Latest news with #NAMiata
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Watch Toyota's GR Garage Restore a Third-Gen Supra and Make It Like New
Toyota currently offers many hard-to-find replacement parts for its iconic vehicles. With new parts on the way for 2025, the automaker's GR Garage restored a third-generation Supra to show what's possible. This car, torn apart to a bare body shell and then built up again, is basically a brand-new 1992 Supra. Toyota first announced that it would be making replacement parts for its heritage vehicles back in 2019, at the launch of the then-new fifth-generation Supra. Earlier this year, it expanded that program to include more parts for older Land Cruisers, the third- and fourth- generation Supra, and even the scrappy little AE86 Corolla. As you'd expect for something aimed at enthusiasts, the program is run through the Gazoo Racing division as GR Heritage Parts. In an effort to promote this work, Toyota brought a third-generation Supra into GR Garage, and restored it from the ground up. Factory restorations are almost commonplace for European marques like Jaguar Land Rover or Ferrari, but are a relatively new phenomenon in Japan. You can probably thank Mazda for the trend, as it was one of the first to offer in-house restorations, as well as reproducing new parts, initially for the NA Miata. According to the Mazda employees who set up that replacement parts program, some of the first phone calls they received after the announcement were from Nissan and Honda, curious about how they might also set up heritage parts efforts. Thus, Honda now offers an NSX restoration program in Japan (and has said that a U.S. effort is under consideration), while Nissan offers parts for older Skylines under its NISMO brand. Further, Mazda has expanded its factory restoration program to the FD-chassis twin-turbo RX-7, though there have been some delays to rolling out those plans. For the GR Garage restoration, a Supra model not sold in the U.S. was used: a 1992 Supra 2.5 GT. Fitted with a twin-turbocharged 2.5-liter inline-six, this car made the maximum, unofficially mandated 276-hp cap in the so-called "gentleman's agreement" among Japan's automakers. While not quite as legendary as the fourth-gen Supra that followed it, this generation of Supra has plenty of fans on both sides of the Pacific. The car looks to be in pretty good shape initially, but some careful examination turns up a few bodged repairs and rust. GR technicians cut, disassemble, and take the Supra completely down to a bare body shell before welding in replacement steel and respraying the entire car. The whole process took two technicians six months, and the result is basically a brand-new 1992 Supra. It's now flawless. The video below shows the process (sorry, no English subtitles). If you're a fan of golden age Japanese machinery, whether because of the cars of your youth or just hours spent playing Gran Turismo, seeing this Supra brought to concours quality is incredibly satisfying. There are any number of individual specialist shops doing this kind of work, but having the weight of an OEM manufacturer on board makes a huge difference. It's nothing but good news that Toyota is following through on preserving its heritage. [/image] You Might Also Like Car and Driver's 10 Best Cars through the Decades How to Buy or Lease a New Car Lightning Lap Legends: Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang!
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
A Turbo Single-Rotor Miata Looks Like The Most Fun An NA Can Get
The Mazda Miata is beloved for being tiny and light, a combination of qualities most modern automakers seem to avoid like the plague. It's never been the fastest car, but who really needs that? It's more of a slow-car-fast deal, and every method of upping the power always seems to add weight in equal measure. Unless, apparently, you're rotary wizard Rob Dahm: then you can slap a turbocharged single-rotor Wankel in there, and add power while actually cutting weight. Dahm's latest project is to swap an NA Miata's four-cylinder out for a compact rotary engine. But unlike other rotary swaps, that usually use a 13b dual-rotor out of an RX-7, Dahm is using just a single rotor for his Miata. This comes with its own challenges around simply putting the engine together, but it also ends up with an engine block that weighs just 64 pounds, or less than half the shortblock weight of the engine it's replacing. Yet Dahm claims, with a properly-sized turbocharger, this build could double the Miata's factory horsepower. Read more: Subaru Had It Right All Along This video is just the first in the build series, but it's already more progress than many ambitious swaps ever make. The Miata's transmission has been cut up and welded to a rotary bellhousing, and the single rotor mill is physically inside the car's body. Surely not for the final time, as it's missing little niceties like "engine mounts," but it's in there all the same. The rest is just wiring and pipes, and that's easy, right? If Dahm is correct about the eventual power and weight of this engine, he could have a truly incredible Miata on his hands by the end of the build. It would be more powerful than any Miata built by Mazda, but still light enough to sit with the stock cars, and not so overwhelmingly powerful to entirely change the beloved driving dynamics of the NA. We'll have to keep our eyes peeled on the build to see how it pans out. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
This NA Miata Gated Shifter Conversion Kit Was Inspired by a Ferrari
