Noob does a diy fab build (3d printing inside)
 

Hi ya'll

I wrote my introduction thread ages ago, while having issues with my AE settings.It has a kia tps now with a 3d printed bracket ��
Did a lot of reading in the meantime and i got my car on the road without blowing stuff up.I've seen a lot of noobs fighting against guys like savington and all, that was pretty fun but you're right, all the info is here to find ��
So, about me:i started with rc cars since i was a kid, and slowly grew into full size vehicles.
Bought a 3d printer, landed a job @ Tesla,and am stiil learning a lot of good stuff over there.

My red NA below is my second mx5 , my other one is a stock NB on which i recently replaced the cluth slave and master. I will also post all my pittfalls here so you don't have to fail in the same way i did (like the intercooler pipe routing trough the ps)
This car will be a purely street driven rat. I want to go about 200 hp at the wheels. This should be easily achievable from what i saw here.
And yes, there is a 1.6 in it for now. I wasn't using my brain correctly, but it only costed me 200 euro on which the seals were already done ��
1.8 blocks cost around 600 here... maybe i'll build one from an old 1.8 with a vvt head one day.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5ce4308e3a.jpg
This is her in stock form

So what's in the car?

- Flying miata clutch ( shipping and import fees really killed me sine i live in Holland )
- 1.6 liter with power steering ( yeah i know, should have bought a 1.8 NA for obvious reasons )
- 1.8 flywheel
- AEM wideband
- Diypnp
- Rx8 yellow tops
- Diy log style manifold (took me 2 tries because clearance issues)
- EBS ultimax pads
- Mishimoto intercooler
- HKS bov ( no fake)
- GM IAT
- TD04 i bought for around 100 euro
- 2,5 Inch ebay intercooler piping
A 3d printed doorhandle that i designed( pic will follow soon)
And at the moment i'm finishing up the exhaust and rebuilding the rear calipers

So, now for some build pics :

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...c498457b58.jpg
As you can see, there was not a lot of space in my 1 car garage
After some gentle wiggling and creative angles i got it out.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...3caf8a9fa9.jpg
Took me about half a day to get the engine out by myself

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1758083e09.jpg
Just some welds for the intercooler brackets. i didnt use filler material yet. I was at my learning stage



https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...a429b0fd49.jpg
Fitted the intercooler. Thats 3mm thick steel right there

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...62df8e30fa.jpg
This was my first try on the intercooler routing.You can see the 2 inch to 2,5 inch reducer path, both designed in my spare time and 3d printed. Then i found out that the manifold was up way to high and way to far back. I cut up the manifold and redid it



https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...60aa3b1fa2.jpg
thats how she sits now. .She will get some ducting.

I made a temporary hood exit exhaust to see if it would spool up. And holy cats, it did!
I'd already burped the coolant system, and didnt find any leaks (yet)
So first mistake.. make sure to put washers under both the coolant and oils lines. It made a small spill��
Second mistake, ordering parts makes way more sense when you order everything you need in one order, instead of waiting 5 days and finding out you didnt order specific gaskets and stuff.

I was fighting with the idea that i don't have a alu welder, so i just took some 2,5inch mild steel to make to bov adapter, and a bung for the IAC from some piece of an old bicycle.I ordered the flange trough ebay, since no shops around here have that part

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...9d2e16ff6f.jpg

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8ce1f0622d.jpg

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5294af5ff8.jpg
it's fully welded on the flange now, don't worry ��


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...316a9aff8c.jpg
i heard you like cats, so one of my girly friends sent me her cat.

Hello other Dutch guy :wavey:
Where are you located?
Please bear in mind there are some differences between US Miata's and EU MX-5's like diffs, diff ratios and fuel/injection systems.
I have broken a few MX-5s, so if you are looking for a 1.8 or a torsen, feel free to PM me.

Hi fellow dutchman :wavey:

I'm from Tilburg, how about you?
I indeed saw some differences between the diff's, and people grenading them even on stock power ��
I'm getting some 1.8 discs in soon, for some better stopping power.
You'll get a pm from me soon, thanks for the offer

Welkom mede-Nederlander!

