Day Four -- The radiator goes...snap!

Today I wanted to do something easy to help me see more of the engine compartment. I do a fair amount of just staring at the thing, studying all the parts and trying to get as familiar as I can with the engine and its parts. Pictures and diagrams are one thing, but actually seeing and touching the real components can't be beat. Unless, of course, you happen to break them in the process. More on that later. Removing the radiator seemed like an easy enough task to tackle with the last bits of the weekend remaining.

The first thing to do was to remove the splash guard below the engine compartment. It's not really needed to drain or remove the radiator, but it's going to go anyway and removing it now will just make the rest of the job easier. I've done this before when I made a repair to it some months ago. The plastic must have hit something and tore, leaving a section dangling. I fixed it my taping it together with some Gorilla Tape. It worked surprisingly well. It was still together!

Draining the coolant wasn't difficult. The hardest part was collecting the used one gallon milk jugs to store the  coolant (and other fluids) before taking them to the hazardous waste disposal site. :P Looking at the coolant drain made it look like my car was urinating. Heh. With the fluid drained, time to go after the hoses while the drainage tub was still underneath.

Hmmm, I think I'm going to need another one of those.

Well, it looked sturdy enough, but when I went to remove the top radiator hose I realized just how brittle the top had become. I never seemed to have any problems with the radiator save for some slight leakage near the radiator cap. Our mechanic said to just keep an eye on it. Obviously, having not touched the hoses until today, (ever?) I couldn't tell how precarious the whole thing was. It didn't take much force to break. Later I read that this is pretty common for Miata radiators and that some had failed earlier than this one. This is the same original radiator and it lasted 147K miles. OK, add this to the list of follow-up parts to get. I read that all aluminum radiators can be had. I'm going to look into that option when the time comes. First things first. Have to have a working engine before I shell out for other components.

Wow, I can see!

The rest of the job was pretty uneventful. I can see the new drive belts I replaced when I replaced the dead alternator. I'm done for the day and just pondering what to do next. I know I need to disconnect the fuel lines at some point and will need to relieve the fuel pressure in order to do so. Just a little concerned about doing it my garage with the water heater only a few feet away. Don't want to blow anything up. :)

It's new home. The fins look great though.

Day Three - Removing the valve cover

As I'm doing this autopsy of my dead Miata, I keep forgetting that I'm going to be replacing the whole engine. As I disassemble the thing (mostly for my own curiosity) I have to realize that I'm not going to fix what I'm discovering. At least, I don't think I am. What if I find that the engine isn't all that bad? One can hope.

So today I wanted to remove the valve cover. I've done this before on my old Toyota truck ages ago, so it's not all that difficult. I started by removing the spark plug wires from the coil pack. Disconnected the cam position sensor (Now that I know what that thing was!) and pulled out the PCV valve and started to remove the bolts.

There are 11 bolts that hold the valve cover to the head and a few of them were not tight at all. The wrench didn't have any resistance. I could have removed them by hand. The rest were okay. The other two bolts I needed to remove are the one attached to the coil pack in the back. The one on the passenger side is a bitch to get to. I removed the supports on a metal pipe along the top side that was in the way. I think it's a fuel line, but I don't know. I'll look it up when I get there. Anyway, I just loosened it enough to be able to get to the bolt.

While moving some of the wiring harness around in the back, I noticed that some of them used to be tied back, but many of the plastic tie downs were broken so they were loosely hanging there. Doesn't seem to be much of a problem as the entire wire harness is pretty tight together.

I pulled off the valve cover and everything looks fairly normal as far as I can tell. I don't know the last time I ever replaced the valve over gasket. (Maybe never?) It didn't look too bad until I started messing with it and it started to break apart from brittleness. Well, if this ever makes it back to regular duty, a new gasket is in the cards.

