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My fav is black neoprene tubing (real neoprene, with the low porosity surface).
Its fairly cheap, it has decent surface friction (especially with itself), easy to cut, easy to compress so you can ram it into all the holes. Won't absorb fluids that well and is fire resistant (it will extinguish itself if no direct flame is applied)
I buy the thickest noodles I can find, cut them to size and ram them into all the holes. If you do it right, it's usually completely airtight (or has such small pinholes that don't matter) and wont fly off at any speed you would reach on track.
I also buy the thinner tubes for small stuff like top of radiator and so on.
No picture on hand but I can take some of my recent ducting job later
Has anyone looked at the difference in temperature between the front and the back of the head? I've got a reroute with the OEM ECU coolant temp sensor at the back of the head, but I added a GM temp sensor at the front of the head to look at stuff like this.
With street driving from cold, the temperatures initially track each other, but they start to diverge as the engine gets warmer, by about 4-5C, with the rear of the head hotter. Also of note, despite the OEM oil warmer remaining in place, by the time both coolant temps have reached 70C (just over 6 minutes), the oil temperature is still only 40C!
On track, they track each other, but the front is consistently 7C or so cooler, even during cooldown laps.
Has anyone else measured something similar? I'm not sure if this is real, a measurement issue or more importantly, a problem.
I don't think it's measurement error though as they're within 0.5C before I key on from cold.
I upgraded to a Vibrant I/C. It's much larger than what I had before, and I essentially had to shitcan all the ducting I had worked out, including the OEM air director I had modified. Can someone please post a pic or two of what you did to seal a stock nosecone without the OEM air director to the radiator.
I'm also interested in a pic of the underside of an NB hood with the Subaru vents.
The main selling point seems to be its water cooling line hookups for a water cooled turbo. It also looks like it would be a bit easier to install than a QMax due to the bottom bolt being installed prior to dropping it in, however it does use stock thermostat gaskets which I consider a bit of a con when it comes to ease of installation, they present it as a positive. I don't even want to think about scraping a paper gasket off the back of the engine to ensure a proper seal if you ever need to R&R this reroute. Once they start shipping their kits I would be very interested in an in depth comparison between the two, FM also claims that it flows more water than any other re-route on the market, and it may have its thermostat placed closest to the head out of any reroute.
EDIT - Stock gasket is rubber
Last edited by HowPrayGame; 07-02-2019 at 03:29 PM.
Dunno if I'd want to run silicone hoses for the turbo to the back of the motor by the hot manifold and heat shield, at an additional $55. Besides the flow possibly being improved, FM offers theirs with a 180 degree thermostat, while 949 uses a 195. Other than that I'm not seeing too much different.
You can run your own hoses if you don't want to use our setup.
We run the hoses outside the heatshield between the heatshield and the brake reservoir. Temps are good there. I've attached a FLIR image of the engine bay after a long run. Having the hoses go down and forward (the traditional route) exposes them to more heat than our routing does. We also include some pretty effective heatshielding.
There are a lot of detail changes between this and the Supermiata unit. The big one - and it's quite big from a cooling standpoint - is that turbo coolant routing. Pumping the hottest water in the engine right back into the block is not the right way to do it. We also use real gaskets instead of RTV, have a larger flow area, better grounding for sensors and a port for an aftermarket sensor. Less orange, though. We're all trying to solve the same problems so it's going to be a matter of details.
That route doesn't look as bad as I imagined. Are the silicone hoses simply connected to the turbo like your non hard line kit? I like my hard line kit because it's one less thing to fall victim to the heat. Care to weight in on the 180 vs 195 thermostat?
Heat shields work! And FLIR cameras are fun. You can clearly see the temperature differential across the intercooler, for example. I'll get a picture of the routing tomorrow when we have the engine bay on our "pretty" car reassembled.