Hallo daar .Tof om te zien dat er meerdere leden uit nl hier zitten
Translation: Good to see a fellow dutchie over here :likecat:

So guys, i promised you 3d prints ��
I don't own a miter saw, and since i needed to make some pie cuts i just decided to make life a bit easier.
It's not much more than a square with a hole inside , and a 9 degree angle at both sides


https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...ff96d4cb26.png


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...80842d695.jpeg
And here you see the tool in use. The second version is going to be a bit smaller so i can make smaller radiuses. You can see the cuts laying around the pliers ( dont look at my ugly welds, they're improving )


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1d9ff22561.jpg
And here's the mock up. It almost fitted, just needs some trimming so the flange is parallel to the end of the pipe. There's about 3/4 inch distance from both sides of the transmission tunnel.

I'm building a Td04 also. A few others here run them also. I'll be watching to see what kind of numbers you produce :D

Good luck luck with your build!

Thanks, i will be keeping an eye on yours to. Have you got any idea about your setup ?

So, since it was pretty good weather over these past few days, i decided to do some more work on the downpipe, and the rest of the exhaust.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...576afd2f14.jpg

Here she is

And then came the rest of the exhaust. It would be way easier to do a straight pipe from front to back, but i had some clearance issues, so pie cuts were the way to go ��
I also don't want the popo's hunting me down, so a damper will be fitted at the back of the car. For now i need to figure out my air filter setup, so you guys will see some more fab work soon.
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...6364481a0c.jpg
in her full glory

I'm having a few issues (think I got them sorted) and I have a 6 month old baby so I'm low on time.

Is/will be MS2, rx7 injectors, eBay intercooler, 1.8 clutch and rear, and I'm doing stock exhaust with an e-cutout. I'll have someone else fab the downpipe...


Liking your exhaust, keep it up :bigtu:

I like that you go through the trouble of making everything yourself and not just buying it off the shelf. Very rewarding isn't it. Keep it up!

Coming along nicely.

You can clock that compressor housing and aim it down, thus eliminating the extra loop of intercooler piping.
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...624fa3ad52.jpg

Not a great picture, but you can get the idea.

I forgot to update the picture where i clocked the turbo downwards. There has been some progress in the meantime.All the intercooler piping is done, the iat is mounted in between the throttle body and the intercooler( because i dont want to get heatsoak). About the air filter: i didnt want to cut a hole trough the body to put the air filter into the cold air stream near the front bumper.Of course, i'ts better to suck cold air in, but im wondering how much temp/performance difference it will make in the long run. Guess i'll have to have the car on the road to check that. It did give me the chance to practice my pie cuts tho �� That was rather.. interesting, while doing it with only an angle grinder. I will add a heat shield to the turbo , since i've seen pictures of melted brake reservoirs and thats a big no no.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...833ae98a3c.jpg

Thank you,it is indeed very rewarding. Nothing on this car would fit in a normal way, so everything had to be custom built with only cm's to spare. I almost had clearance issues with the 2,5 inch pipes trough the back, luckily it all worked out.

Well, since my last post, i finished the whole exhaust from front to back, the car pased MOT.
I was playing around with acceleration settings,warmup enrichments and idle settings, using some guides form mx5nutz,diyautunes reads,and of course, a lot of related threads on miatatrubo.
And yes, all the info noobs need is online somewhere.Car is on 15 inch nb wheels now, which are waaay better then the 14 inch daisy's.
The car also has a makeshift heatshield and some heat reflective tape on the master brake cilinder. I learned from others mistakes on this one :idea:
The fuel mileage i get now is about 235 miles( about 400 something kilometers) . If anyone has some pointers to improve this, i'll gladly hear them. AFR are at about 15 at cruise, and i didnt alter the spark map yet.

Also,a few days ago i found out why the car wasn't giving me any boost.
Tunerstudio was showing me around 0 boost under throttle. What i found out that one of the couplers from the intercooler blew off. I was allready wondering why a stock miata, and even a 1.2 liter Ford something could keep up with me :giggle:
So, a word of caution, if you find out that your car doesn't pull, CHECK YOUR HOSECLAMPS.

