Howdy! I bought Sean's NA6 that he documented here: https://www.miataturbo.net/build-thr...ru-td04-74776/

I seriously doubt I'll have as much cool stuff going on as he did because he's much, Much, MUCH better at this stuff than I am, but as I went through his thread as the new owner I realized how incredibly handy it is to have that information where I can search it - especially for as heavily customized a car as Sean's is.
So, here's at least an honest attempt to start doing the same thing under my ownership.

 

As noted here...
https://www.miataturbo.net/front-des...-first-110170/
...first the Very Important Trubo Cat stuffs were preserved.

Next, as noted in my "Hello World" note...
https://www.miataturbo.net/meet-gree...ld-car-110143/
...I braced the exhaust heat shield a bit more, added a plug for a trickle charger, and got new rubber.

See the level of skill we're talking about here? Sean fabricates turbo, suspension, and hub solutions while I use a screw and lock washer to hold a heat shield in place and pay some dudes to put on new tires.

Then my boss gave me crap about using a screw and bolt on a heat shield "They come unscrewed!" so I riveted it.


The headlight relay was starting to fail sporadically so I located it in the engine compartment...

It works sometimes so it's not completely bad - just mad

Somewhere on the internet there's a page that talks about resoldering these two spots on the board in that relay to quite possibly sort the issue. In my case I went to three junkyards, actually managed to find the relay (and a different one) perma-stuck to the mounting rail, bought the whole thing for cheap, still couldn't get the stinking relay off of the rail (which might help explain why the case on the one in Sean's car was already broken), and dragged the whole unit to the nice kids at my local O'Reillys who very nicely (and carefully) popped it off intact while I loaded up on paint supplies. Swapped out the relay in the car, (grinding down the rail a smidge to make sure it didn't break the new relay like it did the last one) and hey presto! Working headlight relay. Problem solved, and I've got a sketchy one set aside if I ever decide to get good at soldering. A small victory. Let's not talk about how long that all took. >.>

 

So. There she is. The kid who helped me pick her up bolted the front airdam that Sean had lying around on before I even got there. Thank you Ricky! You can see the paint is...unhappy. You can also see where someone duct taped the gauge cluster hood in place at some point in the past. Like the kid at O'Reillys said when he looked under the hood, "No offense, but looking at the rest of the car you wouldn't know it's this nice inside."

Aaaaand he's right.





The car is also LOUD. Like, "I'm in my 20's and this is my F****** RACE CAR B******!" loud. Now there's actually a really good case for that, to be honest. Folks say if you're racing in spec miata for instance, you want your car to be loud so you can hear when to shift over all of the other miatas around you. The problem is my neighbors aren't necessarily as nice as Sean's, especially if I'm leaving for the track at 4:30am. This is a drive-it-to-the-track car, not a ride-on-a-pretty-trailer car. I can't afford a pretty trailer, and I don't have a big tow vehicle. So it needs to be quieter. Plus some tracks have sound limits.

Solution 1: Downpipe.
Advantages - removable, directional...I'll probably want one anyway to keep fussy race tracks happy.
Disadvantages - Sean's nicely made exhaust system is flush with the rear bumper so the downpipe sticks out and looks silly. And the car is still too loud. The Girlfriend and I can now have conversations in the car with the engine running, but she can still hear me driving all around the neighborhood. So can the police, who seem to appear shortly after I take the car around the block to check for rattles.


Solution 2:
Exhaust Insert from Car Chemistry
https://www.carchemistry.com/3-disk-...-1-2-diameter/

This is a stock photo since I didn't remember to take one before I shoved the thing in my exhaust pipe.
Advantages - It really does cut down on the sound. It's still loud, but at least the police aren't showing up any more.
Disadvantages - The biggest one is it restricts airflow in the exhaust which is absolutely NOT what you want with a turbo! I bought one anyway as a temporary solution since it can be removed (good for 4:30am departures and then taking it out at the track) and I needed to do something in the short-term anyway. I may need to fabricate a puller to get it out though - it was a tight fit.


Solution 3:
The car has a Dynomax Ultra Flo muffler currently and as it turns out, that's about as good a muffler as you could ask for on a 3" turbo exhaust. Changing mufflers would only provide minimal gains assuming this chart is correct:


Adding a resonator, now, that reportedly makes a big difference and won't restrict airflow. I have one now. It's very pretty. It's in a box until I pay someone to weld it in because I can't fab like Sean.

