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She may be a sh*tbox, but shes my sh*tbox. The story of Maggie miata
So i'll start with the boring stuff. Introduction of me and how I came to own my beautifuly awful nugget of our favorite roadster. I'm Chris (same one as RTC runs ouy of talent build). I am a college drop out when my parents could no longer fund engineering school even with my scholarships (Mech E 2.5 years Umass Lowell), 22 year old want to be race car driver/race shop owner that lives in central mass. I am a Technician at a Subaru dealership and spend most of my days playing with and fixing blown up Subarus no one else wants to touch. I've been working on cars ever since I was 13 when I bought my first car (1972 datsun 240z). My passion for cars started at a young age but I'm not really sure where it came from, none of my family is into cars like at all. Every family needs a black sheep though right? I caught the miata bug early from a gran turismo 3 a-spec. Ripping around in even the stock car on my ps2 wearing a dirtbike helmet are some of my fondest memories. Anyways moving on to how I ended up with Maggie, my current miata.
Its fall in New England and I am driving my 2005 Subaru Legacy GT limited I bought from Florida. AWD turbo 5MT car and loving it. Its my second example of this car because well my first one Jamie was totaled when I got cut off on the high way. I'm listening to the radio and hear snow in the forecast for the next week. Well dicks I don't want to drive my super clean Subaru in the snow. So what do I do go to craigslist and find the most wonderfully inappropriate car for being a winter car/daily driver (yes turbo Subarus get awful gas mileage). A mariner blue 1996 mazda miata with 187xxx miles on it advertised for 2k. I messaged the seller, hem and haw and eventually decide its the car for me. 1100$ later im driving home in my new to me miata soon to be known as Maggie. Now I am the 7th owner of Maggie and it clearly showed. Lots of the electrics didn't work, the paint was in bad condition, random wiring from an aftermarket stereo, parts missing or broken and the general smattering of random how the hell did that get there things you get when you buy a cheap used car from craigslist.
Jamie after her accident The Blubaru Blu and Maggie Blu being pretty on Cape Cod Blu and Gramps Blu, my go to desktop picture Yes i have a red trunk on a blue car. its Jamies trunk and it stays. Blu and I.... because im a goofball Gramps the daily after a few nice touches. Rebuilding Kelsey my LGT wagon in the snow Kelseys motor out for reliability mods Kelsey all put together and clean 185k miles, stock EJ255 longblock with bolt ons. 290whp 315ft lbs Sammie 87 toyota supra engine tear down on 7mgte Sammie then Sammie now Maggie at a gas station Yeah.... I did that. Maggie With some buffing the paint came back to life Yes... I wrapped the console and tombstone with an old patman pillow. deal with it. Maggie all cleaned up So i decided at one point 2014 BRZ seats were a good idea and made my own rails and mounted them in BRZ seats on stock miata rails with adapter clear the soft top. glass rear window. And a dead miata. womp womp. Maggies motor during initial teardown. not a happy bottom end. so much scoring. Yeah... that happened. Sorry Maggie NEW SEAT TEST FIT!!!!!! The thing that started this whole rebuild project. 2002 VVT driveline with 120k pulling Maggie apart for new harnesses. I hate wiring.... Work station for those cold rainny New England days. This is gonna take awhile........
Fast forward about 5 months, and no I didn't get stuck everywhere in the snow. Maggie was a champ after the installation of x-ice i3 tires. A "friend" of mine totals his WRX. trying to be the nice person I am I offered to let him drive Maggie until he had gotten through insurance and gotten back on his feet. 6 weeks later I get a video late one night, its 15 seconds long, he is trying to drift but all he is doing is banging the rev limiter in first and trying to steer the car. keep in mind again at this point this car has 199k miles on the original motor. Yes I serviced it and took care of it, checked compression and everything but that is still a lot of miles for that kind of abuse. Next morning I get another video. Maggie starts, sounds like a diesel truck and has a James Bond smoke screen coming out the tail pipe. Great exactly what I need. To make a long story short, the motor was toast it either needed to be over bored to get rid of the scoring on the cylinder walls and rebuilt or it needed to be replaced. I confronted him with this and ended up being treated like I was wronging him. I walked away with 300$ and a blown up miata after 6 weeks of driving The Blubaru back and forth to work which by the way is 35 miles 1 way, paying for insurance on Maggie while he drove it and spending my off days trying to fix problems he was having with the car. But I digress.
