Cyberpunk Mx-5 Build

Called it.



Not even 2 days after putting this lettering down it started to lift up. I ordered some replacement wrap but this time made sure to buy an actual good quality one.



I marked out where the letters went, peeled the old ones off (it didn't take much) and then cut out some fresh ones and applied them.



The colour is slightly darker and it makes the lettering a little harder to make out on top of the red, but so far they are staying down at least.

With the window banner sorted I got to work on the rear, the first thing I needed to fix was my rear garnish. The wrap just wasn't working so I pulled it all off, cleaned all the adhesive off and then gave it a coat of silver spray paint.



Finish was ok, still probably better than the wrap though. Unfortunately there was a large crack from when I had to glue the pieces back together so I just threw that sticker over the top of it.

Next was fixing the rear bumper. You can see in some of the older photos that the rear bumper is visible behind the flares. The fact that it was green from the primer made it even worse so I painted it black but you could still see it so I decided to just cut the ends off completely.





After cutting it though I had a close look at the wrap and was unimpressed. A lot of it was lifting up and it just really wasn't the standard I was after.





As well as that, the wrap on the tail lights was starting to lift up.



In case I haven't mentioned it yet, this wrap sucks donkey nads. Seriously, I am going to have to rip the whole thing off and re-spray this car in less than a year.

I decided the best thing to do was just to pull all the wrap off the rear bumper and tail lights and paint them as well. So I masked up the tail lights and did those first.





And then followed by painting the rear bumper.



I really loved the reflective finish of this colour but unfortunately when I was wiping them down the next day the metallic finish was super soft and it ended up rubbing away. It pretty much ruined the entire paint job of the bumper and the tail lights. It was as if the metallic finish was only a dust coating over the top and it got wiped away the second you touched it. I got another can and re-sprayed them but wasn't able to get the finish as nice. This time I'm leaving them for a couple days to dry and then I'm going over them with some satin clear to seal them and hopefully make the finish a bit more uniform.

While I was doing this my mate came up and he showed me how to tig weld. I didn't have enough scrap material to practice on so I did some tacks on the back of the pipe but let him weld it all up.





Now the exhaust is all fitted up and it actually sounds pretty awesome. A Yoshimura motorcycle muffler works surprisingly well on a 1.6 Miata.

I also pulled the roof spoiler off again, sanded it flat and re-primed it.



The last screw up I had to sort out was this spot on the rear flare. I got some black overspray on it when I was doing inside the fenders and when I wiped it off it took the actual paint off the flare.





I had used up all of that paint and it was a 3 hour round drive to the store to get another can of paint so I just dropped some thinners in the bottom of my old paint pot and got some dissolved what was sitting at the bottom. I ended up with just enough to fix up this spot and another small mistake on the other side.





Overkill with the masking because the show is in 4 days and I am not taking any risks with how precarious this car is being right now. It's hard to tell whether I'm making steps forwards or backwards with this thing.



But for the most part I think I have everything fixed up now. Not happy with it but it will do, there is a lot of stuff that I will be revisiting after the show but for now I just need it finished.

All that's left to do is clear the bumper and tail lights, paint the roof spoiler which I'm doing today, and then with the free days I've got I'm going to paint the capsule pill from Akira on the back window because I think it would finish off the car nicely.

 

That sounds badass dude! I was really surprised when I started mine up how similar it was to the straight pipe I had on it. But at least I didn't need to wear earmuffs when moving it around like I did before.

And since I'm back now I figured it's time to give an update after this awesome labour weekend we've just had over here. So I mentioned that there were a couple things I had to take care of before the show and so here is all that.

I needed to protect that paint on the rear bumper so I got some satin clear from the same brand and tested it on the tail lights and it just really ruined the finish, turning it into a dull grey paint with a clear coat over it.



I ended up having to cut open my old cans of the silver and then emptying them into my spray guns so I could paint them again. I left all the parts to bake in the container for 3 days with the heater on and that helped the paint set but it still got some marks on it from handling.

Up until now that car hadn't been waterproof, this didn't bother me because I dont drive it and I park it inside but I checked the weather forecast for the weekend and sure enough it was predicted thunderstorms so I had like 2 days at that point to get some weather stripping installed.









