Todays adventure - welding upside down on tin foil

The Miata has lovely frame rails that go all the way from front to back which is very unusual in a unibody car. Problem is those frame rails are made out of tin foil. It would appear that poor Jenna has been in a ditch or 2 because both her rails have areas where they are caved in.

The good news is with no effort at all a screwdriver and hammer bends them back in to place. The bad news is clearly they were never designed to hold back dumping the clutch on 400 foot pounds of torque.

Now there is a number of companies out there that offer a solution to this with a cap that covers the frame rails with either manly US steel or blingly aluminum. The problem is those solutions cost well over 100 bucks. So I took another approach and simply added an entire new box steel frame rail right next to the existing one. Hey if 2 heads are better than 1 on the engine it stands to reason 4 frame rails are better than 2 for the body right?

Now when I dreamed up this little scheme it was suppose to have a skilled Navy welder to weld them in.But since that boat sailed I figured I would just burn holes all over the floor of the car. It’s unbelievable how delicate welding upside down on very thin metal is. Thankfully I ran out of wire before I could do any serious damage and headed for the bolt bin and bolted them in.
This will give me a good foundation to mount the transmission crossmember to and when that is in I will fill them and the factory frame rails with foam sealant to keep the crud out. The total investment was 10 bucks and 1 burn hole in my coveralls. :-)
 

The next bit of adventure necessitated a trip to my buddy Dales shop to play with his pipe bender. Word from the forums says door bars help stiffen Miatas even more then frame rails so I for sure wanted to build a set. They are a hunk of 1 1/4 tubing that go from the base of the roll bar to the front of the newly added frame rails. Like so:

 I could have left the bars straight and they would have just squished the seat a little but with the bender it clears it fine.

Cost to build 6 bucks, 1 burn hole in the carpet and 1 burn hole in an oil bottle on my work bench. See a pattern here? Thankfully the carpet hole will be under the seat.

One final photo for the day. This is a shot of my beautiful Camaro hood leaving in a mini van.

I felt quite uneasy about as we were taking it off until the buyer asked me why I was parting out the car. The astonished look of bewilderment on his face was absolutely priceless. It took him a full minute to even grasp the concept and the poor guy never did come to terms with scrapping a perfectly good Camaro to build a Miata. It was an unforgettable moment and never in all this process have I been so validated that I am absolutely doing the right thing!