Cyberpunk Mx5 - Changing up the rear end. (Patreon)

So before I finish up on the Mx5 and get back into the Stagea, I wanted to make a pretty dramatic change to the rear end that's sort of in line with the direction I want to head with this build from now on.In the past 2 videos you would have seen me throw together some new wheels for the rear and matching turbofans for the front. The only downside with that is I've just spent all this time finishing up these wheels for them to be mostly hidden behind the rear bumper.

And on top of this, I've sort of grown tired with a lot of this car, especially the rear bumper and the really round aesthetic of it all. 

When I made the tail lights I got dozens of comments saying to add more light bars or add an infill panel or to curve the edges of the light bar to match the roundness of the rear bumper and my response was always "Nuh". Basically everyone wanted me to add more to this car to fill in the rear end, but I actually wanted the exact opposite. So after about 4 years of looking at the same thing I've finally decided it was time to cut into my overfenders and remove the whole rear bumper.

This involved removing the rear bumper skin and supports, as well as trimming of the rear sections of my overfenders. I also trimmed away a lot of spare metal behind the tyre as well as the OEM tow hooks / tie downs.The end result was honestly exactly what I was after and seeing it like this, whenever I look at the old bumper I can help but see how suppository looking it was. This new aggressive, stripped down look is what I've had in mind for years and I'm glad to finally be moving forward with it.One of the biggest sacrifices for this change was the Yoshimura muffler.

I tried fitting it back on but after mocking it up I just couldn't picture it on the car anymore with the stripped down look. No matter what I tried it always just looked out of place. It is going to be sad seeing it go because it has been such an iconic part of this build, but I want to keep this build evolving and it just didn't fit the new direction.With the Yoshi now removed, I remade my exhaust as a straight pipe and added some heat wrap to go with that sort of bandaged / wasteland look that I'm going for.

And now this is how the car looks.

Because my LED underglow for the rear of the car was mounted to the rear bumper support, when I trimmed it off I had to relocate it so I extended the wires a little and made some tabs to hide it up underneath the spare wheel area. With the underglow on the car feels completely transformed.

I really love how the diff and all the suspension components catch the light and give the car a really mechanical feel. It's a bit embarassing that it's all pretty much stock back there, maybe some company will reach out and sponsor me some rear arms because I sure can't justify spending the level of money it will take to get all the rear arms and suspension replaced for a car that I never drive.

This is where I was going to move into the main part of the video that I was going to upload, but some plans changed and I had to pivot so I'm going to be starting on another pretty dramatic change to this car, addressing pretty much the last area of the car I'm really unhappy with. I'll have that for you in the next update hopefully when the video comes out next week. But I should be back to a video every 2 weeks now before I take a small break from posting videos over December - February. I'll still be working on the cars and filming everything that's going on, I just want to take a break from the editing for a little bit since my time has been split 50:50 working on cars : editing videos and I want to get my productivity up a little bit.