Shiny & Quiet

Took the after­noon off to do some car stuff. First up was to try and get rid of my gin­gling sound when going over bumps. I removed the brake caliper, its mount­ing bracket and the rotor. This was as far as I had gone before and sure enough the noise was still there. Here is where I ran into a bit of trou­ble. The next thing that needed remov­ing was the nut on the axle, I don’t have a wrench big enough to tackle the job, plus once I got it off I would have totally exhausted my knowl­edge of car guts. What the heck, I have all after­noon, but­toned it back up and took it back the the local tire store which caused the noise and let them have it. I took one of the tech­ni­cians for a ride and pointed out the sound. When we got back he pounded on the tire with his fist and could get it ring­ing, he said, “Give me a few min­utes” and dis­ap­peared into the shop. 20 min­utes later he came back and told me that when the last guy replaced the lug he didn’t get a shim in the right spot behind the bear­ing and it could move around caus­ing that noise. He fixed it up and now I am noise free again.

After I got back from the LTS I washed the car. It wasn’t real dirty, but there is a Master’s Miata Club event tomor­row and I couldn’t show up in a dull car. I had intended to wax the car after the last wash­ing a cou­ple of weeks ago, but didn’t get to it, so today I did. As it hap­pened at the end of Decem­ber when I last waxed with Black Magic Wet Shine Liq­uid Wax it went on real easy, but came off a lot harder. When I was using my old skool paste car­nuba wax it came right off with a towel. I’m actu­ally think­ing of get­ting a ran­dom orbital buffer to take this new fan­gled stuff off. The gurus over in the Car Care Prod­ucts sec­tion of the Miata Forum swear by the Porter Cable 7336 which is about a hun­dred and a quar­ter. A can of paste wax would be a heck of a lot cheaper…