MX5 Specialist – Restoration Leicester

We once heard that the Japanese word for Ferrous Oxide is Eunos. You don’t have to be an MX-5 geek to appreciate that these lovely little roadsters all suffer from rust.  With this car the front wings are beyond repair, a hole appearing above the join with the bumper and the bottoms of the wings where they meet the sill are rotted away from the inside. Removed, the wings are discarded and the inner wings cleaed up ready for welding. New wings are on order and aren’t that expensive. We’ve removed the front bumper for ease of access, as you can see. We’ve also carefully removed the engine, transmission and suspension as they’re all fit for an overhaul.

Happily, MX-5 engines and transmissions are pretty robust and with regular servicing will rack up 200,000 miles or more, quite comfortably. This example has done about 125k miles already and still runs beautifully. It has been removed as we make space to work on the tired old suspension and weld up it’s rusty bits. You can see from the picture that one coil spring is broken and that the arms are pretty crusty. The shock absorbers are also all original, as are what’s left of the bushes.

We are stockists for SuperPro bushes and this car will get a complete refit.

With the drivetrain out of the way and wings and bumper off, we can start welding. MX-5s will rust on the sills, often from the inside out due to blocked drain holes, but they aren’t the only grot-spot. Inside the front wheel arches take a pasting and scraping off muck and underseal we can see a repair is needed. Here we clean up the area and weld in plates formed to shape. We’ve also repaired the rear wheel arches, taking care not to block drain holes, we don’t want to repair it again for at least a few years!

These are pretty rims, aren’t they? To refurbish them we removed the Toyo tyres, blasted them and had them repainted. The owner is to be complimented on the lack of kerbing (although we could have fixed that too, if needed). When restoring an MX-5 we do numerous jobs in parallel, no waiting for bits before we start something else, meaning our service gets you back on the road quickly. Refurbishing these wheels was a nice little job and we’re happy with the result.

New suspension. We are stockists for SuperPro, leading manufacturer of poly bushes. We fitted a full set to the car, after having first shot-blasted and powder-coated everything first. Here are the bits laid out, and then on the car. Note how good the underside looks after all the cleaning, welding and painting.

Coil-overs on! The standard suspension set-up on MX-5s is pretty compliant, but we couldn’t put the old shocks and springs back on this car, so it gets a set of replacement coil-overs and a 10mm suspension drop. We set up the geometry too, with new bushes and arms everything is now straight and true. The car will now handle as it should. Note also the refurbished calipers, and the treated and undersealed metalwork. We apologise for the bottle of brake fluid that just wandered into shot! Next job: paint those lovely new wings!

Paintshop time. Our neighbours here in East Goscote are a professional paintshop with not only a huge booth and all the right kit but many years of experience. Our car isn’t having a full respray but we do the bottom of the doors and the new wings. Silver is often tricky to match but we’re happy with the result. Oh, and we’ve fitted a new mohair roof with glass rear screen!