build diary

February 7, 2004: A lot of people are watching this build!
I love to hear from you. And congrats to Geoff Davis, who just took delivery of his own CMC Miata kit. He'll have a website up before too long, I'm told. Apparently the wait time from CMC is now over 3 months.

Well, my ski trip today got cancelled when the Caddy wouldn't start (20W50 gets pretty thick in the cold), the Miata proved to be frozen to the car cover and my Subaru has a dodgy ignitor. And that set the tone for the day.

I bolted up the diff and flipped the car back over. Hopefully it will never be upside down again! Then I started cutting thrust washers for the rod ends. 32 of them, all which had to be within about 0.5mm of the correct length so that I wouldn't bend the brackets when tightening suspension bolts. CMC sent some pipe for creating these, but they only sent enough pipe almost do three corners of the car. Luckily, my local hardware store has short lengths of pipe in the correct diameter and thickness. A bit of an annoyance - but not as much as when I went to bolt up the control arms and discovered that the rod ends don't sit in the middle of the brackets! Argh. So I have to recut a bunch of the washers. This is probably one place where the GRM build had access to prepared items to speed things up!

More disturbing was the discovery that the right rear upper control arm is the wrong shape. I can modify it to fit but I want to make sure I don't end up with a slightly different length control arm on one side of the car than the other. It might also affect the bump steer in the rear - I'll have to do some measuring. Putting the left side arm on upside down made for a perfect fit, so it's the arm and not the slightly asymmetrical brackets causing the problems. It's still more accurate than if I'd made it, probably. On top of this my digital camera was throwing fits and I had a hard time getting photos. You'd think they'd last for more than 15,000 shots!

Still, at the end of the day I've made some progress. The car has suspension on three of the four wheels, the diff is in and the uprights are bolted in to place. I can now spin the wheels by hand through the diff! I mounted the front shocks upside down to keep the unsprung weight as low as possible. It'll probably cause no end of questions so I might put them back upright. The steering rack is also mounted in place and I'm getting ready to run the steering column. Hmm, I'd better get a test engine in there first so I don't accidentally put the steering through the water pump or something...

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