If the Radium dry breaks were the appetizers, the entrees just showed up . Staubli -10AN dry breaks for the oil cooler lines:
By themselves they don’t seem too large, but once you add a pair of hose ends the assembly is like 7″ long. It’s actually rather difficult to figure out where to fit these in. After some re-working of some plans I think I have it figured out. Have to order yet MORE fittings to make the new config work, but I THINK this will conclude the many, many rounds of fittings orders.
Aside from doing a bunch of re-puzzling on that front, I did get a few lines hammered out yesterday. I’ll try to do a more comprehensive post about the line layout for each system once I have them all done but here’s some random pics for now.
Power steering from rack to cooler in, including in-line dry break:
Oil line from engine to remote filter, with fire sleeve:
Continuing to wait on a few more parts to arrive, so I took some time to get some of the suspension bits assembled.
Pressed out all of the old polyurethane bushings and now installing for evaluation a spherical bearing kit for the factory control arms from a shop up in Canada.
Spherical bearings within the press-in sleeves:
I’ve run into a couple snags with some of the parts in the kit, shot some feedback to them to get those bits resolved instead of having to machine my own solutions, and hopefully we’ll get things sorted out. Nevertheless, the majority of the kit is installed and ready to rock.
Also going into the arms are Bauer extended lower ball joints and V8Roadsters rebuildable front upper ball joints:
Finally, I’m replacing the rear upper arms with V8R’s tubular Pro series arms. Feedback from Steve about what they’ve seen on other cars, the rear upper arms are the ones responsible for wheel hop and other funkiness when putting big power down as that factory arm twists with enough torque. The tubular arm solves this, and the pro series has spherical bearings to match the rest of my arms.
Oh, and in my recent powdercoating frenzy I had all the factory arms done.
Doing some napkin math for other fun places the car may fit in.
Looking at NASA, when you move above the complicated mess of the lettered classes on up to ST/TT 1, 2, 3 things get much simpler. With a good bit of power taking the tighter-regulated TT4 out of the question it gets even simpler. Basically take a dyno and weight baseline which then applies modifiers for certain mods and you end up with an adjusted power/weight ratio and that’s that. Everything in class is same adjusted ratio. Obviously this favors a wide torque curve, and this motor should be great for that.
TT2 cars have an adjusted wt/hp of 8.00:1 or more (up to 10.00:1 which is TT3) 2300 lbs with driver / 300 whp = 7.67:1 Relevant adjustments: Comp weight over 2200, less than 2599 = -0.2 Tire size 245 or smaller (DOT approved) = +0.7 or Tire size 275 or smaller (DOT approved) = +0.3 Non-production vehicle = -0.4
A note on the non-production vehicle bit.. have to take that due to the tubular front subframe, but this comes with some benefits. First, I don’t have to take the -0.2 for cutting the rocker for exhaust routing for production vehicles, so it’s really only -0.2 more than if it was considered a production car. But more importantly, with it considered a non-production car there’s no concern about the tubular/removable front nose being OK.
So, with adjustments, 7.77:1 with 245 tires or 7.37:1 with 275’s
Ballasting up to 2375 lbs with 245 hoosiers puts me at an est. adjusted 8.01:1, right at the pointy end of TT2.
While RLTA and GTA are my primary focus… and yeah, TT2 is full of Vettes and Vipers, it could be fun to mix it up there and see how it stacks up. Always love a challenge!
Just before the holidays hit I was deep in connecting hoses and wiring for the final time. Bit of a mess while sorting through what still needs to be figured out, needs to be tweaked, etc. but here’s a quick snapshot of about where we are at the moment:
And, decided to spring for some trick fittings to go hand in hand with the quickly removable front end design, still waiting on parts to arrive but for now here’s a teaser of the dry break fittings that will be going on the power steering lines:
Big day, engine and transmission are officially in! For the final time (fingers crossed).
Clutch and flywheel installed:
Transmission and engine joined:
Notes on installing engine…
We decided to put the engine and transmission in as one unit because room is tight around the top of the bellhousing to the tunnel and firewall. With the long flywheel/clutch assebly, it didn’t look like it would be possible to get the bellhousing over the clutch with the engine already in place. With the front of the car absent we had more options than usual so with the subframe already in we lifted the whole engine/trans and dropped it in tail-first and then lifted the tail of the trans to align the engine mounts. This would have been very difficult with a front of a car there and was still a good bit of work.
Discussing options after doing it this way, we’re thinking the best method in the future is to assemble the subframe and engine mounts along with the engine and trans out of the car, put that whole assembly on a dolly and then lower the car onto the assembly. We figure this is going to be the easiest method for those with an intact nose as well.
Other notes…
Before they went in I installed the brake booster and brake master cylinder. Here I’m using the wilwood 1″ master cylinder kit with tandem reservoirs which pairs very well with most big brake kits.
Also installed the clutch master cylinder. For this, I forgot to snap a photo but I had to do a little grinding on the clutch pedal itself – the new Wilwood master cylinder’s clevis on the end of the rod works mounts to the Miata clutch pedal, but the wilwood clevis is not as deep as the Miata’s, so the pedal bottoms out in the throat of the clevis’ “U” shape when fully pressed down or not pressed at all. You can easily see it when test fitting the clevis to the pedal. A little grinding on the pedal creates the clearance needed.
Funny, when you get rid of the front of the car the alternator and power steering pump clearances really open up.
In classic “if you give a mouse a cookie” fashion…
Modified/Limited TA rules allow free reign on the chassis for everything forward of the shock towers. So, I started trimming excess weight out from the nose of the frame/chassis… Started with just a little – taking out mounting points that were no longer being used etc. and weighing what I had taken off… aaaand kept trimming more and more.
