Life of Brian

The new Miata comes with some small black accent pieces all the way around the lower edges of the car. Those accents look good, but they also have what they call the Appearance Package that comes on the Club trim as standard. These are slightly bigger and a little more aggressive looking and are available as a port installed option for around fifteen hundred bucks on some cars.

Mine did not come so equipped. I’ve seen a car with the package and I like the looks, so I ordered most of the appearance package from my dealer. I say most because the $1500 option includes a trunk lip spoiler that I’m not interested in. Mainly because it comes in gloss black like the lower trim pieces and it would look tacked on. Maybe if it was body color…

My total for just the parts was a little over $1,100 and I figured I’d put it on myself. After all I added the 1st gen R Package (front lip, rear diffuser & trunk lip spoiler) on my second Miata and I installed a front lip and side skirts on Miata #3, a 2nd gen car, so how hard could it be. For the heck of it I asked the service department how much would they charge me to put this new package on this new car, $1,410.35 was the answer. I said thanks, but no thanks, I’ll do it myself.

To get ready for the job I watched the 2 YouTube videos I could find to get some idea how difficult it was going to be. It doesn’t seem too complicated, but it will take me several days to do the whole job because I’ll probably do the front lip on one day, then the rear diffuser on a second and the side sills on the third. It is similar to some of the other pieces that I’ve done before, there is automotive grade double stick tape, plastic spacer pieces, longer screws, etc. But there are some new twists, there is some riveting and installing something called jack nuts. The good thing is that all the holes that need drilling are into plastic instead of metal like on the side skirts for that 2nd gen car.

So, I needed to buy a rivet tool and a jack nut tool, Amazon Prime to the rescue. While I was at it I went ahead ordered a set of Metric drill bits. In the videos I watched they just used SAE drill bits that were close, but what’s another twenty bucks in the grand scheme of things?

I did learn in one of the videos you need a small a piece of plastic angle iron that goes on under the front behind the new front lip. (aerodynamic reasons?) So, I had to call the parts department to have them get that too. Fortunately, even though I had them order it a couple days after the three big pieces, it came in at the same time as the rest of it on yesterday.

I knew, based on seeing those videos, that the boxes the parts come in are pretty big, so I took the Mini to pick them up. When I saw all three boxes there in the parts department I wondered if they would all make it into the Mini. I had the back seats already folded down, but I had to slide the front passenger seat as far forward as it would go, remove the headrest and recline the back of the seat. Even with that, they just barely fit inside the car enough to close the rear hatch. For the ride home the only rearview I had was through the driver’s side outside mirror.

Last night I opened all the big boxes so I could pull out all the instructions and see just what I’ve gotten myself into. Well, wouldn’t you know it, there in the instructions for the rear diffuser is a section that said “Additional Parts Required”, so now I need to order some $15 sticky strips. Not that this particular thing is going to hold me back, all the instructions say, “For proper adhesion of the double stick tape this should be done when the temperature is over 60 degrees.” That ain’t happening here until spring…

That thing I was waiting for showed up not long after I finished the last post. So naturally I decided to put the new muffler on right then and there. I was ready. I’d watched a couple install videos and I even ordered a set of muffler hanger removal pliers from Amazon.

The muffler is attached to the car with 4 rubber muffler hangers and two studs on the muffler that attach it to the mid-pipe. I squirted soapy water on the rubber hangers for lubrication and to give it time to work, I got out a pair of jack stands and jacked up the back of the car, so it would be easier to get at everything. I laid down the flattened muffler box as a pad so I wasn’t laying right on the driveway. Next, I unscrewed the nuts on the studs, one nut and spring came off while the other stud came right out of the muffler flange. So, I was left with this:

Because the studs reside in the muffler itself, they both need to come out so that they can go into my new muffler. The same thing happened on the installation video I watched as the manufacturer included it on the muffler’s order page. The fellow got out his vice grips and twisted it right off. I went and got my vice grips and try as I might that sucker was not coming off. I jumped in the Mini and drove over to Autozone to get some liquid wrench, thinking that’ll do the trick. Nope, several soakings and hammering away had zero effect.

Another option would be to try the ol’ jam nut trick, but I needed another of the right sized nut. There was one right in front of me on the stud that did come out, but unfortunately it was stuck on the stud with the same intensity as the stud that didn’t come out of the muffler. I took the stud that came out, put it in my pocket and headed to Lowes to get a nut. I screwed the stud into the handy panel they have by the drawers with all the loose hardware and found that I needed a M10x1.25 size. I open up the metric drawer and the only M10 nuts they had were M10x1.50. Shit.

Do I chance it and drive 5 miles east to Home Depot to see if they have a M10x1.25 nut? Which is probably unlikely, or do I throw a Hail Mary and drive 5 miles west to the Mazda dealer? I headed west. Even though the odds of the Mazda dealer having one of those nuts or even another stud were just as long as the Home Depot, at least when I get there if they don’t have it, they can order the genuine Mazda parts for me. They didn’t have the parts in stock, so I asked them to order me a stud and a nut. Being a belt and suspenders guy, I said, “Better yet, order two of each.” They’ll be here Tuesday.

When I got home, I looked at the back end of the Miata provocatively hoisted up in the air on jack stands and contemplated leaving it that way for the next 5 days. I thought it would be better sitting on the ground so I started to gather up all the tools and such underneath the back of the car. Look back up at the photo above, do you see the stud in the muffler with its nut off and the stud that came out with the nut still attached? Do you also see the 2 springs that give the muffler mid-pipe connection a little play? Well, I could only find one of those springs. Where could it be? I looked all over the driveway. I checked to see if it rolled down towards the street. I check in the grass next to the driveway. I checked in the shed where I’d been in and out of looking for the right nut in my 20-year drawer. I looked in the car. I looked in the house. I looked in the Mini. Nowhere.

Instead of another drive, this time I called Mazda and luckily the parts guy I was dealing with was still there. I told him that I now have a missing spring and that I’m blaming it on squirrels. The local rodent family and I are in a battle to get to see whether they can live in the little gap between the shed and the house (this is a future blog post hopefully.) Could he order me 2 of those springs as well. He did and they also will be here Tuesday.

When I hung up, I remembered that I couldn’t leave the Miata sit there. I would need to move it to have the driveway clear, because on Friday folks are coming over to pick up the hospital bed we had for Donna. The bed, along with nearly everything else she needed, I have been donating so it can get to another ALS patient who needs it. Crap. I needed to put the stock muffler back on the car. I put the nut and spring on the stud that stayed in the muffler and the screwed the springless stud in and that will have to be good enough for the quick move out and back in the next day.

I am patiently waiting for the UPS driver to arrive. What I bought requires a signature, so I can’t leave the house until that Big Brown Truck pulls up outside. What am I waiting for? Well, first let’s start with, I don’t even take me own advice.

It is that RoadsterSport muffler I waxed poetically about in that same post linked above. I bought the twin-tip version to match what the stock exhaust looks like.

I haven’t joined the local Miata Club, but I did start reading the Miata.net Forum, specifically the ND section that applies to my current generation. Ostensibly so I could learn more about the car and all the new fangled stuff on it that didn’t even exist when my last Miata, the CTBNL, was made.

But, sadly, it is not just the muffler. I was looking to get a stubby antenna to replace the stock one and I found a recommendation about one called, appropriately, The Stubby available from Cravenspeed. While checking out the antenna I noticed that the company is located in Portland, Oregon. Wait a minute, I live there now. So I scrolled through their stuff and found a couple other items that I just had to have, a side mount for the front license plate and the soundtube delete kit. A road trip was planned and executed. Money was spent.

I’m probably going to take a drive over there again next week, I have decided I’d like to get their clear wind deflector to replace the stock plastic basketweave looking one.