Damn, 22mpg on 65% E is pretty dang good considering these cars got what, 28mpg highway from the factory? Curious, what's E85 go for where you're at? I'm paying $2.99 next to where I live, but there's a couple places in LA where I've been able to fill up for $2.29 a gallon recently. I don't know my exact MPG but I think it's similar to you on the highway, maybe a hair less.

I love coming up on parts from a good garage cleanout. Hope you make off with some good spares for your car haha. I'm gonna shoot you a PM if you're not going to put those endplates to use...

 

its getting warm soon you better get on that fan grind 😅

here in yeehaw its about 1.90$ a gallon, i think at around 2.40$ the $/mile was a cent less than 87, and way less than 93, being that i deliver for work ethanol is just better, 20 highway ish 14 city but i have a lead foot, just data points for your curiosity.

 

I think the last tank of E85 I got was around $3.40 a gallon? 91 is closer to $3.20, so it's definitely more cost efficient, but the car just seems to run better on ethanol. I'm pretty sure these injectors are close to their useful limit when idling on 91. Not to mention the horsepower.

 

So a couple friends from Autocross decided to get married last year. They decided to kick off their honeymoon with a ski trip to the Swiss alps. I was lucky enough to be invited to that, and have finally returned from a couple weeks kicking around Europe.




Super fun to get back over to Europe and play around a bit. Funnily, the snow in Idaho has been so bad this year that this is all the skiing I've done this year despite having local and regional passes.

Unfortunately I was told the Nurburgring was closed this time of year or I'd probably have run over there afterwards for a few laps.

As seen in the photo, I took this as an opportunity to get a new action camera. My GoPro 3+ was getting a bit long in the tooth so I bit the bullet and grabbed a new DJI Action 5 for around $225 on eBay. "Open Box" but it was sealed when I got it.

Pretty shortly after I got home I took the Miata out. As expected, after 2 weeks the battery was dead. At this point, if anything, I'm surprised the battery is still working. I put this in the car around 2018 when I got the car, so it's seen some use. I took that as an opportunity to try out my new jump pack, which fired the car up easily after letting it charge up for 30-60 seconds.

I missed a couple shifts due to poor flat shift settings while racing a Civic sport, so the laptop was brought out and I fixed those issues. I also thought the car seemed slow, so I pulled some intercooler pipes apart to do a janky boost leak test. Afterward I realized I could just check the logs, but I'm guessing I just needed an excuse to turn a wrench. I also learned that a can of break clean works to plug the throttle body side of the IC piping. With this setup and my hand over the BOV outlet I was able to see about 16 PSI without leaking, so I figured things were good (later confirmed by logs. I'm guessing the slowness was just due to being around 15% ethanol instead of 65-75 like normal.





Along with the new camera I decided to grab a DJI Mic Mini. My audio has never been great and I realized these were only $25. I grabbed one, drew up a quick license plate mount and printed it out.




Honestly, the price/simplicity factor is pretty crazy here. I might grab another one for the engine bay or cabin, but I'm actually really happy with the initial results. There is some noise from the Mic rattling around, but I think I can solve that with a couple tweaks to the design or some electrical tape to pad things. I did try to do a bit of color correction here, but I don't think it turned out great. The raw footage probably would've looked better honestly.

 

The car sounds great dude! Super jealous of the POV and mic setup, I need to get that going. What kind of mount do you use for the action5?

 

Thanks man! I think it would look even better with some proper color grading and/or an ND filter. The sound is night and day from my old setup for sure.

I was just using the generic GoPro head mount in that clip, basically just some elastic straps.

 

Dude that mic setup is nuts! Crazy it's that cheap too. I need to get something like that for my GoPro, all you can hear in my clips is wind noise lol.

Alps trip must've been super sick. I really want to make it out there in the summer one year.

