No she’s not British but we’ve part-owned this wonderful little Mazda for a few years and would find it very difficult to part with her now. She was bought as a potential track car but hasn’t seen a track in our ownership, mostly because we’ve just been too busy! However she’s an absolute hoot to drive.
The positives: she has lowered suspension, uprated brakes, great seats, a roll bar and working air-con. The engine is an absolute gem and she drives, turns and stops like a car ten times the value.
The negatives: The sills and rear wheel arches are rusty and will need serious attention. There’s a hole in the exhaust, a dent in the plastic nose and the paint has lost much of its lacquer. The wheels are also in need of refurbishment, the soft top is extremely difficult to clip into the fully up position and the plastic rear window is hanging loose and so she’s definitely not watertight.
Alberta, as she’s become known, doesn’t sit still for long and there’s always a fight for the keys. The dodgy roof was a problem though and so when a good quality hardtop became available we snapped it up. Alberta is now able to remain in use all through the upcoming British winter. However the heated rear screen does not work because our car is missing the necessary wiring.
The next job was to replace the dodgy exhaust. We wanted something sporty but not unnecessarily noisy (we’re not 17). We found a great single bore stainless steel exhaust from MX5 Parts. Delivery took forever but to be fair they did warn us about that and emailed us regularly with a delivery update. The exhaust looks and sounds fantastic, just a little louder than standard but a lovely deep boom with a raspy throb on acceleration. Magic.
The new roof is lovely and dry and makes no whistling, even at higher speeds, which is apparently quite unusual! But it does mist up and we really needed to sort out connecting the heated rear screen.
There is a switch for the heated rear screen but there’s no obvious wiring for it. So we needed to add our own. Here’s how we did it: https://youtu.be/DIuLv2ooyl8. It now works a treat!
The rear tyres were close to their limit so Raj popped on a couple of Avon’s to help Alberta keep control of her rear end!
The imported Eunos, which our car is, as well as some other variants, do not have the ‘flash to pass’ function. That means when we pull on the light stalk to flash an oncoming car, our lights flash into the ground. They do not pop up. However there is a simple modification which can be done to rectify this. Click on the image below to watch how:
The paint on the ends of both sills is bubbling badly indicating that all is not well underneath. So we got her on a lift, cracked open the angle grinder and started to explore.
As expected there was rust and we were grateful to find it didn’t extend along the sills more than 6-8 inches or so. However it did go deep. The outer and inner parts of the sills were crumbs and we removed most of it with a hoover. Not great.
We got stuck in and on both sides removed all the rusty metal and while we had large holes, we made use of them and sprayed a rust preventative deep into the sill. Shiny new solid metal was then carefully welded in one piece at a time with each layer treated on both sides.
It took quite a bit of further work to get it to this stage! We also did the same on the other side. Still work to do though to get them perfect but it’s a good start.
Here’s a video of how we sorted the rear end of both sills from start to primer:
With the rears done to primer stage, bar a little tweaking, we also need to do tackle the front of each sill so that’s next.
However, first we had the small matter of getting around the absolutely epic North Coast 500 in the little MX5. Take a look at this video of our NC500 experience and see if you can resist booking your trip right now!:
On a drive in the fabulous little MX5, I noticed a sound of lots of fluid sloshing around the left-hand side of the car. I thought it must be fuel in the tank but then I had the idea that it could be water in the sill. We have of course replaced much of the sills on both sides but one thing I forgot to add back in were the drain holes! Water has come in through the soft top during extremely heavy thunderstorms we’ve had recently and collected in the left-hand sill! I had to drill a small hole in the sill and raise up the car at the other end to allow several pints of rainwater to flow out!
Hopefully the water hasn’t done too much damage as it wasn’t there for long. I will however, once it’s dry, pour in some rust converter/preventer to cure any rust and stop any further developing. Lesson learned!!
The main problem though is that she’s in such demand, how will we keep her still for long enough to work on??