Cars

I’ve loved cars, motorcycles, and really anything with an engine for about as long as I can remember. When I started studying Mechanical Engineering, my appreciation of cars only grew-I believe cars and motorsports respresent the epitome of engineering and manufacturing. I’m mostly into late ’90s / early 2000s Japanese cars and some bimmers from the same era. I currently don’t own a car as I’m living in Boston and my motorcycles are just more practical for the city. All of my cars (including the minivan!) were stick shift besides the white bimmer. Scroll down to see what cars I’ve had in the past!

1999 Mazda Miata (Emerald Green)

AKA Bailey Junior or “BJ” (He/Him)

BUY: 6500 in Dec 2022 SELL: 8000 in Sept 2023

I bought this car in California when I moved to work at Orbis. I already missed my last miata, so I found a car that was the exact same! The only differences were that it had less rust, better paint, and a hardtop.

I had some amazing drives in this car, and some less fun ones as well. About a week after I bought it, I went off the road on Highway 1. Wet curvy roads, old tires, and an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex meant I out of skill quite quickly. Thankfully, the car was alright besides the lip and a few scratches on the bumper. All in all, I paid a relatively cheap price for what could have been a very expensive lesson. I put some new tires on (which were already on order at the time of the accident) and started driving with a new respect for the beautiful California roads.

I did a bunch of maintenance on BJ in the short time I had it. I shipped it back to MA (Worcester) from CA because I thought I was gonna own this car for a long time. Soon, I realized that I was moving back to Boston and it started to make a whole lot less sense to own a car. I got the car detailed, took some nice pictures, and sold it to a nice guy who graduated as a MechE from Northeastern! I do miss this car, but I’m sure I’ll get another 1999 Emerald Green Mazda eventually.

Maintenance

• Tires
• Pads, rotors & fluid
• Radiator & thermostat
• Oil
• Valve cover gasket
• Master & slave cylinder, braided clutch line
• Ignition coils
• Cleaned injectors
• Motor mounts

Off-roading excursion

Merely a flesh wound

1999 Mazda Miata (Emerald Green)

AKA Bailey (Any pronouns)

BUY: 3700 SELL: 2300 (got fleeced when leaving for CA)

I was still quite naive when I bought this car, and didn’t check for rust in the common Miata spots. Turns out, it was extremely rusty! That didn’t stop me from having so much fun with this car, and honestly just encouraged me to drive it as hard as I wanted. It was a beater, and I beat on it. Some of my favorite memories with this car (and in any car) happened just before the winter. I got a new set of wheels with old tires on them, thrashed the car with my friends as hard as I could in an empty lot, put snow tires on it, and took it out drifting every time it snowed.

I did a bit more than the minimum maintenance (rust made any little job horrible), and even did a mod to avoid some more annoying maintenance. I properly depowered the steering rack, which involved taking the rack apart, cutting out a seal, and welding the pinion to the steering shaft spline to reduce steering play. This mod made U-turns hell, but definitely fixed my power steering leak! It also gave the car great steering feel, which I actually kind of missed when I got my next NB chassis (BJ).

I learned a lot of lessons with this car, made plenty of mistakes, and overall had such a great time. I’d highly recommend a beater Miata to anybody who wants to enjoy cars and not spend a crazy amount of money. Eventually, I couldn’t ignore the rust, and I was moving to California. I sold the car to some kid who ended up getting a great deal, even with the rust. I hope someone out there is still enjoying this car.

On film

At the Beach

Beautiful on the inside...

Not so beautiful on the outside.

Was it worth it? Kind of

Miata Is Always The Answer

Even for cats

1990 Mazda Miata

AKA Lucy (She/her)

BUY: Traded a hardtop (1700) for it SELL: 3000

This was a bit of an impulse trade for me. I traded a hardtop I had bought previously for the entire car, but the car came quite damaged and incomplete. The previous owner had been rear ended, and hastily harvested many parts of it to use in his other car. I hammered out the damage to the rear, found replacement parts, and fixed the damage the previous owner had done when removing parts. There were a lot of bolts suspiciously missing from pretty important systems (like coilovers not even bolted in), so I went through the entire car pretty thorougly to make sure it was road worthy. I never actually registered this one, it was more of a fun project to flip. I was able to sell for a decent price-the market for NA Miatas was way too high.

Repairs

• Pads & rotors
• Brake lines (cut by PO)
• Differential & axles (harvested by PO)
• Wheel bearing
• Heater core bypass (heater core tubes cut by PO)

Working on brake lines

Damaged Area

How she arrived

1998 BMW 328I (Black)

BUY: 1900 SELL: 2500

This was another impulse buy. I went out to see this car with my brother because it was pretty close and fairly cheap. It was very rusty, pretty rough all around, so I lowballed him. To my surprise, he took the deal, and I ended up selling it the next day for 600 more. I got lucky, but also I had been spending some significant time reviewing the E36 market on Facebook Marketplace and had a pretty good feeling for the value of the cars.

1998 BMW 328I (WHITE)

BUY: 900 SELL: 1300

This was the first car I ever bought, and the price reflects it. It wouldn’t start, so I towed it home. I ended up replacing the starter, finding out it had tons of rust, and then selling it and just barely breaking even. I ended up becoming friends with someone at Northeastern whose friend bought the car from me, and he told me that the guy often hotboxed the car, ended up drifting the car into a curb, and sold it for 2k-that’s how crazy the E36 market got. At least he was having fun with it!

2010 Mazda 5 Minivan (Manual!)

Gift from parents

I had plenty of firsts in this car. First time driving stick on public roads, first car, first time driving friends around. I made so many good memories, and this car was a big reason for why I became a car enthusiast in the first place. It might just be a minivan, but it handled pretty nicely, and of course, it was stick shift. That’s all you really need to have fun. Of course, I ended up burning up the clutch. I replaced the clutch with some help from my dad. It was the biggest job either of us had ever done on a car, and it gave me the confidence to work on cars in the future. She took us well over 200,000 miles, but unfortunately had to be junked due to rust and a clutch line we couldn’t find parts for.