Donor Car Adventures

For my Miata donor car, I found a 1992 nearby, very inexpensive. It's a 1.6 liter engine, which lacks some of the horsepower of the later 1.8 liter engines. Manual transmission of course. The brakes were shot, so I couldn't really drive the car much more than to load it on the trailer, but I did sit in it, start it up, and run it through the gears with no wheels sitting on jack stands. Everything felt and sounded really good. It didn't even have any of the lifter noise Miatas are (in)famous for.

I put ads on the Facebook Miata groups and Craigslist announcing I was parting out this car. I posted eBay ads for a few parts that were both easily ship-able and fetch prices enough to make it worthwhile - but most of the parts I've sold have been to local hobbyists pretty cheap. Which works for me - I'm on track to recover the price I paid for the car (or close to it).

On the downside, this donor car had just ridiculous amounts of rust - most of which is on body parts I'm not using - but it has led to some very difficult disassembly. Foremost among difficulties, removing the seats which were so totally rust locked in place that I had to cut them out from below.

So I had to cut a hole through the lowermost sheet metal to access the sheet metal into which the seats were bolted, then had to cut the area around the bolt.  I went through three death wheels (3" friction cutoff wheels) to get all the seat bolts loose. This is the kind of dirty, lying on your back in an uncomfortable position, holding a noisy tool that's showering you with sparks, kind of job that I don't like about working on cars.

Much of the suspension and rear brakes was too rust damaged to be salvaged.

Fortunately Ray found me a complete front and rear suspension, differential, and brakes for quite a reasonable price. There are some of these parts I don't need, and - even more fortunately - the differential turned out to be the highly sought-after Torsen limited slip differential, so again I may be able to recover close to what I paid for these parts.

The best parts sale so far was from Craigslist and netted no money, but a priceless spot of help. A guy wanted trim piece from the dash and asked what my asking price would be. I said $20, or free if you help me get the dash out. Turns out he'd taken Miata dashes out before, so he knew where all the annoying mysterious fasteners were hidden and several other tricks that would have taken me hours to figure out. So for the cost of giving up a part that I'm not going to use, I got what would have taken me 4+ hours done in about an hour.

This is the kind of thing that has always discouraged me from working on post-1980 cars. On the cars I grew up with, if you wanted to remove something there were four obvious bolts or six obvious screws you took off and then the part came off. This donor car was 1992 - so not exactly new - but already by 1992, the fasteners are all hidden behind bits of plastic trim, or inside heater vents, or at the very bottom of a hole in the plastic up behind and underneath the dash where you can't see it.