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(Mods, you wanna move this to build thread section? it's evolved from a heat management discussion to a build thread)
Well ****.....been way too long. A LOT has happened since i dove down the LS rabbit hole this time last year. I'll start with last years shenanigans
I didn't keep a great record of the LS swap, but I will show the more interesting points. Also worth mentioning the LS2 I had originally picked up for a good deal.....yeah it had a cracked liner that redered it useless. Long story short through some more bargain bin shopping I ended up with the following:
6.2 LS3 (crate boat motor) short block
243 heads
LS6 intake
LS9 cam
1.5" shorty headers feeding into my old 3" aluminum single exhaust
The swap was pretty strait forward with the exception of a few things. First being the custom accessory drive I came up with, I only need an alternator and picked up one of these Geo metro/ Suzuki swift deals to shed a few pounds. That combined with a corvette balancer made for a nice and tight setup that freed up some ducting room.
The next oddball thing I ran into was making the CD009 work in the Miata chassis. of course a custom cross member needed to be fabricated. This took two tries to get one that maximized ground clearance and even then it's not great.
The next hurdle was a custom driveshaft made from tubing sourced from jegs, salvaged ends from a carbon fiber 350z driveshaft and a custom adapter made to join the getrag to the 350z end.
The shifter ended up being a hot mess of a problem. I grabbed a GkTech relocated shifter that helped but as you can see wasn't enough to get the **** where I wanted it. So I loped off the extension and added an adapter to use a TKO shifter turned around backwards to get the last few inches. There are mid mount shifters available but they cost over $500 and offset towards the driver an inch or two both of which I wanted to avoid.
Late last summer I was in a big rush to get this thing on track before the end of the season so I kept the old turbo setup radiator and ducting on the front and just ditched the intercooler. The ducting to the hood had to go to make room for the accessory drive and TB....which ended up being open to the hot radiator air.
So skipping over all the initial teething issues and wiring harness building to reuse my MS3x and the initial giggle fest it was to drive this thing on the street for the first time I loaded it up on a trailer and took it to Pitt race for it's first track outing. I can't explain to you the mind **** it is going from 250 whp to 360 whp and nearly doubling the torque. Overall the car did great and I had a blast re-learning to drive the car again. 3 major failures from that weekend, first was the aluminum Y pipe made it exactly 1 session before evaporating, off to the parts store to get a few crimp bends to cut into header turn downs and I was back to turning laps and catching the carpet on fire along with sounding waaaaay better The next was that my clutch hydraulics routing ended up boiling the fluid in the lines and no matter what I did I could not get all the air bled out of the system even with the extended bleed line, you'll hear the crunching at the end of the session where the slave was refusing to slave any longer. This resulted in vaporized 5th gear syncros. Lastly was there was some bearing damage, oil pressure was still ok but the oil was a glitter fest that prompted me to yank the motor over the winter.
oops missed the weighing, can't do that. I haven't gotten the whole car back on the scales yet but did weight the complete engines to see what I'm adding.
Turbo BP with all the fixings including downpipe.
That's 290.5 lbs, not too shabby and way less than I thought. Keep in mind this is without power steering and A/C since I wasn't running it.
Enter big boy
That's 382.1 lbs with my lightweight alternator and headers. I've seen 385 published so this makes sense. That works out to only 91.6 lb increase......that's fricken crazy. Now of course you have to add in the 40 lb increase from the trans but much past that there isn't any additional weight. The getrag weights within a pound or two of the iron miata diff. I added ~130lbs going to a V8, whodda thunk it. I'll be able to verify all the little weight adders and deletes when I get the whole car back on scales.
Nice man, car looks like a beast! Curious, is the car more understeer prone with the swap? I only ask because in the track video it looks like it pushes a bit, definitely more than my turbo car, but that might just be car setup.
Although it cant be discounted that the 150lbs added is mostly on the frontmost part of the car, it looks to handle really well still considering.
Bummer to hear about the issues you ran into, that's racing though!
