Since last time I saw the car my dad got the exhaust system installed. It’s now Racing Beat from nose to tail: 94-97 header, test pipe, resonated mid-pipe and power pulse muffler.
Stainless steel ARP 12-point hardware
The coolant reroute is mostly finished. There’s still a few packaging issues we need to resolve due to the ITBs so we’ll probably make some brackets to support the 1.25″ diameter water hose from the rear water outlet to the radiator so it doesn’t rub against the AC lines or the alternator. You can see in the video below that 949 Racing have placed their remote thermostat housing much closer to the radiator, apparently because of packaging issues.
The instructions provided by M-tuned say to mount the remote tstat much closer to the fitting at the back of the motor, pretty much the opposite of what’s pictured above. I’m not sure if copying 949 Racing’s setup will help us with our particular packaging issues. I also seem to remember like 15 pages of technical discussion on MiataTurbo.net about the remote tstat location and I thought the consensus was that it should be located close to the rear outlet (if not in the back of the head) and that it had something to do with coolant warm up times. Don’t some people even remove the jiggle pin to increase the amount of bypass flow also? I can’t recall if it also had anything to do with whether you had the heater bypassed or not. Anyhow, I think we’ve got enough room as is, we just need to make sure there’s no rubbing. We also found that the NB lower radiator hose will not work for us because it kinks, rubs agains the AC compressor hose and is too close to the header. Instead, I’ll go back to the 3-piece NA6 setup. Fortunately, we hadn’t thrown away the old parts so I could mock them up and verify fitment. Will order new replacements.
My dad also removed the Flyin’ Miata sway bars and stock sway bar mounting brackets and installed the beefy AWR sway bar mounts, a Racing Beat 94-97 solid front 15/16″ sway bar and a used OEM 12mm rear sway bar with Energy Suspension poly bushings. We had to go with the NA8 front sway bar to clear the longer BP motor as the NA6 sway bar was fouling against the AC compressor. Now we’ve got a fraction of an inch clearance. The sway bars were also chosen with a future set of XIDA 550/350 coilovers in mind.
Today we pulled the stereo system out completely to simplify and add lightness… and to make room for the Innovate WB02 and MS Labs WB02 canbus module in the hole behind my new Roadster Tech Rack System with blanking plate. Eventually my DIY door panels will get replaced with some plain carbon fiber or vinyl door cards with no speaker hole cutouts. Right now the speaker grilles are just covering some empty holes.
We also removed the RC car AM/FM antenna and replaced it with a Roadster Tech blanking plug. We didn’t have any polishing compound or cleaner wax on hand so I still need to clean up the paint in this area.
We also got the air filter situation figured out. My dad made a paper template that we repeatedly refined until we got to the final spec. Measure 50 times, cut once. Tomorrow we’ll actually see how well it fits. It’s a bit awkward to fit because we’re keeping the AC system, which posed some challenges when it comes to packaging. We considered custom AC lines but in the end we decided to forego that route because they’re costly and quite frankly it’s a pain in the butt to adapt the Miata’s metric evaporator fittings to standard AN stuff used for most aftermarket AC stuff and there are no speciality shops in my area to help make it happen. So the goal for the air filter is to clear the high-pressure AC line, the low-pressure AC line service port and the underside of the hood.
Tomorrow we will continue with cutting the custom air filter backing plate. Once that’s sorted we can make the custom fuel lines and start getting the MS3 installed.