Saw that on IG and was super excited, glad you are taking the time to give a proper update here as well. Looks absolutely fantastic!
Saw that on IG and was super excited, glad you are taking the time to give a proper update here as well. Looks absolutely fantastic!
oldgrayleather (08-30-2020),ueru (09-19-2020)
That looks awesome! Congrats on the find!
'01 NB2 aka MisF1re: http://mazdaroadster.net/showthread....218#post207218
'97 M aka Warbird, gone but not forgotten: http://mazdaroadster.net/showthread....B&goto=newpost
Instagram: @greasemonkey2000
ueru (09-19-2020)
I have never seen that bumper before, looks great!
ueru (09-19-2020)
Such a great front end conversion for the NB. Very happy you were able to realize your vision!
Last edited by speedypenguin; 08-30-2020 at 09:54 PM.
My Eunos Roadster, Jazz
ueru (09-19-2020)
So much love in this thread right here. So happy for you W, no one deserved this more than you! Cannot wait to see where you take this next.
ueru (09-19-2020)
Happy you got the bumper!! I saw it on IG and flipped because I am happy to know someone that is running one of my top 5 favorite bumpers.
You make me want an NB again.
Follow the Builds
1993 Eunos Roadster B-spec by Mazdaspeed
http://mazdaroadster.net/showthread....819#post222819
1993 Mazda Miata LE
https://mazdaroadster.net/showthread...233#post244233
ueru (09-19-2020)
It's been a while (again)! Managed to spray some paint on the tdr front recently.
And I did a couple other things too. I'll write some more later, but I need to go outside and change over to my snow tires now; I want to go play on the touge tonight, so I've gotta get to work before the sun sets!
flickr
instagram~ @100yenrainbowmountain
Agent☣Orange (12-19-2020),atank (12-19-2020),Greasemonkey2000 (12-19-2020),HarryB (12-19-2020),MiataQuest (12-20-2020),Roadster7 (12-19-2020),speedypenguin (01-02-2021),tsingson (12-19-2020),vote4pedro (12-19-2020)
Lovin that front man and all the cool pics !
"My For Sale Items"
"My 2014 Club"
1994 Laguna Blue - (Runabout)
2005 BM MSM #751 of 1428 - someone else is playing with her now
"Nardi Steering Wheel Restore"
91 SD Italia
ueru (12-31-2020)
Looks great with clear headlight covers, but I'm partial to the frp!
The D-Technique/TDR front looks incredible with aggressive styling.
Last edited by Roadster7; 12-20-2020 at 11:12 AM.
ueru (12-31-2020)
So good! That bumper is gorgeous!
Sent from my LM-V450 using Tapatalk
'94 M-Edition - Stock - SOLD
'94 Laguna/Tan - Stock [currently being restored]
ueru (12-31-2020)
Absolutely gorgeous!
'01 NB2 aka MisF1re: http://mazdaroadster.net/showthread....218#post207218
'97 M aka Warbird, gone but not forgotten: http://mazdaroadster.net/showthread....B&goto=newpost
Instagram: @greasemonkey2000
ueru (12-31-2020)
Man... thats a cool front bumper. I've always wanted to see front bumpers that could possibly make the nb look like an NA with the headlights down.
Even more so the NA bumper that omits the signal lights for round indicators.
ueru (12-31-2020)
Looks so fantastic W! Can't wait to hear more of the stories and background behind yet another of your incredible builds...
ueru (12-31-2020)
Buyin' it
This is a dream part of mine, so I figure I should write more of a proper post about the D-Tech front. The story of how I bought it and got ahold of it is pretty short. I was sleeping in late one (Saturday?) morning, and my phone started going off like crazy. The first few buzzes woke me up enough to realize my phone was trying to tell me something. It wasn't the terrifying noise of an earthquake alarm though, so I just kind of shrugged it off and tried to get a bit more shut eye. It was weekend morning and whatever it was could wait another 20 minutes. The messages didn't stop though and I became curious. Someone wanted to tell me something important obviously.
The screen lit up to reveal a bunch of Instagram messages from Maksim. From the push-notifications, I could see some link, followed by a lot of 'buy this' 'why haven't you bought this yet' messages of that flavor haha. As soon as I opened the link, it all became clear.
I'd been wanting one of these D-Tech kits for a long time, and after I got an NB here in Japan, it became my singular goal. I was already in the middle of saving up the $3k it would take to buy it new from D-Technique. The auction listing that came up on my phone showed an entire front D-Tech kit in white with a buy-it-now price of 100,000 yen. I don't remember what the starting bid was, but it was considerably lower (30,000 yen or something). Zero bids on the auction. 6 days or something remaining, so it had been posted relatively recently.