Honestly the balance didn't change much at all, I unhooked my rear bar for the first track day with the V8 just to make the car push on purpose. I find it easier to get up to speed that way and typically hook it back up once I'm making consistent laps. I'm an "ok" driver, so a loose car would be slightly faster in the hands of a better driver. Honestly the car feels the same, I've had a passenger in the car for most every session out because.....well it's fun to share in the insanity. Overall the data shows the same G's I've seen before 1.3-1.4 with the rivals and 1.4-1.5 with high cycle Hoosiers. Min speeds are within the margin of my driving, just need to drive this thing like the momentum car that it is along with the teleport mod for the straits.
Ok so that was late last year, I did some auto-x and generally tooled around on the street before diving into the off season to fix the few issues that were found. If I didn't mention it the coolant temps were just fine with the old setup, so that verified that I had at least double the cooling capacity I needed for the turbo setup, granted all of the inlet air was now being diverted to the radiator. The IAT's were astronomical, I was seeing as high as 170 deg at speed and was retarding timing to keep the pistons round. So here's last winters refinements:
Ducting! Obviously the old radiator setup was fine but just about everything else sucked. I had a pin hole leak that threatened to end a few weekends and since I welded litterally everything to radiator I was a 20-40hr endeavor to replace the radiator which is a wear item. So the goal was to maintain the current cooling capacity but make the radiator a bolt in affair if it needed to be replaced. I snagged another summit racing circle track deal (27x16) and got to work with the flat rate mock up supplies
So of course the hood wouldn't work any longer and my original hood was a cheap body shop steel replacement so I picked up an oem aluminum hood. Funny enough it was impossible to weld without turning into bacon so I found this super effective poly urethane bonding agent (liquid nails) that was the right amount of stick but still flexible enough to not dis bond as things expanded and vibrated. I was planning to full seal the radiator to the ducts but these water falls seemed to do pretty well. I saw some hood lifting at speed (more on that in a bit) so I'll probably finish the exit ducting this winter.
So of course I threw a new set of bearings in the motor but found that pick up on the Kevko road race pan was 3/4" of an inch off the bottom of the pan.........verify EVERYTHING!!!! Lesson learned. I also went ahead and picked up a 3 qt. safety net.
Next step is dry sump obviously.
The last issue I had to address was the clutch hydraulics, after re-routing the lines and heat shielding them I discovered that I was indeed power shifting this turd into 5th gear without a clutch at Pitt the second half of most sessions. DOH!. So I picked up another facebook market place trans to swap in.......found it had a broken shift fork and also had botched 5th gear syncros. Tore both trans apart harvested the best 5th and 6th gear syncros to put into one trans, put it all together only to find it wouldn't shift into 5th and 6th at high rpm......mother......******.....so I threw money at it, got the brand new nissan CD00A trans in on Friday and had it in the car in less than 2 hrs just in time to hit the track and break something else dumb. In the end adjusting the clutch linkage like FM tell you to do with their clutches and bleeding the **** out of it fixed the issue well enough as you can see in the Mid Ohio videos.
I learned through this **** show that it's almost impossible to identify CD009's externally. I got lied to on both of my trans, one was a CD008 and the other a CD004. The various versions kept adding double and tripple cone syncros on gears 1-4 but always left 5th and 6th single cone. Nissan did upgrade those syncros and you actually can't buy them new anymore without a revised input shaft that costs over $400 which is what pushed me to a new CD00A with all the upgrades. Cost me $1800 but I think it was worth it. Ideally this trans need a 2.73 rear gear to make 1st useful and keep me out of 6th on track. Can't get a posi in a 2.73 Getrag so I'm either stuck here or swapping to a 8.8. Not ideal. I can easily take off in 2nd now with the 3.23's so that's what I do. The gear spacing is very tight which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm still on the fence if the CD009 was the right trans choice. Cost wise it's identical to a t56 but had I had the clutch issues with the t56 I'd be looking for a used trans at $2000-2500 where I was able to go new for half the cost of a new t56.
