mx5cartalk.com

Hi all
I have been meaning to do this for a while, but haven’t for lots of slack reasons I am not going to waste your time with haha.
I have had this car for over 6 years and a lot has happened in that time.
Looking back through the pictures I think damn that’s a while ago and sure I did that. So some of you may get a laugh out of it.
I am going to try to remember what I’ve done from start to finish and maybe end for this shell.
These are some recent pictures of what it looked like before today as I have started pulling it down for reasons I’ll explain as I get towards where I am atm in the build thread.
Anyways here we go.

Sexy.

Please keep us posted.

I haven’t got a picture from when I first got it but it was just a stock 1989 common red Australian delivered mx5.
My reason for buying it in the first place I am unsure but have never regretted it.
I originally payed $7800 for it and it had about 200’000ks on the clock
Everything on it was stock nothing changed from factory.
It had no aircon no power steer and no hardtop.

Not long after I brought it Tony my house mate at the time had a Turbo Excel.
Yes I know it sounds wrong but it was quite surprising with full suspension strut braces front and rear and 14psi going through the motor was rather quick and often wiped smiles off commodore/falcon drivers faces from the lights and around corners.
Anyway he had a set of 17x7 chrome wheels on it and we decided let’s put them on the mx to see what they look like.
At the time I thought it was awesome but looking back on it now I think why did I do that????
Here are some pics.



Moving on The first things I did to it was being a proud young hoon that I was.
Exhaust shop for something loud to make it sound like it was going fast haha
Went for a 2 ¼” inch from the cat back, through a 2 ½” lukey muffler and a massive 4” stainless dump tip that fitted neatly in the exhaust hole in the rear bar.
The standard wheels were staying for the time being but decided supercheap matt black paint was needed and centre caps removed for that cheap watanabe look.
I wanted it lower so I fitted with help from a mate. A set of lovells Lowered Springs which did the job.
Also the numberplate got screwed onto the front bar off to the side as it seemed like the thing to do at the time
This is pretty much what it looked like at this stage.


Mind the crap photo but this is a few of us hanging out one night and is the only picture i have from the front at this stage.

The next things to be done were stereo a different steering wheel and a set of wheels.

With the Stereo I changed the door speakers with a pair of mdf speaker mounts cut to shape of the standard covers that clipped on so to fit neatly and not have to cut and shut 6 ½” splits in the doors. I used a pair of Jaycar Kevlar series speakers that I had from my previous car.
Wired in an old alpine flex 4channel amp and bridged it to 2chaneels to drive the splits.
To finish it off a pioneer head deck. This had mp3 cd playback. (Back then wow) haha
I had been playing with car stereos since before I got my licence so setting it all up was easy for me.

The standard momo Steering Wheel I did not like. When I got offered a different one I jumped at it.
It was also a momo wheel but had Red and Black Hand grip with a chrome centre also was smaller than the original.

I came across a Set of ROH Adrenalin 4x100 17x7s off a lancer at a wrecker for $400.
I remembered the ad that use to be in hot4s mag, advertising them on a Honda S2000 and really liked the look of them.
I Got out the Supercheap paint again and gave them a number of coats then a clear over the top and to me they looked pretty good.
Dropped them off to Bob Jane to get some tyres, can’t remember what brands but the front ones were a far better tyre then the back.

This is what it looked like after I had done these things

Hi Chris.

The car is still looking great!

(btw, Nik here, you came to Pam and my dodgy day a while back)

I was getting into drifting whenever it was wet and I wasn’t at work. I was out somewhere trying new slides hand braking into corners and spinning out occasionally haha. Wasn’t unusual to see a pair of standards on the back and the 17s on the front. Dam it looked silly but the grip and slip worked well. Plus they were both black so didn’t stand out a lot at night.
Was great fun! Sometimes with others and sometimes alone.

I use to go to industrial areas at night which were deserted had some flat wide streets good corners and away from houses to keep a low profile from the coppers.
Also found large roundabouts were great fun! The off camber helping the back end out.
Due to the short wheel base of the mx5 there was an angle and speed you had to keep otherwise it would spin out or loose its slide.
Was great fun glad I didn’t get caught doing it though, as they had just brought the hooning laws in and the police were having quite a lot of fun with their new found power. They were ok really though as long as you didn’t do anything stupid around town, I think they turned a blind eye.

Due to this new found fun I was putting a lot of strain on the poor standard open diff.
Eventually broke and had to get towed back to the house.
A mate was renting a place with a hoist in the garage which was awesome.
He also had a welder so off I went there the following day to weld up the diff. We pulled it out melted a few nuts bolts and anything else we could find into the centre and refitted it.

