$25,000 Turbo Miata Build in 10 Minutes

- This Miata is the product of $25,000 worth of modifications, thousands of hours of effort and a lot of frustration. It wasn't easy getting to this point, but today we'll go over all the things we've done to this car in over 50 episodes, to turn it from a $2,300 Craigslist find into a

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charged daily car you could hit the track. Then in the end we will decide if it was worth it or not. - Thanks to Omaze for sponsoring today's video. - I know what you're thinking. What's a jock with 100% authentic bulging muscles doing with Jerry going through a goth phase? - It's not a phase, Nolan, oh my God. - There are athletes and goths.

And they rarely mix. Well, now they do, because Omaze gives you the chance to win the ultimate muscle car of the 80s, the 1987 Buick Grand National GNX. - Decorated and all black, my second favorite color after the misunderstood gray. Furthermore, its simply sinister, all-black exterior houses a 3.8-liter Turbo V6 engine on 16-inch cross-weave wheels. - It's the strength of a muscle car. - With the dark and melancholic charisma of your favorite supervillain. Hey Nolan, wanna listen to some death metal and doodle in notebooks about our favorite spiked necklaces? - Ah, I'm fine, Goth Jerry. - Ah, I feel the pain. - Best of all, every donation supports the ACLU, a nonprofit organization that fights to defend the rights that the Constitution guarantees to all of us.

Now, that's strength. What are you doing there, Goth Jerry? - Biceps curl, this GNX has inspired me. I can be melancholic and strong. - So for your chance to win this 1987 Buick Grand National GNX, including tax and shipping, visit omaze.com/donutmedia. Oh yeah, make sure you're focused, like you're pinching that muscle. -Ah. - As if you were pinching the biceps, not necessarily a pull. -Ah. - Feel that pinch. - Three years ago I had just moved to Los Angeles from Ohio. I lived in a motor home and needed a daily driver. So I bought this 1994 Miata.

This car has the Sea package, which means it has some upgrades over the base model, like a Torsen limited-slip differential, leather seats, and nice speakers in the headrests. It had low miles and I was able to get it for $2,300, a deal you can't find today. It just so happened that we were developing a program that would become Money Pit and we needed a car to

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it. And what better than a Miata to teach people how to turn cars? It's cheap, the parts are cheap, Mazda made a million of them, and overall it's a great beginner car project.

Ah (beep). With production underway, we needed a plan. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to eventually

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charge the Miata, but we needed to do some basics before we got to that point. Mainly find out what condition the vehicle was in. Luckily the car was already in a pretty good place, but it's always good to replace all the fluids and lubrication so we can have a nice healthy base before we start working on the Miata. With the liquids and everything refreshed, it was time for the first modification. One of the first modifications anyone makes to their cars is the wheels and tires, and we are no different.

So we removed the old material and installed Enkei RPF1 wrapped in Toyo R888 tires. The original wheels and tires were quite thin, so the Enkeis and Toyos are a bit wider, giving us a big improvement in terms of grip. Now the next logical update was suspension. We bought the Skunk2 suspension with adjustable damping, ride height, and preload because it fit the budget and provided all the adjustability we really needed for this to handle well on the track. After that, we install a steering wheel. It's a great steering wheel that doesn't fly off while I'm driving. So with our upgraded steering wheel, we decided to improve the fact that our steering system was leaking by upgrading it to a leak-free system.

I decided to re

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the power steering rack that is on the Miata, which turned out to be a terrible decision. Oh. Not only was it no fun, it didn't work and the leak became 10 times bigger than it originally was. So I had to buy a remanufactured steering rack anyway, but it was time to align it. So I went into this episode expecting it to be a little tedious because of all the trial and error we'd have to do, and that turned out to be true. It was a long couple of days of testing, but it's a good skill.

Obviously, it's much easier to take your car to an alignment shop. But the real point of that episode was that if you're an athlete, going to the track is often a very good skill to be able to do on your own so you can try to modify and dial some things in differently while you're on the track without having You have to go out and go to a store and pay them to do an alignment for you. With the alignment done, we decided to turn our attention to the engine bay, so we started with an air intake system.

We went with a race cold air intake, not really because it was going to make a lot more power because it didn't, but the metal looks colder than the stock intake and the induction sounds alone, honestly makes it worth the money in my opinion. grief. opinion. (car accelerating) And if the intake makes cold sounds, then the next logical step is to make the exhaust sound cold. The original Miatas don't sound very good, but with this MagnaFlow we can get a little more grunt out of the 1.8 liter engine. There's a bit of a hassle fitting the new exhaust, as it always is, but it's always good to have friends like Eddie around to help.

Now, Eddie appeared on several different episodes of Money Pit. He was one of the guys that was usually behind the camera and behind the computer editing making Money Pit happen. Eddie decided it would be a great idea to do a flame shooting episode. Then Eddie saw a video online where a guy was shooting propane flames out of his tailpipe and, much to my chagrin, we ended up doing it. In a way it worked. It's a little silly, a little dangerous for no good reason, but it worked. We shot some flames and that made Eddie happy, and I guess at the end of the day, that's all that matters.

So, since we were done shooting fireballs, we decided to do a real upgrade and upgrade the car's old clutch. In retrospect, I probably would have chosen a different clutch. It was a three disc clutch for a very low power application. I thought it might look strange or difficult to drive, but it ended up fine. But again, I probably would have chosen a different one, but it worked, and that's what matters. The next step was some new headers, which are a pretty simple update, but they are important. This is the first time we've taken the car to our dyno guy, Richard Gibby, and we wanted to get a baseline horsepower figure.