Lastly I finally go this thing on a dyno to refine my street tune and see what it had. I recreated the arrangement from last year on the dyno and saw ~360whp which is what I had at Pitt. At the end of the dyno session I was able to walk that up to 401/409 hp/tq and man did that extra 40 whp wake the car up. Feels much stronger now........like I needed the power. I found I was shifting too high (6800) so I dialed back the shift light to 6500 and with the tight spacing of the CD009 that means I never drop below 395 whp through any gear. This motor could easily make more power with real headers, bigger exhaust and a real manly cam but I'll save that for when I fully lose my mind. I'm sitting at 5.8 power to weight ratio as it sits and that's crazy enough.
After this first dyno session my neighbor and good friend made a hell of a purchase, I now have access to this bad boy pretty much anytime I want.
So.....first two track weekends of the year were a complete disaster and I nearly died. So that was fun. Went to Mid Ohio in May and on the warm up lap I jumped on the brakes to work out the balance and heard what could only be described as a mechanical explosion from the front end. I was able to limp it back to the pits and found that both adjustable control arms had snapped in the same location. These are the same control arms I've used for years with no issues. I recently replaced the adjuster sleeves and heims just to cycle them out. I can't 100% verify why they snapped under braking but my gut is telling me it's because the forward link aims to the outside of the ball joint instead of strait through the pivot creating a bending moment that snapped them at the end of the stud. In any event stock arms with delrin bushings went back on......****......THAT.....NOISE
Second track outing was to Nelson Ledges which I might say is sketchy little track with big drop offs at track edge and tire piles as far as the eye can see. I battled an odd issue where the car would loose all power randomly, I was able to trace it down to the 5v reference was reading 1v so I assumed a voltage regulator issue in the ECM. Once I was home and on the bench the ECM worked just fine. Went back to the video and saw my oil temp hit negative values right before the motor died........sure enough the 5v reference wire had pulled out of the connector and was grounding out .....DOUBLE.....****
So with half the summer gone and string of bad luck I re-centered myself to ask why I was having all these issues and I realized I just wasn't driving the car on the street as much. Covid had me working from home eliminating my 60 mile round trip commute which was great for finding issues. I went over the whole car checking things again and packed up for Grid Life's Mid Ohio event, I had hoped to participate in Time Attack but this years shake down just didn't leave me confident so I stuck with HPDE. The car did great......just friggen worked, didn't need anything, not even oil all weekend granted the track time was light and there were quite a few rain sessions in which this car was useless, but still I turned laps in anger and got into a groove. I was able to click off a few 1:36.x with a passenger on the Rivals with the predictor showing mid 1:35's a few times before being held up by traffic. I think less the passenger and me doing my job low 1:35's would have been easy and the car was certainly capable of more than that. That would have had me in the top 10 cars there that weekend and a great showing fro BroFab....ohh well at least I know the car works now.
Couple of notes from this event. The speed on the dash was off by ~10 mph at 120, data verified at peak speed of 152 MPH on the back strait , talk about sketchy. I was able to get the traction control working better with the speed sensors on the same side of the car front and rear. If you listen carefully you can hear the ignition cut activating from time to time. This really tempered the torque and gave me the confidence to drive it out of the corners without the back end snapping too loose. I think with ABS it'll give me the confidence to get to peak braking G's quicker without fear of ending up deep in the sand trap. Also the oil accumulator seems to be doing it's job, you can see the oil pressure moving around a little but never drops to dangerous levels. I'll be doing oil analysis soon to see if it's gnawing on the bearings.
Lot's more to come from this car, hoping to keep getting better at using all the available power. I'll be getting it back to the drag strip here soon and hopefully one more track weekend before the summer is done. This winter will bring a full cage that should have been in the car already, bigger brakes yet and maybe a few minor improvements.
Car looks like a ******* monster man. Seriously good work, thanks for sharing. I can't wait to get back on the track, been a weird year due to Covid, but I got a track day setup for Sept 08. Nothing quite like it.
