and .010", so I shot for that on the last motor, and did the same with this one. Clearances were a touch tighter than on my last motor, but still all within .002" of each other so I was happy and sent it. Very glad I didn't have to order more buckets from Detroit. I finished assembly on the new motor and was able to finish yanking the old motor and subframe out before the shop doors closed last night.





This whole assembly doesn't have enough colors. I'm thinking it needs some green in there next.


@DUDELOL Thanks bro.

Got the car all back together and fired it up. Luckily the new engine didn't ask for much in the way of retuning. Actually, I still haven't done anything to the tune at all so far. I left the car on the lift and ran it at 2k rpm for 20 minutes for the cam break in procedure. Drained the oil and filter and no metal or other offensive materials came out of it. Good news so far! My parents' place is ten minutes from where I work so I decided to take a quick trip over to their place for the christening drive.

I pulled out of the shop. All good. Drove a few miles down the road. All good. AFR's looked good, no wild fuel trims, oil pressure and temp looked good, coolant temp looked good, etc. Aight, I guess it's pull time. I pulled onto an empty road, put it in second, and gunned it. Engine pulls, nice! Feels like it's got more power where my other engine dipped around 5k rpm, and maybe just a tiny bit less top end. I grab third and rev it all the way to redline again. Still good. I go to shift into fourth. Trans gets stuck in neutral and the clutch hits the floor. F*ck! Winning streak over. I coasted into a neighborhood and spent a couple minutes trying to figure what the hell went wrong with my clutch before realizing I never cinched down the slave cylinder bleed nipple all the way after bleeding it. The NC's clutch and brake system share the same reservoir, and my brake light came on after a couple more minutes, confirming what I believed to be true. I pumped the clutch up enough to row through a couple gears and drove the car to my parents' house in 3rd. Tightened the bleed nipple and topped off the reservoir and we were back in business.



Like I said above, the engine feels good so far. Upon first impression, it's a little smoother at idle (to be expected), has a little more torque on tap at cruise under 3.5k rpm, and strangely the exhaust note is noticeably quieter than my last engine. I did a handful of pulls on the way home and it feels like it pulls stronger from 5-6k than the last motor, and maybe a little bit less from 6.5k-7.2k. I'll confirm this via the datalogs when I check them out tomorrow. It's pretty straightforward to tell where the engine's making peak torque by looking at the G/rev readings from the MAF sensor.

Also of note, I haven't even touched my tune yet. The new cams are close enough to the old ones that they aren't asking for much in the way of fueling changes. Fuel trims are pulling 6-8% of fuel at idle, which makes sense due to the decreased overlap. At cruise, fuel trims are close to zero like I was able to dial in with the last engine, and AFR's at WOT are sitll in the mid 12's across the whole rev range. Again, I'll look at the datalogs tomorrow and see if anything needs to be done, but the car's running fine right now. I'll make some time next week or the following to go out and experiment with different VVT and timing settings and see if I can squeeze another one and a half horsepower out of it lol.

 

Welp, if she was gonna blow due to assembly error, she probably would have already. 160 miles and a very warm flogging in the canyons this morning. Lots of time at full throttle and at the rev limiter. Definitely an upside to having a powerplant making only 180whp. It's safe to say the freshly built motor scaries have subsided.

Datalog readings show the torque curve shifted downward and peak power's occurring around 6,500rpm as expected. Can't directly compare MAF sensor readings to my old datalogs as my IAT's were in the 80's yesterday vs 60* for my last recent logs. Peak MAF readings were 127g/s yesterday vs 133g/s on the old motor when it was in the low 60's, so both motors are performing very closely. This engine doesn't seem to have the torque valley around 5k rpm that the last one exhibited, though, so I think that might more than make up for the lesser absolute top end.




Almost all of the food groups in one photo.

