Project Track Rat: 1990 Miata

[SlimKlim]

Goodspeed would be proud of me. Today I stayed home from an autocross so I could paint the rockers back to the correct color, help the rust fall the rest of the way out, do a two stage polish, two coats of sealant, clean and recondition the top, and put some sweet ass tire dressing on. This is what I started with:



It was very hard to photograph because 1. Red photographs well. (Pro-tip, if you want your car to look nicer than it actually is when you try to sell it online, make sure it's red.) 2. I had it up on jack stands to make it easier and I wasn't taking it down to roll out into the sun and take pictures.

I polished with a borrowed 6" Porter Cable DA, coarse and fine foam pads, and a good intensive polish and fine polish for the seconds step. I spent about 90 minutes doing the first stage, and maybe 45min to an hour on the second. Then I applied two coats of sealant and conditioned the top, cleaned the windows, dressed the tires and did some other little stuff while I let it haze.

Then I pulled it into the sun to show it off.











Then I pulled it right back into the garage. What am I gonna do, drive it? Pfft.

Its kind of hard to show the change, and as hot as it was, documenting the process was not my first priority. Its definitely not on Dan's level or anything, but it'll certainly do for my purposes. There are some small clearcoat scratches that were a little stubborn, and because it's not the original paint, there are a lot of little imperfections. A couple of runs, spots that look like they used to be fisheyes but were mostly polished out, etc etc.

Next steps while I continue to save up money for suspension are to assemble my homemade intake, continue cleaning it up a little bit, throw a home depot lip on it and some other small stuff.