After about 2 weeks I finally got a new oil pump and after checking everything I could on it to make sure it was good I put it on the motor and lo and behold no more tight spot. Now that I had a functioning oil pump I went ahead and put the rest of motor together, oil pan, head, valve cover, intake manifold etc. Putting it back in was short uneventful affair and soon enough I was putting coolant lines back on and getting ready for the first start of the new motor.

 

It is now march 2024, before attempting to start it I adjusted the tune slightly to account for the increased displacement and compression. After some cranking with no fueling, she built oil pressure very quickly, and after a compression and leak down test I had the green light to start it... and she fired right up. I quickly bled the coolant system and set the base timing and went on the initial run to seat the rings, and she drove great, it felt smoother than it ever felt and pulled so much harder. After seating in the rings I brought her back and changed the oil with more breakin oil, did about 30ish miles of light city driving, then brought her back again and changed to conventional oil for the next part of break in process. I saw nothing concerning on the drain plug or in the oil after I changed it so I was confident that I put it back together correctly and 2 samples sent to Blackstone confirmed my thinking which is further backed up by the next 1000 miles being uneventful, with no leaks, oil consumption, or anything breaking. Now that it was properly broken in I changed the oil again (Rotella T6 my beloved), and street tuned her (switched to a spartan wideband which actually works unlike the aem I had), and she gladly revved all the way up to redline with no complaints. I haven't had the chance to put her on a dyno yet, but if I had to guess, i'd say its making about 140-150hp.




Finally got to clean her after sitting for months collecting dust

 

Now that my car was finally running properly again and seemed like it would stay that way for the foreseeable future, I turned my attention to the suspension. About a year prior to my engine blowing, on a black friday deal I got Flying Miata's handling kit with the V-Maxx XXtreme track pack coils, and their adjustable sway bars and endlinks. I installed the sway bars and endlinks the same day they came in, but held off on installing the coilovers as I wanted to replace all the bushings and joints in my suspension in one go. It took me a year and half to get around to it as something else was always needed fixing on the car that took priority or the specific part I wanted was sold out and/or not available for purchase. But finally the stars aligned and I got ahold of all the bits I wanted and I got to work. In one go I installed coilovers, lower and upper ball joints, all new polyurethane bushings, new alignments bolts, sway bar bracket reinforcements, and rolled the fenders. I was going to install new outer tie rods, replace the cracked steering rack boot, and steering rack spacers, but I was sent the wrong tie rods so that part of my suspension had to wait. The one redeeming quality of the absolute **** pile of miata I had was that it had literally 0 rust on it, so this went smoothly with no broken bolts, having to replace more than I wanted because they were destroyed upon removal, or even needing to pull out the torch (except to burn out the old bushings). After everything was in I eyeballed the alignment, luckily I was close enough I could drive it to the alignment shop. Overall a 1.5in drop made the car look a hell of a lot better, and even though I installed what is technically race car parts, it still rode better than it did before (30 years old rubber sets a pretty low bar).

 

This is last part of what I did to my car in the past. After having driven my car around extensively in the summer, I noticed a pattern, after a while of driving my car would shut off when coming to a stop. after looking though some data logs I found that the culprit was my intake. My iat sensor was located under my intake getting constantly cooked by hot air coming from the radiator and heat radiating from the header, and the intake was bare aluminium with no heat reflecting tape. Specifically what would happen is that when I would coast to a stop, so much heat had built up in my intake tube and body of the IAT sensor that within half a second of getting off the throttle and stopping the flow of "cold air" my intake temps would spike 50-80 degrees and would lean out the fueling so much and so rapidly that my engine would shut off. I fixed this by moving my iat sensor to my plastic airbox as that wouldn't heat soak as bad nor transfer heat that fast. I also put heat tape on the intake to further slow heat soak and fashioned heat shield around the iat sensor to hopefully reduce contact with the hot air coming out of the radiator.This worked perfectly, before it would hit a peak of 80 degrees over ambient and would reach that temp after a second or two of coasting and/or the engine being off, to now only going up to 20 degrees above ambient and taking a whopping 17 minutes to get that "hot", small enough and taking long enough that it gives my wideband enough time to react and keep the engine going.


location of old iat sensor now blocked off by a plug

 

Now that i've gotten the past of my build fully uploaded (well at least the highlight reel), I can finally start posting about all the sub-projects im doing, these won't be as organized as the rest of the build thread, as I kinda jump around between these sub-projects depending on how im feeling, what parts came in, and what time I have to tinker with it.

Anyways, here's the boost I mention at the very beginning of the build thread.




Its take off turbo from an 04 msm, I was able to confirm that it was a good turbo, that just had a blown oil seal so all it needed was a rebuild. It has zero shaft play and spins freely so i'm pretty confident that I can get something put together based around this. all in all, not bad for $200. An msm turbo was not my first choice in how I would boost it, but the dirt cheap price of entry for a cast manifold and downpipe makes this perfect for my budget track build as I only plan on going up to ST4 at the max.

