cambelt change

I did my 1990 at 70,000 without removing the sprocket. Everything worked fine. I'm now planning to do it again this year at about 130,000.

I checked out the instructions in the shop manual and on miata.net and it looked easy enough for even an old codger like me to do it. I'm sure you'll have similar results.

Even easier to do it my way:

1. Cram trunk full of money
2. Drive to dealer
3. Drive home with empty trunk and new cam belt, new waterpump, new camshaft seals, new crank seal, new idler pulleys.

To me, it's worth it every 100,000 miles since that's about all the car costs other than normal maintenance and gasoline.

Early Miatas with the "short nose" crankshaft do not require removal of the crankshaft pulley to change the timing belt. If you wish to replace the crankshaft seal, then the pulley must be removed.

My advice (I am the original owner of a '90) is to not disturb the pulley if the seal is not leaking. I had to get much more involved with this than I intended and have been nursing this along (I now have 230K miles on the car).

There is a lot of stuff written about the pulley, loctite fixes, etc. I am convinced that a lot of this is well intentioned but question the facts behind the conclusions.

I think it is reasonable to say that the crank nose design is not as well done as the rest of the car. My opinion is that the Mazda dealer may not know much about this. Take the last statement for what it's worth; I have not been impressed by the technical expertise of dealers.

Good luck,

Ken