The hoses are attached to banjo bolts on the turbo, like our existing "soft line" kit. They've got a reasonable lifespan these days thanks to good heat sleeve and good hose - we sell very few replacement hose kits. We've looked at hard lines but haven't yet come up with a good routing.
I'll try to find out the reasoning on the 180. IIRC it's the same thermostat range we've always used.
I'm going to bet that FM sent CSF a drawing, CSF said, oh we already have this product that is almost the exact same, and sent that to FM. FM gets part, verifies it fits in the car, but doesn't verify that it matches their drawing, and then :boom:. Internet street fight.
Back on the topic of cooling - we've always used 180F thermostats, which is why we used it here. It's a pretty common thermostat size and we'll include the Stant part number for the 195F in the instructions if you prefer that instead.
This thread has become a very useful and undiluted resource to the worldwide Miata community. Let's keep it that way. Start a new thread if you wish to start a new topic.
To keep this thread on topic, these are the facts:
- FM did not copy our radiator design. Their crossflow design predates ours by about 2 years.
- FM asked CSF for a Crossflow for the NA/NB. CSF said OK, gimme a drawing.
- CSF is the manufacturer of both the Supermiata Crossflow and the new FM Crossflow, which breaks an agreement we had with CSF for the exclusive of this application. FM did not know we had this exclusive.
- FM has been a customer of CSF for many years and uses their products for several platforms and applications, not just the NA/NB radiator.
- FM's new (and unique) reroute shares virtually no design features with ours. We simply couldn't offer them a good price on ours so they built their own. Fair game.
My beef is with CSF, not FM. You may now take your popcorn somewhere else.
If you want to quote me or comment further... it's a free world. But please start a new thread. We have a good thing going in this thread, let's not spoil it.
Back on the topic of cooling - we've always used 180F thermostats, which is why we used it here. It's a pretty common thermostat size and we'll include the Stant part number for the 195F in the instructions if you prefer that instead.
I think the question was why use the 180 over the 195 when the qmax that you sold was using the 195?
Id be curious to know if a turbo Miata, which your fm reroute seems to cater toward, inherently has better margin of heat capacity with a 180 thermostat over a 195 thermostat.
The only time we've used a 195 was with the Qmax, I believe. That was a choice made by the Qmax design team and we stuck with their specifications. We've been recommending and selling 180F 'stats for non-rerouted cars forever. The theory is that by opening earlier, you start to shed heat a bit earlier and that keeps you from starting to climb the big hot hill. Of course, pretty much any forced induction Miata on track is already running with the thermostat wide open to stay on top of the thermal load so it's pretty much irrelevant.
Dunno if I'd want to run silicone hoses for the turbo to the back of the motor by the hot manifold and heat shield, at an additional $55. Besides the flow possibly being improved, FM offers theirs with a 180 degree thermostat, while 949 uses a 195. Other than that I'm not seeing too much different.
tstat temp is a design philosophy thing. A decade ago we offered the M-Tuned reroute with a 180° and were still learning about making B series Miatas run cooler. As we got better at it we saw that it was entirely possible to get the system to run right at tstat temp even in full race conditions. It was also common for customers in colder parts of the country to actually struggle to get their cars up to temp even with prolonged driving. We also noted the OEM timing tables for each generation of Miata and what temps they made the best power at on a dyno. Another factor was default clt temp correction or warmup enrichment tables in programmable ECU's errant adding of fuel because the engine was being kept too close to 180. Weighing all factors and our significant experience on track in hot weather, we feel 195° in our kit works for the widest range of Miata owners now. The Stant 45848 180° alternate can easily be swapped in by the customer, $5 on Amazon.
WRT to sensor grounding, the anodize on our early Qmax kits sometimes (but not always) interfered with NB2 clt temp sensor signal. Current kits have selected areas of anodize machined to eliminate that.
The two designs are completely different form factors, but share a similar concept. To be fair, I don't think you can go wrong with either. Key to this thread is just adding a reroute if you want the best possible cooling in your B series Miata.
06-06-2019, 10:47 AM
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