A/C system delete, NB Miata

TIME FOR ANOTHER EXCITING BLOG POST EVERYONE! Well a couple weeks ago I took what they call the "baby teeth" off my car. This is the act of removing the two tie down hooks on the front of the car. Apparently this is a rite of passage for real Miata owners. Since I am realler than the real slim shady and I believe everything that the internet says I took the 20 minute task to take them off. After proving my worthiness to own a Miata I started my car to let it warm up and check stuff since it had been ~ -20F a week ago. Lo and behold that the radiator was leaking coolant pretty badly. So I did the only sensible thing and rather than try to fix it I promptly went on the internet and bought a more racing friendly radiator to replace it with. I figured while I have the radiator out and I am waiting for the new one I would take the air conditioner out. You can apparently remove the air conditioner without unhooking the radiator, but it is far easier with it out.

I am going to start by addressing all the questions I had when I was looking at doing it as I am sure others will have similar questions. 

Q: What parts do I need to remove the A/C?

A: The only things you absolutely need is an M8 - 1.25 x 45mm bolt and a new power steering (P/S) belt. There is a bolt that holds the A/C bracket on that goes to the oil pump too. If this spot isn't filled oil will leak out. Now for the other things you may want. The cooling unit in the dash can be left in but it is somewhat heavy so I wouldn't recommend leaving it. You can take it out and leave the system unhook or you can get the factory replacement tube for non A/C cars. This weighs almost nothing and will still let you bring in fresh air from the outside. Rosenthal Miata sells this for ~$30 and it comes with the grommets to fill the holes that are left in the firewall. I recommend it. (1999-05 miata non A/C air duct) (P/S with no A/C belt)

Edit: Apparently Rosenthal Miata has shut down and the links are dead. So the part number for the air duct is NA0161150A. There are several retailers that sell it for a similar price to Rosenthal. However, I doubt any other sellers will have it with the firewall plugs, so you guys are on your own for that because I don't have part numbers for those. If someone leaves them in the comments I will add it to this. The PS belt with no AC is also readily available from many places, I am fond of Gates so here is a link to Amazon with the belt.

Q: Since I am removing one of the accessory pulley's, do I need an idler pulley or something to replace the A/C pulley?

A: Nope. The belt tension mechanism is on the P/S unit, so nothing is needed in this case. Just the new belt that will be shorter. I have seen some forum posts that people had concerns about the change in force on the main crank pulley. For scientific reasons I won't go into, it is fine. Just trust me.

Q: Where are some good references on how to take the A/C out since this blog is long winded and I don't really like to read.

A: Mx-5.net forum post

     A/C installation instructions - This set of instructions is what everyone uses to do this job. It details how to put A/C in the car, so just work in reverse.

Q: How much weight is this going to save me?

A: I weighed everything I took out and it was 32.0 lbs. Not to mention that your engine isn't running the a/c pulley anymore. That is likely worth at least 50 HP. 

Q: Forums scare me and I still have a questions that has not been answered.

A: Lucky for you there is a comments portion on this and no one ever reads it. So your comments are safe between you and me.However my asnwer may or may not be helpful. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Now we can get to the pictures and stuff! I am not going through the whole removal process since the instructions referenced above are pretty good. I am just going to touch on the things that I had issues with or I had more input for. 

So step one of this whole thing is to get the refrigerant drained out of the system. This should be done by an auto shop or a refrigeration repair person. SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT SO I CAN HUNT POLAR BEARS! It just isn't as fun when they are trying to swim away. 

In standard Ray fashion I was all excited to start working on this and dove in head first and then didn't start taking pictures until I was a good portion in. Maybe one day that won't get the better of me but today was not that day. To give yourself a little room I would take the fan shroud off. The driveer side fan has two bolts on the top holding it in. Remove those and it should pull right out (don't forget to unplug the fan). The passenger side fan has 4 bolts holding it. remove the top two and you only have to loosen the bottom two. The bottom mounts are slotted so they just need to be loose enough to pull the fan up.

