Supercharged mx5 built for Welsh roads
Discussion
Hi everybody
I've owned this car for about three years now and it's sole purpose has always been for weekend drives to Wales. It all started off with a road trip down to Oxford area to pick up a fairly standard mx5 but with the addition of a Jackson racing mp45 supercharger kit and a megasquirt ms2 diypnp ecu. The car had just been serviced, had a new cam belt and water pump. The body work was fairly good but on the test drive there was spluttering around the 4.5k mark and it didn't want to start very well. Most sensible people would of walked away and left it but I bought it anyway and put it down to a mapping issue.
This is one of the first pics of the car which shows the bad start I got off too
The problem I was having was that we could not get a laptop to connect to the megasquirt ecu to start trying to solve the running issue. I got help from a few members of the mx5 nuts forum that knew about the megasquirt ecu's but even they couldn't get it to connect to a laptop. Me and my dad ended up pulling the ecu apart. Nothing on the boards looked faulty so we just cleaned the serial port connected with electrical cleaner.
Here the ecu in bits and being tested
Cleaning the serial port worked but being a newbie at tuning I made a school boy error. I thought seen as it was now connected that I'd update the firmware not realising that this would wipe all the settings. I now had a car that wouldn't run at all. The car sat in my back yard for ten months till I finally gave up and sent it to a company to be sorted.
Here's the car sat on the lowloader being sent off to be sorted
After a couple of weeks at the tuning company and a lot of money I got my car back for twenty minutes and then it blew one of the main coolant hoses so back it went to get a full set of new hoses fitted.
It's not the best of pics but you can just about make out some of the silicone hoses. I've always regretted the blue hoses you'll see why later.
The car finally came back running which was a bonus and with 140bhp at the hubs which I was told equates to about 180bhp fly. Either way it goes alright but it never idled right. I just put up with the rubbish idle for a couple of years and started buying goodies for the car and driving it. Here's some of the goodies in no particular order
Bc br coilovers
Wilwood four pots with 280 mm disks and ferrodo ds2500 pads for the front with hel brake lines, spacers for the new rear callipers so I could run 276mm disks
Red leather cobra Suzuka bucket seats and Luke 5 point harnesses
As you can see in the pic above I went for the competition clutches stage 4 paddle clutch and I also went for the lovely competion clutches ultra lightweight flywheel
When we fitted the brakes we ran into issues of the wheels not clearing the calliper so I ended up getting team dynamic prorace 1.2 with nankang nsr2 tyres
I had a my first track earlier this year so got a tr lane gpv rollbar
I didn't really like the trackday and with whole intention of the car being a road trip car any I decided to fit a nice stereo as I love my music. I tried to keep it light but sounding nice so I fitted focal k2p component, jl audio 500/5 amp and a jl audio 8inch micro sub which hardly weighs a thing.
A few other bits were fitted like a genuine Mazda hardtop, oem splitter and a milltek exhaust which takes me upto recently and how the car stands now
Recently I've really got into the megasquirt tuning as I'm off to Austria to worthersee for ten days so I needed it running perfectly. I finally after a couple of years found out what was causing the idle issue it turns out that it was three odd cells in the ignition timing table causing all the problems.
I smoothed out the idle area and set the timing advance right and it idles just fine now. I've been building a custom dash so I can monitor the car and also make changes to the map easily. This involves a netbook connected to the ecu at all times and a small lcd screen to display everything
I've loads of pics of the car on the many road trips it's done but for now I'll leave it at that
I've owned this car for about three years now and it's sole purpose has always been for weekend drives to Wales. It all started off with a road trip down to Oxford area to pick up a fairly standard mx5 but with the addition of a Jackson racing mp45 supercharger kit and a megasquirt ms2 diypnp ecu. The car had just been serviced, had a new cam belt and water pump. The body work was fairly good but on the test drive there was spluttering around the 4.5k mark and it didn't want to start very well. Most sensible people would of walked away and left it but I bought it anyway and put it down to a mapping issue.
This is one of the first pics of the car which shows the bad start I got off too
The problem I was having was that we could not get a laptop to connect to the megasquirt ecu to start trying to solve the running issue. I got help from a few members of the mx5 nuts forum that knew about the megasquirt ecu's but even they couldn't get it to connect to a laptop. Me and my dad ended up pulling the ecu apart. Nothing on the boards looked faulty so we just cleaned the serial port connected with electrical cleaner.
Here the ecu in bits and being tested
Cleaning the serial port worked but being a newbie at tuning I made a school boy error. I thought seen as it was now connected that I'd update the firmware not realising that this would wipe all the settings. I now had a car that wouldn't run at all. The car sat in my back yard for ten months till I finally gave up and sent it to a company to be sorted.
Here's the car sat on the lowloader being sent off to be sorted
After a couple of weeks at the tuning company and a lot of money I got my car back for twenty minutes and then it blew one of the main coolant hoses so back it went to get a full set of new hoses fitted.
It's not the best of pics but you can just about make out some of the silicone hoses. I've always regretted the blue hoses you'll see why later.