It's running wastegate pressure for now, since i couldn't really get the EBC working. I put a switch in between the DIYPNP and the solenoid(i can hear it activate when i flip the switch so it's getting power), and only got the ebc cycling ONCE, by putting 50% over the whole table.( i took that info from : https://www.miataturbo.net/megasquirt-18/ebc-pos-46521/ )
The 12V is taken from the blue plug under the hood.In the output test it's working fine though. I'm not really sure what causes this, since it's adviced to run in closed loop boost, but for now, i can't even get open loop working.

And now, back to the exhaust building part
Buying this from a local guy would cost me around 900 something euro. I did it for about 500 + the manifold( iirc). The exhaust tone is pretty deep, and ofcourse, people are always wondering where that deep note is coming from when i pass them by.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...0ba89ce886.jpg
The exhaust was making my ears cry, so i put a cherry bomb under the transmission tunnel. This dampened the noise quite a bit


https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...2cef35ffba.jpg
Well, going under the car , while being parked in the street was no fun, but i managed. Its mounted diagonally. For now the car is not lowered, so normal speedbumps are fine :)

The welds are getting better also.No filler material and cranking it up to about 60 amp seems to do it


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...e921dcf559.jpg
Thats a 5 eurocent coin for comparison . I have no idea how this compares to a nickle

I feel for you for how much time you must have sunk into those pie cuts. Is it impossible to get mandrel bends where you are at?

There were no mandrel bends over here in the sharp radius that i wanted . And i had a lot of straight tubing since i kinda overshot on the amount of materials i needed :giggle: , so i just used that instead. It also made good practice to weld round tubing this way. And indeed, this took quite some time, but my stubborn self likes to find ways to do the impossible for some reason

Try to add filler rod to the welds. It makes the weld a lot thicker and stronger. I like using 45-50amps for 1,5mm wall pipe ;)

Regarding your fuel economy, look into increasing the ignition timing in your cruise cells. There are some threads about the stock timing having 40° or more for lean cruise and some posts of MS map screenshots.

what muffler is that?

It's a muffler from Simons exhausts parts .2,5 inch wide and 10 inch long.Costed me about 70 euro's

I'm jealous. You're doing everything I wish I could. 90% of my parts are still in storage and I only have four off days a month >_<


Get some video of the sound :D

i will have a look into these threads,before i start changing stuff without knowing what the consequenses are ( im still learning about ignition timing and stuff):) D

So, today i gave the closed loop tuning thing a try again. For some reason the car doesn't rev beyond +/- 3500 rpm ish on WOT in 4th gear. I've put the boost protection at 210 kpa(spark and fuel cut just to be safe) ,checked the min/mx duty of my mac valve,and included a log to see if anyone can chime in on this.I tried multiple pulls over the day, with different settings but all still showed around 170kpa. I was thinking that maybe the accel enrichments were a cause of this, but after fiddling with those, nothing much changed.

I've read numerous threads like : https://www.miataturbo.net/megasquir...oop-ebc-94391/ but for some reason it doesn't seem to rev past the 3800+ rpm point. If i remove the EBC all together, and connect the vacuum line inbetween the wastegate and the compressor housing , all works fine. Does anyone have a clue whats going on ?

Does it rev up without load in neutral? If that works fine, my guess would be on spark blow out. What plugs and what plug gap do you run?

I didn't try revving the car to redline in neutral tho.I did however , had a look at the spark gap. It showed 0,9mm and what i've seen here shows that it would need to be around 0.7mm .Strangely enough, kpa showed a 10 kpa increase under boost after this change. but it still blowing out at about the same RPM. I tried new plugs, gapped those, and the issue still persisted. The second thing i tried is swapping the ignition cables for a different set i had laying around, which also didnt change anything.
Could it be a possibilty that i just don't get a strong enough spark ?

I just had a look at your logs, is your wideband reading correctly? Because you are way to rich, it may just be misfiring from being too rich.
Also: can you post your spark map?

Sure, im glad you're chiming in on this :likecat:
The wideband is reading correctly and matches up with the Tunerstudio gauge. I hav no clue on how to alter the spark map yet, so i didnt change anything on this spark map. I used the trubokitty default spark settings


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...f2caf547cc.png

From your logs it looks like your timing is fixed at 10 degrees, it looks like it is not following the map, so please check your settings.

