Volt fans fit really nicely.

And I'm probably pulling mine to return to AST.... :wink:

I've been looking at the C7 fan you mentioned earlier but have had a hard time telling if it would fit. I might take you up on those volt fans if you're not going to be using them. They were fine for you with AC last year, no?

Yeah, Though I'm less power than you're at, I was able to bomb it up the local hill with AC On, and didn't get over 105, where before (vs stock rad and fans) I would have to have AC off, and even then get to ~115c.

I can also say that a C7 fan could be made to fit. Though that may include welding on your rad for mounting points. (same as the volt fans)

I think I'd try to come up with some other mounting solution since I don't have a welder, but that sounds like the performance I'm after. I do have a guy locally who I've had tig weld some stuff, so it's not out of the question to weld some mounts on, just a bit more running around.

Get yourself a cheap hf welder, the amount of money and time ive saved by buying 150$ worth of equipment has been insane. if theres anything you spring for, it should be a welder. broken bolts, random tabs, exhaust issues, heating up a piece of metal, and if you're bad enough, it can be used as a rudimentary plasma cutter! Plus welding is way more fun than it seems. An angle grinder and welder and the sky is the limit.

I need to get some ducting going on in my car, i used to have it sealed up with softtop seals pressed between everything, but the first time i removed anything after that I got lazy and didnt put them back.

Just consolodate a trip and come down here.

Get that Oil cooler adapter, oil cooler, hoses, fans, etc. all in one

Sim, if you get a welder, I'll get one too :rofl: Between having that skillset and the 3D printer, you'll basically be unstoppable haha.

I've looked at that welder before but I think I'd want a better area to use it so I don't burn the garage down. Might be worth looking into again though. I was pretty sure that wanted 240 V but seeing that it's 120 makes it a lot more appealing. Besides, the Chevy needs some patch panels eventually anyway.

Don't forget rebuilding the transmission :naughty:. I'll keep an eye on your season schedule and maybe I can come down for a random event.

True, I'll be able to make unlimited amounts of janky half-assed designs for the car lol

I'm a hack with my welder, that said, even being able to do shit like build splitter and intercooler brackets, welding my own o2 bungs, etc. is priceless. I've been going to town with mine.

same, but the amount of custom tools ive made, and just hideous things that have worked has been awesome. Its the ugliest thing in the world, but i made this wastegate dump with a flux core welded and angle grinder, its still holding up.
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...2c72eec03.jpeg
Not to mention the tools again, custom vice grip slide hammer, custom wrenches, when you need it you can make it

Lately I've been tuning the car a good amount. The highs here have been around freezing lately so I've been tinkering with cold starts. I'm not sure that I'm actually making progress, or just chasing my tail. Originally I thought I had way too much pre crank priming fuel dialed in, but even with the cranking enrichment dialed way up (like 400+ percent), it still takes a good handful of seconds to fire up, and that's on 91.

Anyway, the car still starts up every time and I'm getting the cold starts back to being pretty good, and hopefully soon they'll be better than before. I did just fill up with ethanol again though, so I probably shot myself in the foot with that one. Having said that, damn I forgot how much faster the car is on E.

A week or so ago I was cruising around doing some fine tuning on my fuel table and ended up doing a couple pulls alongside a Golf R. It was pretty fun to see his reaction to a Miata keeping up with him, and that was still on 91. Regardless, I looked at the log afterward and my IATs were pretty wild. I think it was somewhere around 5 C ( ~40 F) ambient and IATs were like 20 C (70 F) after going through a couple gears with a flat shift. Needless to say I don't think my sewage pipe intake heat shield thing was worth a rat's ass.

I guess the main tuning point that is actually notable was adding a TPS based wastegate trim. Basically, my wastegate duty cycle is 100% up until I'm around my target boost. With the trim I added, the wastegate duty cycle is trimmed relative to my TPS, so now if I'm at 30% TPS it'll pull 70% of the duty cycle from the wastegate. Numbers aren't quite accurate there since the duty cycle is trimmed from ~80-20 instead of 100-0. So now the cars power is actually controlled by the throttle, what a weird concept... We'll see what it's like at autocross, but so far I've been liking it a lot.

Last weekend I addressed a few things on the car that had been bothering me. First up, I had been smelling some exhaust and assumed one of the turbo bolts had loosened up. Not sure if that was the case or not, but when the heatshield came off I found 2 bolts that were less than torqued.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8c1c7c4c7c.jpg


That bolt sucks. Thankfully the other loose one was right on top of the exhaust housing and was easy to bolt back down. The one in the picture is damn near impossible to get to without loosening all of the other bolts and disconnecting the downpipe, so I decided that future me could deal with that and I just left it. 4/5 is a solid B- and I'm still thinking I'll pull the turbo to port the wastegate before summer, so I figure I'll get it tightened back down then. Man... If I'd been a bit smarter about it I would've had everything here fitted with Vbands.

