LilPlum

Bit of context: I grew up reading car magazines & playing games like need for speed. I finally started making some money and was ready for my first project car. I knew I wanted a popular car that would have lots of parts easily available so I chose …. a v6 97 mustang. Terrible decision obviously. I bought an absolute stinker that leaked from every orifice & ran poorly. After a few years of suffering I decided it was time to start fresh & try again.

I always read great things about Miata’s so I set off to find one. Sep 2023 I found the titular “Lil Plum” a 2000 SE with terrible paint, a hard dog rollbar, and 118k on the odo. I’m in Dallas, the seller was in Austin and I had business in Houston so I got a friend to take me to Austin, bought it and drove down to htown.


Lil Plum


About 15 min into the drive, the car started bucking terribly at highway speeds & losing power intermittently. I was regretting my purchase and wondering if the car would give out & let me get smushed by a semi. Eventually I stopped to put more gas (and change my pants). After that, it ran like a top. No more issues just pure enjoyment of the wind in my hair for the next two hours. No notable events on the drive back from Houston either, just pure joy.

LilPlum

Of course as soon as things are running well it is time to start making changes. I began by adding padding to the rollbar, installing an LRB gas cover the PO had not done. Previous cover was fully rusted. I gave it a little bit of gentle persuasion and pulled it out in chunks. I totally ruined the seats for the plastic nut inserts but I used rivnuts to replace them which worked great.

The car started having occasional idle issues & was leaking from the valve cover so I figured I’d dip my toe in on the mechanical side. I removed the intake & the valve cover. Cleaned everything up (on the inside, I wasn’t up to the challenge of scrubbing the oil off the valve cover) and buttoned it all back up. Seemed to work well enough.

The aftermarket double din radio was not working well & did not raise the automatic antenna. I replaced that with an alpine Ute 73 single din to make some room for aftermarket gauges. Wiring was a daunting adventure to figure out but I think things turned out ok.

I installed a glow shift boost gauge for more motivation and because it was the simplest gauge.


Boost (just vacuum for now &#128542

The ultimate goal of Lil Plum is to turbo it. To that end after much deliberation I bought an MS3pnp and a complete Kraken turbo kit. After reading a ton I also got a cheapo catch can, an aem wideband, shifter rebuild, glow shift sandwich plate, oil temp & pressure gauge, a new radiator, fluidampr, 949 coolant reroute.

I installed the catch can and was very pleased with myself.


Excuse the shitty photo

After hopping onto MT to read about other’s catch can installs I was quickly humbled. My hose routing was all wrong and I swallowed my pride & redid it following the ultimate catch can guide. (No breather installed for now).

I replaced the torn cream seats with NB2 surfboards that only had a couple split seams .