After I finished rebuilding my 1990 Miata, the covid-19 pandemic began. Since school was canceled I began looking for another project. One of my friends was interested in learning about cars so we bought a $400 Miata that had been sitting for 2 years. While towing the car back home, one of the wheels came off and went flying down the road. Luckily we were able to retrieve it from the bushes and no one was hit by it.
With the car back home in one piece, we got to work fixing it up. We did a series of compression tests and determined that the headgasket needed to be replaced. We rebuilt the top end of the engine, replacing the head gasket, valve stem seals and other consumable components. We bolted up the transmission, replaced the brake pads and took it for its first test drive.
Now that the car was driveable, the next step was to repaint the entire car. We sanded paint off every body panel and fixed up defects with bondo. For our primer coat we used a cheap spray paint sandable primer. A friend lent us a compressor and paint gun which we used to paint the OEM color-matched red paint.
Our paint job was somewhat questionable and we had to polish the entire car with a coarse and then fine polishing compound to remove unwanted orange peel.
At the end of the summer, we sold the car and made 8x profits from the initial purchase price.