Car looks like a ******* monster man. Seriously good work, thanks for sharing. I can't wait to get back on the track, been a weird year due to Covid, but I got a track day setup for Sept 08. Nothing quite like it.
Thanks bud, monster is an accurate description for sure. It's crazy how well these cars act with this kind of power and torque, super sleepee on my hands if I would quit putting a strait pipe on it for track days 😆
Hurt some feelings at the drag strip this weekend, that was fun to get back out there. Poor little 225/50/15 drag ET Streets didn't have much of a chance once the track started to cool so I got my fastest run out of the gate. Clicked off a 11.52@123.5.
My trailer was down so I went iron man and drove it 2 1/2 hrs to the track swapped to the drag radials, made like 7 passes and then drove it back home. After some cruise tuning I was able to get 25 mpg out of it as well.....kinda cool to have a car as capable of this and get that kind of mileage.
Just because I don't really have this build documented anywhere else why not a yearly update on how things have progressed. So I didn't get to update the final let's call it "epic" failure of the year when I boiled the brakes and nearly took out a Porsche that cost more than my house.
I had just chased down and passed a McLaren the lap before and I think slowing down behind traffic dropped the cooling air to the brakes resulting in absolutely no brakes what so ever. Not a fun experience.
This set the stage for the winter wrenching season and highly very clearly that I had outrun my safety gear.
First up was the long over due cage, built out of 1.5" .095" I'll be able to run with Gridlife, NASA and SCCA with the exception that SCCA doesn't like my little kicker bar on the X bar intersection....they count it as an extra point of contact. Coupled the cage with a new full containment Kirkey, back brace and 2" webbing harnesses that really help me get them good and tight. I've had fire suppression in the car for a few seasons now. I also went ahead and added two kill switches. Of course everything is out of the car so I took the opportunity to drop some weight and flock the dash for those extra racecar scene points. Only downside to my cage is the FIA bars prevented the dash from going back in so it had to get sliced in half and rejoined in place.
With the safety gear caught up with the 150+ mph peak speeds I turned my efforts towards making the car faster of course......yeah I'm dumb like that.
First up is grip, I jumped on the 15x11 Longblow group buy and snagged one of the first sets of 275/35/15 AR1's. I had plans to compete in Gridlife track mod time attack class and these fit that bill nicely. Cheaper than hosiers and last longer too.
Don't get excited these wouldn't fit under stock sheet metal even with stancy levels of camber, so out came the angle grinder. Super happy with how the front fenders worked out, these are stretched a full inch to clear with lots of room. The fender to bumper tab had to go, so you'll see some quarter turn fasteners that now make bumper removal a 30 second affair. I phoned it in with some $30 ebay flares in the rear. Might go overfender at a later date for less drag.
I've been wanting to dive into the world of aero for a while now so this was the time to dive in. I've had this hairbrained idea to 3D print a wing......most likely to wrap in carbon to give it the structural integrity it needed. So I got the CR10 cranked up and popping out a 15" wing section every 24hrs.
The wing has a 1" aluminum tube and a 3/8" aluminum rod that pickup the mounts and end caps with M6 bolts that tension the whole assembly in compression. A test fit of the setup showed it was much stiffer than I had anticipated.......I'm gonna try this thing before I spend a few hundred bucks to carbon wrap this bad boy. Total width is 72", the profile is a common off the shelf wing with lots of data, so I won't be sharing the files but this would be very easy to recreate with any airfoil you can find.
Of course you can run a big wing without a splitter to balance it. This is the tried and true 1/2" birch plywood, rounded the nose off and soaked the whole thing in resin to seal it and give it a little stiffness. I designed the mounts to be very stout on the frame, which is typically a big no no. I countered this with making the mounts on the splitter the weak spot. The idea being if I go agro this thing will sheer at the splitter leaving less pointy things to cut a tire. I used a cheap bear claw door latch to pop this off in seconds. This is a rip off of the professional awesome design, I did order their support rods. I made a spare splitter......cause I've seen me drive.
