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I went on a cross country trip in my first Miata and spent almost two months on the road, crossing the US and Canada. I'd love to do something like that again, but I had the same experience as you with respect to being away from home that long. Since I was living out of the car, I didn't care to leave it for too long and as a result I didn't get to do a lot of the hiking and backpacking that would have made the trip more enjoyable. At a certain point I knew it wouldn't matter how majestic the next mountain or river would be... I wouldn't be as in awe as I should be, and would only be thinking about how tired I was of living in a Miata.
Looking forward to seeing what's next on your car.
Thanks! I ended up getting to a very similar point. I still loved checking out the cities (especially the older churches), but with no income and no exact end date, I think I pinched my pennies more than I should have at times. At some point you know what you're going to see in a city, especially now that so many businesses are global. I really enjoyed going to a park, drinking a beer and listening to a podcast or reading, but with an entire week to fill, I found myself needing a bit more direction/stimulation.
I don't do social media anymore but I'm in a few group chats, so seeing my buddies doing fun car stuff was making me want to as well. I spent years in high school and college watching RoadKill, Top Gear, Mighty Car Mods and tons of other car content but never had the money, space or skills to do any of it. As soon as I got into a position to start taking action I left. Oh the irony.
At this point I was still living with my parents as I figured out options for working and let my shoulder recover a bit. My Subaru daily also developed knock and was getting a new engine (goodbye savings). I think somewhere between getting home and roadtripping the car around to Utah and to visit my family in eastern Idaho it went through more oil than I expected. I remember putting 1+ quart into it to get back to the full line on the dipstick. An expensive lesson.
My same friend who had let me use his garage for the clutch job offered me a room at a good price. Another friend from AutoX was living there as well. Included in rent was a garage bay, a shared office and utilities, internet, etc... The house belongs to the friend who's renting the room. The location isn't my favorite but I like the guys I live with, the perks are great, rent is cheap, I get a garage bay (and access to a large assortment of tools) and I'm helping my friend pay off his mortgage. I think that's a win.
The first major project after moving in was getting the SpeedyEFI installed. For those who aren't familiar, there is an important distinction I'd like to make here. A lot of people think SpeedyEFI and Speeduino are the same, and they are not. Speeduino is the open source project which includes source code, board layouts and documentation (or lack thereof ). SpeedyEFI is a group of guys (just the 2 of them I believe) who have created a line of plug and play ECUs which use the Speeduino code and board layouts. SpeedyEFI has also added some useful Miata specific things, like an add on alternator control board for the NB Miata's.
I don't have a specific photo of it, but I also replaced the radio delete panel with one I had the local library 3d print. The filament was glow in the dark and the panel had room for 4 gauges.
Temporary mounting. The panel was already missing so this ended up being a convenient location.
After the initial install I was struggling to get my idle working. This was my first foray into tuning, but it seemed like a different issue to me. My idle air control valve (IACV) was only responsive around 85-95% duty cycle and was really lacking resolution.
After searching and reading a lot on here, I found information on adding a flyback diode to the IACV to correct this.
Not how I'd do it now, but I cleaned it up later and it seems to be holding up.
This had a huge impact! I now had control over the IACV with duty cycles in the range of 20-80%. I did a writeup on here to hopefully help others who encounter the same issue.
I didn't have a job at this point, so I was tuning a lot throughout the day, learning what I could about the capabilities and limitations of my ECU. I'll have to get into the specifics of tuning on a Chromebook in the next post.
Eventually I got virtual dyno and started playing around with timing a bit. Some of my early timing modifications. Lots to learn still.
If you remember, I likely mentioned earlier that the PO had done some questionable work. Most of the parts on the car were quality, but installs were questionable. Here's a great example of that.
Let's take a look at the backing plates of this here Hard Dog Roll Bar. If you're going in on safety, might as well get something quality right?
Notice anything wrong with that install? I'd been driving the car for a couple years now like this, completely oblivious. How someone could think this was an acceptable way to set this up is beyond me.
