Is my Miata a '91 or a '95?
 

Greetings,

I've been getting information from this forum for a great many years, so I figure it's time I join up.

I bought my first car, a '95 Miata, a few weeks before my 14th birthday with money I had saved up from a newspaper route. I promptly took to modifying it. Mistakes were made, including 17" wheels (relatively light and tasteful-looking 17" wheels, to my credit). I soon realized that the brakes looked too small and fitted the car with what may very well have been at the time (still might be, actually) the largest front brakes on any Miata ever: Wilwood 6-piston Narrow Superlite calipers on 13"x1.1" rotors.

Years later when the pads and rotors wore out I discovered that I couldn't get inexpensive rotors for my outlandish brakes, so I machined new caliper brackets to use my Superlites on 12.19" rotors (the smallest recommended for these calipers). I still have the 17" wheels for now, but 16x8's will fit, and I have a suspicion that some 15x9's might even fit. The rotors are thicker than Trackspeed's Superlite kit, but the caliper is narrower, so the outer face of the caliper is actually about 1/4" inboard compared to the Trackspeed kit, and the top of the caliper is only about 1/8" farther from the hub's axis. It's still absurd, I realize this, but now it's at least not impractical.

A couple of years ago the car suffered a direct hit to the passenger side rear wheel, so I bought a rust-free '91 without an engine or transmission and did a chassis swap. I put the engine, transmission, differential, entire wiring harness, and yes, front brakes from the '95 into the '91. So now it's technically a '91, I guess, but I still consider it the same car as the original, it just has a different chassis.

My wife has a '96 Miata. Both cars are in need of a suspension overhaul, so after much research I've decided to install the Xida GS coilovers on mine and the FM Fox on hers, along with a number of other bits for this upgrade crusade. The next round of upgrades will likely involve at least one turbo.

Hi there! Welcome to the forum! Do you have any pictures of your Miatas?

Yeah, I think I can find a few. Here's my wife's '96.

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...d5&oe=5B380162
Here's what it looked like when she bought it:
https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...9d&oe=5B0DB657

As it turns out, my car is much less often photographed. Here's one taken at some point in the chassis swap process:
https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...59&oe=5B0159D8

I'll get a photo or two of my car in its current state sometime this week.

it's not a 90-93.

The question was rhetorical. Nimrod.

everyone knows I don't read.

The black one is my wife's, it's a '96. The rarely-photographed red one in the last picture is mine, and it's complicated.