 

I don't have garage space for my Miata. It's a convertible (obviously) with a bad rain rail (ouch!) Now, I'm in Phoenix so it's not like we get that much rain anyway, but the car already has rusty bits from previous leaks and the summers here are just going to destroy a soft top. Convertibles aren't exactly the most secure, either - some folks just leave them unlocked all of the time to prevent light-fingered passers-by from cutting the top to get access to the car. It would make sense, then, for me to get a hardtop. Only they're Obscenely Expensive. Like, thousands of dollars Obscenely Expensive. Not Cool. I was contemplating learning how to fiberglass just so I could fabricate a hardtop when I came across a Craigslist ad for a Miata Hardtop, local, for $800. This looked like one of those "too good to be true because it isn't true!" Craigslist ads, but I figured I didn't have too much to lose and I sent the seller an email and a message.

Unsurprisingly there was no response...

...until two days later. The seller wrote back in the middle of a weekday and said they were willing to sell it to me. O_O So I called my boss, told him I needed to take a few hours off, drove to the ATM, got the cash, and went straight to the seller's location. Who was legit. And had the hardtop. And was ignoring the stacks of calls and messages he was getting saying things like, "Sell it to me instead and I'll give you an extra $200!"


Hardtop!

So now I have a Hardtop. Yes the car is in the garage at the moment. No it doesn't get to stay there.

Things I have Learned about Miata Hardtops:

1. They do not fit in a Ford Flex
2. They do not like to be strapped down in the bed of my boss's pickup truck (they flop around at speed unless heavily strapped down)
3. They do not fit on Miatas with Boss Frog Double Diagonal Clearview Maxx Rollbars until you pull the fat plastic headliner trim pieces off of each side
4. Mazda used Double-Sided-Tape-Of-The-Gods to hold on the funky fiber spacers inside the headliner trim. Heat Gun? It laughs at such a pathetic example of heat. Goo Gone? Rollls off of it like water off of a duck's back. Extreme amounts of force applied using pry tools? Impervious! I finally had to take an orbital sander with 60 grit paper and rip down into the surface of the hardtop headliner itself to get that stuff off!! Yes, I had to nuke it from orbit.
5. There's a Very Useful website with Miata Hardtop information at https://www.miata.net/garage/hardtop/ Assuming I'm allowed to post that here since it isn't a link to a miata turbo page. I have no idea.
6. They have two different styles of latches depending on the year they were made. In theory using the wrong kind of latch can damage a receiver. In practice I can see a difference but my beat up old receivers don't seem to care that much.
7. Unlike the soft tops they have side latches to help hold them on. The receivers don't seem to be a standard option so you have to order a set if you want them. And that's assuming the rollbar doesn't get in the way.
8. You can just skip the latch version drama entirely by buying or fabricating a set of steel plates that screw in where the latches and receivers would. They're required if you want to run a hardtop in spec miata anyway.

Pre-Nuke-From-Orbit


Post-Nuke-From-Orbit

Since I wasn't going to use the soft top anyway, I took it off, took it apart and packed it up for storage.

Top Coming Off

Rust. And Dirt. Bonus!


Soft Top and Headliner Bits Packed Up

 

One of the punchlist items for the car is to put in hood vents. Sean had it on his punchlist too so you know it's worth doing. The thing is, even though paint is falling off of the hood, it's in really good shape. I'd feel bad cutting up such a nice hood! I checked out one of the NA Miatas at the locall Pull N Save - no hood. Put up a Want To Buy ad here on the forum...crickets. Messaged a guy on facebook marketplace...no response. (Ok, that might be because the only facebook account I have now is an incredibly old gaming account dedicated to my favorite character, but still) Finally I decided to visit the only other NA Miata at a Pull N Save in this city...

Hood!!!

...and it had a hood. And a trunk lid! For (relatively) cheap! So I bought 'em both. I plan to switch between a spoiler and a rear wing anyway so I'm perfectly happy having a different rear trunk lid for each - four bolts, scoot the cable for the light over, and Bam! Different Trunk. Like I told my neighbor Ben - "It's like having a Lego Car."

Now we are talking about junkyard parts so they aren't exactly perfect.

It's got some dents and bad spots but all in all it's a pretty nice hood



Welp, the trunk lid is ugly. No two ways about it.


