The budget beater Meowta build

Strut your greasy stuff!
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Acid666
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Today the Meowta did some weird shit at the Autocross. The car killed while idling. No biggie. Wifey couldn't get it started so they push started it. Whatevs. A friend sat with her and told her to work on her launches. So I sat with her on a later run (after she told me said guy said to work on launches), and watched her rev to 6K and RIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE the clutch into oblivion.
Told her to just dump the clutch pedal when you are at about 4K, and don't ease into the fucking thing for so long.

Last run, she does exactly what I say, and it's just slowwwwwwwwwwww with barely any clutch engagement. She had to limp her way thru the track. I told her she burned the clutch.
We parked it, looked at the clutch fluid reservoir and it was full. Like it was boiling over or some shit and pressurizing the line. Removed the cap and some pressure got relieved. Let it cool off, pulled some fluid from the reservoir, and the car was fine. WTF.
We think it just overheated, and maybe think there's a temp sensor or something not activating the fans or some shit. With the AC on the fans kick on tho.
Anywho. Who knows. Will look at it closer in the next week or so.
Last edited by Acid666 on Sun Apr 28, 2019 9:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Acid666
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Also, AIRBOAT TIME!
Working on these custom fiberglass molds to attach to the front headlights when she races. She found these giant Ø6" cat eyes. Think of big googley eyes but with an eye of Sauron cat eye.
The intent is to get a flat fiberglass base to mount the eye, and have the edges roll into contours and attach with 4 corner magnets, sanded smooth so it looks OEM.

Got these headlight bezel things from the Miata that's currently sitting at Pullapart.
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Magnets installed, and JB WELDED from the back. (the semen of our people)
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First reverse mold
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Mold done. The plastic container in the middle is just there to fill in a gap so I don't have to use so much plaster
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Next I'm going to smooth out a little bit of this mold pocketing, and then lube it up and fill it with bondo to get a positive from this negative, and then I'm going to fiberglass over that positive and blend the fiberglass shell into that.
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Acid666
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First positive mold made. Gotta try to find the time this week to touch it up and smooth it out, and then I'll start laying fiberglass over it and getting my backing structure for how to mount the eyes. I haven't touched fiberglass in years, but I did a bunch of it in college. Gonna be interesting
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D Griff
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:fuckyeah:

You are a good husband dude, many dangs. That is way better than :pinshit:
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Melon
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Those magnets going to be strong enough to hold those eyes on?
4zilch wrote: Mon Apr 12, 2021 8:46 am I'm a fucking failure.
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Acid666
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Melon wrote: Thu May 02, 2019 8:06 am Those magnets going to be strong enough to hold those eyes on?
They're the strongest ones I could finally locally. And X4 I think they'll be ok. This'll be something Kendra pops on at autocross, so it's not like they'll stay on the car.
In theory this should be enough to let it grab and have a pretty good hold. I thought of some bungie cables or something blended into the sides, or even velcro, but I don't want something that'll wear or break over time. Magnets was the simplest solution. And if these aren't strong enough I'll order some rare earth ones and just fill in the gap around it to make it all look smooth.
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Melon
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Word. just don't want your hard work to fly off and break mid corner.
4zilch wrote: Mon Apr 12, 2021 8:46 am I'm a fucking failure.
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Acid666
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OMG MOAR STEPS TAKEN FROM THE LITTER BOX!

Got the mold out, sanded a little. Mounted to a base (got the mold doweled into the base) where I'm going to get a measurement for how far the headlight sticks out of this thing and then I'll float a disc above it so it clears. Then I'll fiberglass the disc and blend it into my mold as smooth as I can. I might have to get some pantyhose to get the shape smooth (that's how you fiberglass custom speaker boxes into those nooks and crannies in the back of your ride baw!

For reference, these are the eyes she wants installed.

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Acid666
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Got off my ass today and did a lil bit of fiberglass'n. Also, yesterday I yanked the speedometer cable out of the 91 miata at pullapart and installed it. So I've got a speedo now.
Waiting for the resin to harden, so I can take a look at how I can cut it and make it mold to the contour of the actual headlight bezel, then start the sanding and shaping.