Gonna do another oil and filter change tomorrow. Currently running Motorcraft 10w30 conventional diesel oil for the camshaft break in, since it's what I had on hand. I'll swap back to Motorcraft 5w30 semi-synthetic next. Oil pressure looks good, 75psi at 3k rpm/185*F, just a touch higher than what I'm used to seeing running 5w30 in the previous motor. I'm gonna make a couple minor fueling tweaks based on the datalogs then experiment with different opening points for the intake manifold flappers this coming week.

 

More minor tune adjustments and datalogging today. Y'all can mute this if you want to stop hearing about my silly 185whp motor

I did a couple pulls on the way to work this morning when it was slightly cooler out. Checked the datalogs, pulled a tiny bit of fuel from redline and added more in from 3.5-5k, where the engine was asking for it. Changed the oil back to 5W30, loaded up the new tune and did another couple pulls on the way home. Good news, the 5k rpm flatline really is gone, along with higher load readings at lower RPM than the last motor. Probably a combo of the milder cams and valve springs? Valve lift on these stage 1's is the same as on the stage 2's (0.400"/0.400" for the aftermarket cams vs 0.371"/0.322" for the OEM cams). Stage 1 cam duration is 18 degress less on the intake and only 7 degrees less on the exhaust vs the stage 2's that are in my other engine. The valve springs in this engine also have 39lbs less seat pressure than the overkill springs I put in the last engine, but are still stiffer than stock by a decent bit.

Anyways, here's some datalogs nobody asked for:

Log from my old engine, in slightly cooler weather than this morning. Note the flat spot in engine load from 5-5.8k rpm. You can even see the MAF reading dip at 5,300rpm even though rpm is increasing.



And a pull with the new motor split into two screenshots. Note the higher g/rev readings across the board until the engine hits 6k. The new engine seems to generate more torque below 6k than it loses above it, with g/rev readings just barely behind the old motor above 6k.





Gonna keep fiddling around with the tune. Not sure if the motor's gonna want anything substantially different in the way of VVT or IMRC settings, but it's probably worth experimenting with. I'll keep tinkering with it this week.

 

Well the car's got an engine in it, I guess it should get a roof now too.









A little more work than I'd expected to prep the top for install, but nothing too nuts. The provided side window seals were a tad short but otherwise everything went into place snugly. I could've prepped the hardtop surface a little smoother. Just ended up sanding the initial surface with some 320 grit followed by 800 grit because that's what I had on hand, then did the same again after coating the top with primer. The final result blends right in with the rest of the car, though, so I'm happy. The mild roughness matches the flaking clear coat and rattlecanned hood and trunk pretty well.

And it's light! I didn't weigh the new top with the window installed but it should be 25-30lbs lighter than the OEM top, putting the car close to or under 2,400lbs wet

 

Mammoth weekend means no weekend update or canyon run photos (oh no!), but there's still plenty of projects in the works. Exciting ones, at that!

First a couple views, though.








Ok, back to car stuff.




So today, I doubled the number of engines I currently own for the car. Kinda. I found a part out ad for an NC about an hour from where I live last week. The seller had two 2.5L's that he stated had head gasket issues. The engines were listed for $50 each. I allowed my interest to be piqued, and messaged him for more details. The engines have a claimed 64k and 81k respectively. He said one engine seized up, while the other ran and compression tested at 170-180psi per cylinder, but burned oil pretty bad. Obviously, neither of those issues immediately mean head gasket failure, and now I'm honestly kinda just curious as to what's happening inside the oil-burner, assuming what he says is true.

So I message him asking if he'll take $40 for the oil-burner. I figure if it's totally unusable for some reason, I'm still ahead and can use it for parts. The cam buckets inside that motor would easily cost twice that much and I'd like to have those and some spare valve retainers in case I need them in the future. It'd also save me from having to pay $70 for another piston if/when I drop another one like I did while building my current motor. The seller messages me back saying "Can you take both for $50? I really need to clear out this garage space." Ok, done. I grabbed both engines today and got em home. I'll start tearing them down this week and see what's going on inside each of them. I'm going to assume the locked up engine is going to be useable for parts only. The proclaimed oil-burning engine, though... that might turn into a fun project if it's salvageable. Assuming it is, I could build that engine into something nasty down the line without having to open up my other cammed 2.5, leaving me with a backup motor during the whole teardown/rebuild.

