Winter Upgrades

Happy New Year from South Carolina! This year the Miata will jump out of stock class with an eye toward more track driving. This long weekend I'm getting a jump on the safety equipment, suspension, and possibly some power upgrades. 

Taking advantage of the sunny day, the seat install stayed outside.

Saturday I got to work fabricating mounts for the new seats.  A few weekends ago, Jason helped me figure out exactly how to custom fabricate mounts for the seats so that this weekend I could get right to work. Both seats are now positioned and I also managed to determine the mounting locations and hardware needed for the new six-point harnesses. Nothing like drilling holes in your car!

Starting with 3" flat stock, I bent it to fit the Miata and drilled holes to mount to the car and the seat to the bracket.

A few pieces of specialty hardware are needed, so the seat and harness project will hit the pause button for a few days while I place some orders online. Once the new seats and harnesses are in, I'll have a much safer seat setup than what came stock. Hopefully this project will wrap up in a few days.

Two new seats in the car, still need harnesses, additional hardware, and fabric covers.

The temperatures continued to drop into Sunday morning, so I cleared out the garage and got the car inside and fired up the halogen lights.  The goal is to replace the 20 year old factory rubber suspension bushings with polyurethane and add lower, stiffer springs in time for the track time with NASA next weekend in Savannah. 

Those halogens really crank out the heat, which comes in handy in the winter!

Part-way into the suspension work, I've got the front passenger side fully disassembled and have started installing fresh ball joints.  Now Sunday night, I'll take a break and get back to it early Monday morning. If all goes well, I'm hoping the get all of the suspension work done Monday.

The workbench, littered with control arms in progress.

If time allows, I've got a brand new header ready to go in the car and I'll do a close evaluation of the brake system before going on the track, so new fluid and possibly fresh pads will be in order. 

Old ball joint on the left (20 year old factory original), brand new on the right. These lower ball joints easily bolt in. The uppers require all-new control arms with them built-in.