Miata Track Hubs: Custom design
 

Let's talk Miata front hubs: For me, I clean and repack my old style OEM ones every ~30hours and every weekend in the rain on street tires. I know others do this more often to avoid a failure. I am working with Hoosier Performance Engineering (HPE) to come up with an acceptable bearing design (likely tapered roller) to get away from the failure when you laterally load the OEM ball bearing design. Options on the market today include "Blueprinted" hubs but they don't address the Achilles heal of the bearing design. HPE has a successful F-body hub on the market today and they are trying to gauge interest in a Miata hub that would be designed for an infinite life cycle under track conditions. Who would be interested and would you be willing to pay as much as $350 per hub for something like this? What is your application?


https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1456408951


For reference, Flyin Miata charges $212 + s/h for each of their blueprinted hubs with ARP studs https://www.flyinmiata.com/na-nb-blu...ront-hubs.html

interested.

Erock what would you application be and what have your experiences been with trying to run the stock hub design so far?

interested. I just blew up a front hub (first time ever) and had to be towed home.

Hub was original afaik with 110k miles and 25 track days.

Supermiata. Currently my car is a street driven hpde car, but it is being converted atm. my oe hubs lasted 115k and about 60-70 hours on track. I have some replacement timkens that only lasted about 25 hours.

FWIW i always repack my oe hubs with the amsoil smelly stuff.

We are one of those teams that repack the hubs between each race weekend (so every 14 hours or so). Talk with Jeremy, I know he's done a lot of research on bearings and different types, he maybe able to help you out some. If you need his contact, shoot me a message.

hmmm

I would buy these just because. All four corners. I just like the sound of reliability.

I am interested. Usage will be ~10 autox events on hoosiers, and ~10 track days on probably 245 RC1's.

I'd be interested in a set eventually. Still need to do a lot of cutting to figure out how to fit the 15x11 6ULs that showed up yesterday. If you could offer something that was bombproof and never needed attention, I'm sure you'd have some market for it.

I'd be more interested at like $350-400 an axle.

Question: Who cares about retaining ABS? The bearing package they are trying to put in there means that we most likely will not be able to retain the tone ring for the sensor. You might be able to move the sensor or do some thing else but that's not in scope here.

Likely not a problem since the 01+ and Mazdaspeed are the only NA/NB with ABS worth anything anyhow.

I want to keep abs. I didn't spend nearly a grand in used parts and ~10hrs to add it to an non abs car for no reason. And for Autox with big fat sticky Hoosiers (and a fuck ton of money in the tires) no one wants square tires. TNTUBA and Leafy would agree.

Not sure what you mean about msm', but any 01+ car with ABS, or anything swapped is worth it.

The rings are the same across all model years, I'm using '04 abs brick in a '94 chassis.

I wasn't anticipating the love for ABS, it's not used on the track since the early ABS system wasn't the greatest plus it's not a common option on the early cars. What other markets besides Auto-X use ABS and wouldn't appreciate us removing the tone ring?

ABS ring, yes. If not included on it, at least a way to press on the tone ring from a standard Miata hub on. The tone ring can be pressed off the OEM hubs. We do it all the time because we use a front ABS sensor to feed our AIM dash.

As long as it stays the same size you can just put a tone ring on.

That's the issue here, the small OEM housing is restricting what they can do in terms of offering an alternative bearing package. If it has to be ABS capable it makes things really tough, more to come

If you can just machine the teeth into the housing you get a little wiggle room. Especially if the sensor can be spaced out.

If someone knew more about electronics and we could use an alternative sensor that packaged well would be another option.

For reference, here is their X-Tracker hub they developed with SKF

C6 Corvette SKF HD (X-tracker) Racing Hubs w/Active (Bosch) ABS Sensor

An alternative sensor wouldn't help, it has to mount in the same place.

The rear tone rings are on the axles, so no issues there.

All you need is a tone ring that fits in the original front location, and has the same teeth per revolution. Thats not super hard to find.

Then just space the sensor out the correct distance.

I would be happy to test all of the above in exchange for a beta set of hubs :)

Since they are going with a clean design, we can try to source a more cost effective (higher volume) stud and offer those as well. Trying to maintain the OEM 12mm x 1.5 thread so you don't have something different front to back though

I would have to see the output of the sensor to compare to the Miata output. But with the correct number of teeth and the correct output signal its possible.

My thought was to replace the tone ring and pick, moving to something integrated that could potentially package better. The small diameter of the tone ring is the issue, and without moving the pickup I don't see anything easing that

Exactly, that's what I'm after

As long as you match the teeth per revolution and the vr signal output you should be fine.

Send me a prototype and I'll test it :)

No. Mazda changed/upgraded the front ones (IIRC sometime in '04). Thus the late NB have different front rings and sensors.

I believe the sensors are still interchangeable. I just setup an NA ABS hub with an MSM front sensor.

The newer sensor part number doesn't supersede the old one, so I would keep each sensor type to their corresponding trigger ring type (especially for such critical thing as the ABS system).
Not all MSM use the new type front sensors/rings. The change happened somewhere in the middle in their life cycle and is not MSM specific but affects all NB cars.

Interesting. I have 8 sensors at home, and a few look different. I will take pictures and compare when I get my spindles back from powdercoating.

How are you going to space out the front sensor when it mounts through the upright? You'd need to drill a new hole.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1456534471

--Ian

Very true, I was thinking about the rear.

