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While on my trip to Washington D.C. to help my girlfriend move into her new apartment, my miata started to overheat mid day. It wasn't a bad overheat, I had my gauge rigged up to flash overheat at 220 degrees fahrenheit so we pulled over and let the car sit. The overheat scenario was with the stock replacement radiator, and both fans on with the ac on at idle or idle ish waiting for cars to pass as we were looking for street parking. We had been sitting there for maybe 10 minutes. It was just so incredibly hot outside and mid day heat in D.C. was just the breaking point for us and the car. Thankfully Payam (Psyber_Optix) was nearby and I had a radiator on reserve with him so that worked out. I had been so mentally out of it from the various misadventures with my girlfriends car and renting a trailer and navigating down some narrow D.C. streets that Payam really came to my rescue with helping me install the radiator at his house. I had to keep walking around the car and play part fetcher to prevent myself from falling asleep. Afterward he gave me a lift to my girlfriends apartment since I was too tired to drive safely.
But, you guys don't want to hear about that. You want to see some shiny parts right? Of course you do. I bought his trackspeed radiator that has his custom made brackets to mount not a 13 inch spal fun but a 14 inch spal fan that hugs right up to the fins so it draws in air straight through the fins and not from the stagnant engine bay air. These new fans require a much bigger relay and their own wiring to work. Payam already figured out the hard parts on Smurfette but essentially it is a 60 amp relay, with a 60 amp fuse connected directly to my alternator with the stock fan wiring acting as a trigger to my fan. Stock chassis wiring gets less stressed and I get full power to this fan. I am very happy I upgraded to that FD alternator when I did my engine swap.
But now, with this huge fan kicking on I need to re tune some megasquirt parameters because at idle, this fans startup can stall the car.
I purchased a new wheel hub so that I can mount wheels besides my motolita. I went with a works bell shorty hub. Fitment is spot on and it installed easily with no issues and my airbag connector passed through just fine so no wires needed to be cut.
I also purchased a nrg 2.0 purple quick release and a 2.1 black quick release. My current plan is to buy a few steering wheels and pre mount the quick release on them so I can easily swap my wheel as I please.
I received a new horn button from Revlimiter and it looks awesome. I also installed the new steering wheel and I am pleased with the results. Also, quick releases are awesome for having more than one steering wheel in rotation.
It has been a while since I have updated this thread. The year started off looking like this with my car.
At that time my car was running the stock VVT engine with the Alec Moody 3d printed intake and a racing beat header.
Then sometime in May I graduated from Law School and started studying for the bar exam. The bar exam was postponed multiple times but ultimately was administered and I passed on my first try. Now that schooling is over I have been able to get back into wrenching on my car the last few weeks with all the parts I've been collecting the past few years.
First up on my list of upgrades were Bryan's old V8Roadster motor mounts. He had them in his car for a year or two but the NVH drove him a bit crazy. I took a chance on them since I thought I knew what the problem was. I still think I know what the problem was.
Below is what the V8Roadster sleeve as included in their kit looks like. It is marginally smaller than the distance between the face of the bushings when the bushings are installed. This would cause the clevis, when tightened, to use the face of the bushing as the mount rather than locating on the sleeve. This was turning the bushing into the mounting surface instead of the medium to quell NVH.
I contacted Sean from SadFab to have a custom made sleeve made. He has helped me out in the past with 3d printed parts and custom machined parts. Needless to say, this small difference in sleeve diameter seems to have made a difference when the sleeve was assembled. Below is the side by side of the included sleeve on the left and Sean's sleeve on the right.
This is what the motor mount looks like when the stock sleeve is pressed into the bushings.
Here is a photo of Sean's new sleeve in the v8roadster clevis. It is a pretty precise and tight fit.
Below is what the mount looks like with Sean's sleeves installed.
And here is a quick video I made showing that the motor mounts can now rotate freely without clamping on the bushings themselves.
Next up after the motor mounts was airflow or lack there of.
I have a trackspeed radiator which was intended for a now defunct turbo idea I had rattling around my brain. Unfortunately the radiator only had provisions for a single fan. I used the largest Spal 14 inch fan that was readily available. It claimed to flow 1800 cfm of air. Radiator temps were awesome and not an issue except when using AC. When I had my ac properly recharged it would not shed enough heat at idle and the temps would slowly creep up if left at idle long enough. Down here in Miami I have nearly 100% humidity every day and on a hot day with ac on things get toasty.
Below was my original fan setup. I didn't create this setup. psyber_0ptix from Miataturbo.net was the brainchild behind that fan mount. It worked great for him and it worked well for me but ac was still an issue.
I contacted a friend of mine who goes by the name Matrussell122 on miataturbo.net He was able to help me design a new shroud, get it water jetted, and shipped to me for final fitting and adjusting.
