congratulations! you made it worse

When I was in highschool I bought a Miata.

When I was in college I bought another Miata.

At graduation I bought, you guessed it, another Miata. Sometimes a mf do not learn from previous mistakes. I consider it all to be a continuation of the same vision I had when I bought my first car in 2013.

I like these chassis and had a small stockpile of parts from the previous iterations of the car. They're fun to work on and dead simple, parts are still kinda cheap in 2023 and frankly I just like small cars.

At the time of purchasing the car I had some wheels being rebuilt by Wheelflip in California. In between the purchase date and those wheels being completed/shipped to me, I took care of a bunch of engine maintenance and suspension work to sorta baseline the car. So timing belt, seals, ball joints, tie rods, blah blah blah. The car was 90% original and came with one mismatched tire so it pulled hard to the right. The soft top was destroyed so the inside was super moldy. Cleaned it up and took the soft top frame entirely out of the car and slapped a hardtop on. It started and ran well and since this was my third miata I know where to look for rust, which is the primary reason I got rid of the first two chassis. This chassis is gloriously rust-free. Also this one was an a-package car so it came with a Torsen, the last two chassis were open-diff. Some grossness:

Refurbed the calipers too:

I had a hardtop and bride zeta leftover from my black car, I purchased the hardtop for $900 and seeing them for $2200 makes my stomach turn but I will end my rant before I begin. Look at how fuckin stupid this car looked:

Anyways my wheels finally showed up (took like 10 months) and I test fit them and they looked tight:

I was planning on just running a big lip ala corolla styling, so I got a Nue lip which is just a knockoff mazdaspeed a spec lip without the holes. It fits like dogshit which I was not expecting for a $500 piece but oh well:

Got tires on and popped on an r-lip I had laying around as an interim look until the car got painted. Looked stupid but cool and I rolled around like this for a while:

Eventually I rattlecanned the NUE lip and installed a Joyfast exhaust, Racing Bead header, 10lb flywheel, and a bunch of other shit. Light flywheel is the best thing you can do for a Miata IMO. Also rattlecanned red looked super shitty next to the faded oem paint but we will pretend like it doesnt for now:

I also had these laying around for a while but couldnt put them on my 96 chassis because of obd2. My 94 chassis tho....

Fast forward a bunch, I broke some things and fixed some things but the car remained pretty much as-is for a year. Sooooo mo aero mo problems?

Fuck unpainted multicolored cars, all my homies hate unpainted multicolored cars. So I learned how to paint a car and painted my car. It was a horrifying thing to attempt but I am soooo glad that I did.

Sanded:

Painting:

Painted:

Back on the road, just one day after my birthday:

SO I enjoyed that spec of the car for a while. And now that it was painted I wasn't ashamed to drift it, if I am going to be driving shitty I better at least have a decent looking car lol. So I started visiting my local skidpad in summer 2022 and boy I sure did suck. The car performed decently, the ride was a bit soft and I didn't realize how much PSI you really need to run on stock miata power (I was at 45 psi, I wasn't able to link any turns until I bumped it up to 60psi.

Sooooooooooooooooooo back to my ITBs. I installed those over winter, theyre from an AE111 Corolla using a now-discontinued adapter. I am currently running megasquit 2 but I wish I had gone for Link. Oh well! They sound fuckin sick in conjunction with the joyfast exhaust, I am proud to say it is a really really good sounding car. I got it remote-tuned early in the spring, and it runs okay. There are defeintely some off-throttle spot that need smoothing but overall I cannot complain.

Around this time I also put some tires (165/60r14 lol) on the 6.5j +15 TE37s (god size) I bought earlier in the year:

AAAAAAAAAAANNNND that just about catches us up to present day. I'll probably make another lessons-learned post about the four throttle install later when I'm not at work.

Since I already have my flickr up here are a couple other things I've been doing. Got myself a barn find FC. N/A, M/T, 20k miles, got it mostly-baselined and running. I'd like to restore it but it doesn't really need much lol. It was all complete and original down to the tires.

Been helping another homie with his drift na6:

Also painted another homie's aero for his ap1:

ttyl drift club