The backing plates were contacting the chassis, and wouldn't align with the holes in the trunk. I assume the rest of the alignment and install wasn't quite right, as the rollbar also rubs my hard top a good amount.
I ended up trimming down the backing plates (I know that this is not recommended, I took off as little as possible) and throwing some paint on them to prevent rust.
Drilled some new holes, threw some new bolts in and considered it fixed. Having said that, looking at the photos now, I want to go back and throw better hardware/washers at those.
The car also had an old Sparco tow strap, which matches my seat nicely, but had always been too far back to be useful. I could never access it through the bumper.
While the car was in the air I checked it out.
What the??? That thing was bolted to the flimsiest piece of metal. I'm not joking that I could pull on the strap by hand and easily bend that bracket. It must've been something like 18 or 16 gauge sheet metal.
To add to this, look at how close it is to the baby teeth mounting points which are vacant. A fresh bolt and a little trimming to the chicken wire grill and we were in business.
The front bumper had also been held on by self tapping screws for far too long. There were 7-ish on the passenger side alone. All of the ones on the drivers side had fallen out, so I had patched that up with some shock cord to give it some elasticity (the cord on the inside of tent poles).
I'd been nursing that setup along for a while, but it was time to refit the bumper. The above photo is the "after", and while not perfect, I closed the gap up a lot and got the bumper mounted much more securely. Later, I would go back and adjust it again, getting bolts in at all the mounting points and being way more confident in it.
My friend needed help tuning his car, so I went over to take a rip in it while he ran the laptop. His car is pretty similar to mine, small, lightweight and an interesting livery/paintjob.
With only ~700 HP on the high boot map (turbo K series) and a Quaife sequential, this thing is pretty similar to my car.
LOL JK. This thing is a rocket. I grabbed second gear in a 35 MPH zone and was doing 80. Definitely the fastest thing I've driven in my life, and I'm not even sure I was actually in the high boost map.
First time driving a sequential as well outside of sim racing. It feels weird to keep your foot on the gas while shifting, but I'd love to spend some time getting used to it.
Speaking of sim racing. I was working on piecing a rig together and was nearing completion. I downloaded a mod for Assetto Corsa, which let me get some practice laps in at Oregon Raceway Park, which is about 4 hours from us. Why is that important? I wonder...
A few more photos of the car in the wild. Oddly enough, that truck belongs to someone in my neighborhood which I didn't realize until later that week. We were ~25 minutes away from home at a brewery.
Ran up to my parents place to visit and got some eggs/tomatoes from the garden.
The tow strap job is gold. Plenty of people seem to want to throw a strap on their car for looks only, but I'm assuming the PO of yours wasn't in that camp as the strap wasn't even visible haha. The roll bar install is awesome as well.
Curious, what were you using for knock detection while tuning? Or were you more just spraying and praying?
Also, I raked my brain and still can't figure it out. Is your buddy's car... a Lotus Exige?
Knock detection was done using my ears . Really I was just tuning based on various maps on here. No boost at the time. I was definitely worried about timing, but saw enough maps on here to get a general idea of what would work. Granted at the time I wasn't paying attention to fuel grade or compression ratio for the most part.
I took those virtual dyno logs just for fun and experimenting with concepts, more than to optimize my maps. I've actually never done any knock detection (including det cans), including running ~8-10 lbs of boost, but we're getting ahead of ourselves there. New developments are happing on that front at the moment.
The car is a Noble M400. Pretty much all of the work on the car has been done/developed by my buddy. It's more niche than a lotus, so off the shelf parts aren't always the easiest.
More niche than a Lotus is pretty damn niche haha. Props to your buddy, I'd be slightly more nervous tuning a 700hp monster as opposed to our humble little machines.