Welded diff wow this was fun to drive. First slide span out. I was trying to transfer the weight like I use to but because both rear wheels were now spinning all the time I didn’t have to as much. After some more abuse I broke the weld on the left side and was left with the right wheel driving which was nothing else but crap.

Lucky for me I got offered a LSD Diff from a Ford TX3 turbo 4wd a friend had sitting around to see if it would work.

So back to my mates that had the hoist.
Took the diff cradle out pulled the old centre out and started looking at the difference. The open diff had equal drive shafts. But the lsd had a small and large but both equalled out the same. Went to Mazda and ordered some new seals. The TX3 diff had a different ratio and I thought stuff it I’ll try it and see what it’s like, seeing I had it apart. So basically put everything from the TX3 lsd into the MX5 open wheeler Diff housing.
I didn’t take note on what ratio it was but ended up with a taller ratio as the car didn’t rev as high doing 100ks in 5th as it did before. This was good for what I wanted to do and kept it like that.

Next mod was a simple pod filter made a bit of difference if I remember right.
Also scored a new steering wheel a friend had on his N14 Pulsar he was selling. It was a sparco sport flat bottom with a quite large grip which I loved was so happy when I got it. To my surprise they are still selling them. Must be a success but I can totally understand why.
Anyway this is the wheel

hks_kansei wrote:Hi Chris.

The car is still looking great!

(btw, Nik here, you came to Pam and my dodgy day a while back)

Hey Nik. Now I know who you are on here. You are no longer safe haha.
Gee i have some Crap to put up to catch up to where i am now.
FFS lol

I was lucky enough to be looking through the trading post one day at work.
Happened to be a Red hardtop for an mx5 in the parts section for sale.
I COULDNT OF MISSED THE PHONE IF I TRIED!!!!!!
BANG!!!!!!!!! DONE BROUGHT SOLD I SAID!!!!!!

I was living in Devonport Tasmania at the time and it was in Launceston which is only an hour drive away. Whoo was on the road that night with a mate. Top down on the way hardtop on the way back.
What a difference it made!!!
Worked out great as my mx5 already had the mounting pins fitted, and the hardtop was red talk about a match.

Turned out the fella that had it traded in his mx5 and simply didn’t think about the hardtop in the garage when he did. 6 months later he put it in the trading post and I was lucky enough to call up first and say sold.
BONUS!!!!!!!!

I was getting into Touge Driving.
In Tassie there are endless amounts of fantastic roads to drive on.
A real mx5 driving heaven!!!!!!!
If you haven’t been to Tassie before I highly recommend going for a week and meeting up with the Tassie mx5 chapter for a look around.

I use to go out about 1-2am missing near all traffic plus at night you could usually see lights coming. For some reason most wildlife wasn’t around at this hour which helped keeping the road clear for more fun.

After doing this for a bit I decided new Globes were a must as the standard Lights just didn’t cut it at night. I got a pair of Phillips Crystal clear I think they were. Made a massive difference. Well worth the money for them.

One night I was going up a road I knew well having dríven up it countless times. I was going round a hairpin and decided to dive into it faster then I usually did. Turned out that was a bad idea.
I went into the bank and bent the front left guard and lower control arm. I managed to limp back home turning the steering wheel the wrong way to go straight and traveling at 50kph.

The next day I went to Mazda and ordered a new lower control arm with new bushes. Then came back home jacked the car up and proceeded to see what else I did. Bashed the guard out roughly so it would clear the wheel ok, and then I pulled the bent lower control arm out. It was stuffed so in the bin it went new control arm arrived came home and put it in. Everything else bolted up fine I thought wow for a small car they must take a lot to really stuff them up. Took it down for an alignment and everything there checked out fine so was happy.

I was happy to have it back on the road driving again. Wasn’t too long before I was going for drives again at night. I was a bit cautious at first but my confidence built up again. Till I pushed myself again and went into another bank happened to be the right side this time. This one was a lot harder and I cracked the front bar as well as bending the front guard and lower control arm.
I went to Mazda again and ordered another Arm (they remembered me from the other time) Pretty sure they had a laugh about it. Was all a learning curve for me as I started realising I needed to drive the car to its ability and not try to push it.
This time fixing it was a bit harder as the front shock was bent at the bottom and the bolt wouldn’t go through with the new control arm. I wasn’t a big spender so instead of getting a new strut I put it in a vice and tried bending it back.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha THIS DID NOT WORK!!!!!
So me being dodgy I put it back in the car and looked at it again. I remember doing this because it was a laugh throughout my mates for the next couple of weeks. I put a spoon through the hole and bent it so it wouldn’t come back out. Dodgy as but seemed fine back then as the shock end sat in the lower control arm. The MX5 was back and I didn’t push it like I had in the past again knowing what I had done not once but twice.