I did find another problem when I pulled off the cover. The cam position sensor looked kind of exposed. Upon closer inspection I can see that part of it was broken off. Looking into the timing belt area, I saw the other half leaning against the timing belt. It must have just come off then. I can't imagine it still being where it was if the engine was running. Ugh! Oh! Remember, I'm replacing the engine. Hmmm, this may be one of those parts that isn't included. OK, possible new sensor to buy as well.

Inspecting the valves, I'm not totally sure what I'm looking for, but it doesn't seem too bad. There's a little bit of gunk around. I was sort of expecting all kinds of metal shavings or something, but I don't really see any of that here. I did notice that the spark plug hole, that had the massive amount of oil covering it, has the oil coming from deeper than the valve cover. I'm thinking the head gasket was the problem here.

Hmm, so is this a normal amount of gunk, or is it something I should worry about if I'm going to keep this head?

A look down the gnarly spark plug shaft.

Well, I think that's it for today. What I'm looking at tackling next would be to drain and remove the radiator and maybe remove the intake manifold.

Day Two - Removing the air cleaner and hoses

It was just gnawing at me. I was going to wait until next weekend to do any more work on the car, but the task seemed so simple that I just wanted to do it. Although my back was still sore, I just had to get the air cleaner components out. I think I just wanted it out of the way so I can see more of the engine.

So, it was fairly easy. Removed the three bolts that held the air cleaner box. Also removed the hose to the intake manifold and the smaller breather hose to the valve cover. Also disconnected the sensors around the air cleaner box and left the harness dangling in the engine bay.

On a side note, I found a used 2000 Miata in good condition being offered for sale in Redwood City for $11k. Pretty good price for a car that has only 46K miles on it. I was considering it, but I was already in the process of getting a used Saturn for about $3K so I have a daily car while the Miata is being worked on. If I decided to buy the 2000 Miata, that would be it and I would be done. There's no money left to attempt fixing my 1999. I would have to get rid of my dead Miata in that case. I wasn't ready to do that, so I decided to pass. The Saturn isn't a done deal yet, but should be soon. I need something reliable to get me to work. If things fall through, though, the 2000 might still be a slim possibility. If that were the case, this journey would come to an abrupt end.

Day One - Getting the car in the garage

This is the official first day of my admittedly foolish journey of fixing my 1999 Mazda Miata. The engine was determined by the shop to be essentially dead. From what I've learned about the symptoms I experienced, I'm pretty sure I have spun bearings caused by driving without enough oil. I don't know how extensive the damage is, but my curiosity is getting the best of me. I want to do an autopsy of the engine,  but what I really want is to have my car back. My options are few. The most practical is to do an engine swap, which is what I'm going to attempt to do. The hard part is going to find a replacement engine. After searching online for a replacement, I couldn't find a re-manufactured engine available. I also looked into getting a salvage car to extract the engine out of that, but who knows what condition it would be in? Another option is to have my engine rebuilt. (That's not something I could possibly do, but I could see if there are any shops that would do it and how much it would cost.)

Anyway, with time on my side, I'm going to do the work of removing the engine out of the engine bay. Hopefully I can get a replacement in a reasonable amount of time. While I'm waiting, I may do some work assessing the damage and see if it's worth having it rebuilt. I may not have a choice if I can't find a suitable replacement. I can't really make it worse than it already is.

After cleaning out the garage to make room for the car, I checked the spark plugs. The first three I took out looked to have normal wear. The fourth one removed was completely covered in oil. There was oil all over the insulator and terminal nut. The spark plug wire also had oil contamination in the seal. How did this spark plug ever work? It never misfired as far as I recall. From what I can tell from what I read online, this seems to be a failure of the valve cover gasket.

Anyway, the only other thing I did today was remove the hood, to make working on the engine easier. The next thing I'm going to work on is to start labeling the pictures I took of the engine compartment so I know what I'm getting myself into. Then I want to remove the valve cover to see the state of the gasket and confirm  its failure. I may remove some other components if I have the time and will. Perhaps the radiator and the air intake parts.