Recent Posts

Changing the Front Brake Pads

The Miata had gone two years without any brake changes by me, and having never done it before I thought it would be a good idea to learn how to change brake pads. This would be a skill very useful before going on the track or for an autocross event. In this post, I demonstrate how to change the front brake pads.

Changing the Valve Cover Gasket

The Miata’s engine has an easy to change Valve Cover Gasket, which I chose to replce because I saw some potential oil leak at the bottom of the car. I asked on reddit and the users said that it was probably a bad valve cover gasket and should be replaced, which is what I ended up doing. I am not sure if that has fixed the problem yet but will keep checking. It is quite an easy fix.

Understanding the Torque and Horsepower Curves

How does one plot the torque and horsepower curves for a 1999 Miata ? In this blog post, we explain how to do that using some dynamometer or dyno data from someone else’s 99 Miata. I have not taken my Miata to a dyno yet but this should be enough for an example for your car or for any other car, as long as you have the data.

The rest of the data specific to a factory 1999 MX-5 Miata (base trim and 10th Anniversary Edition) can be taken from here, which I provide as miata99_data_power.csv for download and also shown in the table below.

Jump-starting the Porsche Boxster S

First I added 2 gallons of gasoline in the Boxster. Then I tried to start it with the key in the ignition.

The Boxster was completely dead. So probably the battery was dead and needed a jump-start.

The battery is in the front trunk and the trunk does not have a manual lever to open it, in the event that the battery is dead. The Boxster fuse box (Figure 1) has a special red terminal (Figure 3) for a spare battery to turn on just enough electronics in the car to pop the front trunk. Once the front trunk is popped, you can access the battery and jump-start the full car.

A Copart Experience - 2001 Porsche Boxster S

Randomly in July while getting bored at work I was surfing Copart, a salvage auction site, that I saw a Subaru BRZ that had some hail damage but looked fine otherwise. Getting excited, I registered on Copart and placed a bid on it for about $600, but I lost. Over time I kept losing bids on similar BRZ/FR-S cars and decided to expand my horizons. So I started bidding on Porsche Boxsters with minimal damage, raising my maximum bid limit to $1500. I ended up winning a 2001 Porsche Boxster S (Figures 1-5), with 142,000 miles, for $1400 which had a dent on the rear driver side (Figure 3a and 3b), a broken tail light and was in driving condition. Despite having a Miata that needed work, I took on another project — classic project car mistake 😊 !