Hello, my name is Connor. I've been on this forum for a few years, posting the occasional stupid question. I've had my 95 miata for about 3 years now, and i've finally got it in a "decent" place, with a plan to finally turbo it. So with my car in a good spot so I can finally drive it how I want too and only worry about making it faster, in addition to now vaguely knowing what i'm doing/talking about, I realized I should probably make a build thread.

Context:

I had just gotten into cars after working at an audi dealership for a few months and like every stupid teenager decided to get the the worst car possible... a WRX.



In august of 2021, I got a brand new 2021 WRX, my thinking was that with it being brand new, as long as I took care of it would have no problems with it. Over the next year and some change, it broke 6 times. I had never modified it, nor neglected maintenance so thankfully it was all covered under warranty, and with it being only the A/C that broke I could still drive it (having no ac in the arizona summer is something I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy). During that painful time, my dad did the worst thing he ever did, he paid for me to go to an HPDE day. On paper it was great idea, it's fun, it would teach me how to properly drive my car, and would steer me away from the takeover/street racing/hooliganry scene, and towards a better more responsible way to enjoy cars. In reality putting a young dumb impressionable teenager who just finished binge watching initial D on race track would result in less than optimal financial decisions.



After having the most fun i've ever had and being bit by the track bug, I decided that I wanted to build a track car. Thankfully I was smart enough recognize that turning a leased wrx into track build was beyond stupid, and I started looking for something cheap and old.

For $2500 I got myself a clean title, rust free, no accidents, bone stock, "single" owner, and "running" 1995 Miata. This one was owned by the same guy from 1995-2021, during which time he had put about 160k miles on it. Tragedy struck in 2015 when the car blew a head gasket, days turned to weeks, weeks to months, months to years, until 2021 he realized he would never get it running after it had sat in this condition for so long, so he scrapped it. Thankfully the local junkyards will try to sell cars whole if they are in decent enough shape before scrapping them, so this one was saved from the crusher. Sadly its new owner quickly realized that they had no idea what they were doing and listed on facebook marketplace, and that's where I came in. After having saved up a measly 2500 and desperately wanting to properly scratch the track bug, and seeing what looked like a perfectly clean miata that only needed moderate work, I bought it. I was told that it only needed a head gasket and new cat to get it running properly, and after the current owner started the car up and let it run for a minute, I believed him.

November 2021, Enter the eater of parts:



After getting to it towed to the automotive program at the community college I was going to, I quickly loaded the parts cannon with everything needed to change the headgasket and fix any other minor issues I noticed. Over the course of a few hours me and my classmates tore everything down to get the cylinder head off and see the damage. We found that the gasket blew between cylinders 3 and 4, but no real damage had been done. I sent the head off the machine shop to get it milled and checked for cracks or any other issues, and in the meantime cleaned everything up as best as I could. With not much time left in the semester, I had to have it towed to my dads garage so I could continue working on it.







I'll post more in the morning, it will probably take me a day or two get this thread up the the present time, with how much stuff has happened between me and this car. I'll try to condense it down as much as possible.

 

Condense it? Nah, we want the gory details, the gorier the better!

Good start deserves cat!!

Now, it's morning here, where is P2?

 

Sorry for taking so long to post the next part, my computer decided that being stuck in a boot loop was great a idea, so I spent most of my day trying to fix it, before eventually throwing in the towel and reinstalling windows. Now that its working again and i've re-downloaded everything, it's time to get this show back on the road.

After a few weeks my cylinder head came back from the machine shop with a clean bill of health and a freshly milled mating surface. The machine shop only had to take .003 off to get it flat so I knew that whatever event caused the headgasket to pop wasn't too dramatic. I put the head back on, and installed a new water pump and timing kit, as well as resealing anything that even looked like it could leak. Once the engine was back together I realized that I had no idea which connectors and hoses went where, and that I had not documented well enough to figure out where they went, so I spent about a month doing research to find out where everything went too. I had finally gotten the engine back together enough to start it and make sure I put everything back together correctly, and after about 20 seconds of cranking the engine sputtered for half a second then died.





