Bruce Nunnally Posted June 7, 2011 Report Share Posted June 7, 2011 So if you haven’t heard yet, Project Miata went up in a giant ball of fire last Thursday. Today was the first day I got to see the project car we’ve been so meticulously rebuilding since it burnt to the ground. Let’s just say it’s Project Miata now comes in Extra Crispy. So this is the first sight I see pulling in to my day job at JCLOutdoors. Holy darn my car got cooked! Hopefully we can salvage some usable parts of this bad boy. Look at that gaping hole on the passanger side of the hood! Near as I can tell it it got extra hot in this area since it was directly over the fuel lines. Amazingly enough the headlights are still intact. Slightly blackened but probably functional if you could get them out of the housing. Now they even have that smoked looked! Blistered paint on the hood. Guess that means there’s not going to be much left under it. Looks pretty well intact. However enything that could burn did. Looks like a bad Salvador Dali painting from this angle. The strut tower brace might be salvageable. It looks pretty straight Here lies whats left of the new brake and clutch master cylinders I had just installed. This is the fuse box..er.. well is used to be. Now it’s just a pile of slag. Timing belt looks good! It’s not even singed. Just replaced it to, along with the water pump. they don’t even have 200 miles on them yet. The a/c compressor looks just like it did before the fire. It’s completely untouched. It’s like the fire randomly left some parts undamaged. And then there’s the interior. Rest assured the fire left no stone unturned here. Every last bit of anything even remotely flamable was reduced to ashes. Trust me, you do NOT want to be in a car when it catches fire. My Hard Dog Duce roll bar is still there just minus the powder coat and cool Hard Dog stickers. Suprisingly enough it’s not the slightest bit deformed. I figured this though would be all warped from the heat. It’s amazing how fast unpainted steel will rust. It’s only been 3 days since Project Miata went up in a blaze of glory. The wheels are are virtually unscathed. Which is a good thing, since these damned things are expensive and OZ no longer produces the superlegerra anyway so they be hard to replace. Looks like the calipers and pads will be salvageable, the shiny new stainless steel brakes lines are toast though. Hey look I found a bit of shiny paint! I can see me! The back end of the car looks to be in really good shape considering the gas tank blew up. And look at the tires. They aren’t even blistered. I completely expected them to be puddles of melted rubber, not completely intact and holding air. All the glass in the car is gone. And I don’t mean it shattered to peices and it’s laying on the floor. Nope, it’s flat gone! There was a solid chuck of alumnium sitting on top of that shifter lever. Wonder where the hell it went to… You can also see whats’s left of the aftermarket radio and dvd player / lcd screen the previous owner had installed. At some point in time this car was equipped with the highly sought after red leather seats from a 1993 LE Miata. Now it’s just a pair of rust seat frames. I can not get over the amount of rust that showed up already! Seriously this car had no rust on it 3 days ago! You can also see that that is nothing left of the doors accept the latches and door skins. So that’s all that’s left of Project Miata. The fire pretty much consumed everything combustible. Now it’s time to start the rebuilding process. Kind of hard to believe that just over a week ago this thing was sitting on jack stands in my garage getting a complete overhaul on everything except the wiring harness… now I really wish I would have replace that too… Where do we go from here? Well thanks to all the support we are getting from all of our followers through Motorama Live!’s Save Project Miata Foundation. We’ll definatly be completing this project. This is a major set back, but we’re getting alot of support from our fans out there so we’re going to find a new Project Miata, salvage as much as we can from Project Miata: The Extra Crispy Edition, and keep on building Project Miata the way we’ve envisioned it. With one major change. Because of all the support we are getting from our followers, we’re going to let you guys help decide the direction Project Miata is going to go. After all a good chuck of this project is being made possible from the contributions of our followers to Motorama Live!’s Save Project Miata Foundation. So we want to make sure you guys are as involved in the build process as possible. Our contributors will get a say in everything from what parts we use in the build to what color we paint Project Miata, and even what to name the Car Care 101 mascot. So if you’re interested in helping us get Project Miata rolling again, we’ll have more info on how you can contribute in either parts, money, time, or tools to the Save Project Maita Foundation very soon. View the full article Bruce 2023 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing Follow me on: Twitter Instagram Youtube Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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