OOps

A while went by and nothing really changed with the car.
Till one day in the rain I was coming off the highway at a bridge and looked left and right quickly and pulled out.
Turned out I failed to see a lancer of all cars coming towards me. (Still swear he didn’t try not to hit me)
I stepped on it but the wheels just span and couldn’t get out of the way he clipped the back of me and sent me into a spin I was lucky and didn’t hit anything else moved the car over to a traffic island and got out of the car to go and see how he was.
Didn’t even look at my car. Didn’t really want to.
Result


Anyways this was not cool as third party didn’t cover me and I had done quite a bit of damage as you can see. I handed in the rego and sat the car out the back of the house with a tarp on it. Also kicked it a few times didn’t help but for some reason made me feel a bit better.

Found a 1983 Toyota Corolla KE70 with rego for 400 bucks was stoked so had a daily. Which turned out to be a future project but this is about the mx5 not the ke70.

So as you can see I had been making a rather good mess of the car.
I decided it was time to make amends with it and fix it up also change the colour seeing most parts needed respraying. Also made some plans for a number of other things to do to it while it was off the road.

I was at a mates place having a bbq one day and he said a fella at his work was a panel beater and said he would have a go at my front guards. So I thought can’t hurt and they went off to see what he could do with them.
About 3 weeks later they came back as he was doing them in his spare time. They didn’t have much bog in them and were pretty straight apart from around the Wheel arches. I was looking at Body kits on the internet but didn’t really want to change the front or rear bars from the stock ones as I like the style they are.

Anyways stumbled across these from carmate. I thought perfect will hide the guard wheel arches that haven’t been repaired properly. I didn’t understand flares much back then so they didn’t really strike to me as flares.

This is the pic on there site of the full kit but i only got the flares

Due to the car being off the road I decided on a colour.
It was going to be black; I didn’t know what black but knew it’s got to be black.

This decided I thought about the wheels I still liked the ROHs so got the tyres off and sent them to work with a mate to get sand blasted.
They looked awesome when they came back!! Just raw alloy had sparkles n all kinds of stuff through them.
I should have just got them clear coated and left them like that for something different, but I had already decided on getting them powder coated white.
The next day I dropped them off to get powder coated in fridge white.
When I got the call to pick them up the result for think it was $110 they were awesome, easy to clean and white as white could be.

Here is a pic after the tyres went back on.

Right After getting a few other bits.
Smoked front indicators, side indicators, and Yellow fog lights with park lights built in them.
I didn’t want to put my parkers in the new Smoked front indicators. Due to the holes not being in them and found these fog lights so problem was fixed already for me.


I got some alloy and what I thought was stainless bonnet pins. (Turned out they were not as they rusted in a year and looked crap.
I also got a pair of fake carbon clear rear tail lights, but after looking at them decided fake is crap so in the bin with those.


The driver’s side rear guard was beyond repair so I sourced a cut out from another mx5 from a wrecker. Turned out I should have gone to Mazda and priced a new one as it was only $100 more than what I paid for a second hand one. To make it worse I discovered the second hand one had a fair bit of bog already in it. DANG!!!!

I had seen with a lot of Hondas they mould an air inlet into the front bar which I liked the idea of that a lot. So I cut my plastic front bar out and fixed in a fiberglass duct towards the pod filter. The end result I think looks great and serves the purpose I wanted it for.


The flares were next I didn’t know how I was going to put them on as they didn’t have and holes or obvious mounting positions.
You just lined them up and ………. Yeah and stuck after that.
After talking to a few people on ideas there were a lot to think about.
One night though in my slightly drunkish wisdom I decided counter sunk screws would do the trick nicely.
I woke up the following morning to my house mate saying we should go and have a look and see what we did.
All I could think of was new set of flares coming up.
But when we opened the garage the end result wasn’t that bad. So for the rest of the day we spent doing the other three flares.
Anyway here is a mock-up of what it looked like after prep work rear guard fitted etc. I’ll let the pic say the words.

Just found some more pictures of it before it went down to the spray booth.
This was after I got my rear bar back from getting plastic welded.
The rear garnish was not salvageable so got another one with the rear guard.
Instead of getting another rear bar I decided on getting this one fixed.
I also got the reflectors filled in and did the same to the front bar to match.

Spray time.
This was just after we brought the car out of the oven to see daylight for the first time.
Looked fantastic!!!!



Also I got a permit so I was able to drive it home.
No windows and feeling rather cold with a stupid grin on my face all the way.

I got back home to put it back together with everything else I had collected.
Also put the windows, interior and other parts back in.
After putting it together it was a matter of waiting till the following week.
So I could get a rwc done to be able to re-register it on the road again.
This was just some pics from around that time.




This is the first day it came out of the shed.
Was worth all the work for what I had achived.