We'll cap this update off with the first track event of 2021 at Pitt Race at a HPDE with Chin motorsports. This event started out a lot like my 2020 season with an odd missfire that had me driving off into the grass with what sounded like only 4 cylinders. Dip stick also decided to blow out and cover the motor in oil, lucky it didn't catch on fire. I had a quiet moment with the car and we had a talk about how I was gonna light the oil if things didn't straiten up. Cleaned up the oil and started digging for issues.........and found one of the DB connectors on the MS3x only had one screw holding the connector on. Tightened it up, safety wired the dip stick and crossed my fingers for the 2nd day.
Finally! Threw the new AR1's on for day two when the track was much dryer......things started to click. The grip was there, the power was back and the oil stayed on the inside of the motor. I was able to click off a 1;53.5 which is a full 5 seconds faster than the year before and there was plenty left in it. This is also good enough for the Miata lap record at Pitt Race! The GS (on hosiers) I passed in this video was pitted across from me and he came over still pealing off his helmet yelling "What in the **** is in that thing" , we had a good laugh.
Things were not meant to be perfect though, you can see the white balance of the video is all screwed up and I hat to resort to some horrible filtering to even make it visible at all. My shifting issues from last year reared it's ugly head again, luckily I only needed to shift twice on this track if I was careful, so I was able to limp it along to finish the day. I had just a month to get ready for my first TT event so my list of things to fix is a mile long.
Ugh......why won't you work like you're supposed to. Tore the trans out for like the 5th time and cut the clutch in half.....I just had a sneaky suspicion this LS7 clutch had something going on and at this point I was gonna throw the credit card at it. Low and behold I found the issue. The OEM clutches have a self adjusting mechanism that uses little ramps to ratchet the pivot point tighter as the clutch wears. For whatever reason the fingers that ride the ramps wore the serrations off the ramps so at high RPM the clutch was self adjusting itself loose. Pump the clutch a few times and it would come back.
Threw an ACT pressure plate on it and bingo consistent high RPM shifting.
At this point I had the credit card out......and after having some time to ponder the results of Pitt I concluded the car could handle some more power pretty easily. So I jumped on a few deals that just happened to pop up at a convenient time. I got an GM ASA cam, which had a full 10 degrees more duration a bunch of overlap compared to the LS9 cam I had. So I stabbed that in, this removable core support is super handy for cam swaps.
Then......a childhood dream fell in my lap. ITB's!!!!!! this is bonkers and not really needed but what the hell, life is too short for air filters.
The timing is off as to when I got it dyno'd (months later) but overall the cam and ITB's only added 20whp, but did add 40 ft/lbs over just the ITB's by themselves (same HP as the LS6 intake no cam) So the car is sitting at 420WHP and 430 WTQ. To be honest this is low, this exact cam made 467 in a crate LS3. My combo is a mishmash of junk yard finds so it's not so surprising. My gut is telling me the 1.5" primary shorty headers and single 3" exhaust is the culprit here. The massive mid range torque gain of the cam but relatively small gains up top point to flow being choked. Something to fix next winter.
I also slapped a much larger catch can with -10 lines to help address the crankcase pressure issues that blew the dipstick out. With that fix the car was ready for Gridlife Mid Ohio meet, it's a 3 day event with just a huge turn out of awesome cars and fans. This weekend was the payoff I have been working towards for literally years. The car with the ITB's hanging out of the hood got a ton of attention and no one knew who I was. The announcers on the live feed bumbled over my name and never did get BroFab right but ohh well, the racers knew. Met a ton of customers and was able to help out a few with hub failures throughout the weekend with what little stock I had on hand. I'll let the pics tell the story.
