Mazda MX5 Forum for Dummies ??

Suggest the Locost forum. Some clever folks on there and plenty of MX5 transplants.

Nick

It's been several years since I was in to the Mx5 world, but at the time you had 2 major forums in the UK. The MX5oc and the MX5nutz forum. There were several others out there, but these two were the biggest.

The owners club, as you can imagine, had a bit more of a traditional classic car club thing going on, plenty of knowledge there but at times a bit matching hat and sweater, 'that's not an official Mazda bolt', if you get my drift.

The Mx5nutz forum was a younger crowd and much more focussed on modification, with lots of info about increasing performance and track use etc. On the downside it was a bit self absorbed into the 'mx5 scene' with whatever mods were cool this year, big wings, etc.

In the US, Club Roadster used to be thought of as a bit more fashion orientated, lots of super cool pictures of really nicely done MX5s though. Miataturbo had some great info, especially about turbo builds and serious performance, but the forum culture was pretty aggressive and unpleasant, lots of 'flaming of newbs' and stuff.

What any of them probably aren't going to tell you directly, is how to wire up your engine into the Rezin Rockit, as they're very focused on 'standard' mx5 stuff. A kit car forum as suggested above might be a better idea to find info on how to get it running in a different car.

The mx5 ECU is a pretty simple beast really, it shouldn't be too tricky to strip down the stock loom and leave the wires you need to run the engine. It's not like modern EUCs with lots of codes to throw, if you remove some of the ancillaries the ECU wont know or care. One advantage is that because of the popularity of DIY ECUs, like Megasquirt, in mx5 circles, there's loads of info out there about what signals the engine does or doesn't need to run. It just might require a bit of research and figuring out.

Unforunately Nutz and MX5OC forums were pretty dead last time I checked, everything seems to have moved to fb.

There are lots of mx5 related facebook pages... Nutz tends to be ok about non MX5 builds, pretty hit and miss on the advice you get there though.

If the engine is a 97 or later I think the ECU requires the immobiliser and chipped key before it will do anything - You can get a lockset, immobiliser and ECU for £100-£200

These are great leads guys.

Thank you.

Between all of that, I am sure it will end up with me learning enough, stealing enough ideas.

Thank you for taking the time to write this up.

And yes, I certainly want this whole thing to be as basic as possible.

As few unnecessary ancillaries as possible.

Simply because they will not be needed in what is ostensibly going to be a “Locost” type kit car.

If not supplied, a ready made, makes sense.

Thank you very much.