Originally Posted by Loren
Interesting. Sorry about that. Short nose crank failure on a Miata just immediately made me think 1.6 because that's all it applies to... pre-92 1.6's. All of the Miata 1.8's have the big nose crank. This problem must have been caused by improper assembly or something.
Or, did Stuart actually take the thing apart yet? Maybe it's just a bad pulley?
Oh he's taken it apart all right, haha! It was glued/epoxied/rigged on there to the point that he had to cut off a bolt to get the timing belt pulley off... We discussed the JB Weld/Quickmetal/welding option and he really didn't feel comfortable doing it.
We also discussed the junkyard motor option, and he didn't sound too excited about it, and I hadn't seriously considered it... The up-side is that I could find a younger/lower mileage motor (the current one has 108k). The down-side is that it's not guaranteed to be in better shape than the current one, and I'd still want to do the PM on it (clutch/tb/wp/etc). So it would probably add 4-500 on top of what I'm already paying for the work...
He said that the motor actually looked pretty good in spite of the visible problems. I asked him what he'd do if it was his wife's car and he said he'd replace the crank.
Like I said, I gambled and I probably shouldn't have. But hind-sight is 20/20. The car is mine now, and there's nothing I can do to change that. I actually talked to Stu on the phone the afternoon I bought the car and told him about the crank pulley wobbling. He said it could be something serious, or it could be an easy fix... I was betting on the easy fix. :-/