Remember this? When I bought a Panhard Dyna Z because I just can't resist weird cars, and when I successfuly destroyed a Prius and unsucessfully put the Panhard on it like a Hat?
Then I decided to use junk around my garage and sort of lazily mockup a build using some Miata subframes and a Subaru EJ22 I had?
And then sort of got frustrated and decided to sell everything but no one bought it?
Well Pepperidge Farm remembers.
And I got to thinking. The Miata subframes worked appered to work really good with the car size. But to make them work I would have to fabricate a simple tube chassis to hold everything including shock mounts. I also don't have all the parts I would need for the rest of the running gear so I'm going to be chasing pedals and steering columns and wiring and all that needs something to bolt to.. and the floor on the Panhard isn't so great so some steel would be nice.. .. You can probably see where this is going?
Enter Top Flite, the most hail damagest Miata I have seen. Seriously there is no metal panel unaffected by hails wrath. The car came from tenessee and was a insurance buyback rebuilt title car. The previous owner put about 30K miles on it (there is 109K on the chassis) over about 10 years and just kinda stopped driving it. It sat for a while and now it's in my garage. It has no Transmission. Like literally it was removed for use in a turbo Miata.
So about 15 minutes after it got home I put it in the service postion and began disassembly. The longer this stayed around the garage as a "complete miata" the more likely I was to attempt to use it as a Miata and I don't need that.
And After lunch
The last thing I did today was throw the Panhard hood on to check if it fits better then a Prius.
At this point nothing irreversable has been done to the Miata.
That will change next time I am in the garage. The hood still can go down about 2" and nothing has been cut on the Miata chassis. The better news is that the sill botoms of the Panhard would only be about 1" above the Pinchwelds on the Miata. This is MUCH better then the 3" that the Prius was.
So the plan is a pretty straightforward bodyswap. I want to keep the Miata HVAC but the interior will be all Panhard. I will also get the car running with the Miata engine and a 5 speed trans. And this will attempt to be done for the Challenge and roadtripped down.
Better get to sawzalling.
