Love it!

Found this thread on the Salvagewon/Steel City cars: MX5Atlanta.com EXCLUSIVE build thread- Eliminator .v3T aka Dragon

 

Drill hole behind license plate. Pull rod. There are articles on this in the M.net garage section.

 

Cool...I will give that a try. Thanks.

 

<p></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>See this youtube video</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p> </p><p>&nbsp;</p>

 

Stop fannying around drilling holes and fire up the plasma cutter already

 

We are in deep southern GA...maybe I just blow a hole in it with a 12ga slug

 

Extended trajectory = fuel tank, just sayin'

 

Just picked up a ghettocet donor myself. I'll be watching your thread for updates; will start a build thread of my own once I start to make progress. I'm in the process of selling off parts and finalizing my cage plans. My net budget target is $0.

 

Net $0 is a good goal and probably doable. The hood alone sells on ebay for almost as much as I paid for the entire vehicle.

So I made some more progress over the weekend. Still all I'm doing is cutting and removing more stock miata parts. I removed the power steering pump, lines, etc... and air conditioning (at least what's under the hood) over the weekend. Might be hard to tell in the photos, but we used a cut off wheel to remove the softtop (yeah we were lazy). Once the cutoff wheel came out we passed the point of no return!

Hopefully I'll start adding parts back soon. The car definitely feels a lot lighter now. I'd say I'm 50% through the strip down process.

Wheels:
Would anyone have an idea where I can find some cheap 15" x 10" (or something close to 10" wide) wheels with a seriously negative offset? I'm debating whether I want to attempt to buy steel wheels and modify the lug pattern and offset. My welds are good, but it seems a bit risky to drive fast on modified wheels. Still finding wheels with a 4 x 100 lug pattern in the size that I want has proven very difficult. Maybe I need to go to a 5 lug.

I'm pretty set on using wheels that will widen the stance of the car significantly. Also, being able to see the tires while driving is one of the biggest motivations for me to build this car. Any advice?

 

Super heavy wide steel wheels seem very counterproductive to me when the goal is a stupid light car. Good-win-racing has a lot of light inexpensive wheels in the $100-150 range that give you significantly more offset. A 15x8 +20 offset is 30mm more aggressive than what's on there now.

If you're not happy with that then there's a bunch of cheap heavy xxr 15x10 +0 offset wheels the omg-leet-hella-stance-yo-bros run that should still be better than the steel stuff you're talking about.

 

I think they were saying 1650

 

Thanks for the info on the wheels. Cheap and light! Pretty awesome.

So I have a guy coming to my shop tomorrow to look at the body panels I've pulled off. He's interested in trading a 1.8L for my bodywork. I should do it, right?

 

What year is the 1.8?
Probably yes regardless.

 

He's got a few apparently. What year is preferable? Also, if the motor is out of the car what should I look for to verify the year of the motor. I know to avoid VVT, but is that all I need to look out for?

 

<p></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Why would you want to avoid VVT?</p>

 

:hate cat:

 

As you may have guessed by the last few replies, you do not want to avoid vvt.
VVT will give you a better torque curve.
It is slightly more difficult to tune, but still easily done using a newer megasquirt, which you should definitely buy.
You do want to avoid the intake manifold that came with it though. In a nutshell, you want an 01 or later engine with a squaretop or 99-00 intake manifold for the most NA power.

 

Read this.
https://www.flyinmiata.com/support/i...sc/1.8swap.pdf

 

Cool...I'd like VVT, but figured there would be a lot more to swapping in that motor. I just need to get my butt over to his place and see what all he has to choose from.

By the way I forgot to mention the hole saw method works beautifully. I literally had it open in under 10 seconds. If I had a system in a miata trunk I'd think about adding a nice 1/4" plate somewhere behind the linkage....

 

Why isn't this in the Build Threads section?