Here is the layout of the pulleys if you need a reference:

Next I took off the accessory belt that runs the A/C and the P/S. This garage post on the mx-5 forum has the all the details on loosening and tightening the belts: Accessory Belt Maintenance. The only thing I have to add to this is my bracket was a little seized and I had to loosen the bolt circled in the picture below to get the whole thing to swing down far enought o get the belt off.

Now comes removing the refrigerant lines. Be careful when doing this, as there may still be some pressurized refrigerant in there. So safety glasses are probably a good idea. I removed the two rubber hoses that attach directly to the compressor. Then came pulling off the condenser (radiator that sits in front of the real radiator). I believe this is held on with only two bolts. Mine were super rusted so be prepared for some rust remover spray.

Then I removed the hard lines that run along the passenger side of the engine bay. I removed the brackets that hold them too. 

Once the hard lines are off you can go behind the glove box and pull out the cooling unit. Pull off the glove box and it is the big black box behind it. Take off the two hinge type clips. There are then two nuts that hold the box on, one on the bottom and one one the top. THE TOP NUT IS A REAL BITCH! It is really packed in there. It uses a 10 mm socket and I had to get a universal joint to get the nut because you can't get a straight shot. When you pull out the box the two hose ends that are right at the fire wall come with it. It is easiest if you take the grommets off first. For whatever reason my box was really stuck on the top mounting point. I had to take a screw drive and get it behind the tang and pry on it pretty damn hard to get it to come off.

 If you got the Rosenthal kit, the tube just hooks in. The tube sits on the outside of the white plastic openings. The clips that hold the block box are not reused. The three firewall plugs that come with it cover the two holes where the in and out pipe go through and then the third plugs goes where the drain hose was on the cooling box. 

Don't forget to un-clip the electrical connector. 

 You can kind of see where the top nut is on this picture. The red dot at the top is the threaded post that it is on.

The two front firewall plugs 

Now you can remove the compressor and the accompanying bracket. This part is easy. There are 4 bolts that hold the compressor and 5 that hold the bracket.

The compressor. The four bolts are shown here in the picture 

 I already took out two of the bolts when I took this picture. 

 The shorter bolt is the one that needs to replace the front facing bracket bolt.

The shiny bolt you can see is the one that gets put back in.

You now have the whole A/C System out! Last thing is to put on your new shorter belt for the P/S. Refer to the garage section that I posted on how much tension to put on the belt.

I did nothing with the electrical components yet so I have no input on that. For the two radiator fans, the driver side one is turned on when the engine starts getting hot. The passenger side one is for the A/C unit. My intention is to rewire the A/C fan to just come on when the regular radiator fan is. We will see how difficult this ends up being.

here are all the parts that cam out with my A/C unit.

Hard Dog Hard Core M2 Roll Bar Install

Well this past weekend I obtained and installed my roll bar. The thing probably weighs more than all of the weight I have taken out unfortunately, but safety first right? Well before I get to the installation of the bar I am going to review it just a little. Overall the install was pretty easy. I had most of the interior removed before getting it so I got to skip the steps of taking out the carpet and some other plastic pieces. Without running into any serious problems I put the bar in with some help from my dad in about 5 hours from start to finish. The instructions are kind of vague so hopefully my write-up can help someone in the future. There is a youtube video I found of some guys putting one in and it was a nice visual.

With the bar installed, my soft top still works perfectly. My 99' has the glass window too. My one complaint is that I have probably made the car more dangerous for myself personally by putting this bar in. Because I am rather tall for this car (6' 0") I sit with the seat all of the way back and with some recline to keep my head lower. Even with this, my head is maybe a little more than an inch under the top portion of the main hoop. That isn't even the part that concerns me the most. With the seat all the way back, the head rest actually lies behind the side support of the bar. Which means in any sort of collision where my head goes to the side, I am probably going to die from brain trauma. WOOT WOOT, QUICK AND FULL OF PAIN, just the way I like it! They of course make padding for things like this and I am hoping to get a racing seat with side head protection for that and so it will lower me even more. This is my warning to tall people that own this car and want the Hard Core M2 roll bar.

