Caught up now

Thats gets us up to speed and to the present. The miata now sits in the shop with a dented fender waiting for some time for me to come and give it some love and get it back up to speed again. Everything from now on will be posted as it happens.

Drifting, a wheel, some vinyl, and some damage

Here's the miata after the last round of mods sporting some seriously mismatched offsets with +40 in the front and +5 in the back. It looks goofy but its temporary until I get another set of front rims.


After that event I got my hands on a sparco course wheel off craigslist and got it installed. I really like the deeper dish and smaller size. It made a lot bigger difference than I thought.


I also started a little vinyl business and decided to do some advertising on my car.


And here's some action shots of the car with the new graphics doing what it does best.




Unfortunate all good things come to an end and my miata's reputation as being the cleanest drift car at the track was one of them. I competed in the D1 underground licensing for fun. I was ranked 9th out of 16 in my initial runs which was an interesting place. The top and bottom placers were matched up to allow the best qualifying drivers to advanvce and not knock eachother out in the first competition rounds. This meant that drivers like me exactly in the middle of the pack faced very closely matched opponents. This pretty much also meant that we were both completely new to tandem and inevitably I went too deep on the last corner and couldn't make the transition and got tagged. Fortunately this is just an excuse for the new paint job I've been wanting for a while now.

Fabrication, a bench, and a seat

Next up I had to do some fabrication. While on a trip to SPL to get some parts for Ashley's RB25 240sx I spotted a nice looking carbon bucket and asked about it. It turned out to be one of the last display models of SPL's old seats. I picked it up for a steal and took it home to install. I tried to install it the same night as the roll cage however the bride seat rail that I purchased for it turned out to put it up against the cage and far too high for my 6'2" frame to fit under the cage.

With this in mind I went to Home Depot and picked up a nice Rigid cut off saw to make sure all my cuts worked nicely and then to the metal shop for the stuff to make a bench and some seat brackets. I think the end results speak for themselves. The bench works even though its a tad... industrial and the seat brackets came out extremely nice. The seat now fits in the car perfectly and sits with the bottom touching the floor. Despite this I still do not sit as low as I would like and I plan on actually modifying the seat pans in the future to allow an even lower seating position.

Roll Cage

The next thing I did was ditch my hard dog roll bar in favor of a full hard dog cage. Again this came courtesy of Chelsea Denofa who hooked me up with a great price on the cage AND a JIC racing crossflow radiator. The cage was a bit of a hassle to install but I managed to get it in and re-welded in a couple of days.

My next set of mods came quickly without a lot of pictures being taken inbetween but here's what I have from this stage:

I got a new set of BC racing coilovers to replace the old worn out stock struts. Thanks to Chelsea Denofa who helped develop these for getting me a great deal on a brand new set. Once I got them set up right the BC's really made the car come alive. Finally I was able to use all the power I had availible.

Next I installed a new front air dam courtesy of Home Depot's garden section. Despite how ghetto this seems I really like it. It looks great (imho) and it is nearly indestructable. I've run it over many cones, scraped it in and out of driveways, and tagged tires with it and it doesn't even show a mark.

Finally I pulled the old and questionably accurate boost gauge in favor of a nice greddy that I had on hand from another old project. The new gauge looks great, matches the stock gauges extremely well, and did actually reveal that my boost setting were a bit different than were being shown with the old unit.

Early miata photos

Here's the pictures from when I first got the miata. At this point it had the stock suspension, a hard dog roll bar, turbo kit, and a borla exhaust. That was IT. No other supporting mods at all. There's a long road ahead for this little machine but first the starting point:

(Please forgive the poorly resized images, I'm still getting used to this blogging thing.)

Me and the miata

They say you never forget your first love...kiss...first time ha-... yeah you get the idea. I certainly never forgot my first fast car. I was 15 and it was a '96 Mazda miata. Silver racing stripes, blue/green paint, turbo kit, 250 to the wheels. It belonged to an older retired friend of mine who decided to take me out for a little ride. 10 mind blowing minutes later he pulled into a parking lot and asked if I wanted to take it back. 10 even more mind blowing minutes later I had driven my first RWD car, first turbo car, and fallen in love. That car probably got me interested in cars and imports more than any other factor.

When I was 17 my old friend was selling the car. I didn't have the money to buy it but my girlfriend did and she picked it up to replace her stock 1.6L miata. She daily drove it for a couple of years and did nothing more than put new tires on it.

When I was 19 she traded her father for a trailblazer so that she had something that could haul more than a passenger and a backpack at the same time.

When I was 21, her father mentioned that he was thinking about getting rid of the miata to focus on his corvette. 10 minutes later I finally owned the car I had been dreaming about for 6 years.

Amazingly the miata was still in pretty much the same form it had been in when I drove it. Same paint, same turbo kit, same engine, about 50-60k more miles though. The reupholstered leather seats were a lot more aged and the engine was down on power quite a bit thanks to well aged rings and a lot of abuse. It still had its factory suspension, a set of late-model miata rims, and a hard dog roll bar. I bought it to use as a weekend fun car however that never happened thanks to a couple factors. First off my girlfriend was daily driving a Ford F250 which drank gas and was a pain to park. I loaned the miata to her for a couple months to drive instead. Several months later we were getting close to completing our RB25 conversion on the 240SX we shared as a track car when we decided that we each wanted a car for ourselves. Since I already had the miata and she had more money into the RB25 car she bought me out of it and I took the money to upgrade the miata. You might think that I would have been dissapointed in losing my weekend car but I really didn't mind. For one I realized quickly that at 6'2" it took some determination to drive the miata for long periods of time. I also realized that there was no way the miata was ever going to be an elegant weekend cruiser. Hyperactive, fun to drive, jellybean styled go-kart, but never elegant. With that in mind I decided that going full-race was the way to enjoy it to the max of its potential.

Getting started

I'm new to this whole blogging thing however it seems like the easiest way to keep all of the build of my cars in one place for viewing and referencing. With that in mind, stay tuned for the build!