Nice, I feel you there. Sometimes I wish I played around with sh*t on my Megasquirt more before I was boosted. If nothing else, just to get a feel of what increments of each adjustment make a palpable difference. I only ever tuned fuel and just assumed timing was fully off limits to anyone except a pro tuner on a dyno. That's safe, but not an entirely accurate assumption haha.
Looking forward to hearing more about your timing map development story lol.
I need to get this thing caught up so I can post the exciting day to day stuff that's going on right now.
A few things I forgot to mention previously. The house I moved into has 3 guys (including me) and when I moved in we were in possession of 4 Miata's. 2 NB1s with moderate mods, one stock NA and a J swapped fully caged race car. Our friends gave us the nickname "House Of Miata Owners". If you can figure out what that abbreviates to, you win a prize.
Around this time I got my pickup down from my parents place as well. It had been sitting for quite a few years. Grandpa picked this baby up in 74 and it's been passed around the family ever since. My dad drove it when he was in high school and when I was a kid. I drove it for a few years in highschool as well before I got a (non-BP) Ford Escort. I'd been waiting to work on this thing for years. It was always a "When you have a stable job after college" kinda deal. Well, time, space and money for car projects are all in alignment at this point.
This thing is an experience to drive. 4 speed with a granny gear and a straight 6. Sounds like a tractor when you fire it up. Lots of character.
If you didn't figure it out, I had been prepping the Miata for it's first track day. There are track days put on by Skipday that are 7 hours of open track for (I think) ~$300. No sessions. If you want to do some laps you just leave the pits and drive.
This might have spoiled me, because I don't imagine that I'll ever want to do a regular, session based track day. I practiced a lot in the sim, and while I asked which direction we would be driving, I never got a response. I figured it would be clockwise and it ended up that we were driving counter clockwise. Oh well, I was still pretty familiar with the overall track layout. I'm not sure how long I was out on track exactly, but I'd bet ~40 laps throughout the day? I drove the car 4 hours to get there, tracked it and drove home 4 hours again. No issues, although at one point I thought the brakes felt a bit soft, so I bled them and added some new fluid during the 1 hour lunch break. Pretty sure that was just in my head though.
Surprisingly the track day didn't make me want to change much about the car. I think I was just happy that it held up. My roommate and our friends Audi both had failures throughout the day, but my car was fine. More power would have been nice (what a novel idea), but overall I think the day was mostly spent getting familiar with how a track day operates. Sim racing was a huge help here. I'm used to checking my mirrors in public lobbies, so this wasn't too far off. Roommate unloading the J swap
This was on the RT660s I'd bought a while back. They held up well. I got at least a few point bys and had another NB driver come up and ask what I had in the car because he couldn't keep up. The tune held up fine. IIRC I took a few degrees of timing out of it for the day. Big win for me and the car.
A local school had a science fair shortly after, so me and some buddies took the cars out. I guess someone we know thought it would be cool to have some cars there. I got a friend to drive the Miata out and I took the Chevy. The Chevy definitely got more attention, especially from the parents. A lot of people have stories about these old pickups that they or someone they know owned.
Helped my buddy move into his new place. Roll bars also make great tie down points. Freeway with a cat tree in the car? Easy.
And of course, more autocross. BTW, if you need numbers for autocross, you can get floor vent covers (called register covers) at home depot and cut them up. 3 Sheets are ~$8 and work really well for magnets. Easy/cheap to replace as well.
The truck is rad. You oughtta use it to tow the Miata JK.
Open track days are great. Aside from the freedom of doing as many laps as you want, I enjoy knowing that I don’t have any time constraints if I have to fix a mechanical. That being said, it also gets interesting when you have track vets in 500hp TT cars mingling with the first timers in daily-driven econoboxes lol.
Maybe I glossed over the post too quickly and missed it, what track were you at?
I mentioned it in a previous post, but completely forgot in the last one. We were at Oregon Raceway Park. It's about 4 hours from where I'm at. Really fun. There's essentially a half pipe in the middle of the track that has some gnarly camber to throw your car up against.