 

Very cool. Always nice to have better quality videos, and audio is often overlooked. What editing software are you using? I went down a rabbit hole of video editing for my kids' piano recitals and landed on Davinci Resolve by chance. I'm kind of blown away how good a piece of software it is and it's free. There's def a bit of a learning curve to it but nice thing is it's quite popular so you can find tons of tutorials on youtube/etc. It makes syncing clips/audio/color grading fairly "straightforward" and intuitive, relatively speaking, imo. Just figured I'd throw it out there if you're going down the rabbit hole of video editing.

 

I used ShotCut for that but I was actually thinking about giving DaVinci a try. Back in high school I got into video editing/effects with some friends, so I'm somewhat familiar with video editing software, but like 3d modeling, it takes a while to relearn the small intricacies of the programs. I almost went back and reedited that sample footage after realizing how blown out the hood was, but figured it didn't matter too much since I was mostly interested in testing the mic.

I also realized I can put the camera in "Pro mode" and manually adjust exposure, so I think next time I go do some testing I'll try that and see if I can get the exterior to be less blown out. It's somewhat ironic as well that I finally get a decent camera setup the year that we lose our main site for autocross. I'm sure I'll find excuses to record stuff though.

On that note, I opted to get another mic so I can have one at the rear of the car and one in the cabin or engine bay. Obviously using the magnet mount is way too simple, so I modified the license plate mount to fit where the sun visors would go.



I also wanted to revisit the roll bar mount for the camera. I had something previously but the vibrations and audio made the video pretty unenjoyable. I opted to draw up a design that would utilize a couple hose clamps to attach to the rollbar, along with a TPU (a rubbery plastic) layer to try and absorb some vibrations. I doubt the TPU will do much, but I think with the mics and the stabilization on this new camera that the video will probably turn out pretty decent. The quick release mount for the camera and being able to use my phone to wirelessly set things up is a huge step up from the old GoPro as well.


The print failed right at the end, so the internal structure is exposed. Fortunately it's still plenty usable.

I ended up switching this over to the other side of the bar, which frames the shot better.




I'll probably go grab some sample footage later this week or this weekend and see how it ends up. I also need to rewatch the Gravel Co/Ryan's Road to Rally video where he discusses all about how to capture better looking footage. Great channel for those of you who are in to sim racing and/or rally. Very well produced.

 

Not a professional with video settings either, but being able to manually change exposure for in-car, rollbar-mounted footage is a game changer. With my old Insta360 and any GoPro I had before the 8, auto exposure couldn't figure out what to do and would just make anything outside bright white and completely unwatchable. I'm running a Hero 11 Mini now, and auto exposure works well enough to see outside, but I still mess with it a bit manually depending on ambient lighting. Particularly bright spring/summer days with zero cloud cover are always a bit hard to get a good exposure balance.

Gonna watch that vid a couple times and try to pick up some tips. I know my track footage isn't perfect, but I wanna try to make it as good as possible. It's funny how much terribly-shot track footy exists on YouTube. Super annoying trying to find a good video of a new venue you're going to and having to sift through a bunch of videos where you can hardly see out the windshield or tell what's going on lol.

 

Hopefully not anymore though haha

 

I finally got the oil temp sensor installed last night. I spent a lot of time in analysis paralysis on this one and in the end just decided to grab a sandwich plate, move the pressure sensor over to that and plug the brass tee that feeds the turbo.

Obviously this doesn't eliminate the brass tee as a potential failure point, but I figure without the weight of the pressure sensor hanging off of it it'll probably be fine. If they were that massive of a failure point for my use case I don't think FM would still be using them. I expected this job to be a huge PITA, but it went pretty smoothly. With the oil warmer, sandwich plate and a Wix filter (not sure if those are smaller than normal) I was able to clear the intake manifold brace pretty easily, which was a concern.

I used a generic sensor from Amazon. No idea if it'll hold up, and I don't love the bullet connectors, but I had it on hand and figured I'd get this setup for now and if it doesn't work then I'll move to something else. I measure the resistance in ice water and boiling water along with a few other temps to try and get a rough calibration curve. I found some other posts from people that had values that lined up with mine so I think I'm in the ballpark. I also did some extrapolation with the data to try and get a better calibration curve at higher temps. Once I have some real world data I'll post those up as there doesn't seem to be much data for these sensors floating around.




