The Roadster NA Journey Begins

[MattR]

Glad you had a good day Mark and the car went well, but you need a barge arse passenger seat for those of us who are a tad wider........

Chris was very complimentary about the set up and how well it goes round corners, so you are kicking goals there. The bad news is, the extra power will mean more fiddling for you...... But it will be a cracker when the motor is in and you have some more seat time to set it up and get it motoring along.

Chris is a great peddler and a great teacher as well. Take note of his driving in the video and any tips he gave you and trust the car to go where you want it to and you will get to his times soon enough.

[Magpie]

MattR I had a great day and learned heaps, thanks for the tips as well. Becky the driver in the afternoon had nothing but praise for Chris and his style of teaching (she does not impress very easily).

I'm working on the setup problems that the extra power may give, possibly about 5 mm height increase, stiffer springs and different bump stops. Plus I now have a video of his lap to review (as well as the data logger was also on for his lap) so will be watching it to pick up how Chris does it.

Looking forward to the new engine and attending another Morgan Park day with SDT again. I have a heap of data to go through and see if the aero actually worked

[Magpie]

Well the good news and the bad news, my head is ready (good) bad is I have to pay

Not sure if it will be ready for the club day on 09/09 and I'm not pushing for it. Aiming for 26/10 and another run at Morgan Park with SDT



The ITB manifold has been matched to the head as well, 11:1 compression, 284 deg In/Ex cams, exhaust valve seats suitable for E85, oversized vales and other goodies MX5 Plus will be doing a write up of the engine build so I will leave the finer details to them. I just need to sort out the suspension and MX5 Plus will help by moving some weight around as I have found a limitation with the BC Racing ER's and how high a corner can be raised. At present the car has 10mm rake (with driver and fuel) and therefore I can not raise the front and maintain the corner balance.

I'm exchanging emails with FatCat Motorsports to work out bump stops and spring rates so I'm going to wait till I have this info before moving on any changes to the suspension. Plan is to relocate the battery to LR and possibly the accumulator as well then corner balance (with possibly new bump stops and springs) and then remove the preload from the sway bars and test from there. Idea is I can then adjust rebound, damper and sway bar end links as well as alignment and tyre pressures to fine tune the handling. It was fantastic handling at Morgan Park and I'm not sure if it can be improved however the driver can do with an improvement.



high res photos here https://plus.google.com/photos/115769813738304087848/albums/5897371582327153441

[mmx005]

Hi magpie, was discussing enclosing itbs with mates over the weekend and one asked why i was doing it. Couldnt really answer him. My consumption of jd may have affected my ability to answer him, but it got me thinking.

Why do you want to enclose your itbs???

[sailaholic]

Cold air is one.
Sock style filters are horrible for performance, so remote mounting the filter is two.
Three is, a good system will try and provide "high pressure" air to the inlet.

If your really good, the pressure waves bouncing off the inside of the box wall will also help cylinder filling at certain rpms.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[mmx005]

Cold air was about the only arguement i could come up with at the time in my JD induced state :-)

It was argued fore and against that using a mania style intake with the quads would be detrimental as the radient heat from the extracters and radiator would heat the air as it passed by on its way to the itbs. will be looking at some testing of this some time soon.

[Magpie]

Why do you want to enclose your itbs???

For the reasons sailaholic gave! The cold air will be somewhere from the drivers side, when it is finished I will post details as well as air temps. Plus another reason was if pulled over it would pass a quick inspection. ITB's with just socks are way too obvious.

[koop21]

hey mags,

thought i'd give you a heads up about the pipecross airbox. I spent time yesterday trying to fit the air box and theres no ways it gonna fit under the stock bonnet. The airbox itself is to long and interferes roughly near the headlight area. The airbox tip (where the internal filter is) pretty much touches the bonnet when it the bonnet is in the bonnet catch, and probably needs another 5cm or so to even have the slightest chance of closing the bonnet. I'm not sure if your GV bonnet is gonna clear it but it looks alot lower around the head light area than stock so you will probably need to get fancy with a hacksaw. I gave up at this point because cutting the tip of the airbox voids the internal filter. You could however attach some piping to the end of it and route it somewhere then put the filter at the end but i hadn't thought this far yesterday.