I didn't check the location.
I didn't read the description (in detail).
I didn't check my bank account balance.
I didn't bid.
Still in bed, sleepy-eyed, having woken up a minute or two earlier, I quickly typed in 100,000 yen and bought the auction out.
Then I celebrated! I sent Maksim a screenshot of the won-auction listing, I posted a cheeky Instagram story hiding just exactly what I had bought, I told Pete about how I'd just bought it when he spotted the auction as well (sorry for jumping on it, I still try and usually ask!)
Then, I got up, had some coffee, and read the auction listing in detail...
Location: Kobe. Shipping: no.
Any other time, this would be no problem. I'd take the bumper off my car or rent a kei truck and drive down to Kobe. It's only 14 hours away by normal roads! That's just a weekend trip. But, pandemic and everything, I was prohibited from leaving my prefecture. And all the friends I had down in Kansai weren't really car-people willing or able to go pick up and hold onto some old, fiberglass bumper. I put out an SOS on Instagram asking for help, and a new friend appeared! A really great guy living in Nagoya offered his help, and we worked out a deal for him to go pick it up in Kobe, then drive it up to Tochigi and drop it off.
I'm lucky I keep meeting awesome people. The seller was really kind about it too, he held onto it for a while and didn't hesitate to accommodate when I told him I wanted someone other than me to retrieve the bumper. And my new friend from Nagoya was great too, we spent the day driving around the mountains and chatting in his pristine Mark II wagon after he dropped the bumper off.
I'm real lucky.
I guess I'll go into a little more detail on the D-Technique front.
The front was developed for D-Technique's complete factory car, the TD1001R, a collaboration between Deki-san of D-Technique and a former Mazda employee Tachibana Hirotaka, also the former managing director of M2 Incorporated. The base car was a Mazda Roadster NB6C (no 1.8l cars were ever produced as far as I can tell), and featured the complete aero kit with a choice of two different front ends, interior changes, and suspension tuning among other things. The stated goal was to make a complete car to the NB like the M2 1001 was to the NA. The cars had a sales price of 3,570,000 yen in 2004.
http://www5.plala.or.jp/dtec/TD1001R/TD1001R.html
Many might also notice the obvious similarities in design (front and rear) of the D-Tech car with the Mazda Roadster MPS concept car unveiled at the Frankfurt Auto Show in 2001. The cars similarities are deep (the concept car and D-Technique's share a ram air intake design), but the concept is not using a single FRP piece unlike D-Technique. The proportions are slightly different, and the MPS appears to use mixed materials for the bumper in under-the-hood photos. The MPS concept also had a much hotter engine, close to 200 naturally aspirated horsepower. I think I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that it was a concept design for the NB that didn't become the final version, but I'll have to do some more digging before I'll stand behind that claim.
D-Tech bumper specs and details
The D-Tech front is a single CSM FRP unit that comes in white gelcoat. I haven't put mine on a scale, but it feels similar to the stock bumper in weight. It also uses anti-UV coated polycarbonate shaped lenses, held in place with rubber threaded inserts installed into the bumper and machine screws. The bumper comes with a grill. It attaches at 6 factory points, 4 on the top and 2 at the fenders. It also includes an "aero tray" built into the single piece design, where the FRP on the bottom of the bumper continues back to almost where the front wheel wells begin.
The lights are common Cibie 8711 units from the mid-2000's. 2 low beam halogen projectors, 2 high beam halogen reflectors (with parking lights), and 2 turn signal housings. These are the same units many aftermarkets used to make parts for other cars around the same time. Morette (spelling?) NB headlights, Wagon R option headlights, along with Lancers and some Subaru models all used the same Cibie units. D-Technique offered an HID upgrade for the low beams, but with my own experience putting universal HIDs into these projectors, I can't imagine the output was very good.
Prototype style front
There are two available front ends, the 1001R style and the "Prototype" style. Mine is a 1001R style. It's not just front though, D-Tech also sells the entire kit from the TD1001R car: front, side skirts, rear bumper, and interior center console delete kit.
I've also got the interior carpet center console from them. I like the side skirts a lot, but I'm not a big fan of the rear bumper personally.