Not sure if this'll set up properly given the oily environment, but I figured it was worth trying.

An oil change was overdue, so this was a good time to get everything done. I tested out a vented oil funnel that I 3d printed as well, which worked great aside from some issues printing the threads for the valve cover.




Fired the car up for a minute or two and didn't see any leaks. I didn't take it out since I wanted to give the thread sealant I used some time to cure. With everything here being NPT it's probably not a huge deal, but I figured it wouldn't hurt. The calibration numbers I gathered put the oil temp right around the same as coolant temp, so I'm crossing my fingers that trend continues as the car gets to temp.

I found this gem on FB yesterday. Figured someone on here would appreciate it

 

Had to fiddle around with the sandwich plate a bit this weekend due to some leaks. The temp sensor wasn't torqued down tight enough apparently, as it was leaking even with the thread sealant. I also had to remove the oil filter and tighten the sandwich plate bolt. Annoyingly, it uses a 25mm nut and isn't easy to get an adjustable wrench on. I have 24mm sockets and a 1" wrench, but nothing in 25mm. I ended up using the 27mm deep socket I had which allowed me to get it tight enough. I didn't see any leaks after a couple short drives yesterday, so I think we're clear.

When I was doing that I fired up the car to check for leaks and heard a bang. Still not sure what it was. I thought I'd blown the engine due to oil starvation or something, but there was still plenty of oil in it when I checked afterward. The car seemed fine on the drive after so I guess it was a fluke, either that or I'll be posting in a couple days about building another engine.

The oil temp calibration seems reasonable. I've been seeing operating oil temps in the 100-110 C (212-230 F) range. I'll probably have to scrutinize it a bit more once I get to higher temps, as I wasn't able to take any cal measurements over 100 C.

On another note, the camera setup on the roll bar seems promising. I took some test footage this weekend with one mic on the rear license plate and one in the engine bay. There's no comparison to my old camera setup.

Again, I think there's some fine tuning that could be done here, but for raw video and audio I'm pretty happy about it. Can't wait to get out to an event of some sort to get some more exciting footage.

 

Footage looks great and f*ck me, that audio is so good dude. Gonna close this tab right now and start searching external mics for my gopro.

I did the same thing with a 27mm and my BP's sandwich plate long ago lol. Probably best to give it another torque check after a couple heat cycles. Mine eased up once just a bit after install then stayed put after that.

 

engine noise a little too loud, hate hearing all the valvetrain. Can you fade it down a bit or muffle it next time?

 

Agreed on the engine noise, but on the plus side you could probably use it for knock detection!

 

Haha, yeah, maybe I can run the engine bay noise through a filter to look for 7KHz chatter.

I agree, the engine noise is a bit much in that clip. That was just raw audio/video, but I figure after I sit down with everything and get more familiar with the user interface and options it won't feel like a big hassle to adjust things. Brain, when I recorded that I believe I selected mono audio, so both mic's recorded to a single track. That prevented me from adjusting the levels in post (I believe I can change the levels when recording if I go into a "Pro" mode). In the future what I think I'll try is recording in stereo. That should give me two audio tracks, one for the engine bay and one for the rear, which I could then adjust in software and merge together into a single track so you don't have engine bay noise in one ear and exhaust in the other.

Hopefully after a bit more use I'll find the sweet spot for quality and ease of setup. As much as I enjoy having quality audio and video, I don't always want to play Menu Simulator when I'm at an event.

 

No real updates, but I was pretty happy to get the car up to the local ski hill last week after work. It's been a **** poor year for snow, otherwise I wouldn't dare trying this so early in the year. Usually this parking lot would be covered in snow and ice. The road up to this ski hill is one of my favorite driving roads anyway, so why not have fun driving and skiing?






I also took the hardtop off this weekend since we saw temps around 18 C (65 F). Still a clumsy job with one person, but doable if you're careful.

