I’ve just picked up my 1997 NA. 27K on the clock and in very nice condition until I got it up on the axle stands this morning. Not a sign of rust anywhere original paint etc and you can still see the spot welds on the rear wings.
HOWEVER!
The drivers side frame/chassis rails have been crushed near the front and rear. Clearly someone has used it as a jacking point to change tyres or something.
Now my question is will it fail an MOT for this?
The dealer before transporting it to me took a number of pictures to show me how clean underneath the car was. There is a picture included which shows the chassis rail but not close up. I’m guessing he isn’t to bothered by the extent. Maybe I’m fretting over nothing.
I’ve discussed the issue with him earlier and I’ve sent the pictures I’m posting here. I’ve also booked it in for an MOT Friday morning to see if it will pass. Hopefully he can resolve it for me considering the price I paid for the car. I’d expect something like this on a project car or something need a bit of work not this one.
I owned an NA some years ago with similar damage to the rails. Apparently they can be damaged like that when in transit I learned. Yes they used to move them around by picking them up on the chassis rails, rather like somewhere like Copart shift their damaged vehicles I’ve noticed.
That does look like a single piece of damage though and as you say possibly a jack used.
You can jack on the rails but place the jack or axle stands at the very extremes front or rear of that rail, it’s double skinned and will not crush, well if not crusty with rust.
I’m not an expert but I think MOT wise it should be ok, at worse an advisory.
I’ve had a NB with similarly crushed chassis rails since buying it as a repaired Cat C in 2009, and only started having advisories on this from 2019. I believe that was due to the car being lifted up by a forklift truck in a breaker’s yard. I had a bodyshop press the creases out very neatly and it has been clean since then from a MOT point of view.
They don’t look too terrible. Could they not be ground back to bare metal and then tack welded and pulled back out into shape with a slide hammer then primed and undersealed? I’m sure a decent body shop could do it to satisfactory without having to cut and weld…
This is one of the reasons I take my wheels off and give them over loose for new tyres to be fitted.
I’m starting to think I’m overreacting. I’ve done a bit of digging on the web since I first discovered it and mine look not that bad compared to others I’ve seen on youtube.
I’m taking it for an MOT tomorrow. I’ll need to mention to the tester to be careful when putting it up on the ramp.
It came to about £680 to repair the four bad creases in the chassis rails. This was from AutoDoc in Norwich in April 2021. Certainly not the cheapest I could find, but from past rear sill repairs undertaken by them, I know their work is of a very high standard. The notes on the MOT results for the previous two years were:
The original assessment was to cut out the four damaged pieces of box section and replace with new. However, I was told that the technician assigned to it, scratched his head and said “I could do better than that”. He cut out four rectangular holes in the floorpan, then pressed out the depressions in the rails with hydraulic equipment before very neatly rewelding into place each section of the cut floorpan.
They’re not even structural. Just slap on some underseal and forget about them. The MOT inspector was clueless, or trying it on. From Mazda’s perspective, these are anti-drum channels; part of the effort to reduce NVH. Hence they have no real strength, unlike the actual chassis rails at the front.
You only need to worry if they have split, or the damage has caused a split in a seam and rusting.
Nearly 30 years of NAs, never had an advisory for crushed rails.
Arguably cutting holes in a car makes it weaker, created a new place for rot to start.
It you really did want it fixed, the proper aproach is to weld on pins, slide hammer to straighten, frind off pins, repaint.
If a car is on a ramp, there is no contact with the bodywork. If its going on a lift, then they are not going to use the so-called chassis rails and have the car fall off.
What happens is the tyre garage is in a hurry, all the lifts are occupied. So they tell the apprentice to use a trolley jack. Apprentice tries to use the middle of the rail to lift the car so he can change two wheels at the same time, as they are clock watching, because the owner has brought some cheap tyres online with a “partner”, and the garage is making £10 a corner on the deal…
A heavy duty rail set was an option I was considering. The squashed area on my rails were forced outwards as in the photos at the top of this thread which meant they were potentially too wide for the “U” channels to fit over. I did try unsuccessfully compressing them with a large G-clamp, hence why I eventually decided to go down the bodyshop repair route
