Any UK sources; my choices seem to be £450 with MX5parts, or £50 for a used part thats quarter of a century old. They seem to be available in the US for $120
Try Rock Auto’s UK site, don’t know if they have the part, but its worth a try.
I have one came of my 1.6 if needed.
Thanks; a good website, if confusing. Can’t see it listed there, but Rock are a Cardone distributor, so am contacting them directly. I think Mk1 owners will be needing a lot more remanufactured or reconditioned parts soon; used scrapyard parts can only go so far, especially for Mk1s, as the parts are all getting a bit old. Hopefully, the known MX5 parts specialists are reading this, and taking note. There seems to be a rich supply of Miata parts from the US not available here; Rock are even offered recon ECUs for NAs for quite a small fee!
Edit; Rock Auto got back to me. They can supply an A1-Cardone remanufactured AFM for the 1.6 Miata MX5 for £95, plus £15 post. But they also do AFMs from other remanufacturers.
I cannot believe that the ECU’s will last for ever and there has to be some source of these in the future as well as air mass meters etc.
The main problem I see is that Mazda had a number of different ECU’s depending on market and these had different pin outs and functions.
Therefore while rust will kill most of the cars, I think the electrics will also be a major concern.
Therefore to keep the cars on the road beyond let’s say 2020, rewiring to Miata specs may well be the way to go to keep a clean car mobile.
I am quite happy to help in that respect:-) Lots of used standalone ECUs and secondhand AFMs available.
What is the problem with yours? Unless you are looking to tweak as Blink did with the MA5DA racing guys until banned, what is wrong with a used working example?
These don’t go wrong that often but this was an undiagnosed problem with my MK1 that kept it off the road for 4 months some years ago. AFM completely failed and killed diagnostic.
Local(at the time) Mazda expert from Nuneaton failed to find the fault - nightmare!!
rhino
Reread my post. I’m not reporting any ECU or other component problems.
My thoughts is that electronic components are “relatively new” to us therefore in the long term over 30 years, they may well have questionable reliability due to ageing and lots of older electronics just stop working for no apparent reason when given a visual inspection. The original poster’s car is around 23 years old.
The problem being it may be uneconomic to redevelop some of these components for small production run purposes and I assume Mazda and any other manufacturer will not release the spec required to remanufacture. If for no reason other than the original design documents at component level have been junked.
Therefore even the parts Mazda or other suppliers still have in stock for the older cars, the so called “new old stock” or the stocks held by breakers may well fail due to internal chemical processes in the components as a result of age.
The following is a true story from an Oil Company that I worked for.
A major Northsea platform has a main turbine controlled by a circuit board that fails twice a year.
The manufacturer of the control system was asked how long they can supply replacement boards as the platform has 15 to 20 years life ahead of it.
Their reply was quite interesting.
They said " the integrated circuit that fails has not been available to purchase for the IC manufacturer for some 10 years. As long as we (the control system vendor) can buy a certain model of Italian washing machine off ebay or other sources we can reclaim them from the washing machine and repair the circuit board.
The have a search on ebay running and get around 5 of those washing machines from ebay a year.
Therefore in the short term they can provide replacement circuit boards.
In that case due to the costs involved it would be financially possible to redesign the control system box say £50,000 to £100,000 and get around the problem but these numbers are not realistic if we are talking about keeping a few cars on the road.
As you correctly said in your original post rust is the main issue with the MX5 which is no real surprise after 25 years.
From my experience in the trade ECU’s do not degrade unless abused and the same goes for air flow meters.
Whilst rust tends to send these cars to the breakers and their value is low, there will be a source of spare parts available for all MX5 cars.
The pin out diagrams may be different and ECUs vary but if you have the correct spare, there is no problem.
These components will likely outlast the cars, you and me Drumtochty. There are far more important issues to worry about:-)
Not a worry more a fact that with age the ecu and other electroncs may well go wrong due to age and that will happen to the spare ones as well.