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Acid666
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Pulled the mold off the thing at lunch today. I trimmed it a little as well, but didn't get a pic of it. Concept seems to hold well. These will only be on during autocross, so that's all I'm really concerned with. They seem stout and don't slide or fall at all. I'll likely do a little more fiberglassing for strength and so that when I sand it down and paint it'll be smooth and not have random lumps and shit.

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Acid666
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Gotta lift that leg to pee. Only it's the wrong leg.
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:fuckyeah:

Lets see these eyes on the car!
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Acid666 wrote: Tue May 28, 2019 1:05 pm Gotta lift that leg to pee. Only it's the wrong leg.
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Woah!!!!!!!!!!
brain go brrrrrr
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Acid666 wrote: Tue May 28, 2019 1:05 pm Gotta lift that leg to pee. Only it's the wrong leg.
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:fuckyeah:
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Acid666
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For some reason, I had a total brain fart on these spare engines I've got. Cliff notes is that when I bought the miata I got another engine in pieces for $100. Most of it's good, but some pieces are bad. I also have a motor from a friend's 1999 that he blew. All the blown 99 needed was the crank polished. For some dumb ass reason I never thought about putting the other crank in this blown motor till a friend mentioned it.

So I tore it apart today and started to get some dimensions. On the blown motor, the hatch marks still look good, and the crank journal bearings look good as well. The crank journal diameters match on both cranks.
The rod journals on the blown motor are .010" smaller than the pieced out motor. So that tells me that it's been turned 10 down. One of the blown motor rod journals is a good bit smaller than the other 3, so what I think I'm going to do is slap this other crank in it and spec out an oem bearing (all new, rod and crank bearings), some new seals and rings, and a handful of other things. Slap it together and see what I've got.
This motor also has the BP4 head, which apparently is the bees knees.

Here's one of the bad rod bearings.
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Acid666
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On another note, I ran the compression on the motor in the car. It's weak, and burns oil. I was expecting the rear cylinder to be way off. It feels like it's running on 3.5 cylinders. Doesn't really miss much, but it does have little bitty hiccups here and there and I think that the power loss is turning into my bottle-neck in autocross where I could use that extra bit of power. Also, I ran next to my buddy's 95 ES miata and did a few races. In 3rd gear from about 30-70, his car left me by 2 full cars. Pretty bad. It just had power everywhere and mine is a dud. So I got a compression test kit to see where it's at.

Dry it was 135psi across the board. Wet it was 150psi. For this 1.8, it's supposed to be @ 180psi. The 1.6 is 135. I had to check to make sure I didn't have a 1.6. It just confused me and made me wonder if I was retarded. But I'm not. It's just weak.

So getting this 99 motor up to speed on the cheap is my next plan. And then the Kswap later down the road.
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Acid666
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New bearings came in today. Rod bearings and crank bearings. I went ahead and installed the crank bearings and checked the oil gap with plastigage. It's between .002"-.003" on all of them (max tolerance on these is +.004), so the crank that I'm replacing is good to go on the center mains. Next is to check the clearance on rods. I'll do that when I get the piston rings in and reinsert them back into the bore. But I think they'll be ready to roll as well.

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After watching this thread for a while, I have learned two things...

1.) I don't have enough time for any of it
2.) Keeping an old car alive would cost boatloads of money for anyone that doesn't have time to do their own work... I can't own anything 10 yrs old or more

Really enjoying the thread though! :megusta:
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Acid666
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So some updates.
Been working on cleaning up the engine for rebuild. I cleaned up the existing pistons, but when compared to my spare engine pistons the sides looked faded. Almost like I cleaned off a coating or something. I was going to use the backups because they looked good and all 4 diameters were within spec, but my friend noticed that the existing pistons had a little raised plateau on top and the spares didn't . I was worried that this would mess with my compression so I went ahead and ordered another set of OEM ones for $65. Also ordered a new set of thrush washers because I couldn't find the others from the spare motor.

So those come in Tuesday so I can finally rebuild the bottom end of this motor and get it together. The oil clearances look good on the rod and crank bearings, so we're ready to torque it all down once it's in.

Worked on the headlight cover today too. Cleaned it up and painted it. I accepted that the smoothness is never going to be perfect unless I get a perfect mold, so I just cleaned it up and started to lay down some paint. I need to clear it for more protection, and then 3m tape the cat eyes to it. But here's some pics of it. I'll put it on the car when I get a chance.

