Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

My red one was supercharged. I loved that car but the head casting suffered a catastrophic failure. The supercharger was mounted utilising a mounting point for an engine hook. Unfortunately, this caused a shear in the head, so the head actually broke purely from the stress of having a supercharger bolted to it, rather than boost/power/heating/cooling issues.

I spent a large amount of money (proper theme for me) having a head skimmed, ported, polished, bigger valves machined by Blink Motorsport, but then naively thought it would be cheaper to take the car to a local MX5 place rather than get my car transported up to Blink.

They did a shite job of fitting the head which resulted in me having to pay twice and I took the car to Skuzzle after to fix the shit job the local place did, but there was still ongoing issues. It still made a little bit of blue smoke after sitting on idle, eg sitting at traffic lights, and the supercharger belt wouldn't stop squealing no matter what I did. I just had the fear that it would never be OK again, so I sold it to buy a mate's ITB MX5 he was selling, which was the grey car which I think was posted on here a few times. I had a good 1.5 years I think in that car but when I took it down to Skuzzle for an MOT and a few minor tweaks, it turned out the floor was really rusty so they suggested I do a body swap.

The body swap to this white car didn't go as well as it was supposed to and I had 12 months where I barely drove the car, literally every time I drove it something would go wrong, which was extremely frustrating after I'd spent basically the price of a decent MX5 getting this car built. Then I finally got it back to Skuzzle to get it finessed, which should have been done before the original handover, and then on the way home the engine overheated (my fault for not noticing but the car shouldn't have overheated) so badly it seized.

That was about 2 years ago, I completed 90% of an engine swap to a good 1.8 engine in 2 weekends but the last 10% has taken the rest of the time, plus I was adding bits and replacing bits that were always a bit dodgy. Such as:

1. Fujitsubo exhaust manifold
   
2. HKS main exhaust
   
3. custom exhaust tip (to look narrow and conservative like the MX5 Cup
   cars)
   
4. AFR, water temp, oil temp and oil pressure gauges - did a
   proper job on these, fitted the sandwich plate, sensors, created
   a loom, made a gauge holder for the dash top out of an upside down under dash headunit mount
   
5. 6 point harness
   
6. modified the ECU chassis to have a permanent USB cable to connect to the standalone ECU
   
7. worked out why the horn didn't work and found the right
   steering wheel hub, slip ring, horn push etc to make the horn work
   
8. Created a loom for the LED headlights
   
9. gearbox oil change
   
10. new speedo cable
    
    

Extremely glad to have this car back from Unit 3 and "finished".

Been a shit few years of car ownership.