The problem was that the engine was getting nowhere near enough fuel, after a week of looking over old and incomplete wiring diagrams I finally traced the problem to a corroded wire. After using this opportunity the replace the who knows how many years old gas, and confirming that the fuel pump was working I went to fire it up. It started and ran for 3 seconds before I shut it off because of awful noises it was making. There was no tach signal and it only seemed to be running on 3 cylinders which pointed towards the wrong coil pack being installed. This was the start of when my dad said I coined what he says is my catchphrase, "one more part".





After replacing the coil pack with correct one, it ran and stayed running, but idled at 3000 rpms, and wasn't running smoothly, and to add insult to injury the check engine light was on. The CEL was on for the EGR valve, 02 sensor, and atmospheric pressure sensor. After looking into what caused each of these codes it seemed that my ecu was fried, because the atmospheric pressure sensor was part of the ecu, it would need replacing. This is where my ignorance starts to show, I assumed because one thing in the ecu was broken that everything else was caused by the bad ecu... in other words, one more part.




After buying another Ecu and having the same symptoms (minus the code the for atmospheric pressure sensor), I realized that it was more than just the ecu. I did a smoke test on the intake and a lot of smoke poured out of the back of the intake manifold, so I "temporarily" deleted the egr to eliminate the vacuum leak by using delete plates and new gaskets to seal it off. But during the process of this I realized the the threads for the egr on the oem shorty header were boogered as were threads in the o2 sensor bung. Being the moron I was, I decided that this was the perfect excuse to get a set of long tube headers as that would get me brand new threads for the egr and o2 sensor... one more part. Being the moron I was, I gambled and bought a set of raceland headers. Surprisingly the fit and finish wasn't that bad for a $250 header... except for the egr port and. The threads were correct, but the port was angled wrong, however since I had already deleted the egr, I just used the remaining block off plate to fully delete it instead of just the solenoid. It also rubbed up against the coolant pipe that ran under the headers, but some heat and "persuasion" got the pipe to an angle where it didn't touch anything. The engine still ran poorly, but my miata was now able to move under its own power. Despite it being obvious that I was missing something obvious (I later found out I had done the timing wrong and was off a tooth), I thought that my non functioning power steering and a/c was the problem, and so came the great deleting.

 

The first thing to go was my power steering, this is the only delete I did prematurely that I don't regret. It was leaking like sieve, and the rack would have to be taken out and have the seals replaced in order for it to stop leaking. After having driven a friends miata which had a ps delete and it leaving a good impression, I decided that it was better to just depower the rack when I took it out instead of resealing it... and because "race" car. I took it completely apart and cut off the internal piston that was in it, as well as removing all the old dirt and grease, and then putting new grease on. I also replaced the inner tie rod ends while it was out. After having properly depowered the rack, I added plugs to cover the holes where the lines used to go, set the adjustment right, reinstalled it, and eyballed the toe. After a quick test drive (with the accessory belt off as the ac was still there), the steering felt much better than it was before, granted the bar was set pretty low.

 

This is my biggest regret with this car, the deletion of my a/c and interior. I did it this early on because I thought I would be racing it much sooner than I thought I would. I was expecting that it would get a roll cage in the next month or two and start doing events soon after... this still has not happened. I forgot to mention in my first post that while it was at the automotive program at the school I went to, I had the a/c system looked at and found it to be completely empty of refrigerant, and after hooking up some nitrogen gas to it, we found it be leaking from several places. While it was obvious that the a/c was broken and would need fixing, I wish I would have at least tried to fix it, instead of immediately deleting it, as this car has been "properly" running for 2 whole arizona summers now, and having a/c in 120 degree weather would have been kinda nice, so i could have driven it more or had the times I did drive it be less miserable... doubly so as when I took the a/c out, I took the interior with it.

