Love that steering wheel!
Love that steering wheel!
Sorry to hear about your top. The new top looks great.
Also, you totally should look for a hardtop. They're the bees knees.
My build thread and my Instagram.
Phatmiata (01-09-2015)
So I went to replace some seals today hoping to stop the leaking.
And long story short, the head is now at the machine shop. Hopefully it doesn't have any cracks or anything. We'll find out soon enough.
Also I somehow managed to strip the spline on my WB hub, so that was nice
My car runs again!!!
I put on the alternator belt last night, which was the last little bit to putting the engine back together.
It actually was running on Sunday, but the old alternator belt slipped off the water pump pulley and got eaten up.
The car sounds about how I remember it sounding when I got it. I think I still need to play around with the idle and stuff to get it perfect.
Oh, and the check engine light is on, it came on when the belt slipped. I'm going to try to reset it and see if that fixes it.
And despite having the stock steering wheel on right now my airbag light is on, and my horn doesn't work. So I'm sure the clock spring was broken.
The airbag isn't an issue since I'm going to put my Momo back on, I just don't want the light flashing. The horn however, I'm pretty sure I need that to pass inspection...
So the car is basically good as new. I ended up replacing the fuel rail and a few other things.
Most of these problems stem back to the car having to drive its way home during a flash flood, but it's even better than when I got it now.
A friend in North Carolina has a line on some NB Bilsteins for about a hundred bucks, and she'd be willing to get them and hold on to them for me. I'd be revalving them in preparation to get GC sleeves and whatnot. And since they have 160K on them, I'm sure Bilstein would be replacing some stuff too.
Would this be a cost effective idea, and one that's good for some occasional track / aggressive street driving? I know it's a fairly popular setup. And I'm awful tempted with the price of those shocks.
And would those NB shocks actually work for what I want to do? The way I understand it I'd have to run NB top hats with it too. What I've looked up everything seems like it should work, but I'm still not 100% on the specifics of it all...
I thought the NB shocks are taller than NA? or maybe that is just the stock black ones?
From what I understand they are, which is why you have to use NB tophats with them. That could be wrong though...
Thanks to a very generous raffle on this site, I recently won some of Revlimiter's gauges!
This past weekend I finally got to sit down and install them!
Snuck a toy in here to try to get an Adam-esque shot. Removing the cluster was a whole lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Adam's blog has amazing instructions which helped a ton too.
And here's the package! I'm a sucker for good packaging, and Adam does it as well as any. Everything is taped and wrapped and secured beautifully.
He has amazing business cards too.
And this is the meat of that packaging. A set of Version FB gauges.
I didn't take a lot of pictures because I was just really excited! This is the teardown done, with the plastic and everything all cut out.
The gauge install was easy peasy! It's already looking amazing.
And here they are all tucked in!
These gauges are amazing. They do so much for the look and feel of the car. And I have to say, this is also the nicest product I've ever received for a car. I'm so happy with them, and I'm throwing around some ideas for custom gauges in the future!
Agent☣Orange (06-03-2015),Demon I Am (06-03-2015),fwdtamiya (06-04-2015),Grip Driver (06-03-2015),Ihatecars (06-03-2015),RustRat (06-04-2015)
Awesome, congrats!!
Nice price on your Montego NA! I never get tired of seeing Adam's handy work with those gauges, there is no denying his genius! Where at in west Texas are you?
Hot damn.
Those gauges look rad. Great choice, Ryan!
My build thread and my Instagram.
Well guys I've kinda kit, let's call it drivers block, with the Miata.
If you've never been to West Texas. the roads here are pretty uninspiring to drive. Take some paper and draw a tic-tac-toe board. The roads are as square, flat as that. No nice curves, no elevation changes, certainly no amazing scenery to soak in. Since the Miata is my daily it sees a few 90 degree turns a day and a lot of 0-50 and 50-0 between stoplights on my way to work. I'm just not getting a lot of driving pleasure from it. Right now I want to be faster, but I don't know if my heart is in it enough to put in the time and money to boost the little guy.
It's looking like I'll be moving to North Carolina early next year and will be keeping my car until at least then, and the driving there is certainly better than it is here. So maybe I'll find some new life in my car and myself when we make it out there. My girlfriend and I have been talking about sliding our cars together occasionally, and just kind of doing more fun car stuff together when I move.
But that again leaves me unsure, is the Miata the right car for that stuff? There are certainly a lot of people that do it with them! It brings up the questions of would the car still be something I could daily? Would I have to go down the forced induction path, or could I have a cool NA car to dork around with?
I'm just in sort of a haze right now as a Miata owner. And I guess I'm just needing some inspiration and advice from some kindred spirits.
Where about in NC will you likely be?