I spoke with Travis at Boundary Engineering earlier this week.  BE makes some innovative products for niche performance-Miata needs.  The BE product that I’m most familiar with is their billet oil pump gears.  From what I remember of the Miataforums.net posts over the years, the stock Miata oil pump gears are made of sintered metal and can fail at high engine speeds and stress.  At the suggestion of Bill Cardell at Flyin’ Miata, I purchased an ATI harmonic damper to help reduce the destructive results of vibration at high RPM’s.  I called Travis at BE to learn a bit more about the billet oil pump gears and find out why the gears are only available for 1991.5-2000 cars.

I’m glad I called.  I spoke with Travis and learned that the 2001 oil pumps are slightly different, and not in a good way.  The housing of the oil pump is of lesser quality.  The pump gears are slightly different too.  Travis mentioned that he had a few ’01+ pump gears, but has not advertised them because the gears do not address the bigger problem (the weaker housing).

As it turns out, Boundary Engineering offers a Blue Printed Full Race Oil Pump for ’01-05 Miatas.  The pump is a (stronger) after market pump which is machined to increase flow and locate their billet gears properly. The price of these pumps is only a few bucks more than the cost of a stock oil pump from Mazda Comp PLUS the cost of the gears.  I bought the pump on Wednesday morning and it arrived today.

My build required an oil pump, and I had already ordered a stock pump from Mazda. I compared the BE pump to the new stock pump and took some pictures.  I thought it was interesting that the BE oil pump is about 1/2 pound lighter - no doubt due to the use of aluminum in place of steel.

PICTURES: Check out the pictures in the photo album by clicking here.