While the heat shield was off the turbo I finally got around to fitting the bracket I had my friend make up for the wastegate.

We've gone from this
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...427e8293ee.jpg


To this
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...78524e042e.jpg


Looks way better to me and it's always fun to have parts I designed/modeled on the car.

I swapped the old air box back on as well. It blocks one of the main hood vents pretty badly, but I'm seeing way better IATs with it, so it'll stay. I also pulled the air filter and cleaned that while I was paying attention to that side of the bay.
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...988f547bca.jpg
Plenty more where that came from

The front of the car got ripped back apart as well. When I was doing ducting a while back I saw some places where I thought the intercooler was rubbing and was worried about it chafing through.

I ended up pulling all the ducting out and removed the intercooler with the intention of finally tapping it for the IAT sensor. In the end, I realized the chafing wasn't nearly as bad as I had thought and the end tanks didn't seem big enough to fit the sensor, so I basically just cleaned things up and threw them back on the car. This was my first time taking a good look at the front of the AC condenser and there was definitely some dirt and grime on it. I spent some time straightening fins and cleaning it up before hitting it with 3 passes of some condenser cleaner I'd used on the back of the unit in the summer when I was swapping the radiator.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...3f13cb8e95.jpg

Supposedly self rinsing and non corrosive but I still went to the car wash and sprayed down the cooling stack after this.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...70ba4d86e5.jpg

Fresh padding where the ducting butts up against the IC

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5dbd1fca21.jpg

I've never had a spare tire in this car but was also wary of using the fix a flat I have in the trunk. I'd been eyeballing a jump pack and finally broke down and got one. The GOOLOO brand, which I'd normally trust as far as I could throw it, have been perfoming well on Project Farm's reviews for a while now, so I picked up a jump pack/tire inflator combo for $65 and a tire plug kit to go along with it. I figure once my current battery dies and I go to lithium then this will give a lot of peace of mind.

I'm not sure if these will actually get made, but I've been thinking about making some radiator brackets. I know RGR has some custom ones and they seemed easy enough to draw up, so I started prototyping some. Biggest issue right now is figuring out how the measurements change when you factor in bending a flat piece of sheet metal. SendCutSend will cut and bend some metals, so ideally I'd just make a batch and have them cut and bend them.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...6ee0b21fe5.jpg

A couple more years and the majority of my car will be 3d printed...

And, finally, I mounted my fire extinguisher. I've had this one in the glovebox for a year or so now after getting paranoid about the car bursting into flames. It's been on my list to mount it properly for ages, but after reading into some of the safety requirements for one of our local hill climbs I finally did it.

They require that the mount be fully metal. I had a little bag holder thing that I'd picked up along with some other parts, but never liked how it worked and felt like it would be clumsy in an emergency. I also figured roll bar mounting was a bad idea because 1. I like driving around with the top down and would rather not have the fire extinguisher sitting in plain sight if I parked with the top down and 2. With my gimpy shoulder I'm not sure I'd be able to get to it very easily in an emergency.

The solution I came up with was to use one of those cheap quick release mounts and some aluminum bar to build a little mount under and in front of my seat.


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...77350599ef.jpg


https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5a7eb93bec.jpg
My DIY metal brake. Definitely wouldn't work for steel, but worked pretty well for aluminum.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...a605d805e0.jpg
Plenty of space under with me seated in the car.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...80286c51f0.jpg
I basically made a lawn mower blade.

http://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.miat...5341a3e3d6.jpg
Finished product with some paint.

Overall I feel pretty good about the end result. I'm definitely keeping in mind that if this thing comes loose somehow there's a high chance of it going under a pedal, so I'll keep an eye on it. I got the quick release screws Loctite'd down, so I think they should be fine. I did have to replace the factory seat belt bolts with some from the hardware store, but I made sure to get Grade 10.9, so I don't think there should be any loss of strength there. Annoying, because now I have 17mm bolts in the front of the bracket and 14mm heads on the back of the bracket, but I don't remove the seat often, so not a huge deal.

The important bit, is that I can reach it even with my seat belt sinched up, even if it is a bit of a stretch. It rubs my seat a bit when pulling it out of the bracket, but it's not hard to get out by any means. I've got zip ties and hose clamps holding the extinguisher to the quick release bracket, so that shouldn't be an issue. The quick release bracket was about $10 on Amazon and the hardware probably added up to about $10-15, so I'm pretty happy with that and I get to check something off my list.

