I would agree with that. Can you buy them that way?

Completely off topic, but I pulled and cleaned the wheels on my miata. But mine are heavy and narrow compared to your wheels (stock 15x6s...).

Back on topic, so moving forward, what's your wheel plan?

 

Well my good tires are still on the 13lb 15x10 spinwerks. And I'm not going to need crappy tires until july. My plan is to contract keizer and see what the deal is. Gendron looked at them at the race, since he's the local keizer dealer and thats what he said to do. He recommended taking them all out of service, and after looking at them there's only 1 I'd consider still running. This set of wheels did experience an off on the road race car they were originally built for and one of the centers got broke and was replaced after that incident, and then they went on the run on a csp miata for a year and then sit in some dudes basement for a couple years. You can tell one of the centers is different and has a much more generous radius on the transition from the hub face to the spokes, and thats the only one that looks still good to run.

 

Gotcha. So really worst case is 3 new centers and you got a set of wheels again. I guess that sucks, but it's kinda cool that the wheels are serviceable!

 

Yeah... 3 new centers and the whole set of barrels for one wheel, and we're approaching what I paid for the set, haha. I'll also want 3 more outer barrels to turn them into 15x11s.

 

Twinning

 

Tired of getting stabbed my dad built these.



I went to put my new caliper on and raybestos did a great job of cleaning the slider pin bores after they honed them. Like you could hear the sand noise moving the caliper. Top shelf. And I found my pads like this when I replaced the caliper. So I'm going to replace these, the edge have been doing that for a while, the cracking is new.



And I made a master cylinder brace.



Oh and I bought a black NB with a hardtop and 120k miles that had never seen salt for $3400, but its an automatic. I can fix that.

 

Installed new brake pads and bled with motul. Still getting some of the super blue that was in the ABS block before I bought it, haha. Fixed the slight splitter damage. Did some more launch control setup. Now its wicked slick. Also something happened in the EMS4 and all of a sudden the speed sensor more or less works besides the random spike here or there to 255mph. Before it would like work up to 10mph and the just like stay at 10mph. This is nice.

Oh and I keep cutting the waste gate line so I tried to redrill the holes in the bracket to turn the nipples away from the frame and well I couldnt get the ******* thing to go back in and work and it was binding in its stroke. Very confused I realized the shaft was bent. No problem I guess I'll finally order a real 2 port that'll maybe be good for more than 14psi. Gets here today and they sent the wrong one in the box. Frantic after like 2 hours of frantic calls after 5pm between turbo smart, my house, and the ebay seller that had it drop shipped from turbosmart I've got another one on its way overnighted to me. Fun.

 

I'm pissed at my performance saturday. I should have pulled out 2nd in my class but I cocked up and coned my fast run, and I ran out of brakes on my last run and dnfed. I changed my front parts store pads to new ones but they must have changed the compound so they sucked. And of course the first runs were hitting boost cut because the wastegate was still a bit messed up, but I fixed it kind of. I need to fix it better but that requires taking the turbo off the car. I think I will fix the brakes by going to 1.6 fronts with HP+ that should still be fine compared to parts store pads that would be smoked after a couple runs, should keep the brake bias similar.

I should have some video later. Not sure I want to post the disaster runs from yesterday but I think I'll post my first run from today with the epic trailing throttle drift and my fast run. I think I could have had a 65 something on my fast run but I really dialed it back towards the end to make sure I still ended up with something clean.

 

Can you notice any difference with the master cylinder brace you made? That's something I've always wanted to make, just never actually did it....

I don't know how easy/impossible it would be, but I ran an external wastegate on my turbo setup and it was flawless. Rock solid boost control, no overshoot/undershoot, it flowed enough I could run 8 PSI (spring pressure) or 28 PSI. And it was reliable, only thing I did to it was throw away the paper gaskets they include for the banjo bolts and used copper crush washers. Maybe a winter project for you if you get tired of messing with the one you have.