It ended up working great. Basically just some rubber matt cut to match the window with a piece of metal trim over it and all that riveted through the fiberglass roof. It means I've got some exposed rivets on the outside of the car now but I think it works with the aesthetic.

The last thing I had to do was paint that pill on the rear window and then I could reassemble the car and give it a final wash before the show.





Loading it up on the trailer proved to be a bit of a mission, It was so wide that I needed to be guided on to it as there was only about 2cm gap per side. We needed extra ramps too because the ones on the trailer weren't shallow enough even with the bed tilted. We even had to jack up the front of the trailer just to get the car up, then once we got it up I couldn't open the doors so we had to unload it again and screw some wooden planks down so that I could get out of the thing.





Next morning we took it down and unloaded it at the show. As you'd expect the weather forecast was complete BS and it ended up being perfect and sunny all weekend. We got a spot right by the main entrance so everyone lining up got to see it which was perfect.







The show went awesome. I wasn't by the car the whole time but it definitely attracted a crowd and I got to have a chat with a few people about it so it was worth it for sure. Pretty much everyone was respectful and kept their distance from it but there will always be a couple cases of people climbing over it and sitting on things. Since it wasn't really a car show, a lot of people don't know how to act. One kid even stood on my oil cooler so that he could sit on the bonnet which was obviously not ok at all but luckily I made everything pretty solid so there was no damage.

Overall I'm stoked with how it went, lots of interest and got to meet heaps of awesome people. Looking forward to the next show for sure, though I think I should take a rope and some do not touch signs to the next one.

 

Haha, yeah it was a mission for sure, I never thought I'd find myself modifying a trailer just so we could get a car onto it before. Here's a pic of how long the ramps where we had to use. Luckily it was a tilting trailer otherwise there was gonna be no chance of getting it on haha.



And bro, that little kid pissed me off so much, I was just there and then I walked away and came back like 10 seconds later and my mate told me what he did. There was also this other kid who straight up chucked a Frisbee at my car. Like who even does that? His parents didn't even scold him for it. Hopefully he learnt from it though because I was right there when he did it and I said quite loudly to my mate "Man how embarrassing would it be for that kid if the owner of this car were here?" as I reached into the boot to grab my cleaning rag.

As for my next project... I think it's going to be not what you expect haha, I'm really tempted to start working on my van next

 

Here's a pretty damn long update that doesn't really cover much haha, feel free to skim through and just look at the pretty pictures.

Been going ham the past couple weeks working on some behind the scenes stuff as I talk with international distributors about whether anybody wants to stock the kit. I've messaged a few places but only heard back from one. I contacted Top Miata through instagram asking if they were interested and they got back with an email asking for size, weight and price. They also posted the build on their page and it had a pretty good response. There were even a few of you awesome dudes from the forum commenting on it, cheers guys.



To get as accurate as possible with my estimates I decided to just make another kit that I could use on my other mx5.







I finally figured out how to get this new gelcoat to stop triping/wrinkling as well. When I bought it they told me that you could get away with it being really thin but from my experience it has to be even thicker than the old gelcoat I was using. Either way now I have a repeatable way of laying them all up that gets no airbubbles at all and more importantly no wrinkling of the gelcoat.

With the kit all made I got out some scrap cardboard and started figuring out the size I would need for the box.



When I ship them I plan to cap all the sharp corners of the flares in carboard in addition to the bubble wrap on each flare when it's in the box. I mocked all that up to find the size of the boxes I needed as well as the weight. I've also found a place that can make custom boxes pretty cheap in quantities of about 50 so I'll be doing that as soon as I get a confirmed order. A lot of uncertainty as I've been screwed around quite a bit in the past but I'm still hopeful.

In other behind the scenes news, it turns out that while the car was at Armageddon Expo the other week, the organizer for Big Boys Toys that I was speaking to actually saw the car in person and now he is seeing if he can get me into the next show as well. That could be 2 shows in under a month, I'm stoked since this time he says he wants to put it inside so I can show off all the interior work that I couldn't display last time.