Got to the point that the sway bar mounts were the only thing left forwards of the towers, and still wanted more weight out of it. So in the end I made a jig for every forward mounting point that needs to exist for the new setup – including the sway bar mount points – and chopped the whole nose off.
It was the logical conclusion to take the full advantage of the rule’s allowance.
Currently in the middle of building a new tubular nose section as light as possible. Hey, the project has taken this long, what’s another 50-hour detour right??
I made the jig in order to “earmark” all the mounting locations for the stuff I’ve already made. This way I can replicate each of those points with the new structure so that everything I already have will bolt right in. Hindsight being 20/20, I’d have definitely saved myself some time if I’d known from the beginning that I was going to cut this much out. Oh well! Eventually It’ll be “rightest”.
Building the new structure around the jig:
If I’m going through the trouble to make everything, might as well build some tricks into it. So the front sway bar mounts are fixed, but everything forward from there is removable:
The front section removes with just one bolt and one quick disconnect pin on each side:
Front section in place with the radiator and ducting being test-fit. I’m really excited for this removable nose section. The idea is that when serious engine work is needed, after removing the splitter (just pull 4 pins) and disconnecting hoses, I can essentially remove the entire front of the car in a matter of minutes as one intact assembly and set it aside, then it re-installs as a unit when done:
I’m moving the front tow point to the passenger side shock tower to shift that weight back a bit. Added a mounting point for the new tow hook to the tower:
I drew up a tow hook to go from there up through the hood, that’s being cut at the waterjet soon.
Weighed everything that got cut off and everything before it was welded on. This project shaved 25 lbs off the front of the car.
With all that done, on to painting it. Everything is in primer here. In the end it looks pretty simple, belying the complexity that went into the many details – which I think is a mark of an efficient design:
Just finished two tone paint in the engine bay today. The bay is a medium gray and the cage in the car is pearl white, so I carried that color into the engine bay where the cage extends to the shock towers. Almost ready to get back on track and start bolting parts in for good soon!
While the engine is out for the last time, I had some final things on the list to take care of in there. Modified/Limited classes allow the cage to pass through the firewall so… Not messing around any more, tying the shock towers into the chassis and cage.
The inner tubes are removable for engine work, and assymetric to clear the brake master cylinder.
The end plan is for the center tubes to continue on the other side of the firewall to form an X and tie in to the cage on opposing corners. I’ll finish that portion up later, but needed this part done so I can paint it and get the engine in there. For now, there’s a temporary cross-tube behind the firewall tying the two together:
The tubes going to the corners tie in to a very strong part of the chassis, with a bit of additional gusseting:
As the list of things I want to keep an eye on with gauges kept growing, I realized I was going to end up with far more gauges than I wanted cluttering the interior up. Need a clean solution that does some of that monitoring work for me instead of needing to scan 8 gauges on every straight..
The new and improved plan comes in the form of the Racepak IQ3S dash. In the bottom of the photo is the OBDII interface cable, so it can pull a long list of info straight from the ECU. The black box is Racepak’s USM (Universal Sensor Module) which you can run any of about 20 different types of sensors to and then that condenses all those signals into one and plugs into the dash with one connector. The dash can be set with warning values for each sensor so I can set up the main page without any of the extra clutter from the sensors and the dash will warn me if any of the sensors see something amiss.
Ok, lots of little areas that have been getting worked on.
First the engine came back out. It’s been funny, lots of people have come in the shop and been confused why I took the motor out when I was so close to being done. It was only in there for test fitting and to mocking up all the other bits that needed to be made around it. Now that I know where the engine sits, need to get it out of the way to finish the engine bay up.
First up, the firewall. The fuel pump on the driver’s side rear of the engine interferes with the firewall. According to V8R you can just do a little massaging with a mallet here and things will clear. I took a less gentle approach and went to town with the mallet, knowing I would repair this area later once I knew how much space the motor needed:
With engine out of the way, cut this section out. You can see the modified gas pedal bracket through the hole there:
New plate with better clearance in place. The hole is for the brake bias adjustment cable to pass-through:
Finished up:
That was the major part to do, but there were also a couple other spots that needed a bit of extra room. On the driver’s side, a small notch in just the lip of the engine bay shelf where it gets close to the fitting on the top of the power steering pump. Welded the edges of the sheets together and primered:
On the passenger side, the alternator gets very cozy with the bottom corner of the frame rail. Took a small section out there:
Did the same treatment as above on the corners of the lower frame at the point where the side exhaust tubes get closest, just to be sure there’s enough space with engine movement:
Moving over to the fenders I did some stitch welding in the front wheel wells. Then painted the wheel wells and the side sills where the side exhaust will live, and finally applied heat reflective material to the lower sides to keep the heat out of the interior:
Not swap-related, but happening at the same time..
I’ve been super happy with my 441 Road Race coilovers, awesome bang for the buck with them. Back when we were working with Feal on details of the 441s, we discussed having the option of upgrading any 441 to a 442 (double adjustable) down the road, and that’s been on my wish list ever since then.
Frankly, I’ve been saving up for this whole project for the last year and a half and part of the reason for that was so that while the whole car is disassembled during the swap, I can take this opportunity to also upgrade other areas of the car. So, when the coilovers came off the car they went off to Feal
And they just arrived back today! Road Race spec 442s, valved for my same high-downforce spring rates as before (16kg / 11kg). Stroke is increased to 120mm F / 101mm R. Long hose lengths per my request so that I can mount the reservoirs in the engine bay and trunk for easy access.
Still don’t even have a subframe in the car, but I am already looking forward to beginning testing with these!