Also i LOLd at the sign your dad made, that's awesome!

 

I think I noticed the brace. The pedal was firmer but I'm not certain because I changed from the super amber to motul rbf600 and the pad compound changed. It cost under $5 besides steel I already had, and took like an hour.

 

Why are you trying to run a car this fast with shitty brakes?

 

Because its auto-x, I just need to be able to stop hard like 3 times a run. But the new pads couldnt handle that. I have many other things to spend money on to make the car faster, like 15x11s, new front lcas for more camber, more front downforce, etc. I'm also waiting for a radial mount front kit to come out. Brakes, like aero is one of those things you have to do all at once or it'll be all fucked up.

 

Really. Good to know. Tell me more about this autocross thing.

 

I blew up another 5 speed 2nd gear in toledo. On the other hand I beat that joker from tennessee, took 2nd place in class, fastest left side time in class, and made it into the challenge. And Eric let me drive his car in the challenge. Only my second time trophying at a national event, and first time I've won contingency. I'll throw some videos below, it was pretty wet on saturday, but sunday was great.

There's a 6 speed in my garage now and some 3.63 gears on their way to me. I've got to slap all that together and be good to go. Having to shift in sometimes is going to be interesting. Have to get it in before evoschool in 2 weeks, doing a challenge school.

 

My ribs hurt. Doing a tranny and dropping a diff really did a number on my sore ribs. 6 speed is in, diff is sitting on the bench waiting for the 3.63s to arrive tomorrow. Keizer are boxed up to be sent in tomorrow to become 15x11s. Oh I made new rad fan supports with a hacksaw and hand drill because the zip tie thingies were starting to cut into the radiator.

 

My ribs hurt. Doing a tranny and dropping a diff really did a number on my sore ribs. 6 speed is in, diff is sitting on the bench waiting for the 3.63s to arrive tomorrow. Keizer are boxed up to be sent in tomorrow to become 15x11s. Oh I made new rad fan supports with a hacksaw and hand drill because the zip tie thingies were starting to cut into the radiator.

 

Tips on swapping the tranny? I'm doing mine this week.

 

Well I successfully got the 3.63 r&p setup. Not paying attention cost me a lot of time dicking around with it being confused. I forgot to pull the pinion bearing off the old r&p to get the pinion depth shim out. Which resulted in like 2 hours of trying to figure out why the backlash was being ******* stupid. And I had to use the torch and my new 20 ton press to get that bearing off. I also wasted a couple hours trying to get the bearing preload correct with the crush sleeve eliminator shims. I needed a shim that was 1 thou thicker or thinner than the ones in the kit. With the .0134 shim I was getting 5-6 in-lbs of preload and with the .0113 shim I was 20 in-lbs. And I needed to be 7 to 12 in-lbs. So I went with the looser setup. I also ran into some weird binding issue on the carrier bearing races that made preload and backlash setting weird.

At the evo school I finally ran some real boost and good power. With this gearing it feels like eric's car thrust wise, but I'm all over that rev limiter at 69mph. Was having some real water temp issues too, had to stop like every 4 runs and water the radiator because it was getting to 240°F, oil temp never got over 220°F. Rear end felt fine. I put some decently hard launches on it. Not that there was any reason to. Still starting to figure out that driving thing. I was faster than jinx, and I was faster than daddio in some parts of the course but couldnt find the half second he had on me.

Wheels made it to keizer today. They're cutting me a great deal and they said they'd be back in the mail to me in 3-4 days. Thats pretty impressive considering they have to cut custom centers for me.

 

Car didnt break. Successful race. I couldnt put together a complete run though, my fastest run I was just late and slow everywhere but didnt have a major time loss. My co driver's fastest run he hit the finish lights.

 

Hitting the lights there was on the course designer/setup crew. With a hard offset like that going into the finish...the lights should be WAYYYYY farther apart than that.