New wheels

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Dom

As part of the deal struck with Ben when trading cars, I could have a set of Rota rims of my choice. Unfortunately for Ben, I’m as bad as the missus with shoes when it comes to wheels! This was made doubly hard because the wheels I chose would have to fit a car that I hadn’t built yet!

I phone the Westfield factory for advice on offsets but unfortunately they didn’t have an SDV build to hand so couldn’t tell me what would and wouldn’t fit. I then tried the wscc forums and they came up trumps.

I thus finally decided on 15×7 Rota Slipstreams in black, ET40. At first I thought the offset was quite high and it might look a little weedy in the MX5 arches, but I was quite pleased with the end results!

The wheels also needed tyres. Fortunately, RareRims came up trumps with 195/50/15 Yokohama Parada II for under £40 each!

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The great fuel leak hunt

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Dom

It soon became apparent that this car wasn’t a great fan of keeping fuel in the pipes! The injector leak turned out to be a leaking o-ring. I replaced that, and the leak was solved. However, I’d introduced a misfire. It sounded like there was an air leak, but I’d be damned if I could find it so off I went looking into alternatives. In the end, someone on mx5nutz suggested spraying carb cleaner around the affected area. Sure enough, when spraying it at injector 3, the engine tried to stall.

After pulling the injector rail for what seemed like the millionth time, it became apparent. Somehow, tiny shards of plastic were sitting just underneath the hole where the injector seats, meaning it wouldn’t seal properly. I raided the missus’ shelf-o-crap and robbed some cotton buds to pluck the foreign objects out without accidentally knocking them into the inlet manifold. With the injectors reseated, the car drove fine once again. Just as well, because the mpg was shocking!

It wasn’t long before the next leak was sprung though, coming from the pipe after the fuel filter. For some reason it was plastic rather than rubber and had changed characteristics from the petrol. It was hard now rather than soft and so didn’t seal properly. Promptly replaced with new pipe and voila, no more leaks!

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The donor car

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Dom

And so in the short break between Christmas and New Year 2010, I headed to Exeter to meet Ben from RareRims who had an MX5 I was interested, and he was fortunately interested in my 200sx too. After an afternoon looking over both cars we came to a deal and I was the proud owner of a green 1.8 MX5.  The car was poverty spec, with manual steering and manual windows so should be relatively simple.

The drive home was all motorway based so unfortunately couldn’t get to see the good side of the car. It just showed a lack of power and short gearing! There was a fuel leak coming from the injector on cylinder 2 so it didn’t get much use for the next few days.

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Welcome, background info…

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Dom

Hi,

Welcome to the blog covering my Westfield build, from the very start (perhaps, before the start if you look at it that way). It all started sat at work during a quiet period, wondering how I could get my Nissan 200sx to drive how I’d like. It was looking like over a grand just on suspension bits, and I couldn’t justify spending that on it.  Somehow though, I managed to justify a Westfield build, considerably more than that grand! Considerably more rewarding too I hope.

I knew I wanted to build it myself, and I knew I didn’t want to go for a modular kit for cost reasons, though I’m sure I’ll regret that. Some time ago, I’d seen the story on PistonHeads regarding the Mazda SDV and that seemed to tick all the right boxes. I thus promptly traded the 200sx in for a 1996 1.8 MX5.

The plan is to drive the MX5 for the summer whilst saving the required funds for the kit. As such, this blog will detail the trials and tribulations of a short period of MX5 ownership too.

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