I picked up my donor vehicle. A very tatty 1.6l 1991 Mk1 Eunos (MX5 import) for £500.
I should have walked away really, but foolishly bought it. It was the worst example of an MX5 I have ever seen, it looked like it had been resprayed by a blind monkey with a rattle can, and just about every part of the car had something wrong with it. The seller had an extreme case of rose tinted specs and kept saying he was sad to see it go, etc.
About 2 miles down the road from where I bought it, it all went a bit wrong...
First the electrics kept dropping in and out, which caused the engine to start and stop, the pop-up lights to randomly wave up and down, and the clocks to go a bit bonkers. The cause of this turned out to be a VERY loose battery terminal.
Shortly afterwards the pulley on the end of the crankshaft fell off, which drives the waterpump, alternator, and power steering.
I managed to limp it the last couple of miles to my workplace in a cloud of steam.
Luckily the nice man at the RAC towed it the rest of the way home for me.
I spent the rest of March, and most of April stripping it and selling the parts I didn't need on ebay and mx5nutz. At the time of writing I've got back around £750 (and still have a few parts left to sell) so managed to make a small profit which was nice :)
If I'd got a decent donor I could have made a lot more as many of the expensive bits (like body panels and hood) were not good enough to sell.
On the 9th of May a local scrap yard took the shell away to a chorus of cheers from my neighbours who had accused me of bringing down the neighbourhood.
I managed to get hold of a replacement crankshaft pully recently, and also a semi reconditioned head and will rebuild the top end at some point.
No comments:
Post a Comment