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Acid666
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Tarspin wrote: Sat Jun 15, 2019 12:33 pm After watching this thread for a while, I have learned two things...

1.) I don't have enough time for any of it
2.) Keeping an old car alive would cost boatloads of money for anyone that doesn't have time to do their own work... I can't own anything 10 yrs old or more

Really enjoying the thread though! :megusta:

Well the car runs, it's just "tired" with its age and mileage. It just doesn't pull super hard. So it's a decent city car, and reliable enough to drive 2 hours away to race and come back home, but yeah, there's a TON of things I could find to work on. For now, I'm just slowly taking my time with the motor and other things that need to be addressed as they come up. But I go thru waves where I won't touch it for a month and then all of a sudden I'm finding the time to get to it. I wanted a project that the wide could work on as well, so I thought it was a good team builder. She has little patience, but she'll commit if she's into it and as long as cats are involved, she's willing.

I'll be doing the full kswap to it next year, so then I'll be spending all of my time and money getting it more competitive and I'll likely start trailering it to events with slicks. So yeah. Older cars can be work, but I specifically got this one to completely revamp it to be an autocross machine after the wife learns a lot in the street class, then street touring, then going into full blown SSM. We may track it as well.
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Acid666 wrote: Thu Jun 13, 2019 9:25 pm New bearings came in today. Rod bearings and crank bearings. I went ahead and installed the crank bearings and checked the oil gap with plastigage. It's between .002"-.003" on all of them (max tolerance on these is +.004), so the crank that I'm replacing is good to go on the center mains. Next is to check the clearance on rods. I'll do that when I get the piston rings in and reinsert them back into the bore. But I think they'll be ready to roll as well.

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nice!
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Acid666
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Slapped this bad boy on the passenger side to see how it looked. Still need to clear coat it. Learned that it doesn't like to be lowered with the lens on, so they'll have to be strictly cosmetic with the lights in the up position. So no popping them up and down unless I get rid of the bubble part of the cat eye.
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That looks :neat:
:wap: Where are these mangos?
Detroit wrote: Fri Apr 16, 2021 1:19 pm I don't understand anything anymore.
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Acid666
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After more consideration, I think that the magnets I chose are too weak for this application. So I went ahead and ordered a whole set of 12mm X 3mm neodymium magnets. The original plan was to just keep this one I nearly finished and drill out the center and epoxy in the new magnets, but apparently magnets are basically a hardened ceramic and I can't easily drill thru them. So I just got the other 2 headlight bezels I've got and started from scratch. No big deal, all of the things I've learned from doing this first revision will make going forward a lot easier and faster. I want to get them done for this weekend when we have a local autocross here in town.
So I drilled the holes and epoxy'd the magnets in place last night. They're a lot smaller, and look cleaner. Tonight I'm going to start layout out the fiberglass shell for the eye caps.

During the hurricane scare we just had, I went ahead and got the bottom end of this thing nearly assembled. New pistons and rings, new center main and rod bearings... All torqued down. I need to clean out the oil pan and other stuff that goes at the bottom and then I can reassemble the bottom and then work on cleaning up the top end. I'm not rebuilding the head since it was fine, I just need to clean the carbon off the valves.
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Acid666 wrote: Tue Jul 16, 2019 10:43 am After more consideration, I think that the magnets I chose are too weak for this application. So I went ahead and ordered a whole set of 12mm X 3mm neodymium magnets. The original plan was to just keep this one I nearly finished and drill out the center and epoxy in the new magnets, but apparently magnets are basically a hardened ceramic and I can't easily drill thru them. So I just got the other 2 headlight bezels I've got and started from scratch. No big deal, all of the things I've learned from doing this first revision will make going forward a lot easier and faster. I want to get them done for this weekend when we have a local autocross here in town.
So I drilled the holes and epoxy'd the magnets in place last night. They're a lot smaller, and look cleaner. Tonight I'm going to start layout out the fiberglass shell for the eye caps.

During the hurricane scare we just had, I went ahead and got the bottom end of this thing nearly assembled. New pistons and rings, new center main and rod bearings... All torqued down. I need to clean out the oil pan and other stuff that goes at the bottom and then I can reassemble the bottom and then work on cleaning up the top end. I'm not rebuilding the head since it was fine, I just need to clean the carbon off the valves.
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Shiny!
brain go brrrrrr
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