Oops, another one - because this place clearly needs another NA Miata build thread

Rodan said:

Lookin' good so far!

IIRC the 'R' model lip fits all NAs.  I've got an eBay version on my '92.

Thanks. It may have bent in on itself as it was stored upright. I'll give it another shot then. It's not my first choice (I'd prefer a Garage Vary lip), but I like it enough to consider it an improvement.

Dusterbd13 said:

The vapor barrier: i use landscape plastic and duct tape. Not factory, but cheap and damned effective. 

That's plan B - I've done that before, but it would be really nice if I could find an OEM vapor barrier.

Plan B 1/2 is to use some Dynamat or similar to close up the holes.

Not much progress recently, had to spend time fixing my truck (for towing duty for the race car) and I am waiting for parts. Some of which arrived today:

And a little hint as to what's in these boxes:

I'm still in the "beginning to hoard parts" phase, plus I haven't been feeling well for the last week or two, so not much progress. However I couldn't stand wobbling around the house today anymore so I went and pulled the tombstone to see what sort of bad news would hide behind there as I'm planning to replace the headunit and add some JDM 90s flair instrumentation that has been flying around my garage for a while.

Toying with the idea of a shorty console, but either way I'd definitely have to do something with the original console - bunch of broken lugs etc. And not a big fan of the armrest, either.

Nothing unexpected here, including the view of the driveway through the upper shifter boot. I did figure I'd pull the console before ordering the replacements just in case. One of these days I'll find a car that had the boots replaced before I buy it.

Random piece of plastic broken off something, maybe the console?

Someone had clearly been in the center console before and not too carefully. I had to get the big rubber mallet and the impact driver out to undo one of the top screws on the tombstone, a couple of lugs are broken and clips are missing. Hey, it's a 29 year old car.

And - surprise, surprise - we have a radio install I disagree with. One of these days I'll write a book that I'll call "the art of the adapter".

Well, at least they didn't use domestic wire nuts. I guess that makes it a "pro" install. Either way some of that mess has to go and I'll see if I can fix up the OEM wiring loom well enough so I can plug in the adapter for the new headunit. Mind you, given the changes that were made to the wiring already, all it'd do is draw power from the OEM loom.

Speaking of pro installs:

Yes, someone ground away part of the cubby to make the headunit fit. At least that made it easier to remove the whole thing.

In reply to BoxheadTim :

I have an extra console or 2, not mint, but not broken either. I’m guessing you can find what you need locally for cheaper, but if not let me know. 

In reply to Pete Gossett :

Thanks Pete, I'll keep that in mind. I'm pretty sure I don't want a full length console, but I have to figure out what I want first and if I'm willing to spend the money or not.

Found myself with a half hour and an urge to go outside, so I made an attempt to fit the R package replica lip I had cluttering up the garage.

Fits about as good as I expected from a cheap replica lip. I think I'm going with the original plan and get a Garage Vary lip.

Thats with the lip mounted at the two rearmost bolts and clamped to the bumper cover. I have no doubt that it can be fitted and made to look decent with some effort (and some hot water to make the lip pliable) but I don't like the look that much even without the fitting issues.

I have arrived at the slippery slope:

BoxheadTim said:

I have arrived at the slippery slope:

 

Just give in and jump.  It's a fun ride! 

In reply to Rodan :

Given that I very much agree with Keith's philosophy regarding setting up suspension, I'm pretty confident this isn't going to be the last order from FM for this car.

Especially as I freed up some additional funding by selling another car .

In reply to BoxheadTim :

The RX8?

In reply to Pete Gossett :

The RX8 I sold earlier in the year paid for this Miata in a roundabout way. I sold the Mini Cooper yesterday as it had become a bit of a driveway ornament.

In reply to BoxheadTim :

Ah, for some reason I was thinking your wife was attached to the Mini. 

Sorry for the mild derail - what happened with your 996 in the end?

Pete Gossett said:

In reply to BoxheadTim :

Ah, for some reason I was thinking your wife was attached to the Mini. 