Finally, I decided to have some fun and throw on an old Bailey Motorsports blow off valve on the car. I snagged this with another cheap BOV from a guy on marketplace for like $20 shipped. It has a much more piercing sound than the turbosmart that I've been running. Only downside is that it doesn't seem as responsive in vacuum, so I get some noise from the turbo that I believe is flutter. Probably not harmful to the turbo given the low load, but something I'd change if I could. Tonight I pulled the Bailey valve apart, cleaned and then lubed it with sewing machine oil, which is supposedly good for BOV's. We'll see if that helps it move a bit more freely.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...cd1e996ff2.jpg
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...e661429f68.jpg


Still need to figure out what I'm going to do for cooling, be it some Chevy Volt fans or replacing one of the fans with a newer Spal unit. The car basically sits at thermostat temp right now given how cold it is, but that only lasts for so long unfortunately.

Otherwise I think it's long overdue that I finally figure out what to do safety wise in this car. The airbag was removed when I got it, and up until recently I was under the impression that the giveaway stitching in the seatbelt had been removed, but it sounds like NB's have that hidden inside the belt mechanism/housing. I've read into most of the arguments on both side, "25 year old air bags are unsafe", "harness on the street without a HANs will snap your neck", etc... I believe the PO (more like POS am I right :giggle:) cut the airbag or horn wiring, but I'm considering throwing a wheel with an airbag back in the car. I figure I could get some of those Schroth anti-sub 4 point harnesses and likely be good to meet the safety requirements for what I'm currently doing and be safer on the street. I also don't have the front plastic crash support thing, so that's another point against me... Anyway, if people have thoughts on that subject I'm all ears. As much as I'm getting tired of constantly dumping money into this car, safety doesn't seem like the place to cheap out (he says after putting a $10 quick release fire extinguisher mount in the car).

IDK what's going on... :useless:

i fixed it.

Gotta love showing the new hooligans that older cars can have some bite.

I get that you're trying to make the throttle more a torque value instead of a plate open value.
As you described it, it would seem to me to vary the amount of reduction through a sweep of the RPM at a set pedal%. (as turbo becomes more or less efficient in the RPM band)
Would it be possible to add a 4d to the wgdc table, where you include RPM (as a standin for "turbo boost capability") to further linearize the torque across the pedal range?


Also
I agree, I've seen way too many leaks at NPT threads in 1/8" wall endtanks. Weld Bungs are the way to go here.
If only you knew someone with a welder.......

I was starting to wonder if you’d put the car away for winter. Guess not :rofl: good stuff dude! The wastegate bracket looks tight and the BOV sounds good too from what I could tell in the video.

That downpipe nut (Kraken kit was basically the same) was the bane of my existence on my NA. I don’t think it was ever torqued down after the first two weeks of installing my turbo kit lol.

I know, I know, I need to make a trip down...

Regarding the wastegate stuff, the trim can be applied based on TPS and RPM, and I did play around with that a bit to trim less duty cycle under ~4K where the turbo is still spooling. I might fine tune it later, but what I have now is already a big step in the right direction.

Still here, still racking up miles on the car. It's been cold and I don't have as many projects to finish up right now (that's a lie, I have a ton, I just don't have the motivation). Definitely won't be putting the car up anytime soon considering we have no snow on the ground.

I forget that flutter is frowned upon, pigeon noises are too cool to me, definitely a consideration though as the cost of the turbo rises. I generally hate how bovs sound but I like how this one still has a high pitched whistle noise.

I have a similar nut on mine, if only there was some way to make a custom wrench, maybe by getting metal really hot, and fusing it in a way that could potentially lend you better access and even leverage... :violin:

Just joking, even with a custom wrench its damn near impossible to snug down and keep snugged down. atp i check them everytime im doing a check in my bay. Which seems to be more often than not these days,.,..,

No major updates for me, but I figured I'd post since the car is right on 20K miles on the built engine. I ran over to my buddies cabin last weekend which was about 3 hour round trip and everything was fine. Averaged about 22 MPG on E65 basically cruising at 80 MPH the whole time, so that seems pretty decent to me. Gotta love being able to pass people without thinking about it.

The engine is wearing a decent coat of oil at this point, at least on the front. There are leaks kinda all over the front of the engine, but thankfully the rear main seem to be solid. I guess if the engine survives long enough to need a timing belt service then I'll reseal everything, but for now that's just rust prevention. At this point I still have a few offseason mods that I'd like to get done, but mainly I think a bolt check and an oil change should be all the car really needs.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...73da347202.jpg


I noticed some condensation in the catch can when I got home. Haven't noticed this before and thought it was interesting. I guess that's one side effect of having a clear catch can.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8bf32641f3.jpg



I did get some Singular wing end plates the other day. They were originally on my wing when it was on my old roommates J swapped Miata. He's cleaning out the garage and most of his horde of Miata parts, so I ended up with these, but I doubt they'll end up on the car, as I don't like the look as much as the stock APR endplates.
This is also likely when I end up with an extra block, a few heads, another 6 speed, etc... in my possession, but we'll see how clean my buddies garage gets.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...2ff88362b6.jpg