Now to the install. The first thing I am going to say is that in the instructions it does not say anything about removing the seats or the top. While I am sure you can get it done with them in the car, for your own sanity TAKE THEM BOTH OUT! The top on the NB is rather easy to remove and will take you far less time to take off and put on than you will save by trying to do everything with it on. To take the top off there are three bolts on the drivers and passenger side right behind the door frame and in front of the seat belt reel.

Front three bolt locations

Then along the back of the top on the inside of the car you will see three black strips of sheet metal with a bunch of nuts holding them on. This is what holds the weather stripping tight to the car to keep water out. Remove all of the nuts. After that, there are two more plastic plugs holding the weather stripping to the car. They are located behind where the three bolts were, between the frame and the seat belt. The clips hold a little end piece for the rubber trimming that goes around the car which can now be removed. Once the end caps are off, the top should come out.

Once it is out and you have removed all of the carpet and plastic pieces, and the piece of sheet metal (package tray cover) that has 16 bolts holding it for whatever reason you should have something that looks like this.

Now at this point you can try to put the bar in the car, but it will likely get caught on the battery cable and some other wires that you can't get past on the passenger side. So to get around this I cut out the sheet metal to have a pocket large enough that you could just drop the mounting plate in without having to slide it backwards. You are going to have to cut the sheet metal no matter what, it just depends on how much you want to take out. I cut it using an edge grinder with a cutting wheel. Worked perfectly! The pockets I cut out are shown below.

Now the bar should slide right in. The next step is to bolt the bar to the lower seat belt reel bolt. I put the seat belts back in at this point too.

You can see how the bars fit for the rear mounting points.

Now it is time to start drilling some holes! The first hole for the rear mounts is probably the hardest part of putting this bar in if you do not have the proper tools. I cut the pocket back far enough so I had a direct line of sight for one of the holes on each 'foot'. It is rather deep to get a hand drill in there to drill the hole, so I recommend getting a long drill bit if you can. If not do what I did and use a socket!

Once the first hole is drilled you can bolt the back plate to the other side and use it as a pattern like they say in the instructions. On the passenger side do not forget to pull the evaporation system filter or whatever it is out from its snap in pocket. I also removed the canister that is held on with a 10mm bolt. It lies in front of the calipers. Unfortunately at this point I was getting a little excited and dropped the ball on taking pictures so I don't have any of that. You will also need to jack the back end up and remove the rear wheels and the wheel well plastic guards towards the front of the car.

The rest of the install is as easy as drilling holes and putting bolts through them. My back plates didn't all match up perfectly with the body contour, but once you cinch them down tight it will deform the body to make a flat surface.

Once that is done put it all back together. That evaporation system filter will lose its home to rear passenger mounting plate. I pushed it behind some wires and zip tied it into place. 

The final product:

You can see the seat lies behind the bar when it is pushed all the way back 

So there it is. The first modification to the car. More to come in the future!

Gutting some of the Inside and Fancy Dash Lights!

Well it is a Monday night and I have run out of things to do so I figured I would make a post! When I bought the Miata, the plan was to drive the car for the summer and once winter finally hit to start the work. Weeeeeelllllllll anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty impatient person when I get excited about something. So since I got the car in July, I have done two things: lightly started gutting the car, and make cool dash lights in an attempt differential my Miata from the over a million others sold since 1989. This post will lack an abundance of pictures as I did these before I intended to make the blog, so sorry if this one is a little dry. I will do my best to keep things concise and not ramble too much about what I did.

We will start with the dash lights as it ended up taking only a moderate amount of elbow grease and the rest was pretty easy. This involved me removing the dash gauge cluster. This is surprisingly easy on a Miata and I can do it in under 5 minutes with only a phillips screw driver.