I removed all of the lines, unbolted the compressor, removed the condenser and drier. Since I was taking all the ac stuff out of the engine bay, I thought that it would be a great idea to remove the parts of the a/c system that was inside the car. Somehow when I removed the dash I managed to not damage any part of it, despite the fact I had little no idea what i was doing and was working with 30 year old plastic that had been cooked by the arizona sun for 23 of those 30 years (only part of this delete I was proud of). I also took the heater core out when I did this and looped the lines for the heater circuit, this I don't regret as arizona never gets cold enough for a heater to be a requirement. I left the dash out, just incase I had to go back in there and mess with any of the wiring for any reason, I did remove the dash bar from the dash assembly and put that back in so the steering rack could be held in place. But with past me's infinite wisdom, the rest of the interior and passenger seat came out as well.



Ignore the gauge cluster held in by zip ties, it does get a proper bracket later on.

I wish I had left the interior in, or at least the shell of the dashboard (accidently dropped a wheel on a few days after i took it out, completely shattering it), because a gutted interior with no roll cage looks jank as hell. This is the number one thing I wish I could have told past me to not do, as at best a 50lbs weight savings on what was/still kinda is a street car isn't worth not having cupholders or a radio.

I got 3 posts up today despite a not very compliant computer, Ill get more up tomorrow, hopefully getting to right before I built the motor.

 

I did this same thing to my car right after I bought it off my dad. Threw pristine 90-93 carpet away, deleted power steering, radio, etc. Fast forward to today, and it's got PS back in, carpet back in, and ~$150 in stereo equipment.

Live and learn I guess, enjoy it while you're young!

 

Damn, I couldn't imagine doing that to a pristine car. I got one that was pretty rough so I wouldn't feel bad if/when I ruined it. The interior on it wasn't in the best shape, dash was cracked, carpet was stained, ripped seats, so nothing of significant value was lost... but it was still all there. It just would have been nice to have a center console for my over priced coffee and at least the shell of a dashboard so it wouldn't have looked so jank.

 

As expected deleting the a/c and ps didn't fix the problem, it still felt like a slight improvement, could have just been the slight reduction in what the motor had to spin, maybe it was because both systems were almost empty and that was causing problems, could have just been the placebo effect. But it would have been much smarter to just take the belt off in the meantime. After a month of not being able to find a smoking gun (forgot to check timing), with compression and leak down tests giving my engine a clean bill of health, every cylinder was getting spark and fuel, and the only code being for the egr that I deleted, I thought that i could have gotten another bad ecu. I installed a wideband sensor in effort to try and get more information as to what was happening in the engine, it showed that it was running so lean that it was at the max of what the sensor could detect. Unbeknownst to me, the AEM UEGO I got was bad out of the box and was not displaying correctly, and this sent me on a wild goose chase. It seemed to be a fuel issue, so I replaced the fuel pump, fuel sock, fuel filter, every single rubber fuel line, fpr, and sent my injectors out to be rebuilt.





The car did run a little bit better after this, but it still ran badly enough that it was still obvious something was wrong (timing), so I started looking through wiring diagrams again, checking every single wire to make sure it was going to where it was supposed to, no shorts, or excessive resistance. I found some bad wiring doing this, but nothing that related to operation of the engine. At this point I was at loss as to what could have been wrong, I had checked everything that could have been checked (except the timing), which lead me to think that I could have another bad ecu. But this time I didn't want to gamble on a used oem ecu so I decided getting a standalone, as with my car being a 1995 as long as the tail pipe emissions were at the right levels I could pass emissions not matter how modified it was.




While researching for which ecu I wanted to run, I found a Facebook market place post of someone who gave up on their dreams, and had a bunch of new in box go fast parts. For only 1k I snagged a set of Motegi MR146 15x8+28 rims wrapped in brand new (still had stickers on) 225/50R15 R888R's, Skunk2 64mm throttle body, and Speedyefi pnp ecu and coil on plug setup.