So the original power came to a whopping 104 horsepower, but after installing the new heads we made 107 and a half. We've generated about four horsepower. After the headlines, we decided to test cheap versus expensive roll bars, which would end up being one of the sketchiest episodes we've ever done. Installing the roll bar took some time, but it really wasn't too difficult. But then everything went a little off the rails. (suspense music) Oh God. - I thought that might happen. - For the record, I knew the forklift was going to tip over. We had a pretty tricky situation.

We got that thing back on its feet and got to test our roll bar. Damn, it was time to install one of the quickest and easiest upgrades we've ever done, which also meant one of the quickest and easiest episodes we've ever filmed: the short shifter installation. It took like four hours total, from start to finish, to make one episode. That's pretty good. So, with the shifter finished, it was time to put real racing seats and harnesses in the Miata, so we could take it to the track. It takes us to track day, which was one of the worst track days I've ever been to.

It's not entirely true, it was just incredibly hot. It was like 105, 110 degrees, which I guess is what it's like in the desert. But the Miata overheated all day. It was still on the original cooling system, but that's what happened, it overheated all day. I couldn't even finish a fast lap because I had to let the engine cool down mid-lap. It was a little stupid, but I expected that to happen. And then we knew we needed to do a pretty big and substantial upgrade to the cooling system at that time. So as you can imagine the next thing we did was upgrade the radiator and cooling system in general, especially once you start generating more power it becomes really important to make sure your cooling system can handle the power you're generating . to keep the engine cool.

So I installed a Flyin' Miata kit, which included a Koyorad radiator, a coolant rerouting kit, which reroutes the coolant path for better cooling, and a small brushless fan to draw a lot of air through that. new radiator and keeping everything nice and cool so we could finally finish a lap on the track. You know what's best, being able to stop. So the next step was to stage a big breakup. We opted for Wilwood four-piston brakes and BP-10 composite pads. I bought this kit from Flyin' Miata because they sell a ton of great upgrades for Miatas and because Wilwood makes amazing brakes, but also because it comes with a special purple bracket, and I really love the purple anodized parts.

These brakes have an adjustable proportioning valve, which is convenient when you're tuning your car at the track. This allows you to dictate how much braking power goes to the front brakes compared to the rear brakes. The installation took a long time, but it really was a quality improvement over the original brakes, even if the pad compound squeaks a little in normal driving, but I would say it's one of my favorite improvements overall on the car. so the brakes would be the last improvement before the point of no return. That's when we installed a separate ECU, which in my opinion is the point of no return.

The ECU is basically the brain of the car. And if you're installing an aftermarket computer, that means the Miata is technically no longer street legal. But if we wanted to make more power, there are no two ways to do it, we need an aftermarket ECU to control all the things. This is a plug and play ECU with downloadable tunes, so overall it wasn't a big headache. We took it back to the dyno where our boy Gibby tuned it, and we ended up making a whopping, and in fact, insane 112.75 horsepower to the rear wheels. Once this was done, it was time to make more updates.

So it was time to modify the engine, if we really wanted to start making some power. So the next logical step was to upgrade the intake manifold. So we went with a Skunk 2 intake manifold that had longer runners than the stock, which means a little more airflow and velocity, and also allows us to run a larger throttle body, which is important when you're gearing up. for a turbo. But you have to keep in mind that this all happened during a pandemic and we were having a hard time getting the car parts we wanted. So while we were waiting for our turbo parts, we fixed the cracks in the dash of my Miata and my S14.

We put some nice bright new LED headlights on the Miata. We made some suspension bushings. While we were doing all those episodes, turbo parts would appear and finally they were all there and ready to install. So, since it was turbo time, we had accumulated our parts. So I grabbed what I could get and it was a CX Racing turbocharger kit. CXRacing isn't really known for very high quality parts, but they are pretty cheap so it worked. It comes with the turbocharger, exhaust manifold, internal cooler and charge pipe, exhaust valve and I think that's it. So in addition to the CXRacing kit, we also had to get some fuel upgrades, like a fuel pump and fuel injectors, but we did it all and took it back to the dyno.

My son, Richard Gibby, turned the rollers and we made a huge... (suspenseful music) We (beep) did it, we made 227 horsepower. So, with the turbo kit installed and generating power, it was time to take the car back to the track. And honestly, this was a day that cost me a lot of sleep from then on. We went to the track, started making some passes and started losing a lot of oil from basically every crack and crevice in the engine. But the fact is that I didn't really notice something quite obvious, which was a plug on the top of the crankcase ventilation cover, which was not letting our crankcasewould breathe.

When you add a turbo you end up putting more pressure in the crankcase and that needs to go somewhere. And if you covered it up, only all the cracks and crevices of the engine will come out. So after finding that out and not sleeping forever, it was time to install a proper catch can, so our crankcase could actually breathe, I installed it and the car has been running great ever since. And that brings us to today. So the question is, was it worth it? Was it worth spending $25,000 on this '94 Miata? Well, yes, I think so.

I think the answer is yes. I mean, first of all, we doubled our power from 103 horsepower to a whopping 257, which I have to tell you feels fantastic in a small car like this. So yeah, I mean, $25,000 is a lot of money, but the fact is you could do it for less money. And I think the real takeaway here is that any time you spend with your friends in the garage fixing a car will be time well spent. So, in my opinion, it's always worth it. Thank you all for watching. I hope you enjoyed Money Pit in the Miata, and if you haven't seen it, why don't you go back and watch all those episodes, all 50 of them?

I'll see you later. (jumping music)