There's nothing special about my build, but I want to log it anyways .

I bought a CLEAN '96 back in '09 when I was 16. First car, first manual. 75k on the clock when I got it.

Was extremely nice except for that damn car bra. I would have taken if off but...


Second week of ownership it was crashed. Wasn't my fault though - Illegal with no license ran a stop sign and I just barely swiped her as she went barreling through. I was lucky, if I had gone through a second earlier the car (and possibly me) would have been gone. Luckily my insurance didn't go up anything and I was covered by uninsured motorist.

Wasn't hit hard, but it was enough to cause this:



Day I got it back:


And, like a 16 year old, I took an extremely clean car and completely fucked most of it up

First thing I did was throw on an exhaust and remove the stock airbox breather thing (The thing that pulls air from the fender). Also added a roll bar (Only non-ricer thing there).

I then proceeded to paint racing stripes on it:

Overspray all over, but it was easily cleaned up. Funny enough, I really like the look of them but I wish I hadn't painted them. They were done well though, no half-assed job.

That's around the time I started contemplating the idea of turbo'ing it. Good friend of mine (Rushin on here) pointed me to a FS thread here of "driftchick" selling a "t-28 turbo". Naturally, I signed up, abused the postcount system and bought it ASAP. Also ordered oil lines at this point. Here is her myspace: http://www.myspace.com/mitsubishichick.

It wasn't until later that I found out that driftchick was a lying sack of **** (Fat too, I found all her profiles). She had sold me a stock 300zx turbo (peashooter with the 4-bolt exhaust flange). I knew she did it on purpose because all her profiles had pictures of a 300zx TT. Oil lines I bought also didn't fit for ****. The ONLY thing I ended up using from the supposedly "full kit" was a tee and the feed line. Drain line was complete ****, frayed, and there was no way to attach the drain line to any fittings.

Luckily, I stuck around and started researching.
Started accumulating a pile of turbo parts. It was a poor teenager's budget setup, but they were all (semi) quality parts. They were:

Brand new FM manifold (250 from ebay)
Begi-S 1.6 DP (40 or something from Rushin)
1.6 cat
Random IC and piping (100 from Rushin)
Brain-built DIY MS-I
LC1
SR20 2554 from a gentleman named "pimpmastersexy". He was a good guy. Sold me a busted turbo for the hefty sum of 90 dollars.

Stuck it all on. Went surprisingly well, especially given that I was still 16 at this point. The car was tuned on stock injectors by me. Again, impressive I think, for someone who is 16 . At this point, the car ran very well from just an electronic standpoint... The 90 dollar turbo was puking and pissing oil, it had broken compressor blades and just about everything wrong with a turbo that could be. Still, I bought it knowing this and bought it just to set up the system.

Here it is pretty much immediately after being set up:

Notice everything wrong with that setup. IC was held up with dog leashes, no line to BOV, no filter, no water lines, ect... It was cheap, but it worked.

Upgraded to a China 2560. At this point, my injectors were running at somewhere around 170% DC (Or somewhere around there...) Somehow though, I was maintaining ~12AFR under 7 pounds of boost right up until around 6k rpms. Bought a set of RX7 460ccs and dialed them in. No more DC problems.

Bought a filter, cleaned up IC piping, hooked up BOV and replaced clutch with an ACT-HD unsprung 6-puck. (On a side note, this is an awesome clutch. Holds ANYTHING you can throw at it, and it isn't actually that harsh. You get used to it).


At this point, I had been doing everything half-assed. Nothing was mounted quite right, it was missing bolts and **** all over, and I got a real wakeup call when this happened:


At this point, I stopped doing things half-assed. I went through and redid... pretty much everthing. Most of the missing bolts were replaced, lines were secured better, fixed some leaks, **** like that. Ended up pretty reliable once I did everything right. All that had happened was a bracket got caught in between the bellhousing and engine and was grinding against the flywheel. Made some god-aweful noises. I'm lucky, it could have been a LOT worse.

Ran it this way for 6 months. Didn't break down too many times. Couple slipped couplers here and there, but nothing big. Also had misc things like a Corbeau A4 (bought from Rushin... again). Awesome seat. Had a harness in there for all of 3 weeks before it pissed me off too much to use it. Plus it was a 4 point so it was less safe than a stocker. Sat like this for the winter.

This winter I dynamatted the whole interior, new headunit, 300w sub and amp, rear speaker deck and new door speakers (Haven't decided what kind yet). 3" DP from ARtech, 3" catback (sans cat) with only a single 16" resonator/muffler type thing in it. Coppied Dopple's exhaust with a slightly larger "muffler". It's also getting a 52mm CXracing rad, new wheels (already bought them, went with stock 16x6.5" OEM Mazda wheels.) Yokohama Parada Spec-2 tires (bought because of the cheap price and supposedly phenomenal dry grip) and an OBX LSD.

I was inspired by this Miata:


So I bought these:

Will be repainting them the same color white, but the last guy who painted them didn't prep them very well so it's peeling in some places.

And that's the story up 'till now. It now sits with 82k miles, 3k of which were boosted.