"So do you need any more engines for this car now?" -My fiance, earlier tonight.
No, I think this will be just enough.

 

Dang, and I thought I had some pristine views from the weekend! Looks great! Are there a ton of people on that lake in the first photo? I wouldn't be surprised, but it seems like a lot of watercrafts for how remote it looks.

Hey, now when these engines go the way of the BP you won't have to shell out $1,000+ for one

 

Hahah hell yeah man. I have a few spare bp4w's as well, all needing rebuilds but good running motors. Gotta have those spares, the wife understands.

Curious to see what that 2.5 looks like when you tear it down. Sounds like a great candidate for a full build.

Glad you got to shred Mammoth, were yall riding at the park?

 

Yours were no less sick, dude! Haha, inland SoCal/CenCal is funny. The scenery is mostly either sea of beige or absolutely gorgeous. There's only some in between.

Yeah, there's a lot of watercraft at all of the lakes in the first pic, but all of those lakes are a couple miles from town and easily accessible by paved roads. Just can't see the roads in the pic. The lake in the bottom pic we had all to ourselves, but had to climb up a 5 mile long 4x4 trail that took about an hour and gave everybody mild headaches. Gonna stick to the lakes in the first pic next time haha.

Hoping that's the case and I'll have enough engines to last me the life of this car. I've seen posts from 5+ years back of folks getting these engines for $250-300 with only 40k miles on them. I'm still not complaining but you're right, that number's only gonna keep going up.

Ford actually still uses these motors in their smaller hybrid cars to this day. The hybrid 2.5L has some differences compared to the standard one, though, that have historically made it less desirable for this swap. The engine actually uses higher compression pistons (and a thinner head gasket according to some), netting a 13:1(!) compression ratio compared to 9.7:1 for the standard 2.5. The kicker, though, is that it uses Atkinson cycle cams, which basically provide the exact opposite powerband that you'd want for a track car. Furthermore, the pistons don't have enough valve clearance to run aftermarket cams. However in 2023/2024, the pistons were updated to include valve reliefs, and some are saying that there's enough clearance to run a set of stage 1 or 2 cams in those motors without opening up the bottom end. I've seen some posts on this but have yet to see someone drop a set of cams in one of these engines and put it in an NC. Either way, it looks like there will hopefully be a steady stream of these engines available for a while.

Damn, look what you made me do, another in-depth post that nobody asked for about this sh*t

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I didn't know you had multiple spare motors for your car haha. Good stuff dude, I thought that engine you got off Ricardo was your first backup. It feels good having more than one engine on hand for sure. Like I don't want to do another motor swap anytime soon but it's great knowing that if I blow one, I have everything in the garage to get the car up and running again in a week or two tops. I think that's actually one of the factors that drove me to parting out my last car. If I had a spare head lying around, prepped and ready, I could've popped it on over the course of a weekend and kept on trucking.

And yeah, we rode the bike park both days! Mammoth riding is killer in its own respect. The "kitty litter" dirt is just what it sounds like. When it gets deep, you're basically just surfing on sand haha. There's a bunch of open slopes that you can carve lines down as if you were skiing, but the trail network is solid too!

More post-age that wasn't asked for. I'm at home sick today so have a little time to kill lol.

 

I'm wondering if you would do me a favor, would you measure the width and height of your roll bar, I'm still trying to figure out a solution for a roll bar with the fastback. Mostly interested in the width near the beltline where the top bolts to the body, and then the width where the bends start on the main hoop. Also the height above the parcel shelf, and also how far back the main hoop sits from the leading edge of the parcel shelf. Just want to see if the BBFW GT3 will fit under the fastback, or how close it might be. I tried to contact Blackbird, but they never replied.

 

Fosho. PM’d ya.