Okay, so I haven't posted much since I posted results from the Ecotec.

Long story short, I was thoroughly impressed with the performance of the build after dyno tuning, but the magic and good feels of a well built powerplant just weren't there. The car did all things well, but just felt numb and stupid. So I did what any unreasonable person would and sold the whole setup to a guy local to me for sort of pennies on the dollar! I reinvested that return into a parts car which almost deserves it's own thread, let's just say it was prepped for rallycross and had a turbo. I sold off all the things I didn't like from that car (including the BEGi china 2871) and kept it's flyin miata manifold, upper downpipe and oil lines. Most of the lines were folded up from a harried install, so I threw half of them out and got some Russell lines locally. I came across a very lightly used FM gt2560r turbo on a facecbook group, and ordered up all the remaining hosiery and lower 3" downpipe from FM (ouch!).

Mid-ordering parts, I realized that if I wanted to go back to a BP, it would be WAY easier to just buy a new shell to start from scratch. So I searched for a couple weeks, and found a REALLY nice 2002 SE in Ti Gray in Chicago for a decent price. After a test drive confirmed that the car was indeed mechanically super solid and that there was no rust to be found, a transaction was made and the car quickly found it's way into pieces in my garage, awaiting it's new heart and legs. I swapped over my Swank Force Racing Zyduh secret sauce suspension to the new shell and took a few days off to enjoy the finer things, like mowing the lawn and getting married and adopting an adorable kitten!

 

After a short break away, I found a complete forged long block with na8 parts in the local facebook miata swap group and purchased it for a fair price. I promptly removed the head and bolted on my stock vvt head with some ARP hardware and proceeded to begin an epic weekend build with concealer404. We got most of the car together, but actually cleaning and assembling the short block into a long block proved to take longer than anticipated, and the car didn't get its engine completely dressed and fired until after he left. I ran the car for a few miles to tune the base map (Rev ms3) and the car abruptly died. After pulling apart the ms3 I found that the ecu ground had somehow shorted to power and after an autopsy by Rev, the processor and mail grounds were fried. Upon return of my ecu, tuning happened at a rapid pace! I hooked up and started tuning closed loop boost and was up to 18-20 psi when things really got real.

Lack of ABS, 150k mile untouched brakes, 45* ambient temps and a set of bald rs3's gave me a heck of a bad time. I stuffed the car into a wall about 10 miles from home and despite miraculously not flipping the car, spun down the ditch for about 200 ft before coming to a rest. Mind you, I was in the middle of a build here, so the car had a Recaro SPG seat, stock belts, no airbags and the hard top was on with factory latches. I rolled out of the car with a small bruise on my right foot. The car was so badly mangled, that the left frame rail actually separated from the rest of the body of the car, all the way into the firewall. The subframe folded in the middle, and the whole front of the car shifted about 1.5-2 feet to the passenger side. The frame actually folded over so far, that it snapped the chra in two and crushed the compressor housing into the wheel, making my turbo a lovely three piece doorstop. The intercooler made it out almost intact, surprising especially since the mounts snapped and it was flopping free in front of the car. I have no idea how the hard top survived, but there was only a minor chip to the bottom on one side. My laptop (was on the passenger seat while tuning) ended up on the floor, completely intact and functional. After cutting the belts off (accessories all bent up) the car fired up like nothing had happened! Side note, the one good thing that happened the day of the crash was that my realtor called and let me know that our counter offer for selling our house had been accepted, more on that later. I wasted no time and stripped the car to a bare shell and began the search for a new car.

 

More Carnage:

 

With more help from concealer404, I located a 2003 Garnet red nb2 and after a day trip to Indy (I visit a lot) I had yet another car to put together. After another buying spree, I ordered up another radiator, intercooler, charge pipe, and one side motor mount to replace the noodled up side (really bent). I spent all of memorial day in the garage hucking the long block into the Garnet roller and after a solid 15 hour day in the garage, I had an almost complete car. Almost complete because despite ordering a replacement turbo from Precision (a 4828, if you are wondering), the turbo had not showed up yet. Mind you at that date, it had been about 3.5 weeks since my order and multiple reassurances that "the turbo will ship the next day, for sure!". At this point I was honestly a little spent, between work stress, money from the accident, storing an additional car, insurance battles for value and I needed a break. Remember the house sale I mentioned earlier? Well the week after memorial day was moving week, hence the drive to push the car together in one day. Without a turbo, I couldn't drive the car, so I hauled it to the storage garage at our new "apartment". I would actually barely call it that, at least one shooting fatality has happened since we have been here. Nonetheless, the turbo would come in a few days, so it will be ok, I can finish and tune with plenty of time before MATG, right? About the two month mark, I can see the writing on the wall and I knew I needed to get this car going, NOW.

