I rebuilt the oil metering pump last Thursday. I used Pineapple Racing’s Mechanical OMP Kit & DVD. The rebuild was very straightforward and the DVD was easy to follow.  I broke the o-ring on the piston and had a little trouble finding a replacement.  I was able to find a very close replacement at Ace Hardware.  I’m most likely going to order a new rebuild kit unless I’m sure it isn’t leaking. The kit cost $25 plus shipping so it isn’t a huge expense.  If I was to just replace the OMP with a new one from Mazda, I’d be spending $250.  Since I pulled the OMP, I replaced the oil line crush washers.

Friday I swapped out the shifter boot with the one I recieved a couple of weeks ago.  I had to spend quite a bit of time cleaning the boot but in the end it was better looking than the one off my car.  I also rebuilt the switch for the rear hatch area light.  I was able to use the switch off the car and another switch I already had to make one good switch.  It was a little hard to do because the switch was so small.  It is now working great. I’m slowly checking little projects off my list.

I got an estimate for the frame repair, body work, and paint.  The cost should be somewhere around $1500 for the work plus paint.  We will most likely use 2 quarts of paint and he only uses PPG.  I’m also looking at replacing all the seals, emblems, etc at the same time with a total cost of about $1200. I’m looking at a complete total cost of about $3000.  I’m going to be cutting the front of the car off from the strut towers forward off my old car so we can use them on the SE.  The damage is very hard to see. With the hood closed, you can see that the front is pushed to the right about a 1/4″.  It looks like this was repaired at some point but not done very well.  I would rather do it right once and spend the extra money than have a car I’m not happy with. I will be helping with the complete repaint of the car, including front end repair.