Woah there!

The brakes on little blue were shocking. Not just bad, but awful to the point where you had to plan way ahead to stop at a junction. This is the real reason we've not done any track days with the car yet, and why I've hardly done any road miles in her. Well, that has changed. We spent yesterday fitting new discs and pads all round. It's not a terrible job once you get the feel of it.

Want to see some photos?

Front Brakes
Prior to starting, I jacked up the car and put her on two axle stands. Then removed the road wheels from both sides. I figured I'd like to be able to see the current set up in case I got lost somewhere, so I did one side at a time.

Initial set up:
 

Entire caliper removed to get to the disc, disc removed. Box crate deployed to hold the caliper so that the brake pipe isn't damaged:


Giving everything a little clean with a wire brush:

Fitting the pads: I went for EBC Yellow Stuff. :-)

And the final setup on the front. Note the disc being held rigidly in place with wheel nuts while the caliper and pads were fitted.
 

Rear brakes
The rear brakes have an entirely different caliper, pad and disc configuration to the front.

Jacking the car.... in the pouring rain. Not pleasant!



Trying to find the correct alankey size for the manual adjuster. (It's 4mm by the way). The adjuster will do its best to fall out. We spend twenty minutes looking for it once it had done so. Doh.

Folding the caliper up and out of the way. It's tough work because there is a huge amount of spring in the handbrake cable:

Pads going in:
 

And finished:
 

Watertight at Last!

One of the problems that our car has suffered with is a damaged hood. The hood itself was fine - in fact, arguably the best hood out of those one all our cars - but the plastic window had become detached from the surround. I suspect that the previous owner had been dropping the roof without unzipping the window...

We wanted a new hood. An bit of canny eBay work got us an entire roof including frame for £28. We had to pick it up ourselves, but we turned this into a decent weekend away, so all good. The replacement roof was described as 'not A1, but serviceable'. It has a pretty major rip where the rain rail hold it in, but most importantly the zip out window section was perfect. See where we're going here? :-)

You can't just zip in the new window - you have to remove the roof first. It's not that tricky to remove as we discovered. To undo: 14 x 10mm nuts around the rain rail (bear in mind we'd already stripped and binned the carpet), then strip back the seat belt tower plastic cover and undo 6 x 12mm nuts (3 per side). The roof will be out fairly easily. The Haynes manual actually totally misses out the rain rail part! Fail.

Here we are with the roof removed:

Having removed the original roof carefully, I zipped out the window section of the replacement roof and then realised that the zips are incompatible. We were pretty annoyed for a while until we decided to unpick the zip from the original window and resew it onto the replacement.

I left the girly sewing stuff to Katy. ;-)

Unpicking:

Ready to sew:

Pinned in place:

Full on sewing machine action:

This took some time, but seems to be pretty successful, I'm pleased to report.

I cleaned up the rails quickly. Ideally, they'd be repainted, but we needed to crack on. A task for another day.

After that we had to wait until a few major rain showers had passed before rolling the car out of the garage to give us space to pop the roof back on. It's not the easiest task in the world to re-seat the roof into the rain rail and then attach the metal cover rail in place. Katy took this task in hand with remarkable skill. I'd never have done it.

Katy's top tips: drop the roof into place, attach a couple of the 12mm bolts on each side, then raise the roof. Leave the window unzipped so you can reach inside and out as you need to. You will need to have someone (my job!) hold the roof still at various stages of fold so that you get the correct tension to allow you to feed it in.

Here she is refixing the metal rail on her side of the car:

And here you are, a totally fixed and awesome roof:

When it rains...

...we'll be able to see. I finally replaced the refurbished wipers this evening. I also changed the gear knob from the clunky broken one that was there (see previous pictures) to a much nicer, neater standard Mk1 knob that I got from eBay for £6 delivered.

Then I had to take it for a quick spin of course, just to test it out you see. Ahem.

Next major job: the brakes.
Second major job: a 'new' hood.

Stickers!

Bluey (no, I know, it's not original but the name seems to have stuck!) was looking a little drab and sad-looking with her scratches and scrapes and certainly not interesting enough for a race car. We (Tom) found the wonderful website Hippy Motors and ordered a large number of stickers, mostly for Bluey but a few for Poppy and Scarlett each.

One day, while waiting for someone to come pick up some bits that they'd bought off us on eBay, we got rather sticker happy. See below for the outcome - I love it!








Look out for us!

Improved - Not Perfect

So, following the crappy smokey video that we posted on YouTube (see below), the new idle is much, much improved. She is using a little oil, and smokes a bit blue on start. I suspect that it's the usual valve stem oil seal problem that older cars tend to have. The mechanic said not to worry, so we won't. :-)

This is not an exciting video - which is nice. Just a gentle idle. More videos to come.

Been at the Doctors

Well.... after much poking about under the bonnet, I decided that it was time to take her to the car doctor. I figured that the oil leak was most likely coming from the cam shaft and crank oil seals. To get to these, you have to remove the cam belt... and most importantly, get it back just right.

So, she went to the local garage. I'm up for most things on a car, but the innards of engines are still a bit of a no-go area. It's something I clearly need to get sorted, as we'll need to change the one on Katy's car soon. I'd like to 'help' someone who knows what they are doing change theirs: any takers?

I've had a call from the garage today. Everything seems to be much improved. She has decent oil pressure, isn't leaking oil like a sieve and the sound of the engine is fine. That'll be due to oil being able to reach the tappets...! I'm picking her up tomorrow, so here's hoping we're much closer to our first track day...

Update: Today, we picked her up. While my wallet is much lighter, the car seems to sound much more like an MX-5 should! I reckon a decent service will smooth out some of the remaining issues. The idle is a little lumpy, but I've already found advice on how easy it is to mess with that.


I took her for a ten mile run. Let's say she went like a train. Ahem. Big smiles. I don't think I've ever been that aggressive with my Mk2... and I'm still grinning. That engine, although a little abused, will stand up to what we want her to do. :-)


Here we are on the way home... 

Tempting.

Today I found this website. Hippy Motors. Let's just say, our racing car may be a little different from the others...