Cars fall into three basic categories for me.
1. Cars I want.
2. Cars I don't want.
3. Cars I want to drive and spend time in but I don't want to actually own for various reasons.
At the top of #3 is the Miata. I LOVE driving them on course. Rallycross is perferred to Autocross, but I'll take a co-drive in any Miata anywhere. The problem is that I don't like them as street cars. The seating and visibility feels weird on the street. I hate convertibles. I despise the fact that the chassis feels like a noodly floppy 60's car over bumps. Mostly it's just one of the cars that doesn't feel like "me". I always say that cars are more than transportation, we wear cars like a suit of clothes. We want to feel comfortable in the car. Sitting in a Miata feels like I'm wearing someone else's pants. They may be great pants, but it just feels weird.
So for years and years I've driven other people's Miatas, loved the hell out of the drive, and then sent them home. Fantastic day, not my problem. Until last night.
This is a 1999 Miata owned by forum member Spacecadet. You might remember him from adventures like "buying Mazdeuce's STS Civic and driving it to nationals and ending up on the cover of SportsCar" or "I'm going to video these parade laps in the R63 the day before it explodes". We have fun. He lets me drive his car. Good guy.
Unfortunately he's caught up in a tornado of things happening all at once. He just accepted a GREAT new job which requires a move, he gets to fly home to have Christmas with his parents for the first time in five years, and his Miata broke. It was acting like it had a fuel issue, then it stopped running. Then when it restarted it turned the exhaust manifold a nice cherry color, and finally it backfired through the intake hard enough to pop the airbox apart. He's got no time to fix the car, no extra car to drive while it's being fixed, nothing to move his stuff in, he's hosed. The easy solution was to move his new car purchase up a year and sell the Miata as is for a loss. That's unacceptable. I told him that as a giant karmic rebalancing act for all of the times Miatas haven't been my problem, he should drop this one off at my house and I'd let it be my problem.
Normal Miata engine, except it's broken.
Battery is dead, went to charge it and the undertray is in the trunk. At least I don't have to take that off. I do have to clean it though. The front of the motor is covered with oil.
And in the armrest are the bolts for the undertray, and the crank sensor. That's probably important.
The suspicion right now is that the timing jumped. Maybe a couple of times. It looks like taking of the valve cover to check is about 8 bolts? Is that right? What does the TDC mark on the crank look like? I've got VERY limited hours to look at things before Christmas, so I'm just going to poke around, see what I can see, and get back to it after the first of the year.
It really is a nice car. The interior is much better than usual for it's age and it's been repainted a sparkly white that is much better than an autocross Miata deserves. It's got a few go-fast suspension bits on it and it's a fun car to drive. The plan is to fix it, and Spacecadet is either going to sell it or keep it depending on how life works out between now and then. There is a part of me that wants the motor to have fragged itself so I can do a K swap and a Paco lift kit and just be dumb, but it's not my car, so we're crossing our fingers for cheap an easy.