This is that shroud overlaid on my radiator. I had to do a bit of drilling on the shroud to get things to line up with alignment and what not but it bolted on nicely. I bought some special foam sticky spongey material from Mcmastercar so that I can sandwich the shroud to the radiator and not let any air go in places that I didn't want it to go.
When we designed the shroud I had it built on the assumption that I would be using the same fans that FM uses in their airflow kit. I was able to find a pair of those fans on ebay for $100 shipped.
Test fitting those fans on the shroud.
I also added some thicker foam squishy tape to go between the ac condenser and the radiator so that the fans pull air through the condenser and can't possibly pull air from around the condenser.
Content updates have been slow on my end.
I tried using my megasquirt to control both fans on and off and it was a real struggle. Even the best of my tuning efforts couldn't cope with the current inrush. I had spent about a year and a half getting my big single 14 inch spal fan to play nice and I just couldn't get the twin 12s to play nice so I brought out the big guns.
I found on ebay a Ford Fusion / Lincoln Zephyr 2006 to 2012 oem fan controller with the harness. In reality, you have to buy the fan controller complete with the fan shroud and fan since you need to snip off the connector for the fan and most salvage places won't sell you the harness with it. Total cost was $75 shipped with the controller, shroud, fan, and harness. The shroud and fan were quickly dumped.
Here is what the fan controller looks like.
I used a 50 AMP fuse inline between the fan controller and my alternator. I needed to use M8 AWG 10-12 heat shrink ring wire terminals to get it to fit on the alternator stud. Below is what my first attempt at the wiring looked like.
Power and ground each go to the fan controller. Then the fan controller has their own outputs for power and ground to the fans. The fan controller also has a pwm input to control the fans.
I made the mistake of trying to reuse the factory fan output trigger to control the fans. What I neglected to think is that the factory fans have a relay and relays don't like getting a PWM signal so that idea was scrapped. Instead, I used an extra output from my megasquirt wired directly to the fan controller. I believe PWM Out 3 on the NA PnP Pro is used for alternator control if using an NB alternator. I am not so it wasn't an issue. Wiring that output directly to the fan controller allowed me to use fan output with the below table. It looks like around 5% duty is energizing the fan controller but not turning the fans on and is the true minimum. Around 93% is around the true maximum for the fan controller. If you feed it too high or too low of a signal the fan controller errors out and decides to go full speed ahead or turns off.
While I don't have a picture of it, the fan controller did fit nicely beside the hood latch behind the stock bumper crash bar. It is out of the way of everything and was easy to route. Next time I have my black cowl off I will snag some more photos.
However, the results are in and the fans no longer stall the car anymore. Major win in the drivability category. I no longer need to think about controlling or tuning the fans. They just work. If you have a single big beefy fan or two big beefy fans I suggest taking a look at some kind of fan controller.
I went with the Ford Fusion unit because it uses any input regardless of frequency and outputs a variable voltage to control the fans as opposed to pulsing the fans on and off rapidly. There is no humming or any strange noises going on.
If you have any questions setting up the fan controller I'd be happy to help.
Now that the fans have been squared away I got to work on my rotrex install.
I am not thrilled with how Track Dog routes their pipes and the amount of cutting on the chassis that is required to make things fit. I still had in my garage left over my FM intercooler and FM Silicone piping. I figured since I never did get to use them on a turbo setup I might as well try and see just how close I can get to having a system that works together.
My kit uses the C30-84 rotrex and I have a full TrackDog NB kit but I did not use all of the trackdog parts.
For brevity sake I'm skipping straight to the hard part. FM intercooler fits, FM silicone cold side piping fits. FM hot side piping does not fit. I had a friend send to me a setup that he previously used on his car to solve my hotside piping problem. It uses a combination of a few couplers and the sharp angled trackdog coupler. I am not entirely thrilled with how that connection is made but it does work and it doesn't require cutting up the front of my car so I am content.
Because I like my car to not screw look at me I make wooshy noises I decided to go with circulation style of blow off valve instead of venting it to the atmosphere.
FM assumes that you will use a 34mm BOV with their coupler. Track Dog assumes you will use a 24mm BOV. Thankfully turbosmart sells their kompact blow off valves with replaceable fittings. On the feed side it has 34mm and on the vent side it has 24mm. It works and it keeps my wooshy noises at bay.
Here the car is in it's first startup glory.
I found out the hard way that the airfilter that track dog includes does not fit my NA. It could be because it was designed for the NB chassis and those don't have the headlights in the way. Either way it was too long by about an inch. K&N filterRU-2790 fit my space perfectly. What's interesting is that trackdog uses the filter over the silicone 3 inch coupler itself instead of using a charge pipe to connect them. So the inside diameter of the filter needed to be larger than 3 inches. Here is a link to the one I bought off of amazon. It fits great and works well.