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instagram~ @100yenrainbowmountain
Agent☣Orange (12-31-2020),druz (12-31-2020),Greasemonkey2000 (12-31-2020),HarryB (12-31-2020),MiataQuest (12-31-2020),MikeA (12-31-2020),oldgrayleather (01-01-2021),Roadster7 (12-31-2020),speedypenguin (01-02-2021),tsingson (12-31-2020)
Where mine was
I'm not sure exactly how many people have owned this bumper, but I do know one car it used to be on! It surprised me, because it's my favorite D-Tech car and a big inspiration in general.
I noticed some strange lines and markings on the bumper when my friend first dropped it off, but I assumed they were all just fine cracks in the gelcoat. And it turned out a lot were, but the longer I spent with the bumper and closer examination in the right light revealed a clear pattern. Out of curiosity, I pulled up a reference photo of the only other D-Tech bumper car I knew of that ever had a livery (well, besides the red one, but that was a Prototype style bumper and that livery was mostly just text). To my shock and delight, the ghost markings lined up perfectly with this car:
All around the nose and the driver's side light, there were faint marks where vinyl used to be.
His Minkara page shows that he now has the same NB roadster with a TD front, minus the 1996 Porsche GT1 Le Mans car inspired livery. So as far as I can piece together, he used this bumper on his car when he used to track the car, then bought a fresh D-Tech front kit when he retired the car from circuit duty.
A small motif of his past livery lives on the roll bar
Anyways, I'm stoked to have a piece with history from a car on my inspiration short-list.
Modifications to the bumper I've done
This bumper came with some minor (impact?) FRP material loss near the passenger wheel well that had been smoothed over with body filler prior, and fine cracks in the gelcoat throughout. I vee'd out all the cracks I could find and filled them with polyester putty (basically just loose, short fiberglass strands mixed into resin) then smoothed it all out with body filler. Then I painted it!
Driver's side had a little bit too
I also decided to use a modern bi-xenon projector (from a Honda N-One kei car) in place of the Cibie halogen low beam projector. My approach was a bit caveman, simply cutting the stock Cibie housings in half and epoxying the Honda projector cradle onto the back of it. I needed the front of the Cibie housing for the bolt holes that line up to the D-Tech steel headlight brackets, so not many other options with my limited toolset/workspace here. While the low and high beams sit behind the FRP, the turn signal pods sit flush inside the FRP bumper, so headlight bracket alignment is crucial and the Cibies were the smallest sacrifice I could make.
Also, because the Honda projectors are a D2 bulb with the ignitor resting on the back of the unit, the entire headlight became longer overall and impacted the chassis at the wheel well. That led me to shave some FRP off the low beam holes on the bumper down to give me a little space to move the headlights forward. It's virtually impossible to tell the difference from the outside, but the low beam headlights do now sit ~1.5cm further forward than a factory D-Tech.
I also made some FRP headlight covers! It was a fun project. It was a very simple wet lay up, schedule was 2 layers of #200 E glass plain cloth, then one layer of #600 E glass plain cloth in polyester resin for each side. They're a little bit lighter than the stock polycarbonate covers, but the weight is nothing super impressive.
I haven't been able to play around with composites since moving to Japan a couple years ago and I'd been missing it. Not digging the smell of styrene in my apartment, but it's been difficult to find high strength epoxies for laminating here in Japan. I'll get some better stuff down the road.
Plans from now (bumper etc)
I love it like it is! Just drive it a lot. I was considering making a front lip/dam for the bumper or modifying a Mazdaspeed A-Spec to fit, but lately I've been toying with the idea of buying a second bumper in 2021 and modifying it into a one-off something or other. Really digging the old Midnight cars or 935 race car bumpers.
As for the rest of the car, the next goal is circuit safety equipment. It appears I'll be able to drive on Nikko Circuit with just the hard top, but I think larger tracks like Motegi and Tsukuba will require a roll bar and harnesses. I swapped to some G-loc R10 pads front and rear about a month ago as well, and I love them! They squeal a lot, but nothing I wasn't already used to with the old Carbotech pads on the NA.
After that, more tires of every variety. Looking forward to the new year!
flickr
instagram~ @100yenrainbowmountain
Agent☣Orange (12-31-2020),druz (12-31-2020),Greasemonkey2000 (12-31-2020),HarryB (12-31-2020),MiataQuest (12-31-2020),MikeA (12-31-2020),oldgrayleather (01-01-2021),Roadster7 (12-31-2020),speedypenguin (01-02-2021),tsingson (12-31-2020),vote4pedro (12-31-2020)