I finally got around to getting some heat shielding for my headers. I've been running long tube headers without any form of heat shielding for a while now, and needless to say i've been plagued with heat soak. I decided to go with the TDR header blanket as it was made to work with aftermarket headers and came with miata specific brackets. I tried to install it first with the airbox still in, but it was an absolute pain in the ***, so I removed the airbox and it made the process much easier. The install itself was pretty easy and took less than 15 minutes. Before I had installed the header blanket I took a bunch of measurements of the temperature of various things in the engine bay so I could do a before and after. I took the car for a few loops around the block and I noticed that it was less affected by heat soak. Heat soak has been causing my car to stall when coming to a stop, after idling in place for a few minutes, because my IAT sensor is reading artificially high and then doesn't give the car enough fuel to run after the overrun fuel cut turns off when the rpm gets back down to idle territory so it just ends up stalling. Without the header blanket on the few loops around the block, the car stalled 4 times and almost stalled/stumbled about a dozen times when coming to a stop. After installing the header blanket it didn't stall once and only stumbled twice, despite it being hotter outside and getting stuck at traffic lights much longer than I did yesterday. Overall the TDR blanket is well worth the money, i'm just mad at myself for not buying it sooner.

 

Finally able to start working on the miata again, life got in the way a little bit.

I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to make out of metal, an intake isolation box, a new radiator close out panel without the hole for the hood latch, and some headshields and covers. I got a 48x48 0.032 sheet of aluminum (managed to fit it in the back of my civic to the bewilderment of the guys at metal supply store), and got it home. I had already made paper and cardboard versions of what I needed so I just used them to trace out what I needed and I started cutting. After I got them cut out, I started drilling and cutting out any holes that were needed, and folding them where needed.






Tin snips go brrrrrrrrr

 

Most of the stuff I made from the sheet of aluminum was pretty basic or simple so I wont go into much detail other than a before and after picture. But the process for creating my intake took a bit more effort, so ill detail the full process.

My idea was to have an intake isolation box that would only take in cold air and could quickly be repurposed to feed a turbo once I boosted the car. The only way I could tick all of these boxes was to make have the isolation behind the driver side headlight and have it be fed by a TSI and NACA duct on the headlight lid. I got some carboard and made the base of the box so I would know the general outline, after that I got a larger piece of carboard so it would all be one piece. I cut it so it was about 1-2 inches below the bottom of the hood,, then I put a toothpick into each vane of the cardboard and then shut the hood, which pushed down all the toothpick and gave the exact shape I needed of the underside of the hood. I then traced this out onto another piece of cardboard, checked to make sure it fit, then used it trace out what I needed to cut out of metal. I then folded the metal, cut the hole for the intake tube, and made some brackets to hold it in place. I put some weather stripping on the top and some nomex tape on the bottom of the airbox so it would seal better (and not rattle as much). This additional material on the top and bottom made it not fit perfectly, but I only had to trim it slightly to keep the perfect seal. I put a layer of grease on top of the weather stripping and then closed the hood to check where the weather stripping was/wasn't making contact and then trimmed the airbox, and then repeated the process until it sealed perfectly again.

 

I also swapped to an NB idle valve so I didn't have to find an way to feed air to the idle valve. The TSI I bought was plug and play other than some very simple wiring, but the NACA duct lid required some moderate modification to fit. The first one I used didn't fit as one of the mounting tabs was contacting on the headlight, I got that fixed, but when I first went to use the popups, they broke the headlight lid because the back of the NACA duct was too far backwards and down and contacted the frame of the pop up whenever it went up and down. I contacted the Etsy seller about it, and he sent me another one, I trimmed one of the mounting tabs and the back of the naca duct so it would no longer contact. After 30 minutes with a dremel I got it to fit and not explode when I used the pop ups. Despite it being kind of a pain in the ***, this headlight lid was only $50 and had minor fitment issues, which was better deal than spending $100+ on the other naca duct headlight lids in the market that also have fitment issues.

 

more pictures of finished intake

 

Nice work on the intake shroud! And that 3d printed headlight lid doesn't look half bad ...

 

Sorry for not posting in awhile, life got a bit busy and combined with getting a new phone with a better camera has caused me to neglect the build thread. I've spent more time than i'd like to admit getting the new phone to save the photos in the correct format and then getting the file size to be low enough that I can actually upload them.

