An Introduction

I came to mechanical repair reluctantly, with a conviction that I ought to learn to do more of my own work, especially on my autocross car. I don't have any natural inclination for machines, and I used to believe in hiring professionals to do good work; but I had a series of bad experiences where I paid a shop to do a repair or installation, something went wrong with it, and I had no idea where to start to troubleshoot the problem and didn't trust the original shop to make it right. This anxiety was usually compounded by the under-the-gun time pressure of trying to get the car fit for a race.

I decided if the work was going to get botched up anyway, I may as well do it myself; I'd save some money, and at least then I'd have some idea where to look when things went wrong. I had a jack, a socket set, and a torque wrench; I could figure out the rest as I went.

Getting into repair work has a steep learning curve. Tutorials and videos online rarely cover the super-basic information that you need to get started with confidence. There's a lot of jargon that everyone assumes you already know. And while it might be easy to find a video about just about any job on a Miata, cars that are less popular among motorsports enthusiasts have poor topical coverage online. It's taken me a long time and many frustrating hours to get a basic grasp of how to find my way around a car and accomplish simple tasks, and I've often found myself wishing for a more thorough tutorial.

Well, I'm not here to change the Internet. But I am going to document my own repairs thoroughly. Maybe someday, someone will stumble on one of these posts and say "Oh, finally, a photo!" and it will all be worth it. Or maybe I'll reference them myself, five years later when I have to do the same job again.