If you have a first-generation Mazda MX-5 Miata, here's something you might not know: you can buy a gated shifter for your car right now. The conversion kit is from a brand called Minottek, and at the moment, it's the only product the company sells. Minottek is the work of Ryan Conforti, an NA Miata owner who was inspired to design a gated manual for his own car after experiencing a shifter with a gate for the first time. As he tells Road & Track, it all started with a drive in a Ferrari 360. "I work for a company that produces parts for exotic cars and I had the opportunity to drive a gated Ferrari 360 Spider," he says. "Everybody's always talked about how amazing and romantic the gated shifter really is, and I understood it, but it wasn't until I drove it that I realized how much it adds to the driving experience. The tactility of changing gears, hearing a click, and watching the shifter slide into the next gear. It brings a whole new joy to driving..." "I saw it as this pretty sort of object of Italian heritage, but there's more beneath the surface. There's more past the pretty face of a gated shifter staring at you. I thought, immediately, 'I would want to have one of these in a Miata.' It's a coveted experience, and I wish more people had the opportunity to use one." Creating one meant going to work developing the tech for his own example of the ultra-democratized Japanese sports car, a 1995 NA Miata ( which, as it so happens, was his first car). The work started with a series of 3D scans. "I have some background in product design and engineering, so I sort of had an idea of where I wanted to start, which was 3D scanning the stock shifter in every single gear position," he says. "I took those scans, overlaid them on one another, and I was able to extract exactly how long each gear throw was at any particular height on the shifter rod. From there, it was really just making a gate that surrounded those dimensions." Conforti built his first gate, then revised it more than 30 times to nail down exact dimensions within a tenth of a millimeter. His goal was the determine the dimensions of the transmission's internal gating, then shrink them by a couple percentage points to give a satisfying click after every shift — but without allowing gate forks to encroach on a solid gear change. "I made 30 revisions," he says. "That goes to show you that you can't get it perfect just off [stationary 3D scans] alone." "There are centering fulcrum bushings and springs that locate the shifter rod within the transmission turret. Those can sort of sit and act differently, depending on which gear you're actually in. Then, of course, that varies while driving, the actual fulcrum bushings move slightly while driving. I can't accommodate for that sort of thing [while scanning] — it was just a good place to start and get me into street testing. That's where most of the refinement took place." The driving portion required the help of two other NA Miata owners, both with unusual builds that allowed Conforti to stress-test the gated shifter under more extreme conditions than what the average Miata would see. "My roommate actually has a prepped drift car, a drift NA Miata. It's also street-registered, so I installed the kit on this car and I had him handle all of the 'donut and burnout testing,' as we like to call it." "I would just give him a revision of the gate, he would go out and drive it for a couple days, do a few burnouts to make sure nothing was rattling, and he really took care of the abusive side of things to make sure that everything would hold up and not vibrate or rattle loose," Conforti says. While the drift car owner handled cases of extreme, torturous use, another friend offered a car with another problem to solve. His car, a lifted Miata build based on a particularly well-loved example, had more than 200,000 miles on the odometer. "That car in particular is very special because it has original motor mounts — original to the car, 200,000-mile motor mounts. It was absolutely crucial when developing the kit, because it really demonstrated the maximum amount that the shifter could possibly move in a Miata," Conforti says. "In the event somebody had a car with 200,000-mile motor mounts, I wanted to make sure I accommodated for that." "At the end of the day, we learned that the transmission could move up and down almost 3/8ths of an inch while driving with worn mounts." Conforti has since finished the process of designing, developing, and producing gated shifter conversion kits for NA Miatas; now that he's done it once, he knows he can do it again. He notes that the Miata's transmission is part of the car's structural rigidity, a unique complication that makes it a bit of a "worst case scenario" for this kind of conversion. Since most other sports cars don't opt for this solution, other kits going forward could actually be easier to develop. That means he has to decide what to do next: "The NA [conversion kit has] garnered a lot of attention, so the NB is the natural progression," he says. "Eventually, I would like to do it on the ND. I've also had a number of requests for a BRZ, GR 86, S2000. These are all cars that I'd really like to do, because now that I sort of have a formula down, a recipe, I can apply it to more cars." This conversion kit is unique among many similar dreams, in that it actually became a product available for other owners to buy and install themselves, but Conforti sees his work as repeatable by anyone. He closed our conversation by offering advice for any other car owner with a dream project in mind: "If there's any wisdom or inspiration I could impart on somebody that's interested in making car parts, I would say buy a 3D printer and learn how to do a little bit of CAD. Make parts for your own car, and some day you may be following in my footsteps."You Might Also Like You Need a Torque Wrench in Your Toolbox Tested: Best Car Interior Cleaners The Man Who Signs Every Car
