There used to be a slight tick­ing sound that was com­ing from over on the pas­sen­ger side. We could make it go away by mov­ing the seat for­ward and lean­ing it back or push­ing it back and lean­ing it for­ward or some­thing. This last time I vac­u­umed the car I didn’t get it right because the tick­ing returned. No man­ner of adjust­ing has elim­i­nated it. It doesn’t feel loose in any way. Smack­ing it hard while sta­tion­ary doesn’t make the noise.

This Sun­day while return­ing from the gap and Donna dri­ving, I did a lit­tle trou­bleshoot­ing and dis­cov­ered where the noise is com­ing from. I think it is the seat­belt hit­ting the side of the seat. It stops when­ever you lift the seat­belt up off your shoul­der. If you look at the seat there is a slight black smudge on the tan leather where the seat­belt is rub­bing. I say I think, because I am 6 foot and Donna is 5′-2″ so the loca­tion of the belt is dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent for each of us, yet the tick­ing is there for both of us. Also the driver’s side is silent for either of us and that same black mark is present on that seat as well.

My first thought for a solu­tion is a small strip of the fuzzy side of Vel­cro (in tan) glued to the spot on the seat. Any­body else got a dif­fer­ent idea?

Comet Ges­ta­tion Counter: 50 days

Tomor­row I’m going to call and set up the 15K ser­vice and men­tion about the clutch shud­der and the TSB that cov­ers it. It has done shud­dered the last two morn­ings, not as bad as Tues­day, but more annoy­ing than recent weeks. It used to be just morn­ings, but now it has been show­ing up in the after­noon too on the way home from work, so it is get­ting worse. From anec­do­tal report­ing I’ve seen on Miata.net this lat­est bul­letin which entails swap­ping just the clutch disc seems to do the trick.

Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted.

Comet Ges­ta­tion Counter: 51 days

Well it is on its way. Almost. It hasn’t actu­ally been picked up yet, but I have a track­ing num­ber. You can bet there is a short­cut on my desk­top for this link. Expected deliv­ery date: Fri­day, Sep­tem­ber 24th.

On what will be placed into the dic­tio­nary next to the entry: Fall Day, Per­fect, the Miata sat unused in the garage all day. I went rollerblad­ing in the morn­ing while Donna went for a walk. Later we all piled into the MSV to take Donna’s aunt to Augusta Regional Air­port (Fly Here Fly Home) for her flight back to NJ. What was sup­posed to be a short wait turned longer by the remant of Ivan pour­ing down rain and thun­der onto EWR. Because the flight depar­ture was delayed a cou­ple of hours we piled back in to the Civic and went in search of lunch. We ended up at Waf­fle House where we dined in high fat splen­dor. After return­ing home one adult shy, we set about decom­press­ing on the couch. Tried watch­ing “Wel­come to Moose­port”, but we couldn’t get by Ray Romano. Popped out the DVD at about the 10 minute mark. Now I remem­ber why we stopped watch­ing Every­body Loves Ray­mond, we don’t. We do love Monk and watched the last 2 episodes of Sea­son 1. Now we wait until they release Sea­son 2.…

Comet Ges­ta­tion Counter: 53 days

I’ve men­tioned sev­eral times here that I want to get some lighter 15″ wheels to replace the stock 16s. I’ve mocked up about 4 or 5 dif­fer­ent styles to see what they would look like. This is all in antic­i­pa­tion of when I wear out the OEM tires next fall some­time. Well I have a line on some 15″ wheels now that the price is right (free) and I know they look good on a Miata. Russ, of new Boxster fame, is try­ing to sell his Miata and he has agreed to a do a trial wheel swap this weekend.

Donna is not too sure of this, she likes the 16″ wheels (I do too) and can’t fig­ure out why I’d swap tires with 15,000 miles on them for some with 25,000. I want the, min­i­mum, 2–1/2 lb drop in unsprung weight at each cor­ner. The fact that I might be get­ting some Toyo T-1S tires sooner is just a bonus. I know Russ is just being nice, but I don’t know whether the big­ger wheels will help or hurt his try­ing to sell the car. I’m get­ting some­thing for noth­ing, I’ll be OK with that, as long as he doesn’t lose any­thing in the deal.

Comet Ges­ta­tion Counter: 57 days

Or, How is your German?

