Apologies in advance for my questionable grammar and sentence structure..
But first for those of you who didn't read the old threads, the story so far *wavy screen and flash back harp noise*
I bought the car in 2008 from Fuzzlet, and after a few adventures with a main relay going all flowered on the way home (luckily fixed by a truckie bypassing it with a bit of wire, after the NRMA failed to work it out)
Pretty well as soon as I got it home the mods started firstly with a DIY and rather ghetto but functional Mania CAI replica (as mania were out of stock of them).
This was followed shortly after by an exhaust of a similarly ghetto nature, for this I got some N*power extractors off the forums then made the trek down to the local wreckers with the missus (she's a keeper!) to scrounge some bits. We managed to bag ourselves an ex EA falcon catalytic converter and an ex 3.5L Magna resonator.
Taking this lot down to the exhaust shop along with the Roadstersport dual muffler that came with the car (not fitted), resulted in a rather nice sounding and cheap exhaust which seemed to unlock some decent power up top also.
After this I generally just enjoyed the car for a while, and finally got around to doing a trackday with the MX5 club.
This was a complete blast, and it was great getting back to Wakefield after about 2 years away from there, however at the end of the day a nasty tapping noise started coming from the motor, as we drove home this noise got worse and worse, and as far as we could tell was something majorly messed up in the bottom end.
On pulling it apart, it turned out one of the rod bearings had gone majorly melty, and had huge chunks gouged out of it (i'll try and dig up pics)
A DIY rebuild ensued, however due to various herp-a-derp moments on my part, leaked rather a lot of oil (broke what I thought was a cover bolt, turned out to hold oil in..) and thus I took it to RussellB of Carco for a rebuild.
Of course I couldn't help myself but do some extra fruity stuff into the bargain, below is the final specs/stuff/things done we ended up with.
Tighe 805C cams and adjustable cam gears.
Head ported and valves unshrouded
Head Skimmed and generally rebuild (new stem seals etc.)
Block Rebored
New Cast Pistons - 9:1 compression for future turbo goodness
Spool H-Beam Conrods
Crank Reground
New Bearings etc.
Bottom End Balanced
Sump tapped with an oil fitting for future turbo (currently capped off)
This motor ran fairly well, but had a rather flat bottom end and idled a bit poorly we really needed an ECU.
RussellB suggested a Adaptronic 420C as a good cheap option (a suggestion he now regrets!) and after a bit of tuning and messing with cam timing it spat out 101kw ATW at around 7500rpm with a nice strong midrange and a decently steady idle (still lumpy, but acceptable)
After this we spent aproxmately a billionty.5 hours trying to get the damned ECU to behave itself, it would stutter at random times, and even after we thought we had it all sorted it would sometimes randomly cough and die when getting to operating temprature, randomly running far leaner than the maps should tell it to, Russell was a real champ, sitting in my backyard covered in frost at 6am trying to make it start, lending me his slightly scary windsor V8 powered volvo, and generally giving me about $5000 of his time for free, simply because he promised he'd make it work for $1200 and damn it he was sticking to it! If you live near Canberra, I can't recommend Carco highly enough!
- Me at MDTC, and no I didn't catch that spin! 
Much fun and trackdays came after that, and to cut a long story short, I've now moved to Melbourne, and after about a year of having the car left in Canberra, me and my best mate drove it back to Melbourne, the fun way! (via thredbo etc, see below for photo of my mate Caswal in his stupid hat)
I've now got the car in Melbourne (as of about 6 months ago now) and I've got some exciting plans to finaly fix/improve some things that have been annoying me, more on that when I can be bothered posting the next post