I have no problem sleeping at night and have yet to wake up worrying about car spares!!!
The Bosch-Motronic AFMs have been around long enough (30-35 years) on other cars that they are known to wear out; they are full of moving parts, and, on the MX5, situated right next to a hot exhaust, without or without a so-called heatshield. ie. Porsche 924 AFMs. There are a ton of write-ups about owners having take these things apart tweak bits of wire, clean various boards, to keep their cars running. And in response, the industry responds.With MX5s; early wiper motors; the speed controllers are wearing out, and I know some garages are starting to effect repairs with blobs of solder.
Whats wrong with a used AFM? As I stated, a previous owner already replaced the AFM with a used one at some time. Given the way the unit left me stranded in quite a vulnerable place, requiring police protection, I have no intention of going through that again. Other modern classics are now being supplied with remanufactured AFMs, but not the MX5, which instead has to depend on an ever dwindling elderly used parts supply chain, confined to half a dozen suppliers (ensuring negligible competition). Mazda in the US no longer lists new AFMs, so MX5parts may be sitting on the last remaining stock. There are no supplies of used AFMS under 17 years old now, and most are at least 22 years old, with the bulk being a quarter of a century old.
MX5 ecus, for rhd early cars at least, are vulnerable to water damage. Used ECUs are £100 each, no warranty (fetched from whatever dirty corner of the workshop they stuff them). Reconditioned/Remanufactured ECUs seem to be about £200 with a warranty. I don’t think these PCBs are hardened either.
The number of breakers is dwindling; legislation is increasingly making these non-viable, and many cars made today won’t end up stacked for parts, but will go straight to the crusher.
It seems that Cardone, and others, does not work directly with the car makers; they use their resources to reverse engineer parts. So, in some cases, the manufactured assemblies have revised parts designs.
The MX5, particularly MK1 is an easy car to work on with spares available cheaply.
In addition to being easy to work on, the cars are very reliable - not that much to go wrong.
If you want to spend £20, buy of ebay and get a part with no backup or guarantee, covered in oil and quite possibly not working.
I clean, test and guarantee my parts and charge more - others do the same - it is your choice. Simply buying some key spares - ECU, coilpack, CAS, AFM, testing them on your car and then storing them sensibly is highly recommended, especially as lots of cars being broken at the moment and good spares very cheap.
Go on to Miata.net and see how many of them are worried about spares. They do much higher mileage than us and not too many talking about AFMs wearing out or built in obsolescence in ECUs. Water in the passenger footwell will kill an ECU, ignition on without car running could harm a coilpack. The MK1 1.6 AFM has old technology but from my experience is more reliable than the AFM on the MK1 1,8 and those on the later MK2 and MK2.5 cars. When the AFM on my MK1 1.6 went wrong about 4 years ago, the problem was pretty much unheard of, hence 4 months off the road and the poor experience with the so called experts from Nuneaton.
In my opinion you are conjuring up a problem where there isn’t one. I know what goes wrong on these cars and why - it is my business. If you want to spend your hard earned on refurbished/new parts rather than good, clean, tested, used spares, that is your prerogative. I have always found that ‘If it aint broke, don’t fix it’ works best for me especially where new prices are prohibitive. Refurbished parts always used to be items that have failed and been repaired. Doesn’t work for me generally and I wouldn’t touch a repaired ECU with a bargepole.
All the best
Rhino
The thread was intended to help source a remanufactured part, not to degenerate to a trader knocking other MX5 traders. Thanks to those who took the time to offer constructive help. The thread is now over for me.
My apologies, I didn’t realise you were from Nuneaton - over and out.
Not this is anything to do with it, I’m not from Nuneaton. I think you have misunderstood this entire thread. I was asking for help.
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Not this is anything to do with it, I’m not from Nuneaton. I think you have misunderstood this entire thread. I was asking for help.
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I hope you find what you are looking for. I should not have got involved with this thread.