- This Miata is the product of $25,000 worth of mods,
thousands of hours of wrenching, and a lot of frustration.
It wasn't easy to get to this point,
but today we're gonna go over
all the things we've done to this car in over 50 episodes,
to bring it from a $2,300 Craigslist find
into a turbocharged daily-driver
you could take to the track.
Then at the end, we'll decide if it was all worth it or not.
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- Feel that pinch.
- Three years ago I had just moved to Los Angeles from Ohio.
I was living out of an RV and I needed a daily driver.
So I bought this 1994 Miata.
This car is the sea package trim
which means it has a few choice upgrades
from the base model, like a Torsen limited-slip diff,
leather seats, and sweet speakers in the headrests.
It had low miles and I was able to snag it for 2,300 bucks,
which is a deal you can't find today.
It just so happened that we were developing
a show which would go on to become Money Pit,
and we needed a car to build out.
And what's better than a Miata
for teaching people how to wrench on cars?
It's cheap, parts are cheap, Mazda made a million of them,
and it's just a great overall project car for beginners.
Oh (beep).
With the production wheels in motion, we needed a plan.
From the jump, we knew we wanted to
eventually turbocharge the Miata,
but we needed to get some basics done
before we got to that point.
Mainly figuring out what condition the thing was in.
Luckily, the car was in a pretty good place already
but it's always good to replace all the fluids
and lubrication so we could have
a nice healthy baseline before we
started wrenching on the Miata.
With the fluids and everything freshened up,
it was time for the first modification.
One of the first mods anyone does their cars
is wheels and tires and we're no different.
So we took off the old stock stuff
and installed Enkei RPF1s wrapped in Toyo R888 tires.
The stock wheels and tires were pretty skinny,
so the Enkeis with the Toyos are a little bit wider,
which gives us a huge improvement in terms of grip.
Now, the next logical upgrade was suspension.
We bought Skunk2 suspension with adjustable damping,
ride height, and pre-load because it fit the budget
and provided all the adjustability that we really needed
to make this thing handle well on the track.
After that, we installed a steering wheel.
Which is a great steering wheel,
which doesn't fly off while I'm driving.
So with our steering wheel upgraded,
we decided to upgrade the fact
that our steering system was leaking,
by upgrading it to a non-leaking system.
I decided to rebuild the power steering rack that's
in the Miata, which turned out to be a terrible decision.
Ah.
It was not only no fun at all, but it didn't work
and the leak got 10 times bigger than it originally was.
So I ended up having to buy
a remanufactured steering rack anyway,
but it was time for an alignment.
So I went into this episode expecting it to be
a little bit tedious because of all the trial and error
that we would have to do, and that turned out to be true.
It was a long couple days of testing,
but it's a good skill to have.
It's obviously way easier to just take your car
to an alignment shop.
But the real point of that episode was
if you're a track rack, going to the track often
it's a really good skill to have
to be able to do it on your own
so you can try to tweak and dial some things in differently
while you're at the track without having to leave
and go to a shop and pay them to do an alignment.
Since the alignment was done
we decided to turn our attention to the engine bay,
so we started out with an air intake system.
We chose a racing beat cold-air intake,
not really because it was gonna make a bunch more power
because it didn't, but the metal looks cooler
than the stock intake and the induction sounds alone,
honestly make it worth it, in my opinion.
(car revving)
And if the intake is making cool sounds, then the next
logical step is to make the exhaust sound cool.
Stock Miata's don't sound amazing,
but with this MagnaFlow we are able to get a bit more growl
out of the 1.8 liter engine.
There's a little bit of a struggle to fit the new exhaust on
as it kind of always is, but it's always good to
have friends like Eddie around to help out.
Now, Eddie popped into
a bunch of different Money Pit episodes.
He was one of the guys that was usually behind the camera,
and behind the computer editing making Money Pit a reality.
Eddie decided that it would be a great idea to do
a flame shooter episode.
So Eddie saw some video online where some guy
was shooting propane flames out of his exhaust pipe,
and much to my chagrin, we ended up doing it.
It sort of worked out.
It's kind of goofy, slightly dangerous for no good reason,
but it did work out.
We did shoot some flames and it made Eddie happy,
and I guess at the end of the day, that's all that matters.
So since we were done shooting fireballs, we decided to
do a real upgrade and upgrade the old clutch in the car.
In hindsight, I probably would've chosen a different clutch.
It was a three puck clutch for a very low-power application.
I thought it might feel weird or be tough to drive
but it ended up being okay.
But again, I probably would've chosen a different one,
but it did work out, and that's what matters.
So next up was some new headers, which are a pretty
simple upgrade, but they are important.
This is the first time we took the car to our dyno guy,
Richard Gibby, and we wanted to get a baseline
horsepower figure.
So stock power came in at a whopping 104 horsepower
but after we installed the brand new headers we made,
107 and a half.
We've made about four horsepower.
After the headers, we decided to test cheap
versus expensive roll bars, which would kind of
end up being one of the sketchiest episodes we ever did.
Installing the roll bar was kind of time consuming,
but not really all together too difficult.
But then everything went a little bit off the rails.
(suspenseful music)
Oh God.
- Thought that might happen.
- For the record, I knew the forklift was gonna tip over.
We had a pretty hairy setup.
We got that thing back on its feet
and managed to test our roll bar. Dang
It was time to install one of the quickest
and easiest upgrades we did, which also meant one
of the quickest and easiest episodes we ever shot,
the installation of the short shifter.
