I got an email yes­ter­day let­ting me know my coco­mats shipped. They hope­fully will arrive tomor­row. I say hope­fully as that is what the email said. The email also said that I could click on a link and track my ship­ment with DHL, but when I click on the link DHL says that num­ber doesn’t exist. I even got a sec­ond email today, same as yes­ter­day, tried the link again, still doesn’t exist.

Update: clicked on the track­ing link just now and ta-da, there is info. Although if I’m read­ing it right it is com­ing by ground from Dan­bury, CT to me here in Aiken, SC via truck and expected deliv­ery is tomor­row, but it didn’t get picked up until this after­noon at 4:30. Accord­ing to Yahoo Maps that is an 833.5 mile trip and it should take 12 hours, 49 min­utes. He must be com­ing door to door.

As a mat-ter of fact the last known scan was — 3/5/04, 8:01 am, Processed at Sort Facil­ity, Wilm­ing­ton, OH — so much for the esti­mated deliv­ery of 3/4/04. I’ll be lucky If I see them on Monday.

I’ll be get­ting my muf­fler installed tomor­row by hook or crook. It is Master’s Miata Club Tech Day and if we don’t get it on there, I’m stop­ping at a muf­fler shop and pay­ing some­body. I hope it doesn’t rain (Weather Chan­nel says 50%) and scare off some peo­ple, espe­cially not Dave Harp, as he is sup­posed to swap my OEM brushed alu­minum inte­rior bits for his black.

In the lit­tle over a week since Tech Day and my bemoan­ing the lack of sound improve­ment the new muf­fler made, it is start­ing to come around. Get­ting just a lit­tle throat­ier. Still dead quiet at idle and cruise (which is good,) but it sounds a bit bet­ter under accel­er­a­tion now. If it improves just a bit more I can for­get all about that intake business.

On that very same day I named the car, The Emperor, but have not been able to refer to it as such since. My guess is that it may now be what the car calls itself, but to me it has no name. I’m just not the type of per­son to name inan­i­mate objects. I feel that this is my biggest fail­ure in Miata geek­dom, on par with my inad­e­quacy to obtain sci-fi geek­hood because I haven’t been able to read (nor watch the movie of) Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I man­aged to get my hands on a copy of the wiring dia­gram for the fog lights and as a bonus the head­light cir­cuits.* I’ve had it for a while, but today I decided to attempt the mod again (my first ended in failure.)

With care­ful study of the cir­cuit wiring dia­grams it looked like for the fog light relay to trip, turn­ing on the fogs, it needed +12v com­ing from the head­light relay and a ground avail­able when the head­light switch is in low. My ideal sit­u­a­tion would be to have an igni­tion on twelve volts applied to one end of the relay and a ground applied to the other when­ever the lights are off. This would dis­able the fog lights as fog lights, but make them day­time run­ning lights — always on when the car is run­ning and off at night.

First thing I decided to do was cut the red/yellow wire. I really didn’t want to, but I could never get the relay loose from the con­nec­tor, so snip I did. Hooked up the bar­rel splice to the +12v wire I found in my orig­i­nal attempt and the red/yellow wire run­ning into the relay con­nec­tor. Fig­ur­ing that this would not change any oper­a­tion as the ground from the head­light switch was still miss­ing, I tested the setup. Much to my sur­prise when the key was turned to IGN the fogs came on. Not only were they on, but the light in the switch was on, even though the switch was not depressed. I tried turn­ing the lights on, another sur­prise awaited, as when they came on, the fogs went off (along with the light in the switch.) So I pushed in the fog light switch and the fogs came on, they also went out when I turned on the high beams, just like they are sup­posed to.

Fol­low­ing the dia­gram out, I must be get­ting a ground from some­where I’m not sup­posed to be, through either the left front low beam or some­where in the instru­ment clus­ter. See­ing as my +12v is only applied when the igni­tion is on I won’t be run­ning down the bat­tery or any­thing. The cur­rent draw to trip that relay is prob­a­bly small enough that I won’t do any dam­age to any­thing, but I would still like to know where it is com­ing from. When we go for a drive tonight I’ll see if I can fig­ure out which one by look­ing at the head­light and the instru­ment clus­ter in the dark.
Con­tinue read­ing Fog Light DRLs