After I got the car up and running and doing some tuning I had a few issues with spark. I presently have the LS coils running sequentially. I used the settings that Trackspeed has posted on this forum in the past and well, those aren't good settings for a dwell table. It caused some pretty significant spark blowout around 5500 rpm. I thought it was my plugs so I used the miataturbo approved spark plugs gapped at .033. That helped but I had blowout around 6600rpm. While tuning I found an old tune from the prior owner of my LS coil setup from his tuning setup. @psyber_0ptix I slammed those that dwell table into my tune and what do you know, no more spark blowout.
FYI, it looks FlowForce uses the same dwell table that Trackspeed posted on this forum. If you use the FlowForce dwell settings and have spark blowout issues try mine below instead and see if they work for you. The issues I had were solved by increasing dwell by about a full point.
Since I hope to help anyone else in their endeavors this is what I settled on for dwell.
Because I don't leave much alone even when things work, I decided to try my 75mm pulley instead of the 80mm pulley I had. For reference, I have no power steering but do still have AC so I am stuck with the 4 rib belt for now. To date, the best size belt I could find for the 75mm pulley in 4 rib was the Gates K040500 belt. I did some virtual dyno runs/pulls and I think the belt stretched slightly after I first put it on so I think it needs to be re-tightened. My logs show that after 5500rpm my boost gets a little ripple wave and I think that was from the belt not having enough tension and causing some slipping.
Either way, I make some pretty nice power. I am still trying to get consistent pulls and good runs. Bumps in the road affect my data and I know my data isn't that great since I am doing my pulls in 3rd gear. @vteckiller2000 Has helped me quite a bit dial in my spark tables and so far this was the nicest looking graph we were able to accomplish.
I still have a stock block vvt engine, RB header, magnaflow 2.25 cat, cheap yonaka 2.5 exhaust, skunk 2 manifold, and ls coils. I think these are pretty good numbers all things considering. More work and time will be spent on this but so far it is tremendous fun. Now I need to see about getting a 3.9 torsen.
Good numbers though! Car must feel great there, I love a good rotrex build... they really feel like n/a with more grunt. Have fun!!
Thanks. The numbers are good. I truly thought i'd be at the 220hp 175 torque area so anything above that is gravy. Car sure is a handful and I like the feel.
I also ran tighter Spark gap (read less potential) but also eliminated blowout for 32psi of boost on e85.
I think I ran between 0.022-0.028 range
Hey, good to hear from you. My first step in attempting to fix the spark blowout was new plugs around .030 gap range. It wasn't until after that that I realized my dwell table was wonky and yours was better.
Not much in the name of an update. I drove to Miatas at the Gap this past summer. The car did get kind of toasty on the highway. I am still addressing why it might be overheating while on the highway. On my road trip with the AC on the temps would slowly climb to around 220 and then the ac compressor would shut off and re cycle again when it was a bit cooler.
Fast forward to last week I finally did my first track event. Car performed great except on the long straight aways it had the tendency to get a little hot again so I had to short shift it. I will be taking my cooling system apart and giving everything a good clean to see what might be going on. It has all the symptoms of an airflow issue so I am going to see what I can do just short of venting my hood which is something I very much do not want to do for the time being.
We've been telling you this for what, 18 months? 2 years?
I have a theory. Hear me out: You have too many heat exchangers and sub standard ducting.
There is a reason the TSE rad has no provision for an AC fan, because nobody in their right mind would run that radiator on a car with AC and an intercooler blocking all the flow and inefficient ducting. You've got too much resistance to airflow through your core stack and your ducting isn't allowing enough pressure differential to actually help air move. Hood vents will probably help but that's only going to do something at speed when they have air flowing over the top. Hood vents aren't going to help your precious AC function.
Try this, go get a big, thick sweater (if you even have them in Florida) and clamp it over your nose and mouth and try to breathe through it. Unless you are smoking 2 packs a day like everyone else in Florida, this should be no issue.
Now go get 6 t-shirts and clamp them over your nose and mouth. Notice how its harder to breathe? That's resistance to flow. But I believe that's only half your problem.
Get a thinner radiator that provides less resistance toair flow and make some goddamn ducting. Don't order some "one size fits something probably maybe" solution from some aftermarket vendor. Zip up your andym suit, get out the tin snips and duct tape, and made some **** happen.
We've been telling you this for what, 18 months? 2 years?
Get a thinner radiator that provides less resistance toair flow and make some goddamn ducting. Don't order some "one size fits something probably maybe" solution from some aftermarket vendor. Zip up your andym suit, get out the tin snips and duct tape, and made some **** happen.
Makes complete sense to me. I am addressing ducting currently with more to come. I am also looking into a thinner radiator (presently eyeing supermiata) as you suggested and a smaller intercooler since what I have is overkill for my rotrex.
08-24-2019, 08:13 PM
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