Controller Mounted

Well progress has been slow but steady and I am way past due for an update.  I have gone back and forth on the mounting of the motor.  I ran into several issues with my original plan for mounting the controller.  The original plan was the front of the controller would be supported by the strut tower brace.  Well I decided to flip the controller around so the motor terminals faced forward because I wanted to have the wiring connections on the passenger side.  I am using the stock wiring harness and the wires I needed to power the Soliton1, connect the tach output, etc were right there.  This made the clearance between the traction terminals and the hood too close for comfort and so I had to move the "strut brace" down which made it rather pointless for stiffening the tops of the strut towers.

The other challenge was the fact that the adapter had blind holes for all the bellhousing bolts.  I was going to use the bolts sticking out the front of the original adapter to mount a L bracket for the back of the controller.  I do really like the rebirth adapter but there are some parts of the plate style adapters I like better.  If I were going to do it again I think I might try the Jimerico adpater for $500 less.

http://www.jimerico.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=69&products_id=24

I bought my Soliton1 from them (Jim Husted + Eric Pedersen) and had no problems.  Again the Rebirth adapter is great but I had been planning around a plate style adapter so life got a little more complicated.  I did hear back from Steve and he said their drawing called out the right thread pitch on the hub but the machinist made a mistake.  He offered to send it back and they would fix it but I already have it in the car with the bolts I had found.

Anyway I then went through a couple design gyrations and finally decided to make a L-bracket that was mounted to the back of the bellhousing.

I then made a bracket that supported the front of the controller from the front of the 9" motor and mounted the throttle to the front controller bracket.

I  later cut down the throttle lever to go from 7%-73% travel on the pot.

As you can see I also made up the cables to go from the controller to the motor using the nice 2/0 cable and some molex lugs.



I then spent some time reviewing the Miata wiring manual and pull the leads I needed from from the wiring harness.  I also started trimming down all the unnecessary pigtails and cleaned up the engine bay.  When I cut the bundles I was careful to tap of each individual wire so I wouldn't cause any shorts.  I also installed my $27 strut tower brace that was nickle plated aluminum which happened to match the Soliton1.  :)

I turned all of the settings on the controller way down to get ready for the first test.  For instance I set a max motor voltage of 12V just in case something went wrong I knew I couldn't overspeed the motor.