A Quick Update

 First update is the rear gearing. One of the primary performance issues I've had with the car is the gearing. Specifically, the too-short rear end ratio of the car, which was 4.11:1. Combined with the Aisin AR5 transmission ratios, the 23-inch diameter tires, and the 6500rpm rev limit of the Ecotec, I essentially would run out of gears way too fast. First gear was essentially useless, and at the Autocross I was running out of second gear at critical times. In the US (where I live) there are essentially two gear sets available for the NB (second-gen) Miata diff, 4:11 and 3.9. After some simple spreadsheet work, it was clear that even the 3.9 was going to be too short if I swapped it in. The good news is that Mazda did make a 3.6:1 rear end gear set. The bad news is that it was sold only in Japan and Australia. Good news is we found a seller on eBay down-under and, after a couple of weeks of shipping transit, had a hardly-used gear set delivered. We took the car apart and dropped the diff off at a local differential shop to swap in the gears, which was finished this week. The car is now back together with the new gear set, but still not quite drivable....

...The reason it's not drivable, is we took the seats out and dropped them off at another shop (upholstery) to get recovered. I looked into simply buying new seats, but the incredibly tiny cockpit of the Bugeye means essentially that the current Paddy Hopkirk seats are the only ones that will fit. Ergo, re-upholstery time. Still waiting for the shop to finish up the seats so that we can re-install and make the car drivable again. I'm really excited and hopeful the new gear set will make a big difference.

Finally, terrible news with a silver lining. An elderly fellow gearhead in my neighborhood passed away following surgery a couple months ago. He was a really nice guy and a serious car and motorcylist guy who had some pretty amazing fab and machining skills. Long story short, his widow is selling off some of his shop tools, and she asked if I was interested in anything. Well, I am. In fact, I'd love to basically buy all his tools, but there's this pesky little problem of my limited tool budget. In the end, I picked up a few things, including an Evolution chop saw and an Enco 36" finger brake. I will likely go back in the future for a few more things, but the key purchase this week was his Millermatic 252 MIG welder. I've been getting by via a combination of my little Lincoln 110VAC flux-core buzz box and the outsourcing of quality welding to guys like my friend Joe. The new machine I bought is a serious step up in capacity, quality, and abilities, so I'm hoping to improve and hone my skills accordingly and do justice to my dearly departed neighbor. RIP, Ron.

End of the Buzz

If it's not been obvoius in past posts, I really love the car. It handles great. It has more than enough power throughout the entire rev range. It's a joy to drive. It gets plenty of attention. Etc...

...but until recently, it was also kinda annoying to drive. See, there was a vibration-- no, scratch that. There were about a dozen really aggravating buzzes, rattles, shakes, and resonant sheet-metal-shake-your-eyeballs-out noises that ruined otherwise perfectly great drives....

...so, we've spent the last month slowly-but-surely tracking down noises and squashing them.

The biggest culprit was simply all the sheet metal on the car that would buzz at certain speeds, usually when I lifted off the gas around 4000rpm or so. Solutions we applied included glueing fire blanket material to the backside of these various offending locations. We also added a heat shield to the underside of the bonnet over top of the turbo and exhaust, and included insulation there, too. Plus we crimped down the headlight buckets to form a tighter grip, added rubber gaskets to the doors, intercooler interface to the bonnet, installed a boot on the shifter, etc... Well, you get the idea. 

This week, we'd gotten rid of ninety percent of the racket, but one loud buzz remained somewhere toward the back of the car. So, while I drove up and down the freeway frontage road, Joe risked life and limb, crawling all of the car, listening and applying pressure to potential noise sources. Again, long story short, we traced the last big buzzing source to the rear-most body panel that would intermittently touch the old bumperette mount behind it. A clamping bolt was quickly installed and, voilá, problem solved. 

The car is still a joy to drive--and it's relatively quiet, too. Well, that's if you define quiet as the wide-open throttle symphony of the 2.4-liter turbo spooling up. Love it!

Went Racing. Finally.

 Okay, it wasn't pretty. I was slow. I've forgotten some of the most basic tenets of autocross. I don't understand the limits of my car. I have a half dozen important issues with the car to address. Yada yada yada....

...but damn, it was fun.

I'm talking, of course, about my first autocross drive in over fifteen years. And of course, the first race with the Bugeye. 