The integrated sensors look boss

Not to hijack, but I'm FEA testing front and rear hubs now. Samples will then be tested by Keith Tanner and others. Soon. Price = competitive with Mazda, and will include 70mm studs pre-installed.

The big difference? Tapered bearings.

yuusssss

No abs would be a non-starter for me as well. I won't give up ABS.

Holy crap that's great news!!!

I've gone through 3 front hubs in 2 years of tracking the Red car. 2 were bearings. But 1 was cracking of the hub itself, which was pretty nasty although I didn't lose a wheel and was able to limp it in.

I've lost 2 rear hubs, both cracked although I caught those cracks with inspections.

So, tapered bearings is only a partial solution for me if we're building "lifetime" hubs. And, yes, $3-400 for a lifetime hub seems like money well-spent.

"Lifetime hubs"

That will take a lifetime to test...

... only the lifetime of the hub...

Yeah another ABS required post here. If you're not using it, you're doing it wrong.

I'm not sure how much catering to the auto-x market you need to do though. The current set of repacked detriot axle hubs have been on there for over a season, I stopped going through them when I threw the torque wrench out and just started standing on the pipe over the breaker bar when torquing them.

I would buy them and don't need no abs crap if they last. The car sees 15 track days a year roughly, no streets, hoosier tires.

I have 4 detroit axle hubs in my garage that I bought planning to rebuild with amsoil grease and new ball bearings. Glad to hear that your rebuilt ones worked well.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, HPE is looking at possible ABS sensor integration again now that there is some demand for it. I'd like to still offer a non-abs option that will omit the cost of the sensor as well for those who don't want it.

Question: Does anyone care about hub protrusion? Another area we can expand into for fitting bearing options is outward. I doubt anyone is running stock wheels or center caps, and I'm not talking about crazy protrusion, something less than even with a 6UL face for example.

Doesn't bother me

Just remember I only do around 2-4 hours of competition time a season and with the 6 speed and 3.63 for half the season I was topping out at 69mph at 8500 (that poor motor, so much rev limiter).

I almost feel like it might be a better course of action to just make properly built or rebuild stock hubs. The design isnt particularly bad. More than likely it just needs tolerance cleanup, and some hard coating in the races. A nice DLC coating all over a new hub with a focus on the inner races (cost should be ~$10 a hub if you do a couple thousand per batch), higher grade balls, and resetting of clearance (surface grind or lap the faces of the inner races where they come together) to some number that you're going to have to derive experimentally. Or if the DLC doesnt decrease the amount the outer races are being smooshed (technical term) by the balls a through harden might be all thats required to extend the life. At least thats how the bearings on my car fails, the hub side bearing races deform to the point that there's too much clearance in the bearing, balls look fine, thats caused by either the surface hardness of the race being too low and/or too large of a difference in ball size.

If we were breaking hubs it would be one thing wanting to start from scratch, but we're really just expecting too much from a bearing that is mass produced to be able to take stock car loads for the duration of the warranty. Using the same design but treating it like a precision high load bearing should yield significant results. For example a pair of typical medium duty angular contact bearing (which our current setup is) should be able to withstand ~1500 miles of full corner loading from my car. So thats like 1200 laps on the daytona oval before the right front hub wears out.

Endurance racing. Flat spot can cost the team the whole shabang.

Road racers are breaking front hubs. I've seen it from others and done it myself.

I think I might be interested if there is an ABS version that would work with my 04 MSM.

Not to change the subject but j man mentioned 2 different sensors and trigger rings used on late model NB/MSM changing mid year in 04. I only see 1 part number listed for all 04 and 05 MSM's for rings/sensors. No change at a certain VIN # or anything like that but I've only checked on Avondale Mazda's site so far. He got me curious if that is true and what I have if it is. Have to do some more checking.

interested

The "good design" hubs or the shitty ones. IIRC in the hub mega thread we outlined two or three different hubs and all but one had glaring flaws.

hub bub
 

When you consider that the stock hubs were designed for skinny rims and street tires, and are now being used on cars with 10" rims with slicks, 400+ horsepower and massive aero, it's amazing that they last at all.

From the design standpoint, it seems that the bearing races being built into the front hubs limits the hardness of the races. Even with improved bearings and grease, fatigue from excessive loads are going to cause galling, brinelling, overheating, grease failure, etceteras. The answer is a different design.

Even then, you may see hub failures from the simple fact that the loads on the hubs may cause failure over time. No one wants to go bigger and heavier on an unsprung item, but sometimes it can't be avoided.

I am more concerned about legality of class racing.

what's the point if you aren't allowed to run them.

anyone see an issue with most popular Miata classes ?

Classes with restrictions often run less extreme tires.
Points classes is another animal, and there you can seldom plan what the decent mix of mods will be two years from now. So either racers use whatever's on the market at rule publication or they don't like to gamble and use the old trusted repacked ones.

With measly 205 Rcomps on 9" I seem to run 5 years between replacement on the LF. But that's less than 30hours.

Where's the custom spindles with mounts for radial calipers, ABS provision, exchangeable steering arms, just dropped 1/2" and larger bearings?

Bump: HPE moved shop locations but has picked this work back up again. Current consideration is an aluminum hub to house the tapered roller bearings in and slide onto the stock upright. Would this be a restriction in any classes or groups that folks run in? I'm not familiar with NASA/SCCA rulings.

.

So, HPE says they are coming soon in April. What's the status? Nothing on their website and have to dig through a lot on FB.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...e88b52d9c9.png