So onto the results! I ended up 4th in class and 17th out of 100 time attack cars. I'm super super happy with this, my driving is nothing to write home about, but I was able to squeek out a 1:33.3 with a few bobbles. I had a 1:32.2 on the predictor in the last session of the weekend but I got into some oil in carousel and was lucky to not ball it up. This would have gotten me into the top 10. With more seat time I know I'm leaving a ton of time in the braking zones, I'm being a wuss and I'm not consistent, typically rolling off the brake well before turn in. Just couldn't get the courage to dive deeper than I was pushing it. Excuses....I got em, but this was good enough for a new Miata track record. Well, for a few days, the mechanical advantage guys threw down a screamer of a lap time later that weekend but still haven't submitted their times to the register. Give me something to aim for next year.
This is a screen grab of the live stream, this is the really cool part of the Gridlife events. It's a full production of the entire weekend with a large online viewing presence. The announcers were really digging the car, not gonna lie it's ego inflating to have this kind of attention on something you've worked so hard to build.
Last update for 21'......life got busy and didn't get a chance to get the car back out until late September. Just another HPDE at Summit Point this time. Summit is one of my old favorites, I've got a ton of experience there and feel most confident at this track. I did get a quick trip in to the drag strip aiming for those elusive 10's.......my luck strikes again and the car refused to go into 5th. The shifter went.....just no gear. I was able to run a 11.42 basically lifting at the 1000' mark. Would have been danger close to 10's. Pulled the trans out.......again. I found a shift lever that had a loose pivot that just needed the rivet....yes a rivet reset with a hammer and back together it goes.
The event at summit was a nice relaxing weekend. I was able to bring the family along which surprisingly they have never come along. I got the wife in the car for her first V8 experience and most likely her last on track experience. I'm still getting cussed for that little romp. Unfortunately the gopro was dead for this hilarious adventure. Other than using up the rest of the brakes at a faster rate than I anticipated (pads were getting thin) the car just turned laps all weekend. I only took one session with no passengers to chase the clock and was able to rip off a 1:17.8 with a few bobbles, which is good enough for the 3rd miata lap record for the summer. The rest of the weekend was sharing the experience with as many folks as I could get in the car. I enjoy that part of the sport very much and think I got a few folks hooked on the go fast crack pipe.
Of course things weren't completely perfect like I mentioned, the pads were getting thin both front and rear and I kept a close eye on the outer pads to see how they were doing. I started to get some odd pad knock back I hadn't experienced the last two sessions. The outer pads looked thin but good enough for some leisurely laps with friends (never go 10/10ths with passengers). Pulled the car apart when I got home to find the absolute worst pad "wear" i've ever seen......like boy I'm dumb for not catching this but they really did go from 1/4" of pad to this in just a few sessions. Summit is hard on brakes, especially with my power. time to consider some rear upgrades over the winter.
Yeah, got some changes to the car to document. Nothing crazy but fresh motor, ABS, bigger rear brakes, aero tweaks including a DOY carbon wing and seat time are on the menu. Heading to Mid Ohio next week for a Gridlife event so I'll make some time to document how it's going hopefully with a success story to cap it off.
11-05-2018, 02:24 PM
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The next was that my clutch hydraulics routing ended up boiling the fluid in the lines and no matter what I did I could not get all the air bled out of the system even with the extended bleed line, you'll hear the crunching at the end of the session where the slave was refusing to slave any longer. This resulted in vaporized 5th gear syncros. Lastly was there was some bearing damage, oil pressure was still ok but the oil was a glitter fest that prompted me to yank the motor over the winter. 
, talk about sketchy. I was able to get the traction control working better with the speed sensors on the same side of the car front and rear. If you listen carefully you can hear the ignition cut activating from time to time. This really tempered the torque and gave me the confidence to drive it out of the corners without the back end snapping too loose. I think with ABS it'll give me the confidence to get to peak braking G's quicker without fear of ending up deep in the sand trap. Also the oil accumulator seems to be doing it's job, you can see the oil pressure moving around a little but never drops to dangerous levels. I'll be doing oil analysis soon to see if it's gnawing on the bearings.