The local SCCA group (Arizona Border Region SCCA: https://www.azbrscca.org/) conducted their first event of the season yesterday. The race was held at Kino Parkway here in Tucson, and about 60 cars showed up. Everything from Teslas to Miatas, and Porsches to BRZs were in attendance. And the Bugeye, of course. The course itself was pretty straightforward, with four big sweepers, intermixed with two slaloms. 

Here are some random thoughts on the event, the car, and my (lack of) abilities:

• Autocross Is FUN. Many decades ago, before marriage and kids, I was a regular in the local A/X scene. Then life happened. I still sporadically went to races, but other priorities took, well, priority. It also didn't help that I moved a number of times in the ensuing years, to Europe, Hawaii, Colorado, etc.. for work. Further, when I moved back to Arizona, the Bugeye was in pieces. Now that it's running (and mostly reliable) it was time to go back and see if A/X was as much fun and worthwhile as I believed it to be. It is.
• The Car. The car is great. The car is lacking. First, there's plenty of power, but the rear end gearing really limits performance, making first gear worthless and forcing the car to run out of RPMs at just the wrong times. The other big thing is body roll. Yes, I put a sway bar on the car this past week, but it's not enough. Probably need a rear bar, too. Also, I've ordered stiffer springs for the rear, which should help a lot. But the excessive body roll is unnerving. The car never really felt in danger of going over, but the suspension geometry was clearly affected in the sweepers by the excessive body roll. There were a half dozen other things I noted, but these two (gearing, body roll) are the big ones that require first attention.
• The Driver. Okay, I've forgotten how to drive fast. Even the basics are greatly lacking, like looking ahead, not trying to brake and turn and accelerate all at the same time, etc. The good news is I got a full second faster on each lap, which is huge. The bad news is I was still near the bottom of the pack in overall time, with the fastest cars being a full 8 seconds quicker per lap than me. I need to practice a lot more, plus probably ask for a ride along with some more experienced drivers to point out the things I'm ignorant I'm doing/non-doing.
• The Day. I'd forgotten how long an autocross race day can be. Don't get me wrong; it's a fun day, but I left the house at 6:30am, and didn't get home until~3pm or. Only a fraction of that time is spent driving; the rest is getting through tech, standing through the drivers meeting, walking the course a few times, working the course, jawing about cars, sitting in grid, loading and unloading the car from the trailer (yes, I trailer'd it because I worried about breaking something). Heck, just literally standing around on course that long is a bit draining (yes, first-world problems, I know...). I did remember sunscreen and food and water and a hat, but it's still a long day. 

Some photos:

Car loaded on trailer and leaving home. Next time I will probably just drive the car to the event, but I was pretty concerned about breaking something and being able to get the car home afterward:

First in line at the tech inspection:

On course, trying to remember to look ahead, look ahead:

In one of the big sweepers. Pretty sure that course worker is yelling at me to look ahead, look ahead:

Bad news is the (very) slow overall times. Good news is each run getting significantly faster by over a second per lap. Just needed another 8-10 runs at this rate to vie for FTOD. Yeah, right...:

Sway Bars and Tow Hooks and Racing, Oh My!

 It's been a while since I last posted, but that doesn't mean I've been idle. (Well, mostly; I did get really sick in February for weeks, so that did slow things down... sigh.) In any case, I've been driving the car every weekend, taking it on group rides, and a few car shows. Generally having fun with it--and making lists. This week, started tackling some of the items on the list.

First up is prep for the car's first autocross, which is this coming Sunday. Lots of little things to do, plus a few big ones. The most important of these is excessive body roll and some "bottoming-out" that's been happening on hard cornering and in roadway dips. The solution is twofold: first, am ordering stiffer springs for the rear coilovers. Going from 200# to 300#/in units. Might be overkill, but it should fix the problem. (I can always drop back down to 250# if required.)

The second fix is installing a front swaybar. The one I had on a back shelf in the garage came out of a competition MG Midget from many, many years ago. It might be too stiff, but like the springs, I can always back down if it proves to be too harsh. The only real issue with mounting it is (like everything else on the car) finding space for it. In the end, it's getting mounted below the frame rails behind the front tires. I'm a little disappointed in losing a bit of ground clearance, but it should be OK overall.

The other two things happening this week are: a) re-installing the front tow hoops (which were removed last year for a variety of reasons); and b) relocating the shoulder strap mounting points to higher up and further back in the car to provide better protection/compliance for the driver. 