This is not mine, but it looks the same

Changing the lighting on the dashboard is easy. There are 4 bulbs on the back that you take out and I purchased some replacement LED's from superbrightleds. They have a bunch of automotive LED's and the ones I needed were plug and play. Easy enough right!? Well there is one more step. The stock gauge faces have a green film on the back of them to make them illuminate green to easy strain on the eyes during night driving. So the gauge faces have to be removed by taking the needles off and then removing the screws that hold them. I tested using rubbing alcohol and acetone. You have to be careful to get the film off without "melting" the plastic. I preferred the rubbing alcohol even though it required much more scrubbing. Once that is done you put everything back together and BAM! INSTA COOL!

My Actual Dash

*Side note: if you don't put the needles back on properly they will obviously not read correctly. I can personally account for this as my gas gauge and oil pressure don't read very well anymore. My speedo also reads about 5 MPH faster now!

Now on to gutting the inside of the car. This one is a lot less exciting to talk about but is extremely satisfying to do. This step consisted of me opening the trunk and ripping everything out, yeah everything. Then going to the interior and taking out everything but the carpet on the floor. It will probably come out but it requires me to remove the dash to get it out unless I cut it. Removing the dash is not a simple feat, so it will likely happen later. What you are left with after you do this is a car that weighs maybe 20 pounds lighter, assuming you still want a spare tire while driving on the street, and so much road noise that you could drown out the cries of a toddler. People ask me, "Hey Ray, well why don't you play music to at least give you something other than wind to listen to?" I would, except I have pulled out the stereo and all the speakers BECAUSE THIS IS A RACE CAR PEOPLE! Alright no one really gets to ask me that because usually when I meet someone new the first thing I blurt out is, "did you know my car has no music and no sound deadening material in it. That is because I am hardcore!" 

The car is far from done but this is where I am at now. I have decided that I should start setting goals on things to get done and when to get done so I don't get blinded by all the things I want to do to it. So my goals for this winter are to 1) rebuild the engine, 2) likely blow up said engine rebuild by wiring in an aftermarket ECU so I can tune the thing myself, 3) see how much better it is doing donuts in snow with a RWD car. 

First Post

I tried this whole blog thing a while back for friends and family to keep up with what was happening with my formula club, buuuuuuuuut I kind of forgot about it. So I am hoping to try this again with my Miata. This will hopefully also help me later on by keeping track of things that I have done and maybe even give me instructions on how to put something back together that I took apart 3 months prior. I may also learn some HTML programming while doing this to make this whole thing shnazzy.

Posts for this may come far in between since I am not currently a millionaire and it takes time for me to save up the money to buy parts. I believe I have picked the most expensive hobby on the planet outside of airplane racing or any hobby that is done in Dubai. But for those of you who may not already know, I bought my first car and boy is it an impractical one! This is the only way to start building a proper race car; take something impractical and make it even more impractical.

In July of 2014 I purchased a 1999 Mazda Miata with the intent of building it to race in the SCCA Improved Touring S (ITS) class. This class allows me to do both club and autocross without having to make alterations to the car. I assume it will also fit in a class to race in NASA (National Auto Sports Association), not the one that produces astronauts. This class designation may change down the road as I learn more about things, but for now that is the goal.

This is going to be a several year project, but I am hoping to have the car at a good running point by spring of 2015 so I can start racing it and be moderately competitive. Well, I think that is enough writing for now. Stay tuned for more to come. My roll bar will arrive the week of Oct. 13, 2014. So my first endeavor will be to get that in the car.

TL;DR - I bought a red sports car that lots of people argue looks girly to go fast in because I like cars and racing. I am promptly going to do my best to kill this car by doing horrible modifications to it in an attempt to make it "better".

My car the first day I had it

What it looks like when someone who is 6'10" sits in a Miata