Ok so now on to the meaty goodness of this update, what I've actually been doing to the car. Time for some underglow.



I picked up a couple of these 5m waterproof LED kits and the quality on them is honestly not too bad. First thing I had to do was figure out where I was placing them.





I started out placing them just outside the seam along the underside of the rail, but there were a couple issues with that. First of all, it went over the flares, which means that I would have to remove the LEDs every time the flares came off, and also you could actually see the LEDs which was no good.



I decided that I would make some brackets and mount them behind the seam. This would hide the lights, mean they could stay on even when removing the flares, and also it meant I didn't have to rely on the double sided tape which always fails on these kits.





Since the kit was a single 5m roll I had to cut and wire it up myself. This wasn't a problem until my soldering iron broke and I had to tear the barn apart trying to find the spare one. Got it sorted in the end though.



After testing all the connections I insulated them all with hot glue, and also included a plastic support strip behind them to make sure that there was no bending on the solder joints. After that I wrapped it in electrical tape as well as covered them in heat shrink to make them sturdy and waterproof.



With that done I had the full system ready to get mounted to the car.



Since I was skipping the double sided tape, I used some more clear plastic to create clips to hold the strips on to both the rear bumper support and the front lip and zip tied the strips to the brackets I fitted along the sides.

 

And here's how that looked. Surprisingly bright considering it was the middle of the day.











Underglow is heckin badass. I'm actually so damn happy that it's starting to make a come back. Ever since watching Fast and Furious as a kid I always wanted it and now I'm finally old and irresponsible enough to do it.

But it's not just underglow that I was adding. I two 5m rolls and used the other one to match up the interior.







I couldn't be happier with how this all came out and it's actually crazy bright. I haven't had the best luck with these kits in the past but this one has really surprised me. Even the app almost kinda works. Getting the interior light and the underglow to sync up is almost impossible since every time I turn the app on, the phone will randomly pick one or the other to pair with and I can't adjust them both at the same time.

The cool thing about the app though is that I can set it to any colour I like or even have it set up with an RGB fade like a fancy gaming PC.







I do like the RGB in person but to stick with my initial sketch and to make things easier when taking photos I'll just be sticking with the pink, which is an awesome colour and I'm ready to throw hands.





All that's left to do before the show in about a weeks time is just to make a quick little switch panel to control all my head lights, light bar, underglow, interior lights etc... I'm going to be using a tinted acrylic sheet which should show the lighting and wiring behind it. It's going to look awesome.

Should have the next update done by the time we load it up for the show. (That's if the organizer gets back to me with an actual plan.)

 

A lot of quick jobs that needed finishing up, but the car is finally good to go.

First thing I tackled was the switch panel. So this is what I will be using to control the neons, interior lighting, headlights and high beams.



It's built out of smoked acrylic and gives a really cool effect when installed in the car. I wired all the switches in, making sure to make the wiring as messy as possible as that was the look I am going for and then installed it in the car.





It's got a really sleek look when it's switched off but it looks amazing with the interior lighting switched on.





With the switch panel finished, that was really the last thing I needed to make in order for the car to be considered "done"

I took my spare couple of days to respray the door jams to clean up all the mess I made when I was designing the flares and making moulds.





With the doors off I also went around all the edges of the wrap and taped everything down to keep it from peeling up any more. I'm already sick of this wrap. It's coming off asap and I will be painting the car.

The doors were then refitted to the car, the whole thing got a proper clean and then we loaded it up onto the trailer again. A lot easier than the first time we did it.



2 hours later and after finally getting in touch with the organiser of the event, we had a spot in the show and so set up the car.



Even with my blurry ass photos, some of you may recognise the guy carrying the boxes...



We got placed almost right next to Mad Mike Motorsport where they were showing off Mike's badass Rx7 as well as his Lambo and next to them was Lincoln Whiddett's freshly completed MX5, being unveiled at the show.



I can't get over how cool this shit is, I'm getting some major imposter syndrome. No way does my POS Mx5 fit in the same crowd as McLaren's, Porsches, Ferraris and Mad Mikes own drift car. I'm still coming to grips with it.