The car finally came back running which was a bonus and with 140bhp at the hubs which I was told equates to about 180bhp fly. Either way it goes alright but it never idled right. I just put up with the rubbish idle for a couple of years and started buying goodies for the car and driving it. Here's some of the goodies in no particular order
Bc br coilovers
Wilwood four pots with 280 mm disks and ferrodo ds2500 pads for the front with hel brake lines, spacers for the new rear callipers so I could run 276mm disks
Red leather cobra Suzuka bucket seats and Luke 5 point harnesses
As you can see in the pic above I went for the competition clutches stage 4 paddle clutch and I also went for the lovely competion clutches ultra lightweight flywheel
When we fitted the brakes we ran into issues of the wheels not clearing the calliper so I ended up getting team dynamic prorace 1.2 with nankang nsr2 tyres
I had a my first track earlier this year so got a tr lane gpv rollbar
I didn't really like the trackday and with whole intention of the car being a road trip car any I decided to fit a nice stereo as I love my music. I tried to keep it light but sounding nice so I fitted focal k2p component, jl audio 500/5 amp and a jl audio 8inch micro sub which hardly weighs a thing.
A few other bits were fitted like a genuine Mazda hardtop, oem splitter and a milltek exhaust which takes me upto recently and how the car stands now
Recently I've really got into the megasquirt tuning as I'm off to Austria to worthersee for ten days so I needed it running perfectly. I finally after a couple of years found out what was causing the idle issue it turns out that it was three odd cells in the ignition timing table causing all the problems.
I smoothed out the idle area and set the timing advance right and it idles just fine now. I've been building a custom dash so I can monitor the car and also make changes to the map easily. This involves a netbook connected to the ecu at all times and a small lcd screen to display everything
I've loads of pics of the car on the many road trips it's done but for now I'll leave it at that
Thanks for the comments, the nankangs are great in the dry and they are wearing down surprisingly slowly. Mine are the 180 spec ones rather than the slightly softer 120. They do alright in the wet too obviously they are not as good as normal road tires but they are good enough that you can keep driving if it rains without them trying to kill you.
I need to programme the dash to warn me of any danger to the manifold
I need to programme the dash to warn me of any danger to the manifold
This is the only other pic I could find of the engine bay I don't seem to have any. I'll try and get some more at the weekend when I'm up at the unit. I want to make a custom airbox for it as I hate the way the cone filter sits right next to the supercharger. It doesn't seem to affect the way it runs but the intake temps could definitely be lower
I love the way it drives with the supercharger it's really torquey down low and just keeps pulling all the way to redline. It means you can happily drive round country lanes at about 3k rpm and not have to be constantly red lining it to make progress. It actually makes it more relaxing to go quick. Its taken a good while to get here but it's actually my perfect weekend car now
I love the way it drives with the supercharger it's really torquey down low and just keeps pulling all the way to redline. It means you can happily drive round country lanes at about 3k rpm and not have to be constantly red lining it to make progress. It actually makes it more relaxing to go quick. Its taken a good while to get here but it's actually my perfect weekend car now
Well I've finally done the sills after putting it off for about two years, thankfully they weren't actually that bad when we cut in to them. Both sides have been done and now it's just a case of filling them with waxoil. I've painted them, they're not the prettiest but they are functional till I get back from my holiday in May. The cars off to Austria for ten days to do lots of alpine passes and then on to the Nurburgring. We are staying in worthersee.
I've got myself a mishimoto xline radiator and I had got an oem thermostat but I managed to drive over that before fitting it.
Me and my friends that are going to worthersee had a shakedown run round Wales the car seems great at the minute and I'm happy that the nankang ns2r's will be able to cope with wet weather after getting caught in torrential rain. I was going to change them to rain sport 3's for the trip but I'm not going to bother now. Here's the cars there's two mx5's an s2000, Impreza wrx and out of view an audi rs2
The car looked filthy after the run
I've got myself a mishimoto xline radiator and I had got an oem thermostat but I managed to drive over that before fitting it.
Me and my friends that are going to worthersee had a shakedown run round Wales the car seems great at the minute and I'm happy that the nankang ns2r's will be able to cope with wet weather after getting caught in torrential rain. I was going to change them to rain sport 3's for the trip but I'm not going to bother now. Here's the cars there's two mx5's an s2000, Impreza wrx and out of view an audi rs2
The car looked filthy after the run
RoadRunner220 said:
Ooooh, I know where that is, that's a cracking road leading to that lay-by, in fact all the roads round there are pretty great.
Nice car BTW.
It is a great road I've done it a few times before it's got a great variety of corners and surfaces to enjoy.Nice car BTW.
I've finally washed the car it's been sat in the unit filthy since the last drive
Medic-one said:
Nice!
Any idea how much bhp it's putting out with the supercharger now ?
When it was tuned on the hub dyno it was 144bhp at the hubs which I was told was around 185bhp at the fly. That seems about right for how quick it is. It's about the same pace as a Clio trophy Any idea how much bhp it's putting out with the supercharger now ?
Edited by W17GLE on Monday 13th April 11:46
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