The Comet Spoiler comes from Ger­many, so the instruc­tions that were included are in that lan­guage. There are a half dozen some­what infor­ma­tive pic­tures, but there might be some­thing impor­tant in the text. So today I scanned the sheet and ran it through an OCR pro­gram. I then plugged the results into Babel Fish where I got about 1/2 of the total ver­biage in an under­stand­able form. Then I went back and fixed the OCR errors and added all the umlauts onto their vow­els. The sec­ond time through was a whole lot better:

1. Clean first the front in later edi­tion range of the spoiler thor­oughly with sil­i­cone remover.

2. In order to avoid a con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing of the vehi­cle by posi­tion­ing the spoiler with adhe­sive already laid on, the later seat of the part is marked by first pro­vi­sional fix­ing at the vehi­cle.
You found the assem­bly posi­tion if the spoiler rests opti­mally against the out­line of the vehi­cle.
Fix­ing and mark­ing know vehi­cle out­line with stick­ing and/or Krepp vol­ume take place-taking place that.

3. Grind the spoiler within the range of the stick­ing klebesicke with sand­pa­per of the gran­u­la­tion 100 and clean you the sharp­en­ing places. Here must be removed for a later, opti­mal glu­ing, all lac­quer and prim­ing arrears.

4. Lay on like illus­trated the adhe­sive in full bulge.
The spoiler can now set on the vehi­cle in accor­dance with the posi­tion marked before.
Note: in the marked place “X” no adhe­sive is laid on, so that the wheel arches can be fur­ther if nec­es­sary opened!

5. The spoiler can be set now on the vehi­cle in accor­dance with the posi­tion marked before. Exam­ine again the accu­rate posi­tion us fix the spoiler for drain­ing the adhe­sive as shown with tape.
Impu­ri­ties by the adhe­sive remove you please imme­di­ately with sil­i­cone remover!

Please you con­sider before pro­cess­ing the adhe­sive:
For drain­ing the adhe­sive the vehi­cle in a dry, area if nec­es­sary kept at a mod­er­ate tem­per­a­ture should remains (18 — 25 degrees).
The vehi­cle may not be dri­ven in the first 12 hours to the glu­ing. (wash road at the ear­li­est after 48 hours).

Comet Incu­ba­tion Period: 4 days

Got my first esti­mate for paint­ing the spoiler today. Kelly Paint and Body is right down the street from where I work, so it is con­ve­nient, but also they did some paint­ing for me on the ’95 Miata and I was pleased with their work. $63 bucks to paint it. For grins I asked about instal­la­tion, $76. Total would be $139 for the whole works. I’m con­sid­er­ing it. I’m not the most mechan­i­cal per­son in the world and I prob­a­bly could install it, but if they put it on and it falls off with out me hit­ting any­thing, I might have some recourse. My co-worker Brian is get­ting the folks that painted his truck to give me an esti­mate as well. I get the feel­ing I’m about a week off from get­ting the spoiler on the car.

I’m a lit­tle closer to get­ting the new tires on the car. Accord­ing to the FedEx site they are due to arrive on next Mon­day the 4th.

Comet Incu­ba­tion Period: 5 days

I guess I was wrong about this being a money mak­ing propo­si­tion for the Dealer. They told me 6 hours, yet they had the car all day and it was still not fin­ished when I went to pick it up. See­ing as I went into this with low expec­ta­tions, this just rein­forces my bad feel­ings. I’m sure the opti­mist would say that the extra time is a good thing because the tech­ni­cian wants to get it right. I’m sure this means that he doesn’t know what the heck he is doing so it is going to take twice as long as specified.

Because they were keep­ing the car overnight, they gave me a loaner vehi­cle. A 20005 Trib­ute in Dark Teal Metal­lic which kind of brought back mem­o­ries of Splash Green Metal­lic. It took about 15 miles before the feel­ing of being on stilts sub­sided enough that I just felt too high up. The dri­vers foot well seems nar­rower than the Miata’s so I never got my left foot com­fort­able. In typ­i­cal Mazda (and maybe all Japan­ese car) fash­ion the seat bot­tom is too short for my thighs, leav­ing me feel­ing unsup­ported even with the more upright posi­tion. Remem­ber me whin­ing about the cheap plas­ticy feel of the Mini’s inte­rior? Well the inside of this is worse. It is sil­ver (really more gray) I guess to sim­u­late alu­minum, but it comes off more like a plas­tic scale model of a navy bat­tle­ship. The only good feel­ing was from the steer­ing wheel, a lit­tle from the way it han­dled (not really zoom-zoom wor­thy) and a lit­tle from the tex­ture, hard to describe, but felt very grippy and comfortable.

Brian returned with is esti­mate from the folks who painted his car, $200, that is painted and mounted. They felt that they would want to add some pop riv­ets to go along with the sil­i­cone adhe­sive. This is all well and good, but they have not seen the spoiler. I’m hav­ing a hard time explain­ing that the con­struc­tion of this thing just doesn’t allow for adding any­thing else for secur­ing it to the car. I’ve tried to take a pic­ture of it, but can’t get one that will con­vey the shape right.

Comet Incu­ba­tion Period: 6 days