The Miata needed (ok, maybe not needed) new shocks and brakes, but I wanted an upgrade. The first step was determining what to get. I enjoy doing research and this was no exception. First up were the shocks and this was a pretty easy decision. I went with Koni Special Active from Good-win Racing. These were backordered so there was a little bit of a delay but this gave me time to figure out the brake situation. I went back-and-forth over which rotors to get; plain, slotted, drilled, slotted and drilled, etc. Based on my research and how the car will be used I decided that plain rotors fit our needs best. I knew that I wanted to upgrade the brake lines to braided lines and wanted pads that were fairly low dust. The brake dust on my M3 is horrible but that's the price I'm currently paying with the stock pads. I decided on the SuperMiata Stage 1 Brake Kit 2006-2015 NC Miata with GS1 pads. Shipping was quick and then everything was well packaged.
I outsourced the installation to my daughter and father-in-law who completed the work over a weekend. It's nice that they could take their time and not be under tight deadlines. Everything went fairly well overall. I rented a spring compressor from Autozone but we had everything else we needed to do the job. I would say that the biggest headache was pulling together the torque values for everything. Claude, and the internet overall, wasn't what I'd call a huge help in this regard. There are a lot of discrepancies out there so a good bit of time was spent double checking the values. I recently bought a Haynes manual in the hope that this will help in the future.
The brakes were straightforward. I purchased an MTX power bleeder but it had a leak so we bled the brakes the old school way. At some point I'll come back to the bleeder but it's not a priority right now. One of the strut tower brace bracket bolts got over torqued (thanks internet) and broke off, but my father-in-law drilled it out and installed a makeshift bolt. This works fine but I expect to get a new lightweight brace and install that instead. We do have some sort of clunking sound on the driver front when going over big bumps and, to be honest, I don't know if it was there originally or not. We did find that one of the brake pad brackets (IDK what it's actually called) was missing but that didn't solve it completely. This is what led me to replace the front and rear end links. Some of the boots where torn so it was time but this didn't solve it either. I recently had an alignment done and the center said that I need to replace the inner and outer tie rods so I've got those parts sitting in the garage and doing them next weekend.
Overall, I'm very happy with the work we've done on the car so far and we're learning a lot.