She did like it quite a lot, as did I. Actually, I still do like it. Problem was that she doesn't drive a manual and the clutch position kept upsetting my Achilles tendon injury. I've mainly been driving my Miatas or my truck recently so I wouldn't end up limping every time I drove the Mini. And it went to a very good home (fellow SCCA member and track/auto-X enthusiast). Plus my E34 finally came back from the shop (German electrics kept it there for a while) and it being an automatic, it makes a better DD for me than the Mini.

Dammit said:

Sorry for the mild derail - what happened with your 996 in the end?

Insurance totaled it (wrote it off for those in the UK). The eighteen wheeler that hit me bounced me into a concrete barrier at an angle and as a result, the whole front of the car shifted to the right. The only approved fix for that according to Porsche was to replace the whole front and that would've cost around $25k.

Not much build work still as I just came back from a combined work/vacation trip, but somewhere between not racing but going to the track anyway, and working on the honey do list, I picked up this thing:

Pro tip - clean parts sell better. Not that I'm complaining, I got a pretty decent price on this thing and a few minutes with some Simple Green and some elbow grease resulted in this:

Hmm, shiny. Hoping to throw that on the car tomorrow. It's in pretty good shape - the resonator has a couple of scratches on it, but otherwise it's in pretty good shape, came with all gaskets and hardware, and cost me about 1/2 of what a new one would.

Plus it should improve what's on the car by a pretty spectacular margin. Which, given the sorry excuse for an exhaust on the car, should not be hard.

Ended up fitting the exhaust last Sunday. It was straightforward - the exhaust came with all the hardware and (again, thanks to the climate), the exhaust on the car was easy to remove.

Yes, I know, I need to power wash the underside of the car.

One thing I wasn't too impressed with was the way the replacement cat had been welded in:

It does look like they did get the angle on the flange right as the new used exhaust fitted fine with no apparent blow by. Once I figure out what I want to do engine wise I'll probably replace the cat with another aftermarket one anyway.

The new exhaust looked a lot shinier and went out without a hitch.

Unfortunately it was getting so hot that my phone camera overheated, so I don't have anything with the new exhaust fitted. Well, other than the glamour shot at the end:

Overhauling the shifter was another exercise in painting by numbers. I had ordered the shifter rebuild kit from Flyin' Miata, so it was mostly a matter of pulling out the broken rubber bits, replacing the plastic bits in the shifter, replacing the turret oil and throwing everything back together.

The oil coming out of the shifter turret didn't look too bad. I was a bit worried as both the outer and inner rubber boots were torn. While the oil looked bad, I was expecting worse. But then, I'm _always_ expecting worse.

Inner boot fitted - I overfilled the turret a bit as I always do accidentally, but fortunately still had the cardboard from the exhaust change under the car.

Of course, clumsy here dropped one of the bolts that hold the inner boot right between the passenger seat and the transmission tunnel. I ended up pulling the passenger seat out to recover the bolt. The seat has to come out anyway for the planned interior change, plus I have new used seats coming.

A quick test drive confirmed that the shifter action was much better again, plus the exhaust sounds so much better than the partsbin special that had been on the car.

Time to deal with the next "big" interior mod before the really big interior mod. IOW, time to get rid of the fugly steering wheel.

Usual comments and caveats apply - you're playing with a safety device full of explosives, etc, etc, be careful, don't do it. I had disconnected the battery yesterday to make sure that there wasn't much if any residual charge that could set off the airbag. Here's what is going onto the car - the Prototipo was left over from my previous NA and never found a home in an aircooled 911 as I had hoped, plus the Daikei hub is something I've used before. It's one of these "just works" parts and comes with everything necessary to (hopefully) turn off the Airbag light. I'm saying hopefully as the computer is showing a clockspring fault from time to time.

Airbag removal is pretty simple - there are 4 10mm nuts holding the airbag to the wheel, then it's a matter of disconnecting it and unhooking the catch line. I'm pretty sure the steering wheel had never been off the car, so I had to get the +1 breaker bar of persuasion out to get the nut off.

Speaking of getting one's nuts off, don't take the steering wheel nut off all the way. The wheel tends to sit pretty tight on the splines so when you're pulling it off, you'd rather want the nut rather than your face catch it when it finally moves. In this case the wheel came off after some choice words, but at least I didn't have to use the rubber mallet.

