thanks dude! Truth be told I need better ramps. The steps on these ramps are kind of rough and I still have to use wood blocks at the end. But one step at a time. The UHaul trailer I used the first time made a nice gash in the underside of Scooter

 

maybe you could take part in one of the ASR Superlaps? They’re in Deming

 

Great drive!

 

I do. I prefer ASR to Suika because there is zero danger of hitting a wall or anything like that lol. Still, ASR and Suika are the same 6 hours from me, so both are doable.

 

Thank you, Ben! Haven't seen or heard from you in a while. Hope you're well.

Ha, yeah that's understandable. Now with a trailer I really need to plan a trip to ASR

 

I was able to resolve the throttle issue last week. I had purchased a new cable a while ago expecting this job would happen at some point. My father-in-law came by and helped me find a better way to service the linkage, and also silver soldered the new cable for me. It feels much better than my first go-around.



Decided to finally replace the Spartan 3 wideband controller with a Link-CAN Lambda. The Spartan has served me well for two years, but I want the extra safeties the Link controller provides. It's also a neater install. In the NB G4X Plugin ECU the CAN bus provides a fused 12V circuit meant to feed a wideband controller, so only one connector is needed for 12v, ground, CAN H and CAN L.


Spartan 3


Link CAN Lambda

Printed a small adapter to install it behind the brake reservoir. I like that spot because it keeps the CAN wires short, and it's semi-hidden. One small issue is that the plastic can't take the torque and cracked right away.



A friend said to use a spacer or insert in the adapter, so a redesign later I added this spacer to it. I decided to tap the two top holes and thread the bolts into the plastic. It seems to hold well so far but time will tell if it needs a threaded insert instead.









In other news, I've sourced another 6-speed! It is from an NB2, and note the lack of the detent boss the other one had. It so happens I have a Mazdaspeed Miata here with me and I will be crawling under it to check if its transmission has that detent. That will tell whether that's an MSM thing or not.



Two of my friends need help to finish their Miata mods before FM summer camp, so Scooter will not get any major mods until after that trip. I'm planning to install the CHUBs, fix the differential seal leak and call it good.

One odd thing that happened was that after the throttle repair and CAN Lambda change the car was running a little rough on a warm start. Turned out to be overly rich and misfiring, so I pulled out a bunch of fuel from the after start enrichment and reduced the taper to just a couple of seconds. Normally I add a lot of fuel and large taper to compensate for hot start heatsoak. It was fine after that and runs fine at every other point. I don't know what could have changed to cause that, but it is what it is.

 

Cool cool. I'm enjoying seeing more and more people coming up with custom 3d printed solutions.

Odd on the hot restart. I was thinking maybe the throttle cable changes were causing the throttle plate to behave a bit differently, but I'd assume you'd see changes in a lot of places if that was the case. Only other thing I'd think of would be possibly a voltage issue on the Spartan if it was in a place where it would get heat soaked after sitting (engine bay?), but both of those seem pretty far fetched.

 

Controller bracket looks clean and nicely tucked away, good stuff man! Forgot you were still working on getting your other 6 speed useable. You're gonna be stoked when you get that transmission installed! I remember liking the 6 speed in my turbo car, but having the 6 speed and upshifting into the powerband in a N/A car is even better haha.

 

Thanks. I enjoy making little useful things like this with the printer. I think taking into account the price of a set of ITB trumpets the printer has already paid itself off at 3 sets of those.

I considered the throttle cable doing something to the blades, but I made sure it was not opening the throttle, and since the tune is Alpha-N it would have been running quite differently if the blades were opening differently. I will double check this with the engine at full temperature though. Some metal could be expanding funny and causing something odd.

I had the spartan installed under the dash, by the steering column. It was also configured to feed data over CAN, so I believe that data was accurate. I do wonder, but I'm not electrical engineer, if the heater ground for the spartan was causing an odd feedback to some circuit during sensor heating that affected the injectors somehow, causing the need for more ASE. I don't know, it's a mystery that will bug me, but I'll just make the engine/ECU happy. I had the ground in the same bolt as the ground strap that's by the dipstick.