You were right, i forgot to put the timing back to 'use table' :facepalm:. The car feels alot more alive now.. I double checked if the timing was still correct and it was. In the meantime i ordered some stuff for the diy COP conversion after reading trough those threads,so i'll get a package from the US soon.

Is there something else i can check? I'm very eager to find out what other things can be done to get this working. ( The car was still hitting the same boost spike at around the same rpm but actually showed ignition events now)

Plenty of things to go wrong. Position sensors and trigger circuit in the ECU. Boost creep causing overboost. Too rich / too lean. Spark blow out.

You are not too far from my place (Utrecht), I will send you a PM.

Thank you Dawan, i checked my pm's and sent you one back:likecat:

More 3d printing incoming!I got myself a 2nd 3d printer so i was trying out some files. The detail is... amazing.Im still wondering how parts made with this resin printer will react to sunlight, because they cure trough UV,but i'll find out when i fit a resin printed part in the car i guess.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...07394eac67.jpg
Found this file online, it came straight out the printer like this. No work was done, except for removing some support material.



So, back to 3d printing car parts. Well, i only have this potato photo. The elbow rest was hitting my leg so i designed/printed a new handle. It's been on the door for about a year now, stil going strong.
Next designs which are on my list:

- headlight naca duct
- canards
- maybe some custom HVAC vents

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...806de634d1.jpg
If someone wants one, i'll gladly send you one.

Forget the door pull, I want one of those Xenomorphs.
A few more print ideas: Antenna delete plug, windshield squirter plugs, your own version of a cool breeze wind scoop

So, after a few months of tinkering i did some things

- rocker cover seal was replaced because of oil seeping out
- diy coil on plugs, by following that long interesting thread ( because it's better to do it correctly once, right ?)


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8480717c4e.jpg


I had a MAJOR issue with overboosting under full load.So, it seems that the stock td04 wastegate was ... not up for it.
I bought a kinugawa one,and fitted it with a (IIRC) .5 bar spring. It's a quality piece which comes with 6 different spring rates.So, i managed to spike at 15 psi as you can see in below screenshot, with boost cut on 200 kpa,at 4999 rpm (although its advised to run a stock 1.6 at about 12psi max).
I turned down the manual boost controller to 12 psi and now i can finally floor it without hitting overboost in any gear. It got me a lot of thumbs up at the stoplights ;) Don't worry,i know an EBC gives better response, its allready under the hood. Just needs to be plumbed correctly and all that.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...789600dcc8.png
Well, that was fun, and my block didnt spill it's guts :)

Also, i've read trough the spark advance thread regarding fuel economy. Fuel economy didnt change much since i altered the Trubokitty -spark map, although i'm running high 16's during cruise now.Does it have anything to do with injector spray pattern(yellow tops),compared to EV 14's, or am i just rambling right now ?

And yes,i've programmed pops and bangs into it because i'm a big child :likecat: I've tried it without the 'bang' part of the map and the fuel mileage again didn't change much. It's at 23mpg right now and on the highway i reach 28 mpg. Non turbo i could easily reach 500 km on a full tank, so im trying to figure out what's causing this.

Since i didn't make det-cans, this is the farthest i dared to go with the timing.
The spark timing you see below is what i've used for months now.
Feel free to chime in, im always in for constructive criticism.
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...21b54f0e4d.png

So,ivé been busy again prototyping stuff in the past months, and just passed the yearly MOT thing here.

The car is still running strong on my DIY manifold at 15PSI.
I got bored of the standard gauge vent, so i designed a new one. It's fully tiltable like the old one.
When i'm done with the prototype phase, these will likely be offered for sale( i still need some people to test these out tho :)
I had a movie of my other design, but the attachment doesnt seem to work, so you'll have to do with pictures for now.
PLA is not the best suitable material for this, but for prototyping it's actually fine. The white part is printed in PETG and is made to withstand quite some heat.
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...fe7fd0e271.jpg
All the same design, just different materials