Spotlight: Flipper

Flipper

Time for another spotlight post! This time, the light is cast on a nearly-quarter-million-mile-old 92 named Flipper. Flipper belongs to my buddy Stoly (as you might have surmised from his excellent guest post.)

Long Distance Warrior

Long Road

Vintage-modern.

Stoly bought Flipper recently as something to keep him entertained while his main Roadster, Scrat, is being restored. I mean seriously, it’s not always easy to maintain enthusiasm for a project that you’ve not been able to drive in years. Flipper provides a cheap source of top-down grins while the big project gets lavished with wrench turning.

Flipper sits on TEIN Basis with NB top hats at a ride height of 11.25″ front / 11.25″ rear fender-lip-to-hub distance. And even for such a low ride height, it’s quite comfortable. Not at all harsh over the bumps. Some 15×7″ Chaparral wheels with Yokohama s.drives mounted complete the look.

In the revlimiter.net garage…

Coroplast!

One super-light belly pan to go.

I asked Stoly how the drive was. He told me that the temp gauge was twitching a little bit on long hills. I immediately had a couple plans form in my mind before even asking what sort of shape the cooling system was in. One of those plans involved a coroplast belly pan.

For those who might not be aware, coroplast is an excellent material for making ducting, heat shields (intake filter only, not turbo), and all manner of race car parts for cheap. After all, every two years you can pick up vast sheets of coroplast on your local street corner for free! Politicians just leave them out. (Note: you must wait until after an election has actually happened. It’s theft to pick these up before election night.)

Anyways, Flipper rolls in and I asked about the belly pan. “Nope. Not installed.” So I got to work. I love doing things like that. A half hour later, a quicky belly pan was in place and the holes around the radiator were sealed up. That might not solve all the hot-engine problems, but it’ll definitely help.

Back to the spotlight.

A man and his car.

Cruisin’

If you’ve not seen Stoly’s road trip post, for God sake, go check it out. I’ll wait.

One thing I didn’t mention above… after selling off a few nice bits to discount the original purchase cost, Flipper’s cost was all of $300. No, I didn’t miss a zero. This is a THREE HUNDRED DOLLAR, working Miata. It blows my mind. It’s truly a wonderful world we live in.

Of course, a few nice bits have been added since that original purchase – a decent suspension, nice wheels, non-crunched body panels, some interior parts, etc. But that in no way takes away from the jaw-dropping insanity of how much Roadster you can get for $300. Just amazing.

The Office.

The seats are from a 10AE (10th Anniversary Edition) and are quite lovely. Soft and supportive. Just what a cruiser needs. There’s also an excellent center console (IL Motorsport?) with usable cup holders and storage, and one of the finest driver’s steering wheels ever designed – the Momo Monte Carlo. It’s one of Momo’s oldest designs, but you can still buy it new. It features a deep, oval rim that feels nice and thick but doesn’t block your gauges like a round profile rim would.

And then there’s the gauges.

Did you expect any other gauges?

OEM Green backlighting

A quarter million miles young.

These are Flipper’s newest accessory, a set of revlimiter Gauges Version Stirling. And by newest, I really mean it. They were only installed about an hour before these photos were taken.

Yup, I even installed the gauges myself.

This is the first set of Stirling that I’ve done with the green lighting. I was excited to see how they looked. In a word: perfect. The green might fit the vintage character of these gauges even better than the amber. They match all of the other lights perfectly. And the KG Works instrument cluster is the perfect jewelry to finish off the look.

A sunset cruise.

Zoom-zoom

Stoly offered me the keys after dinner, and how could I say no? We went the long way home with the top down. Is there any other way?

Update

Just a few pix that got snapped here and there that managed to not get uploaded. But they NEEDED to be seen. Such good times…

Zoomin’

Panning

Like a boss.

Did I mention that Flipper got THE best panning shots out of all 3 cars?

Flipper and Stoly as one.

<3