Is your ms3 in the car?

 

Yeah it's been running on the megasquirt for a few weeks now. I've messed with the idle settings a lot and done some autotuning and I'm pretty happy with how it's running now

 

You must be Jared right? I was talking to one of the Murrell's about a year ago when they came to the plant for a tour and they told me about you having the NB on Voodoo box. I hadnt heard it was a flood victim, that sucks. My parents house did ok even though it was on the Comite River(there was an old NA there but it was already a parts car) but the solar stuff not so much. Looks like you are making good progress though. I'm about to face the steep learning curve on the MS3 in mine once I finish breaking in this 1.8 vvt in my NA nut I'm staying n/a for a few years. I may have some questions since you seem to be ahead of me on the tuning.

Ill be following this thread though, you got such a nice car there.

 

I went down to help rebuild a few houses when you guys got flooded. What a mess that place was for a bit, just insane. Looks like you were one of the fairly lucky ones, as far as the whole picture goes. It was a fairly isolated (although densely populated area) I wonder if i was near you?

crazy to imagine that it all seamed to stem from a roadway built by the A.C E. that cased the "levy" type of situation..

Glad to see you are back to doing fun things.

 

Underglow? :O

 

I saw your car on IG somewhere and instantly regretted installing my center Singular vent. If I ever replace my hood, I will shamelessly copy you on that. I always thought the car was a Merlot Mica car with an NB2 nose, too. Sad to see that car die.

 

That's me! Yeah it was a sad situation for everyone but at least I had flood insurance. It definitely could have been worse.

I'm still no where near an expert at tuning but I'm learning slowly. I think I've got it running pretty well now

 

Yeah I definitely could have had it worse. I only got 3.5 feet but I know people who had water all the way to the roof

 

Guilty (:

 

I think the kit looks way better without the middle vent. I kept it just in case I didn't get enough cooling ability without it but it seemed to be ok. Feel free to steal my idea lol

 

Made some progress today! We got the turbo mounted, water lines, and motor mounts. The engine pull went really smoothly, too. Overall really happy with the progress

 

It's all done! Here are some awesome pics by my buddy who helped me get this done in 3 and a half days which was a lot faster than I expected. I salvaged a lot of parts off of my flooded miata like the motor mounts, radiator, oil cooler, exhaust, intercooler, etc. My setup now is basically the fm no electronics kit run with the enhanced MS3. It's making about 9 psi on the factory wastegate and it's a LOT of fun. The megasquirt is a big improvement over the stock ecu/voodoo box setup and it's noticeably faster with the megasquirt.

I depowered the steering rack by cutting off the seal but I hated the way it felt so I put the whole PS system back in the next day using the rack from the flooded car. I've driven manual steering cars before and liked them but this felt terrible to me and I'd never be able to live with it for daily driving. I wanted to get rid of it because I've boiled the fluid at the tail of the dragon before but I may just have to install a cooler if that happens again.

 

Most Miata shops will set caster on a PS car at ~6* or so. This results in REALLY heavy steering when you depower. Backing the caster off to ~4.5deg or less makes a big difference in how the steering feels.

If you run good synthetic PS fluid (Amsoil or similar) you won't have boilover problems.

 

Looks good man. Another thing about the manual steering, without doing the "proper depower" you will have play in the steering shaft as well. Hard to say what the issue was exactly with the manual conversion without more details.

 

I may put the depowered rack in again at some point later and get a new alignment to see how it feels but I think I'd just rather have PS while it's my daily driver.

What is the proper depower? I opened the rack up and cut the seal and closed off the ports. I didn't weld the pinion but I didn't feel any excessive play in the steering column, it was just very heavy. I'm not sure what my caster is set at but that might be it

 

Ya. It's caster. You have 205s too right? Greg has a video up on how to properly deepower a steering rack. It was either him or another miata youtuber. I can get the links if you would like.

 

Yeah I followed his video. I was under the impression that that was the proper depower which I did by cutting the seal

 

You did it right, but having 6-7deg of caster will make the steering feel really heavy.

 

I think I had 6* of caster at one point and it was heavy even with power steering.

 

What bulbs are you using for your tail/reverse lights? They look really bright and crisp!

I've always looked up to your car for inspiration. Glad to see everything coming together again!