Miata Turbo Forum - Boost cars, acquire cats. - Race Prep

Oil cooler question

Roundlake — Wed, 06 May 2026 01:58:20 GMT

I was wondering if anyone has opinions on name brand vs Setrab oil coolers? Specifically in regards to how much better (if any) a name brand cooler cools?

Here's a link to the cooler I have. My cars turbo and sees the track a lot.

https://www.amazon.ca/Partuto-Set-Universal-Transmission-Cooler/dp/B0D423VLG6/ref=mp_s_a_1_10?crid=QCA4IWE0HIGJ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9 .SCsOHbnFdCRkXj0i5UB4gUd0Q5fzToLgr88J20FQx_bYDWnQ3 fWCj-wKObSmtNEhoNkvugPg7rQeYumyBh2cRsZC15_s8ULovOFv6Qks 2KFaFGhB9yaztUDeG8avcrtkzA78XjbVEhnylyzUFRXh2_I1ch pQWETFD8BT1xNgV77SdeTWu9cAM0yMIHF0TYKyiabz4EGmdQuV MUfxefry0Q.ZDP4BKKARqsewJOYZCa4ecI68yklD0_l_eut8O1 zBkY&dib_tag=se&keywords=25+row+oil+cooler&qid=177 8032619&sprefix=25+row+oil+%2Caps%2C142&sr=8-10

Basically the same no name cooler I bought but mine is -10 ports.

Safety wiring your turbo flange

42Miata — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:28:24 GMT

So, I followed kboi's threads for a while since we have similar cars, and similar issues keeping our turbos attached. I did not want to go the route he did of drilling out my manifold and turbine housing and re-tapping them for m10 studs, then welding them on anyways so I ended up with a different solution. I am running Flyin Miatas inconel studs from their website. First all the things that did not work:

Stage 8 locking hardware - Not sure how, but it vanished, tried 3 separate times, put it on tighter every time.
Nord-Lock washers - lasted about 10 minutes and I blew my gasket
Welding nuts onto the housing (M8 studs and nuts) - Lasted almost a whole day before all the welds cracked and the nuts vanished.

The solution that has worked for me now, holding up to 3 hours of track time last weekend, is safety wire!

I purchased these nuts:
https://www.probolt-usa.com/titanium...-25mm-drilled/

Installed as pictured

I don't believe I have seen anyone else safety wire their turbo nuts before, not trying to claim I am the first, but since I didn't see anyone here try this yet, I figured I would contribute to the incredible knowledge that is on this forum!

If an admin sees this post by the way, I would love to have a complete offline mirror of this website, just in case one day it goes the way of Zilvia.net The information contained on this forums is priceless and irreplaceable. If there is a good way for me to mirror the site on a regular basis and keep a rolling backup of it, I would love to do that for you guys. I have almost 200TB of storage on my servers at home and cannot think of a better way to use some of that space than preserving the tome's of miata knowledge.

Digital Dashes - Function AND Aesthetics

thebeerbaron — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:54:16 GMT

Let's talk about race dashes that optimize function while also being pleasing to the eye.

Here's a sampling of just Aim and Haltech dashes.

Lots of pretty colors, but IMHO, way, way too much information for me to take in at a glance. After reading the Haltech custom dash Facebook group for a while, I'm astounded by the number of "Race" dashes people are producing that contain crazy amounts of information, much of it completely unnecessary, IMHO.

Maybe I need to relax more in the cockpit, but even when I'm on a straight and taking a breath, I'm checking my mirrors, looking at the next corner, and maybe taking a split second or two to glance at the dash. I'm sure there's some usability study somewhere (or many) that says how many "things" can be processed in a glance, but I don't have that information in front of me.

My thinking is this: as a driver, I really don't need or want information overload. Here are some things I don't need:

Speedometer: The speed sensor on my race car has been broken for about a year. I don't miss it because I simply don't use it. I pick up my speed cues from looking outside the car.
Rev counter: I have lights on my dash that I have programmed for my rev limiter. I know if I'm out of the power band, so I don't care about low RPM. I use the dash lights to time my shifts.
Numeric readouts: Reading a number, processing what it is, and making a decision based on that number is too much for my pea-sized brain. I don't care about 35 vs 37. I care if 35 is OK and 37 is bad, and I should make that decision before I get in the car.
Full sweep gauges: Once on track, my temperatures are never going to be below the fully-warmed-up temperature. Why waste screen space on 0-95c when my car will only ever be running between 95c and 132c?
Information I can't respond to: if I can't fix it from the cockpit, either by backing off, sending it harder, or flipping some backup switch, why show it to me?

I don't want to go through all the thinking I did, because that'd be boring to read and we all like pretty pictures more than anything else. So let's cut to the chase.

I decided I care about:

Oil temperature
Coolant temperature
Transmission temperature
Oil pressure
Fuel level
ABS malfunction
Fuel pump malfunction
Alternator malfunction
ECU malfunction (aka CEL)

Let's hit the easy stuff first: "malfunction" means idiot light. Light is on if the reading is out of spec, otherwise it's off. I don't care if it's out-of-spec high or out-of-spec low, I just need to know it's broken. So I need four idiot lights.

The other five - I want to know where in the expected-on-track-range the reading is right now. This way I know if I need to back off or if I can send it harder. I also want something to grab my attention when I've sent it too hard and need to back off. Each of these sensors has an expected range that I can overthink from the comfort of my garage and that I can stick to on-track because the decision has already been made for me. I decided to use bar graphs for this - they're more compact than a sweeping needle and are very glance-able.

So five bar graphs plus four idiot lights. I ended up throwing in a gear indicator in this version, violating some of my truths, but sue me.

Left to right, top row - oil temperature, coolant temperature, oil pressure, transmission temperature, fuel level.
bottom row - ABS, Charging, Gear indicator, Fuel Pressure, CEL

No unit labels, no text labels. I used iconography to convey the meaning of each gauge, but I expect after a few sessions I'll simply have them memorized based on location. I honestly don't care about units - these could be in C or F, all I care about is the range. I could probably do away with the axis labels all together, but they may be useful as a "second glance" helper. Time will tell.

As you can see from the oil temperature gauge, the bar turns a different color when it enters a danger zone. I find the Haltech "Alarms" to be too intrusive for this task - they cover a good chunk of the dash and have text that needs to be read.

As for the aesthetics - questionable, probably. I gave Claude.ai a prompt to create a dashboard background and color scheme that reflect the world of the Blade Runner movie and it came up with this city skyline with colorful rain and buildings. Very atmospheric. It's arty, without being distracting. I also used it to create a boot screen within the same theme. I think that's pretty cool.

What are your thoughts? Am I wrong to distill a dash down to so few gauges? Is there value to reading discrete numbers off the screen? Should I go further and make it entirely idiot lights?