After putting on a bunch of go fast parts that I didn't need, and getting the Ecu setup, I went to start it... and it wouldn't start anymore. I figured that the tune needed to be refined a bit more to get it start, but getting it right was pretty difficult with the whole not knowing that my wideband didn't work and my timing belt was a tooth off. By now it was august of 2022 and other than getting the car to start and move under it own power, I wasn't much closer to getting it track ready. I spent the next few months blindly messing with the tune trying to get it to start, occasionally I'd delude myself into thinking that it was some random sensor that was bad, and was the mythical "one more part" I needed to get the car running properly. This cycle went on month before I finally threw in the towel, swallowed my pride and took it to a professional.

 

Dude, I'm loving how fast and hard this project spiraled out of control hahaha. Great start to the build thread for sure, at least for us onlookers who weren't subject to the frustration you must've felt. Props for keeping on despite all the setbacks!

I hope there's some good news in the next post

 

It is now February 2023, after having replaced almost everything I could think of to replace and adding go fast parts that definitely 100% didn't make my life harder, while also still missing the actual problem. I took it to some professionals that actually knew what they were doing. When i brought it their I asked for them to make a custom bracket For my ecu, make a proper intake for the IAT setup, tune it, and do anything else to make it run if more was needed. Soon after I got call from them that they were having some problems with the ecu, sadly I was not the one who bought it originally so I was SOL, and was the proud owner of a brick. On the bright side they did find out why I was having so much trouble with my car... you guessed it, the timing was off. After getting that fixed and getting a brand new MS3pro, they tuned my car and it ran perfectly well with no issues and made 108hp and 112ft/lbs of torque... I lied it had one slight issue, the wideband didn't work. They were able to use the wideband that was built into the dyno to make sure that it wasn't running to rich or too lean so the tune was perfectly safe, just not as refined as I would have wanted it to be. The drive home was uneventful, the car ran perfectly fine, it rode like **** because the old suspension, but the drivetrain was good and that's all that mattered.







Got her parked next to my lexus LS430, sold the wrx because I was tired of it alway breaking despite being a new car with payments

 

Great thread, really appreciate all the learnings to be taken from it!! Looking forward to even more!

 

Now this is the fun part. Not only had I gotten my miata properly running, I had also gotten promoted at the audi dealership I worked at to an apprentice technician, so I had access to a much better shop to work on my car in, the next couple months was the best part of my life so far. First things first, was to run it through emissions so I could register it, I knew that it would fail, it just failed way more dramatically than expected, over 4x the limit on HCs and COs, but well under on NOX which confirmed it wasn't knocking or had really high combustion temps, just running rich (who needs a knock or a wideband sensor when you have an emissions station that's real tired of seeing you). Now that the engine was running I started getting the maintenance of the whole car up to date, alignment, diff, trans, brake flush, all new clutch hydraulics, and fixing a few leask that had now shown themselves since the car is driving again. I was also able to start modifying it, FM stage 1 clutch, coolant reroute, sway bars, hood pins and I found another guy who gave up on his dreams and scored a hardtop, roll bar, bucket seat and harness on the cheap.













LS430 hit a massive pothole which blew out the air struts, so I replaced it with a focus ST

 

Really digging this thread, reminds me of the good ole days. Looks like you learned a few things the hard way, but so did most of us.

I highly recommend a cool suit for your car! I use mine in the NM summers to commute to the track (a few hours each way) and it literally saves my life when it's 100+. With good ice water in the system, I'd even argue it's nice than the A/C on my NB. The downside of course is that you gotta wear a funny shirt with hoses sticking out and mount a cooler in your trunk.

 

The second running joke between me and my dad about this car is how i've taken care of every single suprise on it... by being surprised by every single one of them. And in all honesty I haven't been able to learn anything on this car the easy way until this year.

I do plan on getting a cool suit once I finally get it track ready, but for now it's just too impractical to get it for just driving in the summer. And im arizona native who has always worked outside, so the heat doesn't bother me that much, I still end up driving it to work twice a week.