The hood was in pretty good shape for being in a junkyard; the trunk lid had the holes from a luggage rack, but no luggage rack and as you can see it was rather unenthusiastically semi-painted black to semi-match the car. Interestingly enough though, the trunk lid had originally come off of a white car since the underside was, well, white! (As if all of the white showing from behind the spray paint wasn't evidence enough.) So when I got home, the plan for the day changed from wet sanding other things to wet sanding the new (to me) trunk lid. Actually I tried acetone first. It did work, but it was incredibly slow, kept eating through my gloves, was toxic...I decided it was time to break out the Harbor Freight Double Action 6" polisher I had bought for just such a purpose.


There's white under them thar paints!

Holy cow, the monster polisher armed with 1000 grit sandpaper and a little water actually works! It also makes an incredible mess and scuffs up the paint underneath but it needed to be redone anyway. Someday. Just not today. Or this week even. But Someday. Eventually I realized I'd need to cover the entire interior of the vehicle to keep little grey splotches from getting on everything, but at least it didn't stain.


Better! Not perfect, but Definitely Better

And so, after a few hours of soggy sanding, wiping down the interior, putting the hardtop on so I could wash the entire car which was looking more like an appaloosa than the arctic hare it had started out as, washing aforementioned car, washing the kid's car (the red Chevy Cruze in the background of some of the pictures) because I felt bad for the poor neglected thing and because I had soapy water left in the bucket, etc etc, the trunk lid was done. The finish is totally scuffed - I could switch to a finer grit sandpaper and polish it up again but the thing really needs repainted at some point anyway. In the meantime, though, it's worlds better than it was and eventually I'll get enough time to punch more holes in it to mount the Nifty Spoiler I want to put on there.


All Washed Up. In a Good Way.

You know, if you stand back a ways and squint, the car is starting to look pretty good. Except for that stupid downpipe. Totally got to do something about that. I keep bumping into it when I walk behind the car too. Plus the Miata kept grabbing the hose when I was trying to drag the hose over to wash the Chevy. I think it was jealous even though it had just gotten a bath. I can totally see that happening.

 

People with many levels of skill have owned this Miata before me. Sean, as we know, is Tremendously Skilled, while others were more at the, "Duct tape is a fine solution for loose interior pieces" level.

Duct Tape - The Legacy

After a small lake of Goof Off and copious amounts of scraping I was able to get the duct tape residue off of the dash, but the gauge cluster hood was another story entirely. It also was loose and rattled. Flyin' Miata has lovely replacement hoods for $119. Amazon has crappy chinese knockoffs for $30.

What could possibly go wrong with a $30 replacement part, right? Right???

I, of course, bought the crappy chinese knockoff because upgrading the parts that will kill me if they fail on a race track has consumed all of my racing budget and then some. Those parts are Very Nice, Reliable, etc. A replacement gage cluster hood? As long as it doesn't disintegrate while I'm driving we're good. And speaking of disintegrating...

Falling apart to the touch. Great for some food items; not so great for a gauge cluster hood.

The old hood was literally crumbling apart in my hands when I took it off. Good Thing I had a replacement waiting!
Were there issues? Of course there were issues. First and foremost, if you look at the picture of the new hood on the blanket a few pictures ago, you'll see some plastic prongs peeking out from the bottom of the "window" for the gauge cluster. At least on my Miata all of those prongs had to be cut off because there wasn't a place for them to fit into - they just bumped into the cluster face and prevented the hood from going on. Next I discovered one of the spring nuts used to hold the hood in place was missing...

Here you see one...

Here you don't.

...and when I went to snap the hood into place the clips in the back would clip in, but wouldn't hold the hood tight in place. No amount of thumping or adjustment seemed to fix the issue - it just isn't held tightly in place by the back clips.

Still, when it's more-or-less snapped into place and then screwed in with the one remaining spring clip it doesn't rattle as much, isn't any looser than the old one, looks Worlds Better, and isn't as likely to disintegrate in a strong wind and get plastic bits in my eye. Let's call it a Win.

Looks pretty good, all things considered

Look Ma! No more Duct Tape residue!

I've got what my local Mazda Parts Department rep thinks is the correct spring clip on order - we'll see if we can't secure this baby a bit better once that comes in. I'll need to pull the hood off again later to (hopefully) hook up another bit anyway - more on that later.

