So, the background story for this car and build starts about August 2012. I'll cover what's been done up to this point then go from there. I have a build thread on my other car and thought it would be nice to have one for the Miata as well.
Anyways, I had been tracking my then daily driver 2005 RX-8 for about a year, and my Dad came out to the track a couple times to hang out. Miatas are of course very popular out here at NASA AZ and he got a ride along in the same car I got my very first ride along in as well, my friends 1994 Miata. After talking to some other people about cars and costs and other questions, he found that the answer was always Miata, so the search began to find a Miata project that we could both work on and drive. This is my "Plan B" car for when I'm unable to drive my RX-8 and is my dad's dedicated track car. The RX-8 is undergoing a massive rebuild right now and has its own build thread which can be found at the link below if anyone is interested.
Arca's RX-8 Time Attack Thread
So our search for a suitable car started. Our budget was about $3000 and the important things on our list was 1994 or 1995 so we had OBD1 with a 1.8L, and it had to have an LSD in it already. We had a couple cars sold out from under us before we could even show up to look at it.
The first car we actually got to see was a '95 M edition, and the guy swore up and down that it just needed a battery and it would work fine... we hooked it up to jumper cables from our F150 and it would crank and crank and not fire, pulled the plugs and did a compression test right there (guy wasn't expecting that), cylinder 1 had a ton of oil, 140PSI, then the rest of the cylinders were less than 50PSI. 150 mile round trip that was a total waste of time and even with a blown motor and trashed interior he still wouldn't budge from $2500 asking price so we told him to kick rocks. Then I reported that it had a blown motor on the Carfax because fuck that guy.
After browsing Craigslist for awhile and not seeing anything we liked, my buddy (the one that gave my dad a ride along in his Miata) sent me a link at about 8:30PM. A 1994 that was perfect for what we needed... $3500 asking price, figured maybe we could talk him down a bit. The ad had only been up for about 45 minutes so far, and I was sick of people beating us to cars, so I called the guy anyways at 8:45PM on a Monday. He said he already had two people coming over to look at it the next morning, so I asked him what his crossroads were, and he was only 3 miles from my place. I asked if I could look at it tonight and he said that was cool. Grabbed my dad and jetted over there to check it out, and it was better than we could have ever thought.
It was a 1994 R-Package with 103k miles on the clock, kept mostly in Colorado driven by the guys mom, only during summers (no rust) and it was even serviced by Flyin' Miata regularly. Not even a hint of lifter tick, no accidents and it drove awesome on the test drive. The only thing not stock were the shocks (no "R" bilsteins) but they were getting replaced anyways. While we were there, his phone was ringing off the hook with people offering almost $1000 over asking price, but we were lucky he was a stand up guy and fellow car enthusiast and he said if we wanted it for the $3500 full asking price, it was ours. We agreed and we were back the next day with cash and took it home. That's where the fun starts.
June 25, 2012: