A Cheap Car Worth the Trouble
It was too cheap to leave alone, which is how most of the interesting cars end up in the driveway.
The MX-5 is a small two seat convertible built around a very old idea: keep the weight down, put the engine at the front and the drive at the back, and let the driver do the rest. It is one of the few cars where the appeal survives having almost no power at all.
This one would not start. Somebody had tried to steal it and had damaged the aftermarket alarm and immobiliser in the process, which left the car electrically convinced it was being robbed every time you turned the key. We asked around. The consistent answer was that it was not worth anyone's time, mostly because of that alarm.
So it became my problem. I spent evenings with a multimeter and a diagram, tracing circuits, working out which wire did what and which of them the immobiliser was interrupting. There was no single clever moment. It was persistence, one confirmed dead end after another, until I had bypassed enough of it to get the fuel pump running again.
After that it did exactly what an MX-5 is supposed to. Light, simple, quick to respond, endlessly willing. It stayed about a year and Reza in particular got some very good use out of it.
Some cars are bought. This one had to be argued with first, which somehow made it more ours.
