A quick question for any of our Mazda MX5 owners

Both is the answer on the MK1's
Classic red cars always had black stonechip along the sill line while Neo green (BRG) have stonechip but finished in body colour all the way.What colour is the one you're wondering about?

Interesting! Can you state your source for this?

I ask because I've got (just about) the oldest UK MK1 on the road, in Silver Stone, and (before I had it restored) the sill paint was original but silver and not black. My resto thread here.

And here is a brochure scan and also a 1990 car in a museum both showing the black sills.
As a general rule the dark colours have body colour sills and lighter colours black sills.Many have been changed though as they have gone through repairs.

Yeah with Mk1's,a Classic Red would have black sills and a BRG (Neo Green) body colour.
The pale green one if it was in factory paint would have possibly been Sparkle Green and a Berkeley limited edition.They made 400 of those named after a Californian University.

With sill and arch rot i wouldn't necessarily be put off if it's been cut out and repaired properly,repair panels are available and it's a well documented procedure now.Genuinely rust free original cars are hard to find and people tend to keep hold of them.

The early 90's cars seem to be more rust resistant than later ones and Eunos imports are generally rather better year for year than UK cars.Forget the stories about UK cars having more underseal,it's an urban myth.. they came off the same line as JDM and had the same underbody protection.The Japanese climate/lack of road salt is much kinder to cars and an MX5 that has spent the first ten years of it's life there has a good headstart over a UK car.

Plated patch MOT repairs on sills are usually very easy to spot and i would give those a wide berth.The inner sill won't have been dealt with and will always be in a worse state than the outer,it will continue rotting under the plate.
Often the sills and double skinned arch lips rot pretty much in tandem and you can look for the original spot welds to see if work has been done.
Here is a good car showing the spot welds on the arch..This is a good sign of an original car and shows that no one has been busy with filler around the arch lip.

Heres one that has had an arch repaired and you can see no spot welds.


Mk2's and 2.5's suffer much worse than Mk1's on the rust front.They have the same sill and arch issues but also throw main chassis rails into the equation.Mk1's are single skinned and rarely cause issues.The later cars are double skinned for crash regs and very commonly rot out badly between the skins.

Lol,thats one way round it !
There are still a few good original and cheap 5's out there but it's a case of searching for them and getting lucky.
Some of the best cheap ones left now are autos which are overlooked by most buyers and often good low miles cars.A manual conversion is do-able at reasonable cost but the autos are more fun than you might think.

what bike are you going for or have already bought ?

I'm like a kid in sweet shop. So many to choose from. Either keep it simple and lightweight because I live in a city centre so nimble is good, or go a little big bigger. Wavering between the Suzuki Inasuma or the Yamaha FZ6.

It also has to fit in the garage!

I've looked so long for a MX5 and just decided that for the same money I can buy a potential money pit or a reliable bike. Both would be fun and both impractical. The thing is that there are loads of Mk 2 or 2.5 in my budget but I prefer the Mk 1 and good ones of those are outside the budget. Should have bought one a few years ago.

In stuck a pin in the underseal and watched the car wee rusty water for 30 minutes straight!