Just an awesome feeling, if any Kiwis out there were thinking about going to this years Big Boys Toys then definitely check it out. Excluding my car that really shouldn't be here, there are some seriously cool cars here that I have been drooling over all afternoon.

 

Cheers mate, a lot of work for sure but it was all worth it. And as a car guy from downunder it is illegal for me not to follow Mary and Moog in all the batshit crazy stuff they do. The E30 has always been one of my dream cars so watching that build was sick.

Having the car at the show was great and yeah it did feel like it was just right for that sort of scene. Caught a lot of peoples attention.

So it's been a hot minute since I updated here but thought I would quickly jump back in and fill you all in on what's going on with this thing.

Starting off with bringing it back from the show.



The show was amazing. I got to meet a bunch of totally awesome dudes and even had a chance to talk to Mad Mike on one of the days when it was real quiet. Such a humble dude, you can tell he shows a genuine interest in everything he does and we even got talking about building cars and my mx5 for a bit.

After getting home I really didn't do much with the mx5. This stage of the build is pretty much complete for now and the next step is organising a photoshoot before all the wrap peals off haha.

On that note though I realised a photoshoot was going to be easier if I could just take the photos myself so finally bit the bullet and bought myself some new camera gear. Up till now I've been using a Panasonic FZ80. It's alright, but being fixed lens, I've been starting to find it a bit limiting with the shots I want to take. So I picked up a used Canon EOS 70D with a couple different lenses.

Already being a car guy, my bank account is dangerously low at the best of times, but now that it looks like I'm picking up photography as well, damn I make some terrible financial decisions.

I am really happy with the new camera though. It means that you guys finally get some decent looking images after about 8 years of posting on this forum. Decided to quickly pull the mx5 out of the garage and get some shots of it first thing the next morning, I'll let the photos do the talking.

















I am loving this camera. I've also finally started posting more regularly to Instagram. I don't think I've ever linked it here but if you want you can follow @tofuautoworks.

In other news, the boxes and mounting hardware for the flares arrived and so I am going to start making a few of these kits and hopefully start shipping them around the world.

And on a final note, work has started on the other mx5.



For this one I'm going to experiment with filming the process and then will upload the whole build as a mini series on YouTube to start off the channel I'm attempting to make as well. I'm going for a no dialogue style format that just captures the work I'm doing with some explanation in captions for the video. (Primitive Technology format)

But yeah, it feels really weird to be "done" with a build. Though "done" is the wrong word entirely, I'm just trying to think how long I leave it like this before I can begin the teardown for it's next phase.

 

Merry Christmas everybody! Hope everyone's having an awesome break, I thought I'd just jump back in here and give some updates on the car/s and the new project that I'll be picking up in the new year.

So I've been getting some more practice in with this camera as well as buying a new lens for it and I'm about ready to take it for it's first actual photoshoot down by some abandoned garages on the outskirts of town.







I'll never get tired of looking at this car, but I did want some photos with a slightly better backdrop so I took advantage of the empty roads on boxing day morning and crawled it up to the train tracks and got a few more.















Getting a good camera was definitely worth the investment and it's got me genuinely wondering whether I should put some more work in and have a look at picking up automotive photography once I have some more practice. You can see that by very popular demand the screen now has the iconic warning popup found in Brian's Eclipse. And it even flashes too.

As far as what's next for the mx5, I've just entered it into NZ's 4 and Rotary National Show and Shine in Hamilton on Jan 30th. It's going to be the first time having it judged at a show and there should be a much bigger automotive crowd than the last 2 shows. I'm super pumped and cant wait to see how bad it gets it's ass kicked.

In other news I've been making good progress on the other mx5 and it is now fully primed minus a couple panels so it will be ready to spray once I finish putting together a paint booth for it hopefully towards the end of Jan.



I've been filming the whole thing and will start editing and putting the videos up on YouTube next year. Definitely looking forward to finishing it and putting it up for sale because I've got big plans for my next build. I've also sorted out my next side project.



We've had this piece of junk sitting behind the shed for years after a flatmate of my brother couldn't pay rent and left him with the bike instead. My plan is to turn it into a full on 90's Japanese Bosozoku build as a warm up for my next full build that will come after it.

That's pretty much all for now but I'll be popping back in time to time with updates. I plan on leaving the car more or less like this for a while before I strip the whole thing down and do it again. For just semi regular updates and pictures of it I am posting on IG @tofuautoworks but any real updates will be posted here.

 

Haha, you and me both. Just came back here to give a quick update on what the car has been up to over the past few weeks and share the news. I've been buzzing for the whole day, I'm just blown away eh. It's always been a massive dream of mine to get a single car in a magazine, to hit Speedhunters of all of them has just made me speechless.

 

So I reckon it's about time I dropped back in here for a quick update on what's been going on with this thing.

Since the last post the car has been getting around, making it's way to shows and also getting it's first proper photoshoot done.

First up was taking it to one of the biggest automotive shows in New Zealand, this year taking place down in Hamilton, the 4 and Rotary Nationals. This was the first ever judged competition that this car has ever been in and certainly the biggest car event so far. I was incredibly excited to finally have it parked up with other amazing cars and get a chance to talk to other owners about their rides.











The whole show was amazing, there were so many completely awesome cars there that I could make a full thread on them. In particular there was a nice clean S15 that probably won my vote for best in show, even though it didn't end up with any of the awards at the end of the day.



In terms of scoring, my car didn't come home with a single award but I didn't really expect it to. The main thing that I loved was that it was turning heads all weekend and people were really interested in my slightly different than normal approach to modifying.

A short while after the show finished, one of the top magazines in the country, New Zealand Performance Car had their feature on the show published and you bet as soon as that shit dropped I was out the door on my way to the nearest gas station to pick up a copy.







Honestly I cant even describe how damn happy I was flipping through those pages and finding something that I had made making its way onto the pages of the magazine I've been buying since before I even had my license. It was a humbling experience for sure and 100% a dream come true.

There really isn't much in the world that could top having your car show up in a magazine...

Not much...

Except maybe a feature on Speedhunters.



Excuse me... What?

For context, AGES ago I stumbled across the iamthespeedhunter program and thought: "what the hell" and sent through a couple pictures of my mx5 and some words talking about what I'd done and a link to this thread. Fast forward a few months and Brad Lord, one of the editors of Speedhunters, sends me an email saying he's finished with the feature and it will be going live by the end of the week.

Needless to say I was over the moon from just having a couple pictures of my car in NZPC, so to have an actual feature just left me buzzing for days. I'm still so damn happy about it.

You can find the link to the piece here:
http://www.speedhunters.com/2021/03/cyberpunk-mx-5/















So the photos here were taken by me, they're not amazing but they're not garbage either so I'm pretty happy with how it all came out. I had a lot of fun at the shoot. There were a few that I wanted to mess around with doing some post processing and editing and I reckon they come out pretty good too.









And then as pretty much guilty pleasure more than anything, I decided to go full send and do a cyberpunk edit with some photoshop lighting effects and colour grading. Now this one I liked a lot.



unfortunately no, those tail lights don't actually light up like that, and I probably wont ever wire them up because I've already got plans for a whole new rear end on this thing. I'm doing a sharkfin and louvers, it's going to be awesome.

On the side I've been chipping away at a number of projects. I've been posting videos on Youtube about the other red mx5 I'm building. I've been working through plans on the bosozoku motorbike I plan to build. I've even been planning the van build that will come after that.

Progress has been a little slow on this thing as I've been really enjoying how it looks right now but I can feel myself itching to start something new. Hopefully there will be some more updates here in the near future or even possibly another build thread popping up.

So stay tuned for more awesome and stupid shit I guess, that seems to be my specialty.

 

Wow, been a hot minute since I've posted here I almost forgot how the h*ck to do this.

So what's been happening the past 6 months. In short, not much. Got a new job, been working pretty hard on that trying to build up some money so I can start looking into buying a home and I've also been working on that other Mx-5 which is now pretty much finished, just waiting on a windshield to come in.

Filming that whole build was a mission but a good experience overall so I'm going to be doing a similar video format for this cyberpunk one as well, while still posting more detailed updates in here of course.

For any of you who want to see how the other Mx-5 came out you can watch the latest video here.