Continuing turning a giant sheet of aluminum into low quality "custom" parts, I made a better heat shield for WB controller, a cup holder, and some some covers that hide my crude roll bar install. I put some heat reflecting tape on the Wb shield to reduce temps a bit and for the roll bar covers, some felt tape so they won't rattle. I used riv-nuts to attach my cup holder so I can un/re instal as needed, same thing for the roll bar covers (also gave them some paint). They all look incredibly jank, but they do what I need them to, so that's all that matters

 

Did some fuel system upgrades as well. I hard-wired the fuel pump so I don't have to worry about blowing up relays once I get around to installing a DW200. I used K.A.injection's fpr housing which lets me use the cheap and plentiful bosch regulators (can swap them out depending on how much fuel pressure I want), also allowed me to reroute my fuel lines. I got a flex sensor installed, not using the flex function yet, just the fuel temp sensors (has helped a lot with hot restarts and heat soak). And while I was at it, I replaced all my fuel line with new hoses (realized i had 5 different types of fuel hose). Other than inputting the settings for fuel temperature, the new fpr and fuel pump hardwire didn't require me to change my tune all that much.

 

Cleaned up my interior a bit, it's not done yet, but it looks better. I was waiting to install the 1.6 dash until I got around to flocking it, but the guys at the emissions station noticed the megasquirt and started asking questions, so I put it in ahead of schedule in order to hide the ecu. After having it in for not even 5 minutes, I decided that it was too crusty and I took it back out to paint it. I used some basic spray paint thats for car interior parts, better than getting generic spray paint, but still not as good as flocking it. I also painted a gauge cluster hood and tombstone I got with the leftover dashboard paint. I prepped the dash bar for paint by wire wheeling off all the rust and then using evaporust for the rust I couldn't get too, I just spray painted it with some black paint and then sprayed some clear coat over it. I did tape off a few sections to preserve the bars ability to be an electrical ground... still got electrical issues anyways (nothing major). I also got ahold of some door cards, but before I put them in, I replaced my window bushings (should have done this a long time ago).

It looked pretty good once I put it back in, so i'll keep it as it for now. I still want to do some other stuff to the interior, custom gauge faces, fill the tombstone in (not sure with what), get a short center console, get a different steering wheel, and get some grip tape to be some pseudo floor mats. But at least for now, my car no longer looks like a low budget mad max background car.

 

I finally got my knock sensor (bosch KS4-P) installed and setup. I used one of my motor mount bolts, drilled a hole in it, and welded in a shorted m6-m8 stud. its looks ugly as sin... but it works (i'll make a prettier machined version later, this is just a proof of concept). I got It wired up, it was huge pain the *** because the documentation I found on line was very vague, but I did manage to find proper clarification about which wire was the signal wire and which one was the ground wire (pin1 is signal, pin2 is ground, bosch calls it sig(+) and sig(-) instead). I wired it to the dedicated knock sensor input for my MS3 and then used one of the ecu sensor ground ports. Setup was easy, I set it to 6.94khz, internal input, safe mode, and then gave it no authority to actually change timing then went for a drive. I took a data log during the drive and put the car through its paces, high rpms, cruising, doing pulls, etc... after I was done, I went into megalog viewer, the scatter plots section, set RPM as the X axis, MAP, as the Z axis, and KNOCK-IN as the Y axis, and then used the plot it generated to set my input threshold (set it to 15% above what was in the plot, and gave it the authority to pull up to 10 degrees of timing). It works pretty good so i'm confident that I can detect if my motor is knocking, i'm not trying to use it for oem level of knock control, just hoping it will save my motor if something goes wrong (sensor goes bad and sends bad data, I get a bad tank of gas, or some other weird **** happens).

 

This is the last of the stuff i've neglected posting.

I installed hood vents, they work great... toooo great. I have a 195 degree thermostat and couldn't get coolant temps above 176 after installing them. To combat this I switched back to regular coolant and an oem water pump pulley (used to run a 10% overdrive pulley). The water that came out of my radiator was still nasty as ****, it came out clean after only 2 flushes, so i'm just going to chalk it up leftover crap from when i had to run tap water. This worked pretty well, I was able to get coolant temps up to 189 degrees, still not getting my thermostat to fully open, but his was during street driving in the winter, so i'm not that surprised that a miata with a cooling system upgraded to deal with track work in the Arizona summer, runs too cold during winter street driving. I'm undecided on if it should paint the hood vents or leave them as raw aluminum, i'm thinking of just doing black, but leaving them as raw aluminum still looks pretty cool, idk (also didn't install the driver side rear vent, because that would just suck the air out of my intake and not help cool the car at all).

 

I lied, I still have 1 more post.

I also did some other small maintenance items. I replaced the 3 rubber clutch stoppers in my car, 2 of them were gone entirely and the stopper at the bottom of the clutch travel had hardened significantly, I replaced these just to get rid of the clicking, but they also made the clutch feel a lot better which was a nice surprise. Also got an alignment, should have done it sooner, but I was tearing my suspension appart way too often, but now im done messing with it (for now) so I finally got a proper alignment.

Also managed to snag a ceramic coated Racing Beat header for only $250. Its for an NB2, so it won't fit my NA, but for $250 I can't complain.. I am going to have to modify the rest of my exhaust for it to fit, but i'll need to do it anyways because the downpipe I have for the MSM setup is made to bolt up to standard NB exhausts.