It took like four hours total,
start to finish, to make an episode.
That's pretty dang good.
So after the shifter was done,
it was time to put real racing seats and harnesses
in the Miata, so we could take it to the track.
Brings us to the track day, which was one
of the worst track days I've ever been to.
It's not totally true, it was just incredibly hot.
It was like 105, 110 degrees,
which I guess is what you get in the desert.
But the Miata overheated all day.
It was still on the stock cooling system
but that's just what happened, overheated all day.
I couldn't even finish a full fast lap
because I'd have to let the engine cool down
about halfway through a lap.
It was kind of stupid,
but I kind of expected that to happen.
And then we knew that we needed to do a pretty big,
pretty substantial cooling system upgrade at that point.
So, as you might guess,
the next thing we did was upgraded the radiator
and the cooling system in general,
especially once you start making more power,
it becomes really important to make sure
that your cooling system can handle the power you're making
to keep your engine cool.
So I installed a Flyin' Miata kit, which included
a radiator from Koyorad, a coolant rerouting kit,
which reroutes the path of the coolant to cool better,
and a small brushless fan to suck a bunch
of air through that new radiator and keep everything nice
and cool so we could finally finish a lap at the track.
You know what's cooler, being able to stop.
So next up was a big old break set up.
We went with Wilwood's four-piston brakes
and BP-10 compound pads.
I got this kit from Flyin' Miata
because they sell a bunch of great upgrades for Miatas,
and because Wilwood makes awesome breaks,
but also because it came with a special purple bracket,
and I really, really love purple anodized parts.
These brakes have an adjustable proportioning valve,
which is convenient when you're tuning your car
at the track.
This lets you kind of dictate how much breaking power
goes to the front brakes versus the rear brakes.
The install was super time-consuming,
but a really quality improvement over the stock brakes,
even if the pad compound does squeak a little bit
under normal driving, but I would say
one of my favorite upgrades overall on the car.
so the brakes would be the last upgrade
before the point of no return.
That's when we installed a standalone ecu,
which is the point of no return in my mind.
The ECU is basically the brain of the car.
And if you're putting in an aftermarket computer,
that means the Miata's no longer technically street legal.
But if we wanted to make more power,
there's no two ways about it,
we need an aftermarket ECU so we can control all the things.
This is a plug and play ECU with downloadable tunes,
so overall it wasn't a huge headache.
We took it back to the dyno where our boy Gibby tuned it,
and we ended up making a whopping, and in fact,
an insane 112.75 horsepower to the rear wheels.
So with that done, it was time to do some more upgrades.
So it was time to modify the engine,
if we wanted to actually start making some power.
So the next logical step was to upgrade the intake manifold.
So we picked a Skunk 2 intake manifold
which had longer runners than stock,
which means a little more airflow and velocity,
and it also lets us run a bigger throttle body
which is important when you're gearing up for a turbo.
But, you gotta keep in mind that all of this was
happening during a pandemic, and we were having
a hard time getting the car parts that we wanted.
So while we waited for our turbo parts,
we fixed the cracks in the dashboard in Miata and my S14.
We put some nice new bright LED headlights in the Miata.
We did some suspension bushings.
So as we were doing all those episodes, turbo parts were
showing up and they were finally all there
and ready to install.
So, since it was turbo time, we had accumulated our parts.
So I took what I could get,
and that was a CX Racing turbocharger kit.
CXRacing isn't really known for super high quality parts,
but they are pretty cheap, so that worked out.
It came with the turbocharger, the exhaust manifold,
the inner cooler and charge piping, blow off valve,
and I think that's about it.
So on top of the CXRacing kit, we also had to
source some fuel upgrades,
like a fuel pump and fuel injectors,
but got it all done and took it back to the dyno.
My boy, Richard Gibby, spun the rollers,
and we made a whopping...
(suspenseful music)
We (beep) did it, we made 227 horsepower.
So with the turbo kit all installed, making power,
it was time to take the car back to the track.
And honestly, this was a day that cost me
a lot of sleep thereafter.
We went to the track, started making some passes,
and started leaking a bunch of oil
out of, basically, every crack and crevice of the engine.
But the fact is, I really just didn't notice
something pretty obvious, which was a plug on top
of the breather cap for the crank case,
which was not letting our crank case breathe.
When you add a turbo, you end up putting more pressure
into your crank case and that needs somewhere to go.
And if you got it capped off, it's so only gonna come
out all the cracks and crevices of the engine.
So after figuring that out and not sleeping forever
it was time to install a proper catch can set up,
so that our crank case could actually breathe and installed
that and the car's been running great ever since.
And that brings us to today.
So the question is, was it all worth it?
Was it worth it to spend $25,000 on this '94 Miata?
Well, yeah, I think so.
I think the answer is yes.
I mean, first off, we over doubled our horsepower
from 103 horsepower to a whopping 257,
which I gotta tell you,
feels fantastic in a tiny car like this.
So yeah, I mean, $25,000 is a lot of money
but the fact is you could do it for cheaper.
And I think the real takeaway here is
that anytime spent with your friends in the garage
tinkering on a car is gonna be time well spent.
So it's always worth it, in my opinion.
Thank you guys for watching.
I hope you enjoyed Money Pit on the Miata
and if you haven't seen it, why don't you go back
and watch all those episodes, all 50 plus.
I'll see you guys later.
(bouncy music)