I did take off the steering column surround. This isn't strictly necessary but helps with making sure the clock spring is aligned OK and also allowed me to clean out the dust bunnies that have taken up residence in there. While I certainly don't complain about the lack of rust, the dust got everywhere in this car.

Time to read the instructions. Which would be a lot easier if this gaijin could read Japanese, but at least there were enough pictures for me to figure this out. Plus, this isn't the first time I'm using the Daikei boss on a Miata.

The instructions called for wrapping the connectors, airbag sensor defeat and all that in some tape. Unfortunately I couldn't find my loom tape so I had to use electrical tape. I may have to redo this.

Nevertheless, everything fits nicely:

Steering wheel is looking good, and I only had to fit it twice because I used the wrong insert (the part that holds the horn button assembly), so I got to unmount and remount the wheel. Oh well. Haven't taken it out for a drive yet - the last NA this wheel was fitted to had power steering, but this one doesn't.

I bought a set of NB2 surfboard seats on ebay a little while ago and now that I'm seeing movement on them, the next big job will be to remove the whole interior and dash, to swap in the 93LE carpet and dash that is in those "mystery boxes" I mentioned a few posts ago. And order some more bits, like a rollbar and FM suspension.

Which FM suspension?

In reply to Floating Doc :

Haven't decided yet, probably have to call their tech support to discuss.

I don't really need coilovers, so I was thinking about getting the Koni-based suspension, but I did like the VMaxxes I had on my previous NA. I'd love to get the Fox suspension but right now the wallet says no.

I did end up calling FM and spoke to Mike over there to discuss my suspension options. In the end the decision was sorta made for me as the VMaxxes I wanted wouldn't be available until later in the year and I need the suspension before mid-September. So Konis it is, and I duly placed an order.

In other news, my NB2 seats should arrive in the next couple of days so it's time to get serious about pulling the interior. And while I was there, I test fitted my latest acquisition:

Ignore the CAD mount for now - I wanted to see what the mirror looks like before starting to drill holes in the door (these Raydot mirrors require the hole for the electric mirrors that my car doesn't have). Initially I wasn't quite sure but the mirrors are growing on me. Plus they're even lighter than the stock ones, which can never be a bad thing.

Oh look, my inverse Midas touch struck again. FedEx dropped off the NB2 seats today. It's never a good sign when the driver asks you to come to his truck with him to verify the box content .

Box looks like it had fallen off a truck, there are parts missing so I can't assemble the seats (presumably fallen out of the hole that the seat adjuster mechanism made in the box) and one of the two seat adjusters is bent back almost 180 degrees.

Pleased, I am not. Just emailed the seller to see what he has to say. At least the FedEx driver documented on his slip that the box was badly damaged so that should help with a potential insurance claim.

The extra annoying part is that I spend a little extra money on these seats online so I wouldn't have to spent time driving all over creation to get a pair of decent usable seats. Guess that didn't work out too well.

In reply to BoxheadTim :

That sucks. However if you end up with an unneeded but still useable passenger seat I would be interested in it. 

In reply to Pete Gossett :

I may be able to piece together a usable driver's seat. It's the passenger side seat adjuster that's been pretzeld. Unfortunately I think I may have the cover for the passenger side seat adjuster and not for the driver's side one.

Plan for tomorrow was to swap out the dash and the main carpet for the LE ones that I bought not too long ago. The guy I bought the parts off clearly knows how to pack these items well, so everything arrived undamaged.

Well, almost. The dash was in a bag full of styrofoam peanuts, which did a good job protecting the dash and getting anywhere in the vents. They also did a rather good job of sticking to the black painted top of the dash, which appears to have turned into a bit of a gooey mess from the heat or from age. I suspect heat as the dash pads had also become detached. The stuck peanuts helped create this interesting finish:

Looks like I have to pick one of the following options:

a) repaint the top of the dash

b) flock it

c) learn how to recover the top of the dash in alcantara, or have a local shop do it

I'm leaning towards c) but it depends if I can find a shop to do the work in time. Or magically find the time to do it myself.

At least some good news, a vehicle dismantler over in Sacramento has a few sets of NB2 seats in stock so it looks like I'll may be able to at least sort of out the seat situation.

And now it appears I broke the server that is hosting the pictures. Oops.

Phew. And the server is back up again.