 

The reason I named this thread what I did - "John's not so cheap thrills, 90 1.6 with subaru td04" is because it's a joke title based on Sean's original build thread titled "sean's cheap thrills, 90 1.6 with subaru td04". Sadly, both titles are reasonably accurate. Sean did the work and fab work himself whenever possible and had a co-owner to help with the costs. He did Amazing things to this car and was really cost-efficient when doing it.

I am the only owner now, and being a Big Dumb Dummy, my options for self-maintenance are somewhere between "slim" and "nonexistent."

The other part that played a role in Sean's build was if it was stupidly expensive, he found a cheaper way to do it, or didn't do it at all. There are a few items like that - one of which we'll bring up now since it's relevant.
Sean put in a turbo. It's a great mod.
Sean put in a 6-speed transmission. Another great mod.
Sean put in a Torsen rear end with 4.1 ring and pinion. Great mod for an NA Autocrosser, and adding a rear end with a Limited Slip Differential is Absolutely Awesome.
The 4.1 part...not so much. Thanks to the turbo it's got oodles of torque already. Sean said he didn't even use 1st any more and it was "singing" in top gear going 80 on the freeway. He had been looking at a shorter ring and pinion previously but it never happened.
Now, I want to track the car, not autocross it. And I like using 1st gear. And I don't live close to any tracks, especially now that Arizona Motorsports Park is closing. And I don't have a car trailer or a good tow vehicle. And I am planning to drive the Miata to the track.
See where I'm going with this?
After doing some research (mostly on this board) I picked up a 3.63 ring and pinion and assorted bits...

3.63 in the box; bits in the bags

...and found a local shop to install it. They've had the car all week. They still haven't done anything to it because their employees aren't showing up for work. Sick kids, ran out of gas, had a flat tire, didn’t have enough money for cab fare, tux didn’t come back from the cleaners, old friend came in from out of town, someone stole their car, there was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts...the usual. *Sigh* Maybe next week.

In the meantime I managed to do a bit more work on the hardtop (which I obviously took off of the car before dropping it off to have work not-done to it.)


All Masked Up

Shiny Coat

Crackle Finish Complete!

The crackle finish didn't turn out perfect, but I'm Faaaarrrrr from a competent painter/bodywork guy so I'm happy with how it turned out. About all that's left is to remove the dark tint from the back window and possibly install clear, heat-reflective tint in it's place if I decide to keep the glass (which I plan to at this point because it's going to be an outside car and needs the weatherproofing benefits of a glass window and the heat-shedding benefits for the Phoenix Summers.) If you look closely you can see I left the industrial-grade velcro in place - I figured it might come in handy someday; I might want to put up a lovely set of floral drapes or something. In addition I have a set of steel brackets to bolt the hardtop to the body when I want, and I've got a set of side strikers inbound from Japan for when I want to go the latched-but-removable route. I can do screws and bolts to flip between the two. That much I can manage.

 

Since I still don't have a car I'll recap a few of the small things I did when it was here.

1) It got new Hella H4 Halogen Headlights. It already had the Sylvania Halogens but they were really old and the reflectors were in really bad shape. Yes I could have gotten LEDs but I like the H4s and I can always buy LEDs later.

New Hella Halogens

Here's the difference between the Hella and Sylvania low beam patterns - Hella on the left, Sylvania on the right.

Hella Left, Sylvania Right

New Shift Boot - Sean replaced it once, but it had clearly weathered out again.

New Shift Boot

New Brake and Clutch Pedal rubber. The Brake rubber was in bad shape and the Clutch rubber was completely gone. It's the same part for both pedals so here's a picture of the one for the Brake.

New Brake (and Clutch) Rubber

New Weatherstrip Seals. I bought the cheap Chinese ones (big shock) so they went on kinda wrinkly but they'll function. They were sufficiently ugly that I didn't take a picture of them after installation though. Just squint at them from a distance and they're fine. >.>

Here are the old Weatherstrip Seals

While the door panels were off I discovered they still had the original speakers! At least I think they're the original speakers - I'd like to think anyone replacing them wouldn't have gone with paper cones. Anyway, "Had" is the operative word. The driver's side speaker is gone now. I was able to install the weatherstrip seal on the passenger's side without pulling the door panel so it still has the speaker for the moment but it's on the "list of things to do."

Original Speakers! (I think.)

