I bought Ruby my 1990 Mazda Eunos (she was imported from Japan in 2005) back in 2016 when I was still living in London

Spec when I bought her (2016)

• Reasonably clean shell that has had welding and a respray at some point in the past but not needed any more in in my five years of ownership
• Some questionable smoothing work on the body
• Engine block changed out for a mk2 1.6, I would guess due to the known short nose crank issues
• TR Lane Roll Bar
• 8Ball Gear knob
• Mono Steering Wheel
• JVC Dab Radio
• BBS RX2 15x6
• Unknown lowering springs
• Uk plate recess
• K&N Pod
• De-cat
• Stainless Cat Back

Pre turbo prep

First thing I did with the car was a full service, belts, fluids, filters, front of engine seals, water pump, alloy radiator and replacing all the coolant lines. The Inside got an APSX Wideband O2 sensor, Tim Oil Temp (to the sump), Tim boost/vac gauge and new shift boots

Changed the lowering springs out for MeisterR ZetaCRD Coil overs

Fit an original Megasquirt unit, BMW TPS and GM IAT sensor

I used the car like this for about a year including a long trip down to Clermont Ferrand in France for a week of R/C flying

First Turbo Kit (2017)

Picked up a used HKS TD04 turbo, manifold and downpipe (a very old, very small turbo setup with very little info available) and spent a few weekends fitting it along with:

• Small intercooler sized for the bumper opening
• Dipstick oil return - I have done thousands of miles on this and never had any issues
• RX8 Red Injectors - 360cc
• Bailey Motorsport dump valve

This gave a noticeable increase in shove and made the car great fun to drive, over the next year after fitting the turbo I did more improvements to the car:

• Swap the Megasquirt for a Speeduino ecu
• Upgrade to 1.8 front calipers
• Bigger fuel pump
• Fit Drilled and Groved M-Tech disks
• EBC Yellow Stuff pads
• Fit Toyota Coil on Plugs

Second Turbo Kit (2019)

The first setup was not without its issues, firstly due to the size of the turbo even running 1 bar of boost the power was not very high. The turbo outlet and downpipe setup where too small so it had boost creep issues and due there not being a flexi in the exhaust system both the downpipe and manifold cracked.

To fix this I bought:

• Kraken cast td04 manifold and stainless downpipe from Black Cat Motorsport
• NEW Chinese TD04-13t (This was a mistake)

Fitting this kit gave me a few headaches, the oil return was particularly difficult due to this manifold placing the turbo lower in the car gave me real issues including a fun test drive with a jb welded outlet letting go and dumping oil EVERYWHERE!

China turbos - DON’T DO IT

Having got this fitted and back on the road I found that I was getting really bad boost creep with my chinese TD04, on inspection the wastegate port was so small it was never going to work!

The seller was not interested, so the turbo has been replaced with a used TD04-13T from a Subaru Impreza

This brings the story up to date as the car sits now awaiting better weather so it can come out of the garage again!