The engine in my 95 M' supposedly had about 111k Miles when I bought it. People I bought it from said they swapped it yadiyada. Within the month of owning it the water pump took a shit and so I replaced it at a local shop under the guidance of the techs there.


I changed out the water pump, thermostat, timing belt, cam seals, crank seals, and valve cover gasket.

My engine pulls strong and I always pretty much beat on it and so lately I've seen some oil leaks. One is from the cam angle sensor, and one I suspect is either the rear main seal or oil pan. It also appears that the valve cover gasket is leaking towards the front of the engine... Today I was teaching a friend of mine to drive my car and everything was fine. I got in drove to his house shut the engine off and boom a cloud of smoke started pouring from under the hood, I thought I had somehow cracked the oil pan and saw a ton of liquid pouring on the ground. Turns out the heater hose is either cracked or torn or something.

Basically I've been wanting to reseal the engine for a while now just to not have it leaking oil like a POS.

A shop local to me is pretty good with Miatas, so I figured I'll fix the heater hose here and drive it down to him for him to do engine work. I'm not exactly rolling in money so I wanna have him do some minor work to my head while the engine is out of the car.

I figured:

  • Solid lifters
  • ARP studs
  • Some sort of thin metal head gasket (To raise compression slightly?)
  • slight porting of the head.



The main thing that I wanna accomplish is to change over to solid lifters so I won't have to ever lifter tick again.

I plan on keeping my engine NA powered for a while, and maybe ordering a set of Tomei cams in the future so this little "rebuild" should be a solid starting point.

Basically I wanna hear from you guys to point me in the right direction as far as what to get and if you guys have a hook up or something to keep this under budget.