The Poor Miata has Paint Leprosy, so a lot of repainting is in order. Unfortunately the screws holding the metal headlight covers on are frozen in place (and a few are stripped) so I decided to paint them in place. Because I had stupidly installed the Hellas already and I didn't feel like taking them out again I opted for hand-sanding to cut down on vibration. Since they were stuck on the car I got creative to try to control the overspray...

Prep

Cover with garbage bag, cut off the top, add cardboard and spray. Here's a shot from the garbage bag phase.

Isolation for Primer

Yeah, it's hard to do decent prep work when you're A) working in a tiny box and B) a rank amateur at bodywork. The results were about as good as you'd expect.

Primered

The painting phase! Stylin'! As with many other portions of the car (and the planet for that matter) it's tolerable as long as you stand far enough away and squint.

Isolated and Painted

 

Like much of the car, the original trunk lid had paint leprosy. I make no claims to competence when it comes to bodywork and here's a fine example of why.
Since I had sent the car off with the junkyard deck lid, I had the original one at the house to work on.
First I took out the third tailight so I wouldn't screw it up while working on the lid. (There was also a little metal piece screwed on to the back which I didn't include in the photo.) The black gasket between the light and the trunk lid interior was crumbling apart but still managed to stubbornly glue itself to both the lens unit and the lid interior. Much elbow grease was required to remove the remaining chunks from both surfaces.

Third Tailight

I present to you...the original trunk lid in all of it's leprous glory. Poor thing.

Ready for...something.

I scraped the loose paint free from the edges of the bald areas, feathered the resulting edges with high grit sandpaper, drowned the whole thing in filler primer, and sanded down the high spots.

Primered

I painted the lid with rattle can rustoleum. I understand that's a questionable choice for automotive paint. Actually my other neighbor who works at a body shop was the one who recommended it so who am I to disagree? I hit it with a few coats, picking the bugs off between layers (dead serious there), let it dry for a week until my fingernail didn't leave dents in the paint, and then wet sanded it until it was more-or-less smooth.

Painted but not yet wet sanded
You could still see what portions were bald after everything was painted. Looks like I either should have used more filler primer or sanded down the other parts more. Frankly I think I'd have been better off taking the whole thing down to bare metal. Maybe next time. Maybe.
Then I hit it with several layers of clearcoat. On a super-windy day. It's amazing how much dust and dirt is flying around on windy days. Now they're captured in the clearcoat, like bugs in amber. I smoothed things out a bit with some wet sanding aaaaand...that's how it's going to be.
I then reassembled the third brake light with a new gasket from ebay, put the latch back on, etc...

Trunk Lid Parts

...and Voila!

All done. Just don't look too closely. Seriously.
One really poorly refinished trunk lid. It looks Ok as long as you don't look at the light reflecting off of it. And as long as you're 10 feet away. And squinting. It's kind of a recurring theme with this car, actually.

 

Love these updates. I was wondering why the thread title was so familiar, but couldn't put my finger on it until you explained it here.

great work on the paint stuff. That's one thing I've never gotten into, that I plan on diving into eventually on my car, and it's inspirational!

 

Might as well learn on something that's in rough shape. Even with the downsides you mentioned it still looks better, and now you know what to do next time.

 

Thank you both for the positive comments! In a lot of ways it's good that portions of the car are in such bad shape because it frees me up to fumble around and learn things I've never taken on before like bodywork, paint, etc. With the bar so low even I don't feel too bad when things end up "less-than-perfect" to put it kindly. It's definitely an improvement over the starting point, and if I really want to I can aways sand the sucker down and do it all over again. Someday. Just not today because I have a small mountain of other items on the punchlist to get through first.

 

Sunday rolls around and I still don't have a car of course. I've still got plenty of things to work on though and I decide to go ahead and start cleaning up the junkyard hood in preparation for paint, cutting for hood vents (once I get some) etc.

Junkyard Hood

After a wash I realize the peeling paint is...weird. Different than how the paint was peeling on the original body parts. Also the whole thing looks strangely metallic in the sunlight now that it's clean. Was this thing wrapped?

