BABY'S TROUBLES
By Sam Sharp

As some of you know, Baby (and I) had a few problems on Charlie's trip to Silver City.  Part of it involved the turbo, but it was a Sam problem, not a turbo problem, so don't go around saying that turbos are unreliable.  This one has around 100,000 miles on it, and it's still working just fine.  It recently produced 170 horsepower at the rear wheels (a stock 1.6 makes about 90), but that's another story.

It started when I routinely checked the nuts and bolts under the hood.  One of the turbo bolts felt "soft" so I stopped turning it.  The damage was done.  Somewhere on the way to Silver City the bolt snapped, resulting in a pretty bad exhaust leak.  The extra heat in the engine compartment melted the speedometer cable housing, and the speedometer cable broke.

In an unrelated incident, an electrical problem developed where the engine would keep running when you turned off the key.  Not good for gas mileage!  I found that if I disconnected the alarm from the battery it would turn off, but wouldn't restart until I reconnected the wire.  I decided that the best plan would be to get home the shortest way, so we abandoned the trip and went directly home from Silver City.

In order to keep the underhood temperatures down, I removed the left headlight and drove with the lights up.  I didn't have any more problems with heat.  We drove home without turning the engine off.

I had to drill out the broken bolts (two more broke when I tried to remove them) and the turbo was fine again.  The electrical problem was the alarm, and that was another matter.  It took several hours of tracing, cutting, and splicing wires to kill the thing.  Baby is happy to be functioning like a normal Miata again.