Destination SSM

As most of you reading this will know, I’ve been working on a KL-DE-based Miata for SSM (starting with Mark Snell’s KLiata) since March 2011 or so.  Due to numerous issues with the build, I recently started researching going a completely different direction for a new build.  Several things had nearly simultaneously become apparent to me, independently: the KLiata was too heavy, and that I didn’t need a KL to make the power levels I was looking for.  So, the search began for a new car to start with.

I started looking for 1.6 cars with ABS.  I searched up and down the west coast.  I found a few that looked vaguely interesting (but nothing really “right”), and started communicating with the sellers.  I’d started to get a short list when, on a frustrated Facebook post of mine, Davin appeared out of nowhere to offer his car for sale to me.  I checked it out today — weighed it and inspected it in the dark parking lot of building 33 at Microsoft.

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It looked good to me, so we agreed on a price.  This weekend he will upgrade to Dennis Hannah’s STS Miata (Peter Umino’s build) and I will pick up his car and start my new build.  The motor has a blown head gasket (among other potential issues) and the top has a major tear, but that’s pretty much the point, since I don’t want either the motor or the top, so it was a pretty perfect candidate.

I didn’t keep a running blog of the build of the KLiata, which I later lamented, so I’m going to rectify that with the new build, and start documenting it from square one.  This is at least as much for my records as anything else, but hopefully others will enjoy it.  My friends Brian and Duncan are also going to be helping me with the project, mostly with the custom suspension bits we’re going to be building, and they’ll be posting here as well.  I’ve also started a Wiki that will be where we keep the majority of our project documentation.  I don’t really want to keep much of anything secret, so there will eventually be pretty detailed plans in there for future people to follow.

This entry was posted on November 11, 2011 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.