Thank you, Zak! I do think I'll like the feel of the 6 speed for the fun factor. I intend to keep the 4.3 rear end so should be fun and even more rev happy. I'm slightly worried it will make me slower on track with the more shifts but meh. I saw you mentioned your friends with 6 speeds were faster than you in the NCs? Was that because of the higher mechanical torque or something else?

 

Doing well and feeling well. Just focused on the final stretch of paying off the house. Taking my time with the vvt swap on the blue car, and the e85 conversion on the baja miata.


With the 6 speed and 4.3 gears you'll probably want to short shift into 5th at the start of the front straight.

 

Yeah, I guess you'll just have to wait and see. If nothing else, you'll feel like you're doing more on track with the increased number of shifts! Lol. I ran a 6/4.3 in my NA for a while with the turbo and it was definitely too short. However, with less power it may have been perfect.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the 6 speeds in our NC's are beneficial due to the mechanical torque advantage. My car has a mild power dip from around 4.8-5.3k rpm (because of the cams, header, intake setup? Idk.) so the less time I spend there, the better. The power dip isn't noticeable from the seat of your pants but it showed up on the dyno. Shifting from 3rd to 4th with the 5 speed puts me right at 5k rpm, so I believe I lose a bit of tractive force there. Also with my current gearing, I'll be floored through some corners right in that power dip. T2 at Willow Springs has me floored at 5.1k rpm for around 10 seconds, and you can watch my buddies with the 6 speeds take off on me on the latter half of the corner.

Fingers crossed it's the gearing and I'm not still slower than them with this new trans

 

I didn't like 6sp/4.3 even when I had a 135 hp BP...

 

Scratch what I said, Roda's word rules over mine

 

Don't tell Ricardo that, he's gonna have to buy a R&P now to setup his OSG with!

 

Don't know about that... there are a lot of fast guys running 6sp/4.3; but even with the BP engine, for me 6sp/4.1 was just as fast, and much less 'busy' to drive. I'm still running those gears with the K24 (with the limiter set at 7600 for reliability), and will probably switch to 3.9/3.63 down the road. Still testing and running numbers....

 

I still have a 3.6 torsen ready to go.

 

At 115rwkh/150rwhp, I found the 6 speed/4.1 faster than the 5 speed, and the 4.3 faster again. The 4.7 was tried and dropped pretty fast, far too busy for me and I never got the hang of habitual short shifting. The 4.3 short shifting I was happier with, it was less frequent, maybe only a couple of corners on the half dozen or so circuits on my roster. The other thing about the 4.7 was the way the rev limit came up so early on the faster circuits, and I had hold it for extended periods just under redline. It definitely accelerated harder though I couldn't judge if it was overall faster or not due the fact I never got familiar enough with it.

 

Oh man. You guys have me sweating gears faster than @Z_WAAAAAZ NA. Let’s hope I like the 4.3, because if I keep buying parts at this rate, my tax filing status may change by next cycle.

all points noted though. I expect the 6sp/4.3 will put me at odd RPMs in some corners, especially in autocross. But if I’m listening correctly, the mechanical advantage should make short shifting not as bad as I’m thinking? I have to experience this at least for a little bit because it’s the closest I’ll get to a Caterham 6 speed feel.

I would appreciate some data logs or screenshots of 5 sp vs 6 sp tracktime comparisons if you have any. For science.

 

I don't have datalogs or screen shots, but I compared YT videos of my laps at Podium Club in Casa Grande, AZ to a K swapped NB owned by a track acquaintance. Our cars are similar in spec, except he was running a 5sp and I was running a 6sp. He was shifting 4 times/lap to my 12 times/lap! That started me down the gearing rabbit hole...

This site has a pretty good gearing calculator that will show you speed in gears and drops for shifts and generates useful graphs for comparing gearing.

Examples...

6 speed/4.1 - 225/45-15
r

6speed/3.6 - 225/45-15


Also useful is the tractive force calculator in this thread.

Sometimes the math doesn't equal the on-track experience, however, so take it all with a grain of salt.

 

I can't tell you much about autocross, except you might want to launch hard in 2nd. But that also depends on how aggressive you tend to autocross.

With the 4.3 and 6 speed, first gear was pretty much useless for my car outside burnouts. I was deep into 4th drifting the inner oval at suika.

Most gear selections around suika road course are the same, except the short shift up a gear on the front straight. I really didn't like how the shift to 5th felt with my 6 speed.