To be faiir, that is the MO of the used car trade
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You MX5 drivers and your latin 
Used car trade seems like the ones to avoid because they are a business they need to make a profit and cut corners to do so.
I made a little video, really not anything special, just a warning to others and hopefully people searching for the dealership might stumble across it and think otherwise.
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Great thread. Please take to trading standards if you have the time and energy left. I hope someone doesn’t buy this off EBay. You’ve done a great job in putting people off. I bought my NB off a dealer at the start of lockdown. Read MOT and history and took a gamble. Had delivered from private transporter. 2004, 29k, £2,150. Couldn’t even tell what colour it was when it was off loaded as it was so dirty. Had sills professionally repaired for £700 and looks beautiful now. I got lucky.
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Thanks for the praise.
I think if mine was cheaper (it was £2400 and probably needs chassis legs and front sills) maybe I would have gone down that route but seems like you have a lovely car for all your efforts there and £700 seems quite fair for a proper job that should last a few years.
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I’ve been searching the classifieds for days now and very wary now of any NB that I come across. Especially if travelling a considerable distance on a whim. Goes to show that MOT history should be taken with a pinch of salt if it’s been clean with no advisories.
It had history of MOT that said sills were rotting but it also had an invoice that a company had repaired the sills after that MOT was taken. So maybe it was just patched up and not had the sills cut out and replaced. NB issue is chassis legs as well, so it’s double trouble.
I went for a 2.0 sport in the end, NC. Fingers crossed.
Wait, all the ragging on the dealer, but some other company had repaired it. Who was that company?
Well the repair was done on the 27/02/19 and I bought it 04/09/20 so if it had been patched, most places I asked said a patch up would only last a year, a lot of places I spoke to said they can bodge it basically so it passes an MOT.
I didn’t deal with the garage so not going to say anything about them because I don’t know to what level of repair was agreed to.
Car contacts (reading) assessed the vehicle at that time and said it was in good shape and they were the ones who bought the vehicle from the previous owner, who lived in Ireland. From their views they are not great either.
I can’t think of a standup garage being happy to do a repair that involved fabricating jacking points from fiberglass. If you recall the name of the garage, you should name them.
The repair was done during the ownership of the previous owner They may well have been duped., and paid for a good repair, when one wasn’t done.
Irish cars are usually in good order, because road salt is much less commonly used in the Republic.
I know you feel gipped about this car, and hopefully a lesson is learned, ie. when looking at a service history before buying a car, and you come across a receeipt describing rust repairs, check the repairs out. Draw a line under the experience.
Lets just say I know Car Contacts from many years of living close by, an I wouldn’t buy a thing from them.
Like wise! Car Contacts originally came to be as a family business, two brothers (their Dad was somewhere there as well) who previously had a garage in south Oxfordshire. This was in the late 1970’s.
I used them once and traded a Ford Sierra With rotted out door skins which I had covered up and purchased a two year old Granada with high mileage off them. I was happy to get shot of the Sierra and was a satisfied customer.
That would have been around 1988 when they were based on Queens Road. By this time it would appear that CC had already changed ownership.
These days they are defo “walk on by”!
I don’t know who bodged the jacking point, I suspect it was Croydon classics as when it broke it stunk and seemed like the fiberglass was not that old, it seemed newish and after a while it cured on my window seal and changed color.
The work that was on the invoice was sill repair and if that meant fully removing the old sill or just patching it up, well the invoice was not that detailed.
Could be liable to some court action if I claim a garage has done a bad job when in reality I have very little evidence to prove it, not worth it from my perspective.
Amazes me how these business carry on operating and how the people working there have 0 morals or care for people who are spending their money with them, seems really common with used car dealerships.
From the photos you posted, it was obvious it was repaired
The evidence that the supplying dealer seems to be based on that the lump of fberglass “seemed” quite new. Some resins require exposure to air to cure properly. Its quite possible that the repair wasn’t that old, and that the resin started to cure properly only after you broke it off. You don’t really know Croydon Classics was behind the repair anymore than Car Contacts, the unnamed garage on the invoice or indeed the previous owner. The repairs were done in Feb 2019, a long while ago.
Really surprised no one has dug up an Internet history on this car; some owner who preferred to spend on bling and cheap Chinese shocks rather than proper repairs.
The size of the bill on the said invoice would have been some indication as to the extent of the repairs or “repairs”.
There is a discussion ongoing on miataforum, about the value of good NAs in different market. Low miles NAs in the US are now fetching $15-20,000, in the UK, £8-9000, Japan; $25-30,000.
I feel sometimes buyers have an outdated view on how the market has changed.
These are now all old cars, Don’t buy one unless you are prepared to get down on the ground and poke around underneath. If this is something people are not prepared to do, or feel they shouldn’t have to do, then they should go look for a different make of car thats much newer.
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