Shadowplane676
Greenie N00B Member
It all started on a dark, damp and dreary evening.... no, seriously, it did. Almost a year ago, one damp Friday evening, my wife was perusing Facebook and came across a posting from a friend of a friend of a friend. She looked at me and asked "is a Mazdaspeed 3 something we would be interested in?". I replied that if it truly was a Speed 3, yes, most definitely. It turns out this person had posed on Facebook asking what cars fetched for scrap these days. One commenters had asked what vehicles they were going to scrap, and of the three, one was listed as a 2008 Mazdaspeed 3.
I asked my wife to message the poster and confirm if it was indeed a Mazdaspeed 3 and if so, what they might want for it. The poster responded with a confirmation that it was a Speed 3 and included the VIN which checked out. The back story was that her husband had driven the car for a while until hitting a bad pothole and/or had other issues with the car before they parked it over a year ago. As they were racking up the vehicular lawn ornaments, they were looking to clean up the vehicles they no longer used/needed. Knowing that the Speed probably needed some work, we still inquired at what price they might part with the vehicle for. The seller said that she would have to check with her husband when he got home for what they would sell the vehicle for. At this time I figured that the price would go up given the interest we had shown in it so eagerly.
A few hours later, we got a reply from the seller with a VERY reasonable, nay, impossible to pass on price. Our response was that we would be by in the morning to procure the car (as it was late in the evening at this point). What followed was a few hurried phone calls to my Father In Law to secure a suitable tow vehicle and trailer for the morning. Fortunately my FIL is also a gearhead and his response was an enthusiastic "When are we leaving?".
Thus the road trip began the following morning bright and early (all be it still somewhat damp). The seller fortunately only lived about an hour away and from the research I had done after being provided the VIN, the Speed 3 had spent nearly its entire life in Oklahoma (yay non-salt states!). Upon arrival at the location, we surveyed the car. It was not in pristine condition, it was still in quite workable shape. It sat there, slightly hail dented and covered with a light film of organics from over a year of sitting, quietly resting in its tire depressions in the grass, awaiting its fate. The seller also had mentioned that they previously had issues getting it to start and run after having parked it. Armed with jump packs and enthusiasm, we tried to spark life back into the Speed, ideally to see if we could just drive it onto the trailer. While we did get the car to start, it died when we tried to rock it out of its ruts. Resorting to brute strength, leverage and finally a handy winch on the trailer, we heaved, shoved, hauled and steered our newly acquired vehicle onto out trailer. After performing the necessary rituals at the local tag agency, bill of sale and notarized title in hand, we departed with the Speed for home.
On our travels back home, we procured a needed replacement battery as the one in the car was beyond saving. A few hours of attempting to start the car yielded no good result aside from a depleted battery charge. Troubleshooting checks showed that all 4 cylinders had good compression and everything APPEARED to be in working order. Queue a few hours of google-foo that evening for possible issues/fixes while the battery sat on a charger overnight to regain its cranking strength. Sunday morning, with a glimmer of hope and an idea of what the issue may be, I went out and performed a minor correction to the wiring harness. With crossed fingers, I turned the key. The car lazily turned over once, twice, three times. Then with a quiet pop and a small sputter, it fired to life for the first time in over a year. The issue, as I theorized the evening prior, was that a previous owner had placed the coil ground in an incorrect location. A simple unbolt and re-bolt of the ground wire to the correct location 6" away was sufficient to breathe life back into this abandoned car.
And that is how one Speed was saved from the junkyard.
I asked my wife to message the poster and confirm if it was indeed a Mazdaspeed 3 and if so, what they might want for it. The poster responded with a confirmation that it was a Speed 3 and included the VIN which checked out. The back story was that her husband had driven the car for a while until hitting a bad pothole and/or had other issues with the car before they parked it over a year ago. As they were racking up the vehicular lawn ornaments, they were looking to clean up the vehicles they no longer used/needed. Knowing that the Speed probably needed some work, we still inquired at what price they might part with the vehicle for. The seller said that she would have to check with her husband when he got home for what they would sell the vehicle for. At this time I figured that the price would go up given the interest we had shown in it so eagerly.
A few hours later, we got a reply from the seller with a VERY reasonable, nay, impossible to pass on price. Our response was that we would be by in the morning to procure the car (as it was late in the evening at this point). What followed was a few hurried phone calls to my Father In Law to secure a suitable tow vehicle and trailer for the morning. Fortunately my FIL is also a gearhead and his response was an enthusiastic "When are we leaving?".
Thus the road trip began the following morning bright and early (all be it still somewhat damp). The seller fortunately only lived about an hour away and from the research I had done after being provided the VIN, the Speed 3 had spent nearly its entire life in Oklahoma (yay non-salt states!). Upon arrival at the location, we surveyed the car. It was not in pristine condition, it was still in quite workable shape. It sat there, slightly hail dented and covered with a light film of organics from over a year of sitting, quietly resting in its tire depressions in the grass, awaiting its fate. The seller also had mentioned that they previously had issues getting it to start and run after having parked it. Armed with jump packs and enthusiasm, we tried to spark life back into the Speed, ideally to see if we could just drive it onto the trailer. While we did get the car to start, it died when we tried to rock it out of its ruts. Resorting to brute strength, leverage and finally a handy winch on the trailer, we heaved, shoved, hauled and steered our newly acquired vehicle onto out trailer. After performing the necessary rituals at the local tag agency, bill of sale and notarized title in hand, we departed with the Speed for home.
On our travels back home, we procured a needed replacement battery as the one in the car was beyond saving. A few hours of attempting to start the car yielded no good result aside from a depleted battery charge. Troubleshooting checks showed that all 4 cylinders had good compression and everything APPEARED to be in working order. Queue a few hours of google-foo that evening for possible issues/fixes while the battery sat on a charger overnight to regain its cranking strength. Sunday morning, with a glimmer of hope and an idea of what the issue may be, I went out and performed a minor correction to the wiring harness. With crossed fingers, I turned the key. The car lazily turned over once, twice, three times. Then with a quiet pop and a small sputter, it fired to life for the first time in over a year. The issue, as I theorized the evening prior, was that a previous owner had placed the coil ground in an incorrect location. A simple unbolt and re-bolt of the ground wire to the correct location 6" away was sufficient to breathe life back into this abandoned car.
And that is how one Speed was saved from the junkyard.
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