So, like I mentioned before, I bought a $700 blown up Miata. In the last week, I've procured a junkyard engine for around $1k, and I've been doing all the stuff that would be annoying with the engine in. So far I've done timing belt and tensioners, water pump, front main seal, and EGR block off plate. The rest of this week I'll do clutch and flywheel, rear main seal, coolant reroute and hopefully drop the motor in next Saturday. In an attempt to suck less at video, I've been doing some videos on the Miata build for my Youtube channel. Here's a video of my progress so far.

This is insanely tempting to replace my aging iMac. I'm leaning heavily toward a laptop this time around because it would be nice to use it to tune my ECU instead of the garbage HP stream I currently have. Reviews on this model are great and performance seems to be awesome for the price. 

Unfortunately every time I got to hit "add to cart" I remember that the keyboard is a flaming pile of garbage that will break if you look at it wrong. 

Here an Amazon link if you have more faith in the keyboard than I do. 

So, like I said in my previous post, I’m not screwing around this time. I’m getting right down to work, so I pulled the NB in today to get started on pulling the motor. This thing is M I N T Y, I totally lucked out on such a clean, well maintained car. Here’s our starting point, one blown up NB. Poor 1.8.

Looks pretty damn good right? Check out the inside of this air box:

It looks brand fucking new! Maybe they replaced it recently trying to diagnose the problem, but if so they suck, because this shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to diagnose:

That’s cylinder number three, and I’m guessing that’s some part of a valve, but whatever the fuck it is, it’s not supposed to be chillin on top of the piston. Anyway. The car is super clean, and I’m actually being super careful taking it apart, preserving all the clips and shit. I’m trying to keep it nice bros. I did crack the radiator, but it was the 20 year old original, and judging by the pint or two of coolant in it and the coolant in cylinder number 3, it got HOT, so I’m not going to lose my sleep over it. As soon as I get done posting this I’m going to try and find me a good aluminum radiator, because this won’t be going back in.

It took a comically long time for me to find all of the bolts on this splash shield, primarily because none of my hoopties have ever had this by the time I got them 😂

And this is where I stopped today, it was getting late and I had actual work stuff to do. Exhaust side is totally taken apart. The manifold is unbolted, just have to disconnect at the cat and pull it off. The wiring harness is pulled back out of the way, the cooling system is drained and removed. I basically need to pull the fuel lines, the bellhousing bolts, and the motor mount and I should be able to drop it right out.

Not two bad for two hours with a heat index of 105 while also dealing with normal work stuff. I feel like I burned a million calories, maybe “Car Repair Yoga” should be my new workout routine. Here’s a picture I took for Daisy to demonstrate just how hot it was outside.

Anyway, Tuesday I should be able to push it over to the lift and do the last few things and snatch the engine out of it. My maintenance stuff for the new motor is coming from RockAuto.com on Monday, my clutch happy meal is coming from Flyin Miata on Wednesday. My new motor will be in from a junkyard on Tuesday. Starting to come together pretty quick, I’m gonna stay on top of it and get this car built. I’ll update next week with an empty engine bay.

Now to decide on a turbo kit. I'm leaning toward the FM stage 1 but at the same time, the MKTurbo kit seems like a really strong value considering it includes a Megasquirt EFI. Have a little bit of time to decide while I put a motor in and sell my NC...anyone wanna buy a PRHT Miata? 

My MR2 Spyder has been languishing because, frankly, I have too many cars. I’ve decided to downsize everything though in order to actually focus on a couple of cars and do cool stuff, as opposed to just doing little shit to a billion cars.

It makes little sense for me to have both the 08 Miata PRHT and the 02 Spyder, since they’re pretty damn similar cars at the end of the day and I only have so much time, money, and parking space. So I’m going to fix up the MR2 and then do a MR2 vs NC comparison over on my YouTube channel, then sell one of them.

My MR2 needs brakes as I’ve let it sit so damn long the brakes rusted, so I just went ahead and ordered these.

I’ll have some pics and videos up as soon as I get them in.