Our shop phone forwards to my personal phone during business hours. If Jason or Robie happen to have the lines tied up – I’ll do my best to answer it, depending on where I’m at!

I take a call from Mr. Daniel. A seemingly charismatic, self proclaimed novice mechanic. He explained that he’s in the thick of a project with his daughter, Isabell and they needed to get some engine building advice before they make their next move! Their high mileage 1.8L was tired and had been consuming quite a bit of oil as of late.

Their plans are to re-build a donor engine with mildly high compression but not so much that it will require jet fuel or some sort of wild tuning solution, at least for now.

A Supertech 11:1 .5 over piston is the ticket here. Running a premium fuel (93 in Florida) will likely make this a 93 only setup but with the stock timing/stock ECU, it will certainly pick up more than a few horsepower with it’s new found efficiency. A set of rods and a Cometic head gasket with a .040 thickness to compensate for the decked material removed from the head/block will also restore the OEM quench depth as well.

I talked shop with Daniel for 25 minutes or so and the story about him and his daughter diving into this project was charming. She’s learning a lot, he’s learning a lot and we all know there isn’t any better bonding you can do with you kid than building a Miata, right? She’s even learned to drive a manual gear box in this little NA chassis. A truly special story – Follow these two on YouTube to keep up with their story!