In Process

Yup! It's a wrap! Google said to use heat and scraping to remove it so out comes the heat gun (I wouldn't need that if it was, say, June, but I'm Very Happy to still need a heat gun) and a trim removal tool. I picked up a set of trim removal tools a year or two ago to bump a parts order up to free shipping charges and it's amazing how useful they turned out to be! Best $12 I've spent in years.
Peeling the wrap off was time consuming but kinda fun at the same time - there's something viscerally satisfying about peeling stuff off of, well, other stuff. Like scabs when you were a kid, you know? Maybe? ?
*Ahem* Anyway, after a chunk of time I had most of the wrap removed. The edges were (and still are) a bit sketchy but improving.

Whoa! This was underneath!

Bare aluminum! Dented in spots, but still not at all what I had expected when I pulled it off of the car in the junkyard. Well, the aluminum part I expected because that's what NA Miata hoods are made of but you know what I mean. It was a lot less...junkyard-y...than I had planned.
So, what the heck. Over the next few days I polished it up some more. First wet sanding with 1000, 2000, then 3000 grit sandpaper...

Wet sanding

...and then some hand polishing using Mothers Mag & Aluminum Polish.

Hand Polishing

The right side is pretty much as done as I'm going to do things this pass at least - I still need to hand polish the left side. I have no plans to take this to a mirror finish because A) I don't have that kind of time, and B) then you'd really see all of the dents and blemishes. Yes I could try to remove the dents, No I'm not taking that on. At least today. Or any time soon. Yet another recurring theme for the car.

The hardtop I stumbled across is metallic silver. I had planned to paint it white, but now I'm thinking I might keep it silver and run with a bare aluminum hood for a bit, just because. I can always paint stuff later, right? Then the question becomes do I cut this thing up for the hood vents or do I use this as the storage/street driver/socializing hood and put the hood vents on the (mostly) white original hood to make it the race day hood after all? I dunno. I'll sleep on it since I don't have the hood vents yet anyway.

 

Hahaha, I love the dilemma of buying a junkyard hood to put vents in, then realizing it's also too nice to cut up. When I did the vents on my car I procrastinated forever looking for a spare hood since I didn't want to cut up my oem one. In the end I couldn't find a decent hood for an affordable price and just cut up my oem one. Honestly no regrets on my car, the vents are AMAZING for turbo track car cooling and I'll never go back. And my car is never going non turbo again.

 

Haha - just where I am now, but I am agonising (sounds better than procrastinating) over which of mine will be cut up! I bought a spare one years ago just after I got the car, snapped up one that had come off a rear-ended write-off, pristine conidiation, cheap(ish).'just in case'.

It must be a chronic condition, as I also have two sets of vents, and am looking at doing a custom set of the old style. My neighbor has just done a new bonnet for his Moggy, it is a piece of art, and set me thinking ... he has the die and the machinery, and the skill set, why not?!

 

Just wanted to link to this, my attempts at a hood vent install. I'm super happy with how it came out, though I probably spent too much time on it.

 

OMG, if I had a way to stamp louvers like this in that hood...

Example of !@#$%^ AWESOME Louvers

...I would be All Over That. *Sigh* It ain't happening, but they would Rock.

 

Your vent install looks Sooooo Good! It's Amazing! I strongly suspect mine isn't going to turn out that pretty. I'll happily steal your ideas on using a dremel and taking plenty of time to make and clean up the cuts on the top layer though. Using stainless buttonheads instead of rivets was Brilliant too - I might go that route as well if I can figure out what exactly a stainless buttonhead is. >.> *Runs off to google stuff*

 

FWIW my dremel started smoking trying to cut through my hood. It's an older one that doesn't have variable speeds, but it wasn't happy. I borrowed an air powered body saw (small reciprocating saw?) from a buddy and that was better, although the blade seemed to bind up a bit.

I thought about keeping 2 hoods, but honestly I've just stopped worrying about it. So far I haven't had any issues running a cut up hood aside from getting some water in the engine bay.

People talk about getting water in the intake, but if you watch this I think you'll be less concerned.

 

It is not as simple as it first looks.

This machine (and the Morgan originals) really only works on flat panels ie sheets. Preformed panels are not going to suitable, let alone ones with reinforcing/strengthening such as my NB bonnet. So I am going to replicate one or other of the available designs. I will use it as a template, and recreate it as a die-formed louvre, and install it pretty much as per the original.

Before I started looking at doing this I was heading towards doing separate openings between the stiffeners, but aesthetically I think the Singular design would look better than several smaller outlets. Stay tuned, I will write it up in my build thread, but don't hold your breath I have a few items ahead of this on my priorities list.