I called up good ol concealer404 and we make a play date for me to come down to Indy with the car, and we would finish bolting it together and do some tuning plus play with his car for more MATG prep. I ordered and installed the first ebay 2871 turbo I could find with a balanced chra and a warranty, and threw a bunch of crap into a box, strapped the car to a trailer and headed Indiana. When we got the turbo on and fed (oil fitting was wrong, weird!) we went on a drive to try to tune this bastard of chunk of Chinesium. Pull one went something like "ooooooooh that spooled okay!". Pull two was similar, then........ minimal boost until 5000 rpm. Okay, let's try again, 5500 rpm full boost. WTFFFFFF, the wastegate is stuck open. WHY MEEEE!!!! After deciding to suck it up and pull the turbo off to see why it was being a sloot, we found the wastegate arm shaft had actually seized to it's bushing and was completely INOP. So where do we go from here? Much was discussed from just running the turbo with the wastegate open to trying to overnight a garrett, but the mention was ultimately made of a MT user who had recently posted an sr20 turbo for sale. Knowing it was a long shot, I resigned myself to possibly winching the car back onto the trailer and working on Major Hater the rest of the weekend. I PM'd Engi-ninja about the turbo just in case and we had some beers and porch sits.

The next day I was delighted to see that not only was my PM returned, but I had texts about a turbo! We quickly met up with Nick (cool guy!) and went to work at another member (Boileralum)'s house to mod the turbo to work, it needed to have a wastegate bracket made, reclocking, and needed inlet/outlets for the cold side. Rich hooked me up with the inlet and outlets, and all three tackled the damned circlip on the compressor housing. Once we had a "turbo", we bolted the mess up tot he car, and it worked!!! The car made boosty noises and wastegate pressure of 10 psi. After some tuning and cop calling (for launch control pops) we settled on a 14-15 psi boost value, and rounded out the VE pretty well. I sit here waiting for the weekend to come, so I can go down and help Ben put his car together the rest of the way for MATG and have a solid weekend of drives and drinks, separately of course. Stay tuned for more, I have some weird curveballs to throw, including billet things, drag racing and dynos!

 

Finally almost ready to win at MATG!

 

Sweet, I'll see you there.

Did you get the car dynoed?

 

Not yet, I won't have time until after the trip. I will be hitting the dyno and then the drag strip though. I also have an ace up my sleeve to make the sr20 turbo haters' eyeballs pop out...

 

This thread is a great ride.

 

I like rollercoasters, too.

It was on concealer404's super accurate butt dyno. It makes 242.1whp and 253.8wtq @ the 17/15psi closed loop boost map.

 

How do you calibrate that?

 

Carefully.

 

Paragraphs...I wish there were some.

 

I'm glad the SR20 worked out well! It was nice finally meeting some MT.net folks.

 

I wrote this on my phone. You are lucky to get punctuation.

 

Indeed!

If some guys don't stop running out of talent, there won't be any good Miatas left soon!

 

Out of curiosity do you have the final dyno run for the ecotec swap?

And yeah man... stop taking out clean cars! Seriously though, glad you're okay!

 

I do, the final dyno trace is in green. It is sort of hard to see, the black trace was before retuning. I attached the ecotec drag slip as well sine photobucket is basically dead.

I seriously almost died...

 

Nice

 

Aaaaand the piston ring must have given out in the sr20 turbo. I suppose the 20 psi tuning wasn't too nice to it. Guess I'll smoke screen everyone at matg. Sorry in advance to anyone following me next weekend...

 

Welp, the turbo lasted about 20 miles at MATG and went out in a blaze of smoke and noises.

Somehow I conjured up a GT2860r from a local-ish guy with an FR-S. I overpaid a bit, and the turbine housing is .86 a/r.
The car runs though, and well, but spool leaves a bit to be desired... I think I need to get a .64 a/r housing on this for it to be street friendly (it is my fun street car after all).

Today's virtual dyno run, complete with monkey tuning!

For the love of Pete, someone please help me make this not suck!