This is great. Just saw the post about the tow strap, my lord that's wild. The rollbar install reminded me of the home made rollbar my car had when I bought it, which was bolted at only two spots, kind of like a harness bar. It would have worked like a mouse trap if it had been used...
Your friend's Noble is a beauty! And I like your truck too.
ORP is great for track days, I wish someone would dump about 10mil into the track and surrounding area. Needs a big hotel, food options, gas station, curbing, garages, bigger paddock, etc, and it could hose some epic races. Sadly it's for sale for 10mil last I heard. Enjoy it while you can!
Just wait until you guys see the self tappers that are holding the soft top together... I wish I had more photos of the old bumper mounting. PO? More like POS.
Another Skip Day out at ORP was just scheduled for 4/20. Not sure if the car will make it out there, but we'll see. I agree, super fun track but lacking some support. The bathrooms/showers are surprisingly nice though! Maybe I need to figure out how to get 10 mil...
I'd love to tow the Miata with the Chevy, but I'd spend more on gas to get to the track than the track day and I'd be doing about 55 the whole way there. On the upside, I probably wouldn't be lacking torque. We had one guy show up to autocross his C3 Corvette and he towed it in with some beast of a 50's 2 ton Chevy or something similar. That guy was a character and a half. Props to him.
Next on the list was the largest regional autocross our chapter holds, the Winnemucca Wildcard down in Nevada. Prior to the trip I found a model online for a radio delete panel that would hold a tablet for running PiDash on. The fitement of the model into the radio bracket was way more accurate than the previous model I had. The white, glow in the dark, filament wasn't blending in well with the rest of the dash either, especially with holes for 4 gauges and only 1 of them being filled. I modified the file to fit 3 gauge pods and printed it at the public library in black filament. I can't remember the exact cost, but it was under $10 I'm sure, and likely closer to $5. Printing at the library is great because they take care of all the hassle. There's an online portal so you just submit the file, pick your filament and pick it up ~1 week later. One gauge and the volume **** for my stereo. Simplicity is great.
Drove down to Nevada roughly 4 hours. Not a great drive, but that's fine. We took some time to wash up our cars upon arrival.
I still haven't quite figured out how to capture it on photo, but I always get a little giddy when mounting up the race tires. 245's on a 15x9 is such a great look. These are still the RT660's that I picked up in 2021 and ran at ORP. These things took a lot of abuse.
A fun weekend with a great venue aside from the planes landing and interrupting our runs. I can't wait to head back this year. Planning to do better at everything the weekend involves, both the racing and the gambling. The Porsche in the back is another friend of mine who was driving the Audi at ORP
If you guys ever want to kill a Nissan Sentra I know a great way. Let one of your race tires loose and hit it head on at ~55 MPH. That will decimate the entire front end of the Sentra!
Unfortunately the guy who was transporting my tires on his flatbed lost one during some of the extremely washboardy sections of highway. Turned into a real nightmare for him trying to figure out insurance and help out the other people involved. Sunday evening in the middle of nowhere isn't the best time to look for a tow. Thankfully Advanti's are relatively cheap. In my delirious state after the weekend, while trying to process everything I ordered a replacement from Ebay before we hit the road again. Afterall, we had a local AutoX in a weekend or two.
Doing truck things in the truck. Me and my roommates wheels/tires in the bed. My roommate's only car is his Miata, so tire transport isn't always the easiest for him. Having said that, he's in E Street, so his "race" wheels are only 6.5" wide
The new wheel showed up and I went to my tire guy and told him what happened. He was able to pull the tire off the busted wheel and get it onto the new wheel. Didn't even charge me. Falken, if you want to sponsor me feel free. I'm showing how much abuse your tires can take (assuming they don't delaminate on the first lap).
When life bends your wheel, make it into a tacky coffee table for the back yard. My friends laughed when I said I was going to do this and changed their tune a bit when it turned out half decent. We needed a little table for the backyard anyway.