Really looking forward to the A/X on Sunday-- but, yes, with some trepidation about breaking things or embarrassing myself on track. One way or the other, it's going to be an interesting weekend....

Dyno-Tune!

It was a big milestone event yesterday in the Bugeye's life: its first dyno session and professional tune. Woot!

As I may have mentioned in a previous post, the engine for the car came out of a custom Model A (!) driven by an elderly gentleman. The builders of that car were worried he was going to hurt himself driving the high-power/low-weight vehicle, so they had the ECU purposely de-tuned, boost limited to 5psi, and the engine rev-limited to 5K rpm--primarily to give everyone a little peace of mind when the customer took possession of the car.

Fast forward to now. The engine and transmission eventually found their way into my car, including the de-tuned ECU and the 5psi-limited turbocharger. A few months ago, we got the car on the road, but it was clearly in need of a proper tune. I also wanted (needed!) the rev limiter removed. Plus I wanted to up the boost a bit.

This week I took the car into a tuner friend of Joe's. We originally planned to use the tuner's hub dynos, so I purchased some wheel adapters and brought them to the shop. Unfortunately, the wheel adapters weren't machined properly and wouldn't bolt on properly. Argh. Fortunately, the tuner also had a traditional Mustang roller dyno that worked out. In the end, we spent more than 3 hours on the dyno, getting the entire air-fuel and ignition maps setup. Here's a short clip of Steve Cole (tuner) making one of a dozen pulls on the dyno:

The goal of the session was not to maximize performance--far from it, in fact--but to create a base, reliable, safe tune with good, crisp performance throughout the rev range and boost limited to 5psi. We also wanted to "poke at" some higher boost (10psi) to foreshadow a future dyno session.

So, here are the tabulated summary results of the best 5psi pull and the one aborted 10psi pull:

And one of the 5psi money shots:

Nice, fairly flat torque curve with a noticable upward slope change when the turbo kicks in at 3K rpm. Horsepower just builds pretty linearly throughout the rev range.

From the table, you'll note that the one 10psi run we tried was aborted at around 5,500rpm because of the injectors saturating at 100% duty cycle. Assuming I buy/install larger injectors, advance the timing a bit, and run it up to the current redline 7K, I extrapolate max torque and horsepower to be around 220lbf-ft and 250hp, respectively, at the wheels. This would mean approximately 260lb-ft and 300hp at the crank, which is backed up by other people's results with this same type of engine. Sounds pretty promising to me, especially for a car that weighs just 1850lbs.  And what if I crank to boost to 15psi, which these engines have been shown to handle with ease? And what if, what if....

Sigh.

I have to pause and just enjoy the car as-is. I'm not planning said larger injectors, increased boost, or further tuning, etc. any time soon. Instead, the goal is to get a thousand or more miles on the drivetrain and work out some of the various gremlins and issues that have arisen in these first few hundred miles of shake-and-bake driving. I have some nasty sheet metal buzz at certain rpm levels, for example, that requires attention. Plus sway bars to figure out, a parking brake to design, various electrical tweaks, etc., etc., etc.....  Only then will I start to think about bringing the car back for round 2 of testing for more performance.

For now, the drivability of the car is greatly improved. Like night and day improved. Smoother idle, very crisp throttle, and very strong freight-train pulling throughout the entire rev range, etc... Not to mention no 5.5K rpm rev limit! The bottom line is I could not be happier with this first step toward full performance of the car. Woot!

Up on a Lift

 Took the car to the local Cars and Coffee again. Just as I was leaving my house to go to the show (in the dark pre-dawn), I realized the front headlights weren't working. Long story short, got to the show a little late. I (think I have) diagnosed the problem as a bad connector on the dimmer switch.

The show was fun, and as last time, I got a lot of really good comments, feedback, and kudos. Joe even stopped by with his boy, so it was good seeing him.

After the show, I took the car on my big "round-the-mountain" loop to put another 50 miles or so on it. Rattles continue to drive me a little crazy, and the rear diff gearing is way too short, but otherwise the car is SO MUCH fun to drive. Love this car.

Then, when I got home, I finished assembling the BendPak and with the help of my bride, we got the 1000lb beast turned and oriented under the car. I'm using the lift in a non-standard orientation due to the narrow track width of the Bugeye. It seems to work really well like this, and is stable and solid when all the way up in the air. Will make working on the car so much simpler. Need to order a rolling chair or inclined creeper now. Video: