welp, here we go.

After getting the car back and taking a closer look at everything; The frame rails are shoved over roughly 2.5inches to the passenger side, seams on the strut towers have ripped and a lot of sheet metal is buckled. The front driver side coil-over lug is also bent.  I could probably cut everything off, weld another front end on (tube or factory) and be fine, but I decided to go another route.

Last weekend my pops and I picked up a 91 Mariner Blue (barf) rolling shell in Loveland, CO for the low low price of $500. Body is straight as an arrow with absolutely ZERO rust. The 1.6L in the car is half there, but it's scrap at this point. The 5speed feels decent (hooray, another spare). PO did a 1.8L LSD rear end swap (another spare!), and it  came with garage star fender braces, which I didn't realize until I got home, and the interior is maybe 50% gutted. Good for me because that's less work I have to to. If I didn't find this car I would continue with and rebuild the 95, but this was too good to pass up.

I've replaced the front LCA's on the 95, taken the hood and fenders off, put on a new PS rack from the junkyard, also replaced the endlinks and outer tie rods with some shit I had around the house. Hoping it can get a decent alignment and I can drive it for the rest of the year and maybe next year at events. I fucking hate being that guy with the cobbled together piece of shit, but I'm going to focus on rebuilding the 91 for now and keep racking up seat time in the 95 until the 91 is completed. The 95 will be stripped and I'll hoard it's parts as spares.

As far as the 91 goes: I already ordered a Spec Miata cage that I'll install and paint to match the car. I'm going back to Montego Blue because I fucking love that color and I don't want to paint my OEM hardtop. I'll fabricate some front and rear bash bars while I'm at it too. Uh, I ordered some cheap Godspeed rear upper control arms to get closer to zero degrees. I know, they suck but I'll use them as a template to fab my own or just swap in some better bushings. Just got a Racing Beat tubular front sway bar and some heavy duty mount brackets to hopefully reduce the body roll enough to where I can keep my existed Tein coil-overs (replacing the bent one only). Planning on going polyurethane for all bushings in the suspension... Might get some stiffer motor mounts? I'd like to get a nicer steering wheel and a seats too. Engine wise I can either swap the 1.8 that's in the 95 into the 91, or rebuild the original 1.8L from the 95. I'll likely do the latter to build for turbo and to keep the 95 seat time going as long as possible. That's about it really. I don't want anything to crazy, just making this new chassis a little more resilient to frame damage when crashed, a little better suspension, hopefully close to 200whp, and a halfway decent paint job. I got my work cut out for me if I want to get this done by next season, but we'll see what happens.Cheers!