My other summer hobbies are usually backpacking and weddings. Got a quick backpacking trip in, went to a wedding in WA, officiated my childhood friends wedding and took a trip up to North Idaho to revisit the glory days of college.
The road from Boise to Moscow is one of my favorites. ~5 hours each way. I used to do this in my old 1.9L Escort which barely made it up one of the major hills on the route. Lots of great twisty mountain roads with awesome scenery. I brought a sun hoodie and my driving gloves to get some sun protection and dropped the top. Rest Stop
Warning, this post is going to start off on a pretty depressing note.
This was July 2023. Me and a handful of other people from our local SCCA Chapter loaded up and headed for Packwood WA for the same ProSolo that we attended a few years prior. Another 8 hours each way in my worn our Sparco Sprint, oh joy.
My roommate had stayed in the area after the National Tour the week prior, so I was rolling solo for this leg.
Packed up and ready for the road, complete with aero tape to seal my hard top (I've tried to fix it, but no luck so far).
Same spot as last year. This year I got some register cover magnets and put the stickers on those instead of directly on my paint.
Lots of great people out there, and great cars as well. This Fiero was insane. I believe this exact car was raced in IMSA back in it's heyday.
Not a ton to do in town, so the venue becomes a pretty fun place to hang out and visit with the other competitors.
Here's a photo of us in grid. The red car in the back is BBundy's.
Most of the cars I was classed against were either fully prepped autocross cars or XB cars with forced induction of some sort. I was very outclassed, but I expected about as much. My car pretending to be competitive.
Saturday was great, Sunday not so much.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the people reading have heard about the accident, as the story was picked up by a lot of forums/websites.
On Sunday a driver lost consciousness while on course and struck another attendee. Both of them ended up passing away.
The driver who was hit, Amber, was a core member of our club and a friend of mine. From what I've heard, the driver, Des, was also a very notable member in his club.
This was a really strange and horrible event, as I'm sure anyone who was there (and honestly anyone who wasn't there) can agree with.
Amber was a lot of fun and was a fierce competitor and it was really hard for our entire club to lose her. I really hope that anyone reading this doesn't have to go through an accident like this.
Not the most relevant to the build of my Miata, but I wanted to include it.
Next for the car was a cooling upgrade. I can't remember when I started paying attention to my coolant temperatures, but looking back, I'm pretty sure my thermostat was broken for most of 2023.
With the turbo kit sitting in the garage, and the ECU in the car I figured that cooling needed to happen at some point.
I ordered a Mishimoto radiator, attracted by the lifetime warranty if nothing else. A bit of trimming was required on one of the fan standoffs to minimize the space between the rad and fans.
Around this time I also found some spare sheet metal and tin snips, so I built a little shroud and attempted to seal up the top of the radiator.
Not my best work ever, but I'm very much an 80:20 person.
Scored some new gloves for sim racing, which turned into autocross gloves as well. Just obnoxious enough
Not exactly sure when I did this one, but eventually I ditched the zipties and made a little mounting bracket for my ECU
Our next big trip was Top Gun in Montana. Huge regional autocross that'll get you pretty deep into 3rd gear at parts.
Kettlehouse Brewing is a favorite stop on this route. We usually take the longer, but way more fun and scenic, route.
The car, again, was flawless. It was also, again, way outclassed by cars with way more horsepower, including a Kswapped car with a ZF+Caddy.
We camped on site and got rained on. Not too bad though. There is a building on site with showers and power which is so nice.
On the way home we were able to stop off at a friends parents place for an evening. This saved us from having to drive all 8+ hours home after the event on Sunday.
Nothing like being humbled by your friends. I'm pretty sure the "tow car" in this picture was faster around ORP than my car.
Pretty sure I took this photo while listening to Wild Montana Skies by John Denver.
Speeduino added dedicated support for Air Conditioning in the firmware around this time. There was a bit of wiring inside the ECU to support this. After the whole summer only being able to use AC while cruising, I could finally use it at idle.
