its my fault that I am not yet driving a MX5 but come next year when the wife retires that will change. For now though I drive a Seat Leon, I know I know someone as to and unfortunately this week I took it in for its 30k service and they discovered it needed a new radiator. In the end it cost me £850. Ouch that hurts I hear you say, well that as prompted the wife to ask me what the same sort of job would cost on a 5 and as an addendum to that question can I ask whether it is easy enough to carry out work yourself when it comes to changing discs, dare I say it rads etc etc. I have not got the skills of a F1 mechanic but I can do some things.
Yes it is easy to do these jobs when you know how. Feel free to ask any questions on our forum and before you buy an MX-5 or a Eunos Roadster (Same car, nearly) buy Rod Graingers Mx-5 Miata manual as it will show you in detail how to do virtually any job on the car. I think that the Manual is primarily for the Mk1 . Either the 1.6 or 1.8 obtainable from MX5PARTS.
As Pollyana says, jobs like that are very easy to do
Even a complete novice will be able to change a full set of discs and pads with basic tools in under 2-3 hours (maybe nearer 4 the first time, but a lot less by the third or fourth time!).
There are plenty of technical articles on the forum if you want to have a look at how hard simple maintenence tasks are. Another excellent site is www.miata.net (Miata is the US name for the MX5), who have a step-by-step guide for almost anything, but tend to assume a bit more mechanical knowledge than our guides here do, though still easily followed. http://www.miata.net/garage/radiator/index.html shows your radiator.
MX5s are very reliable cars as well, so you shouldn’t have to do much more than general wear-and-tear replacement on them. The only ‘routine’ jobs that you probably wouldn’t want to do yourself (although there is no reason why not) that I can think of would be the clutch and the cambelt.
EDIT: The only tool that I wouldn’t call “basic” that you will need is a Torque Wrench, but you should be torquing up the parts on any car, whether it is a 911, MX5, or Micra.
Thanks everyone for your words of wisdom. Roll on next year. I would also like to say that this site’ just like a Bikers site I use
UKGSer.com is really friendly and helpful. If you do like bikes and you are not aware of the site take a look.Its got threads like Show me your garage and saddos like me just love thems ort of things and I can spend hours trawling through the pictures.
I suppose there a lesson there as well and it is not every biker passing you is sneering at you some of us are thinking Cor I could do with a bit of comfort right now.