 

I'll be the first to say it, it's a little bit of a shame to put that setup on your awesome built motor. I mean, for the price that'll get you boostin', but eventually you'll want more. By the time you get all the supporting mods for that setup you'll be in at the cost of a decent setup (I.E. kraken), and the supporting mods (I.E. FM enchalada) won't swap over to a different setup. As long as you are OK with doing it twice, go ahead and slap that on and make some decent power (leagues better than N/A), but that motor deserves more eventually!

Zak was selling his 2560/kraken setup for $800 for reference, which would be a solid setup on the car and flow near 300whp. Anyways honestly not trying to hate, I swear, I'm not that guy. It's just the IHI MSM setup has all the lag with none of the power, it's notoriously not great. I'd throw it on a junkyard motor for fun, but with the investment you've made into that motor I'd step up the turbo game a notch!

My $0.02, though I'll be following your thread any way you go! Glad to have you in the club.

 

I’ll +1 that thought. You won’t make more than 200hp, unless you want to wear out the turbo faster, and your built engine will be a bit pointless. The only 2 MSM turbos I’ve popped have been with heavy track use. They’re absolutely SCREAMING for mercy above ~5500rpm, where you’ll be sitting at constantly.

 

Thanks for the plug! Yeah, $800 for my turbo/manifold/elbow, or $775 if you go and give cats on 20 of my posts!

Lol in all seriousness, these dudes know what they're talking about. You'll definitely get the bug after dropping that first setup in there and want more power and spool shortly after. Either way, the car is gonna be fun, but you might as well put something in it that'll let you get the full squeeze out of that built motor!

(I swear I'm not just here to try and sell my turbo lol)

 

I'm with you guys on this honestly, only reason im messing with it is because I got it for so cheap. Most of the old go fast parts for the msm setup aren't made anymore, big enchilada is long gone, little enchilada has been out of stock for months and looks to going in same direction as its bigger brother. Only stuff I can find is downpipes, so i'll have fab most of the setup which will be pretty easy as i'll just need oil and water lines and an intercooler which will be easy enough to adapt to another turbo setup. It definitely isn't my dream set up nor one I was planning on, but reliable boost for under a grand was too tempting to not pass up, it would also perfectly slot me into ST4 which is as far as I plan on going... but $800 for the expensive/important parts of a kraken setup and turbo is also pretty tempting. Ill talk to Zak about it. Its a good thing i'm not super far into the msm setup other than acquiring the manifold/turbo/elbow combo, a rebuild kit, and gaskets so not even $300 all together, I see a lot of msm setups going for 750 so If i list it at 500 i can probably sell it somewhat quick. And in all honesty it would be nice to give my engine the turbo setup it deserves.

 

800 for the hot side of a kraken setup has me thinking, do you mind if I PM you some questions about it?

 

Dude of course! Yeah shoot me a message with what you're curious about. I'd rather hook someone up on here and see the stuff get used haha. I've got a low-hanging but useable downpipe and couple other bits as well that I could throw in for cheap to help out, although I don't know what shipping on exhaust components to AZ will run.

Either way, yeah shoot me a message and we'll see if we can work something out that makes us both stoked!

 

PM'd

 

So about 2-3 weeks back we got our first few days of nice weather in arizona, where it "only" got to 91 degrees, perfect convertible weather. So I decided to drive the miata that day... and it broke. The small coolant hose coming from the oil cooler/warmer got a small tear (I probably tightened the clamp to tight) and it acted like a pressure washer and completely soaked my timing belt. Thankfully I was able to get it fixed and be able to limp home, but I had to fill it up with tap water. Now I had been accumulating parts to get my coolant system exactly where I wanted it, new coolant tank, supermiata radiator, cast impeller water pump, so I was able to get started fixing it pretty quickly, all I had to order was a new timing belt kit as the old one was making an interesting noise, and this was good excuse to get a 36-2 trigger wheel in preparation for switching to sequential injection. All the old stuff came out with no complaint, same thing for the new parts, and then I hit a snag, the alternator pivot bolt wont break free. I tried for hours to get it loose and it just wouldn't budge, heat, pb blaster, nothing. So now i'm letting it marinate in some speed sauce (1 part acetone/1 part ATF),I'll try again every days to get it break loose, if not, then i'll put more on and try again the next day.


good soup




couldn't get ahold of cast impeller water pump when I was building my motor, better late than never I guess.






Forgot to write down what I used for lower radiator hose last time, spent 2 days trying to find one that worked






New coolant tank and made some new brackets/ clips to prevent to coolant hoses from rubbing on anything


I found that old hose had nearly rubbed through, so I cut up the old to protect the new one until I could think of something better.




****** wont come loose