Miata Turbo Forum - Boost cars, acquire cats.

Greetings!!
I'm new to this forum and just found the 'meet and greet' section and wanted to say HI.

I'm a Yamaha fan, so my YZ250 and R1 are both blue and white. Since it was hard for a car to match the 'smile' factor my bikes provide, the '89 camry w/ 325k miles putted me around just fine... until i drove a friends boosted miata. It only seemed appropriate then to have a blue miata w/ white Kosei K1 wheels.

I'm in grad-school and don't have a ton of time or $$, so I bought my 1990 miata last summer already mod'ed; *sigh* All I wanted was a low-tuned car that I could daily drive, start auto-crossing, take to track days, and keep it cheap. Sparing too many details; driving the car about 6k miles, I think the only thing I haven't had to mess with is the rear diff.
For example: I didn't realize when I bought it, but the 3rd gear syncro had seen much, much better days and prevented any sort of 'spirited' shifting. The magic tranny-fairy fixed my problem by just locking it up completely while it was parked in front of my house one day. 300$ later, I have a broken transmission in my parents garage and a drivable car.
Fast forward a couple months, and I realize I'm loosing coolant from an unknown location. Compression test reveals cylinders 2 and 3 are about half of what they should be.... head gasket. :vash:

So on spring break, the head came off and I decided to go further and rebuild the short-block as well because the way the car has gone so far, I'd put it back together only to spin a bearing or loose compression because I looked at it the wrong way. This has afforded me more time to mess with porting the heads and think about changing up the compression ratio a tad (thus the question about how far the head can be decked in another post)

Looking forward to de-noobing my forum skillz as well as my miata.