Along with that change, I wired in my Check Engine Light, which I setup to warn me if my coolant temps were too high/low.
I did a writeup for the AC idle up because I couldn't find one.
I finally got around to digging through that box of turbo bits that I'd bought earlier. The intercooler routing looks like someone was using macaroni noodles for mockup.
Took me a bit to figure out how it went together, but all the couplers and pipes were there. I cleaned some inside and out with a bit of steel wool and some rust converter spray paint.
None of them were too rusty, but it seemed like a reasonably thing to me.
Pretty sure this is going to be good for meeting my minimum class weight if/when I try for it.
Pretty sure there's a proverb that good things come in pairs.
My roommate ended up getting a 9 Lives Big **** for his J swapped car, leaving an APR wing sitting in the garage.
I've always wanted a big wing. Figured I might as well get one that works, plus it helps both of us. My roommate doesn't have to hassle with selling it on marketplace or forums, and I don't have to find one.
Lookin like a fighter jet! This photo always makes me smile.
PO had punched a hole in the driver side arm rest. I patched it up a while back but wanted to make it a bit sturdier. I glued a small metal plate to the backside. It seems to be working OK for now.
Not my best fix ever, but it was an experiment to some extent. The beer can was removed by the way. It was just there to provide pressure while the glue dried. Bonus points if you can figure out what beer it is.
The intercooler piping looked a bit like swiss cheese. There were some holes that seemingly served no purpose, but also looked like they were powder coated over from FM. I already knew what holes I needed and didn't so I "fabbed" up some patches. JB weld, cut up Miller Lite can and some aluminum tape. How much boost will that hold? Who knows?
I was able to borrow the tap/die for the oil pan from a friend who's car you'll actually see later in this post.
The whole turbo install took about a weekend. I did some prep work during the week before. Overall it went pretty smooth. I had the old FM instructions so I just followed those and it was pretty painless.
The biggest pain was trying to figure out how to get the air filter on. I had been planning to use my existing KN filter but it was too big to fit anywhere. I ended up grabbing a smaller KN a couple days later.
I also ordered a new thermostat and upper rad hose and threw those on around this time. Turns out that getting up to 250F coolant temps is not normal. Probably should've looked into that one sooner.
Learning experience there but thankfully I caught it before anything failed as a result. If your thermostat looks like this when it's "open", you should probably see a doctor. So much gap
If the previous car was Sgt Slow then we're real close to reaching Sgt Slow EVO at this point.
Got out to one of the last weekends of autocross in the rain. Keeping these 2+ year old 660s from spinning was damn near impossible, but dang that was a fun day. The car was so rowdy.
As much as I wanted to drive my car, I was offered to codrive a really well prepped SSM car by the same guy who lent me the tap/die. He was becoming a father that weekend, so he let me and one of my roommates take his car out on "fresh" takeoff Hoosiers and run it both Saturday and Sunday. Tuned to ~17 PSI on a 2560R and still has a 5 speed. This thing gets beat on and I've never seen it break. Even better, it's codriven by the husband and wife usually.
My roommate was faster. We had bets on who would have the best time Saturday + Sunday. It would have been super close but my brain stopped working on my hero run on Saturday, which cost me a second or two.
Well it held 10 PSI today, so I'd say it's doing pretty well! I honestly hadn't thought much about it until I posted this today. I've had no issues so far, although I didn't intend for it to be a permanent fix.
01-29-2024, 01:26 PM
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). SpeedyEFI is a group of guys (just the 2 of them I believe) who have created a line of plug and play ECUs which use the Speeduino code and board layouts. SpeedyEFI has also added some useful Miata specific things, like an add on alternator control board for the NB Miata's.
. Really I was just tuning based on various maps on here. No boost at the time. I was definitely worried about timing, but saw enough maps on here to get a general idea of what would work. Granted at the time I wasn't paying attention to fuel grade or compression ratio for the most part.
JK.