I ended up buying a 2006 outback I named gramps as a new daily driver as I tried to figure out what to do with a dead Maggie and Blu (short for The Blubaru) who was having engine troubles and was not happy about being used as a commuter car. I had a for sale ad written for Maggie but decided to give myself 2 more days to soul search if I really wanted to sell her for parts, knowing she is one of the favorite cars I have ever driven. Later that night I found a 2002 NB2 VVT miata drive line for sale. Motor, 6 speed and ACT. Messaged the seller, talked with him and he had all the right info. good compression number, video of the car running and driving, low miles on the drive line. It was then I decided Maggie was staying and she was getting TLC that I dont think she had gotten in 10+ years. Spent 13 hours in a car covering over 1100 miles in 1 day driving to Philly picking up that driveline in Gramps, Rish (ridethecliche) then sending me on a detour into PA to pick up a turbo kit from a very grumpy 3rdgen aka Todd (it was f*ckign freezing). Driving back to mass dropping parts of with Rish and then going home to sleep for a few hours before having to be at work 8am the following morning. Lets just say I was not a very happy Chris.
After sitting for what seems like an eternity 7 months I have finally gotten around to rebuilding Maggie. Now this is where i will lose some support, I'm rebuilding Maggie as a drift car. I have other cars strictly dedicated to road race and time attack and I really want to learn to drift. Plus sliding sideways in the rain and snow made me absoloutly love Maggie, Which is why i never sold her in the months of being broken even with crazy offers and a simple out by parting her out. Maggie had to live again better than ever in my dream vision of what a completely ridiculous shenanigans visual miata with some really good proper parts underneath all the crazy exterior. I acquired a new dash board and a new wiring harness that were unmolested to replace the rats nest that Maggie originally had. Bought a CNC exhaust flange and stainless Weld Els to create my own manifold for a Bloush 440 XTR turbo from a Subaru project I never ended up doing. Momo course seats, OMP wheel, BC coilovers, Flyin miata sway bars, Poly suspension bushing kit, drift modded knuckles for more steering angle and some other misc parts. I'm starting with the Wiring harness replacement and have been very closely readign and re-reading Savs post on how to swap VVT into an NA chassis. Hopefully soon I can start getting the VVT motor and 6-speed in the car and running before I pull it back out to rebuild the motor for the boost the Bloush turbo is capable of.
If you stayed with me this far I thank you and hopefully some of you will follow along as I take this journey of rebuilding Maggie. Call it stupid, call it crazy, call it misplaced loyalty, call it whatever you want. But I love my Maggie even if she is just a small old sh*tbox to someone else.
Yeah as I said i would lose some supporters there. Its drift focused but with an alignment change it could have its track merits. I do plan on taking her to as many events as i can weather they be drift, auto-x or open track days. I can just bring the car into my dealership a few days to before to adjust the settings. But I cant win them all.
To be quite honest, we don't really have much issue with people that actually legitimately go to a track and drift their cars. I mean, a Miata isn't really a good candidate for that, but what ever.
The biggest issue usually tends to be with "drifters" being braindead cheap morons who absolutely do obscene, ghetto-rigged things to their cars, then go "drift" in street corners/intersections and generally do dumb things like that. They're usually the ones asking about ebay turbo kits, fuel pressure regulators, and doing things "different" which is really code for "stupid and ghetto" and not in any way unique or innovative in any sense of that word.
Anyways, carry on. I do appreciate the many pictures and taking the time to actually tell a story vs text-posting like many of the "drifters" tend to do.
Haha, I think Chris wants to use this as an opportunity to practice his fab skills and build his exhaust and reappropriate one of the billion subaru turbo/turbo related parts that he has kicking around in 50 different places...
The Miata has a low polar moment of inertia making it a very poor choice for drifting but a great choice for road courses. It will beat your other track car for half the money.
If it pleases the court I do regularly drive a fully prepped race miata in ITA. My friend owns the car and I do all the maintenance and build the motors. I'll get dig out some pictures of the cheetah miata when I get home. Maggie was choosen to be more slide oriented because I already have unlimited access to a proper race miata that I could not mimic on my budget. However since I have my own set of keys to the car and the garage it is stored in I don't feel the need to build another race miata. While yes it has a poor moment of intertia for drifting I have lots of spare parts from the old race cars so when.... WHEN I break something I can fix it. Plus the only real difference on Maggie that will be drift specific is the front steering knuckles allowing for more steering angle. So a change of wheels and tires and a quick aligment adjustment and she could be a road race car. That is the fun and interesting parts of my build. Plus They may be heavy but my leggies usually give miatas runs for their money
Will do!!!. It seems to be a really good combo. having URABUS and miatas makes for many laughs.
Update on Maggie, yesterday I sweated my *** off but I got all the old wiring harnesses out and prepped the new harness to go in. Cleaned all the grounds and mopped up the old oil and coolant that the old motor and trans are covered in. Will post progress pictures after work.
05-17-2017 | 12:35 AM
She may be a sh*tbox, but shes my sh*tbox. The story of Maggie miata
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