A while back someone in our local Miata group had an old soft top frame they were getting rid of and I was lucky enough to snag for free. With my soft top starting to develop some splits, and the amount of self tapping screws holding it together, I think I'll grab a new top sometime in the next couple months and give that a whirl. I was able to get some of the new frame disassembled this weekend and the seals look pretty good, so I'm hoping that makes the car a bit more livable at 80 MPH in the summer.

I'm also planning to steal the Chevy Volt fans that @Ironhydroxide rigged up on his car to hopefully remedy the cooling issues the car has had for the past couple years. If the fans don't fix it I'm done trying to get AC working and pulling it (I promise I actually will this time)...

Oh yeah, and we lost our site for autocross with no real replacements lined up, so we'll see how much action the car gets this year. There's a local "time attack" series hosted at the little oval that I've posted some autocross videos at. I figure I'll try to hit that a bit, drag racing a time or two, PCA autocross and maybe a track day or two in Utah/Oregon. Perfect timing now that I finally upgraded to a decent camera/mic setup.

 

I'd like to add that I listened to the video above through my speakers at work, with impact guns going off in the background, so some of the finer sounds were lost on me

Bummer about your local autoX spot. With tracks shutting down left and right, I kinda figured autoX was a safe haven as nobody's going out and destroying parking lots...

Interested in seeing how the Volt fans work for you. Hopefully you can get your cooling issues resolved once and for all.

 

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I think it'll be a tight fit with the sway bay and charge piping, but I'm hoping they don't need much more than a trim in places.







Ended up snagging this setup from @Ironhydroxide since he's reverting his car to another class. These are Chevy Volt fans (2015-2019 I believe), which seem to fit pretty well over a Miata rad. Iron had cut and rewelded the mounting studs on his SM rad, so it won't be quite plug and play, but shouldn't be too far off. These are PWM controlled, which I believe I'll be able to do through the stock fan wiring. Ideally via a small pigtail connected to the stock AC fan wiring to make it plug and play.

I've only done some basic experimentation with the tune changes required for this. I was surprised that the G4x didn't seem to have a native option for PWM fans. I'm hoping I don't have to anything to crazy to handle idle up and such with these, as they should draw a pretty good amount of power when they're running at higher speeds.

From a bit of research, these should run around 300 watts each (~23 Amps @ 13 V). I believe I'll wire these up directly to the alternator posts for their main power, but need to double check that. For context, the numbers I've found for the stock fans are about 6.3 Amps for the Main fan and about 5.2 Amps for the AC fan. I'm not sure how that compares exactly, but considering these new fans are brushless and ~15 years newer, I assume they'll be more efficient watt for watt. Will they be 4x more effective (~11.5 Amps vs ~46 Amps)? I guess we will see.

Aside from that, I pulled the turbo last weekend because I believe one of the coolant lines was leaking a bit. I figured it wouldn't be bad to look around as well and make sure things were where they were supposed to be. I put a bit of red loctite on that pesky turbo elbow bolt that kept loosening, so we'll see if that fixes that. I assume not, as I don't think loctite is rated for those temps, but maybe it'll hold it for a while.

I'm still playing around with the camera and mics. I printed another one of my mic mounts to go in the engine bay. I tried TPU this time as I assume it'll be a bit less creaky/rattly than the rigid PETG. I have been able to get the mics to record 2 channels so I can balance the engine bay and exhaust levels in post, but still need to play with the noise reduction levels and other settings.




And finally, I picked up a nice little chip in the window when I was cruising around the mountains this weekend. Safelite should be out to patch that up tomorrow. First real chip since the windshield was replaced a couple years back





Still debating on if I'm going to the drag strip this weekend or not. Either way we've ended up salvaging a couple weekends of autocross, so I've at least got a couple events on the calendar. A bolt check will need to happen I figure. I also want to make sure none of the new brake lines are rubbing anywhere, as I don't think I've checked them since the initial install or with the wider wheels/tires on.