[Magpie]

koop21, I'm not sure if I should say thanks after reading your post I do have another bonnet if needed. Yes the GV bonnet is lower around the headlight area because of the duct just behind the radiator. If you don't get too frustrated can you please keep me updated? Did you relocate the brake master and put the end of the filter box as close to the firewall as possible?

Again thanks for the update.

[koop21]

I will take some photos of my current setup now (sausage filter) and mark out the areas you should take watch out for.
Will post them later today.

[mmx005]

Not that it helps you guys, but the pipercross box (without filter) fits fine under an nb hood . I did have a heart attack when I first saw your posts tho

[toppertee]

I'm in the same fail boat ATM , the linkage and filter has just turned up for my set up.
I'm going to pull my my 1600 after the next track day. Then install the 1800. I've gone for the Pippercross foam filter, I'm not going to cut the backing plate, until I see the room I've got. May need a custom brake master set up. Or a hammer
Also I'm not going for ducting as I paid for ITBs and I want the full ITB noise

With bids the question, is. "Are ITBs the new turbo"

[sailaholic]

Certainly seems to be the new turbo, they've gone from a rarity to almost common!

[koop21]

I have already replied back to Magpie, but the sake of others that are interested here is my PM to Magpie below.

No problem mate, happy to help.
Its exciting to see your engine finally progress and we wouldn't want a simple thing like a airbox hold things up now

The image is fairly large so i wont be uploading it to your build thread (dont want to make it messy, but feel free to upload it yourself if you wish).
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/838/mjpl.jpg/

Issue #1 (Front/back)
The back plate needs to cut offset towards the front of the car (not centered) to be able to just clear the clutch reserve, reason being is the back plate wont touch the clutch reserve but the filter/ airbox will. If you do not offset the cut there is no way you will be able fit a filter/box. Look at Issue #1 (back) you can see i still have some more cutting space. I still struggle taking on the filter on/off and its a tight fit for me, so you may want to add +5mm or so from what i have done.

Issue #2
You can see i am not using the 3rd quick release nut or the captive nut because the fuel rail interferes and there is no way to hold it down. So a cable tie will have to do. You can get around the issue if you have a raised back plate, but that will introduce more issues with the limited space in the engine bay. I did not explore this option, even though i have a spare raised backplate.

Issue #3 (airbox)
The airbox is very long and i had doubts this would fit to begin with. I have the airbox that exits to the Left (points towards exhaust when fitted). I do no have a clue if the airbox right exit will make a difference as the issue is with the Height of the box.
The red line a reference line, the brown oval is the airbox. As you can see by my rough drawing the issue is with height of the box, more specifically at the mouth of airbox. I have thought of two ways to get around this issue
1. Hack up the mouth of the airbox to just clear the bonnet, and use piping to route it to a cold air feed. The internal filter thats sits at the mouth of the airbox will be made redundant and a filter will need to be used at the end of the piping.
2. This is the crazy option. Cut your bonnet so it clears the airbox and you get a nice cold airfeed at the same time.

If you end up using the airbox be aware you wont be able to use your 40mm trumpets with the airbox, as it will be impossible to slip the airbox over them. You might get away with smaller trumpets (19mm) but it might be easier to just leave the trumpets off and take sacrifice the benefit of using trumpets. The reason you wont be able to slip the airbox over them is the brake master cylinder blocks you from doing this. And its alot easier to not use trumpets than to re-engineer your brake master cylinder. With my pipecross filter its flexible so no issue for me here, with the airbox on you will have just about 1-2mm gap.

I am not sure if i missed anything else but i think i have written enough for MX5 Plus to make educated decisions.

Cheers, Ian

[sailaholic]

That's so not ideal.

Guy that dynoed my engine said sock filters negate the effect of the trumpets, because they disturb the airflow. Also said flow bench showed a 30% drop in airflow for sock filter vs open trumpet. So i would assume no trumpets could be in the order of ~30% loss.

Super short trumpets also can have a negative effect on where you make horsepower.

I think i'll just plan for the lotto win and do a K swap so the inlets on the other side away from all the brake and clutch mess