With all that going on I've also been really happy to see there's been interest in the widebody kit and I've actually made a few sales all around the world, Colorado, California, Aussie. Some of them have even fitted them up and sent me back some pictures of them.









It's just been absolutely sick having people interested in them and being able to see my work on cars on the other side of the globe has been pretty fucking cool. Hopefully I can keep it up with these kits and then actually turn this into a standalone business.

But enough of that though, the Cyberyata is back boi and I'd say that's about enough of this current state, time to make it what it was meant to be.







So first up was some grounds keeping since I've been totally neglecting this thing.

The first issue I had to take care of was my front lip that had a not pleasant encounter with my driveway one morning.





So where the lip meets the bumper it made a pretty decent rip in the fiberglass and actually severed my underglow which sucked donkey balls. So I had to get under the car to disconnect the LED's and try to salvage what was left.



Luckily though with some properly whorey soldering and a bit of hot glue insulation the strip was back and good as new and so I fitted it all back up and got the lip back on looking pretty again.



The next thing I had to sort out was actually for the other Mx-5. Running 16x9's on a lowered and widebodied Mx5 is pretty finicky with the ride height to get it to work and so the lowering springs that came with it were not cutting it. In the end I yoinked the adjusties out of the cyberpunk one and swapped them over.



But after all that (btw Mazda if you are reading this, your LHS rear suspension top-mount access is ass and I hate you) both the cars were mint and all riding perfect again.



And that's us all caught up.

As for what's coming next, All I'm gonna say is that those scratches and the rusty screw heads I've got from leaving this thing out in the rain for a few months are gonna start looking like they belong on this. It's going to be great not having to try keep this thing "show car" fresh anymore.

Really keen to get into it so I'm probably gonna start working on that in the next few days and I'll keep you all up to date with how it's coming along.

 

Started working on this again for real and decided I would start out by finally finishing the paint work.

So to throw you all back to the original sketch for this thing:



One of the main things about this sketch was the idea that it was supposed to be dirty, weathered, something that looked like it had been used in a dystopian city. It was always the plan to do that but I ended up just putting off the final stage of weathering and I've finally decided that it's time to complete the paint.

To weather the car the main things I needed to do were give the whole car a dirty wash in oil paint and turps and give it a good grime build up, then add streaks and panel lining with an airbrush.

Here's how the first test went:





At first I was really not diggin it at all, and put it down to the fact the effect was too heavy so I ended up wiping the whole front down and starting again but this time going much lighter with the effects until I had this.





And now I was feeling it, this was definitely the way to go so I went ahead and carried the effects onto the sides as well.



I didn't want to risk painting the other side in the shade and having it come out way to strong again so I flipped the car around and took it outside to get a good look at it all in daylight once it was all finished.









The next thing for me to address was the wheels. The white wheels were sort of iconic to the build at this point and I was really happy with how they originally came out, but they either needed to be weathered as well or changed up entirely.

First thing I did was use the same airbrushing technique and hit the edges of the aerocovers as well as dirtied them up a bit with some weathering. The final result was really good. The effect works really well on white and they definitely matched the feel of the vehicle.







But I think unfortunately the white just wasn't doing it for me anymore. It felt a bit like wearing bright white sneakers in a dirty alleyway, so I started experimenting with some other ideas and decided I would give black a test.

I had a spare cover that I used when making the moulds so I hit it with some flat black paint and test fitted it to the car to see how it would look.



This I really liked, so I decided to test it on 2 of the wheels and see how I liked it.









I tried out mismatched wheels as well



But you know what they say about going black, so I masked up the other two and followed up by painting them and then finally had what I would call the finished look for this stage.











So it took almost a year but I think the car finally looks how it should. Just in time for me to start pulling pieces off it and doing it all over again.

I've got some plans of small changes to the outside of the car, starting with the front and working my way around and then ending up working on the rear which I've mentioned I'd been planning for a while.

I'm going to be filming all this new work to the Cyber MX and uploading it to my YouTube as well as to my Instagram so if you aren't already, definitely consider following those. I'll aim to keep posting here as well but updates might start getting a little slow.