 

It is now november 2023 now, I've had my miata for two years and have had it working for about a quarter of that time. Everything was going great, I was getting closer and closer to passing emissions, I was making rapid progress to getting it track ready, and I had finally saved up enough to get a roll cage.

And then tragedy struck.


Ignore the color, I put a UV dye in the oil to find a leak




I had just installed a true oil pressure sensor to make so that the dummy gauge in my 95 cluster would be a functional gauge instead of just an idiot light, and it seemed to be reading pretty low. I changed the less than 1000 mile old oil out and was greeted with shaving and a metric fuckton of glitter. I sampled the oil and sent it off to blackstone and they confirmed my worst fear, my engine was tearing itself apart. Upon tear down I found that the bearings were severely worn, scoring in the oil pump housing, several cracks on the oil pump gear, and a hole in the oil pickup tube strainer (LITERALLY HOW). I don't know how much longer this engine had left before it would have violently disassembled itself, but it couldn't have been long.




Welp, there goes my roll cage money.

 

As sad as I was that my miata killed itself after trying to bring it back to life over the course of 2 years, I was determined that this would not be the end. I had saved up enough money to get a roll cage, new bucket seats, harnesses, fire suppression system, and all the other safety goodies one might need, but It looks like it was going to go towards a built motor instead. I decided on a built motor over getting a used/junkyard block for a few reasons, main one being is that I had always wanted to boost it and being limited to only 250 made feel that boosting it wouldn't be worth it, but with a built block I could pick whichever turbo setup I wanted. Second reason was that I already had the main supporting mods for boost, ecu, clutch, wideband, etc. Third reason was that I just didn't trust used/junkyard engines, several of my buddies who swap out bad motors for used motors would often end up having to do it again every 2-3 seasons, if I was building a street car I might have gone this route, but if I was going to get it running again, I was determined to get it right the first time.

I had decided on doing a mild build, manley rods, supertech pistons, boundary oil pump, volvo springs, oil pump baffle, new HLA lifters, welding in a 10an oil drain fitting, white engine paint to make it easier to find any future leaks, but no head work or blueprinting, beyond what was needed to get the car running right. I went with 84mm 9.5:1 supertech pistons as boring it out would ensure a fresh cylinder wall, and the slight increase in compression would be give me a bit more kick while the car was still n/a, but not require me to run exotic fuels when I did boost it. I went with volvo springs as I didn't want to rev it higher than stock and just wanted some over rev protection (and they were to good of a price to ignore).







Test fit on spare oil pan, the one of that went on the motor was much cleaner

 

After about a month and half of waiting for parts to come in and for the machine shop to work their magic on the block, head, crank, and cams. (catching it in time and the oil filter managed to save everything well enough that the machine shop could make them useable again, so wouldn't need to get a core), I got started on getting it back together. First thing I did was get everything cleaned up and paint the engine block and valve cover painted.




not show car levels of clean, but its a degree of magnitude less dirty



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Enjoying the pics. Have a cat.

 

Now that everything was all nice and pretty it was time to actually start putting things back together. even though I had paid the machine shop to make sure the tolerances were correct, I checked everything over again (trust but verify) with a dial caliper, plastigauge, and a feeler gauge, and everything was exactly at the spec I wanted it at. I put everything together with redline assembly lube and ARP hardware, and everytime I added something new to the rotating assembly I gave it a few spins to make sure everything was playing nice with each other. First was the crank with acl bearings and they spun nicely, then rods and pistons went in and they moved with minimal effort, lastly was the oil pump... and now there was a tight spot when spinning it. I tore down the oil pump and found scoring on the gears. I called up boundary and sent the pump back. guess i'll have to wait a bit before it can be finished.

 

While my oil pump was bouncing around the mail system I decided to get to work on my head. The machine shop checked everything that can be checked on the head and gave it a clean bill of health, so I felt comfortable reusing the valvetrain, but I still replaced the springs and lifters for cheap insurance and the peace of mind. I also replaced the valve stem seals, and resealed my coolant reroute.