At today’s MMC Tech Day I finally painted the insides of the head­light hous­ings. I have been want­ing to do this since 2004 when the Maz­daspeed Miata came out and they had the same treatment.

Came out pretty good. The icky black glue that holds the lens to the back sec­tion left behind a cou­ple of “strings” on the lens. After I had the light all together and back on the car I went to clean it with some Goo Gone. Big mis­take. It cleaned the glue right off but it also took off some of the plas­tic lens. I just spent a cou­ple hours with some 2000 grit sand­pa­per, tooth­paste and plas­tic pol­ish to clean up the lens. It is still not 100% clear, I might have to get some pol­ish­ing com­pound to bridge the tooth­paste and the plas­tic polish.

FYI, WD-40 will take the glue off lickity-split and not “melt” the lens.

The cock­pit of the Miata can be a hot place. I have tried sev­eral meth­ods I’ve found on the Miata.net Forums and they have helped a lit­tle, but not enough. The air that comes through the inte­rior vents is so much warmer than the ambi­ent air, no mat­ter what I have tried.

Abut a year ago a forum mem­ber came out with a lit­tle device called the Cool Breeze Scoop. Peo­ple raved, but I doubted. Plus I didn’t want to invest the $40 price. This year after test­ing out the prin­ci­ple by hold my hand over the wind­shield header and direct­ing out­side air in, I took the plunge. Received and installed on Tues­day, but because of the ser­vice trip to Colum­bia and the weather we didn’t get a chance to really use it until today.

Two thumbs up! It doesn’t do any­thing when the car is stopped and adds a touch more wind noise, but it dumps cooler out­side air right at the footwells of the car and makes a notice­able dif­fer­ence. I pre­dict that this be like the microwave, later we will won­der how we lived with­out it.

Yanked out the coco­mats yes­ter­day evening to vac­uum the car and I left them out for good. I went ahead and put the tan OEM ones back in, even though they were slightly dirty.

I really loved the look of the black mats with the tan dots. Check this photo for a feel of them. The dark color broke up the vast expanse of light col­ored tan inte­rior and the mats hid the dirt real well. On the down­side, they shed short back fibers on the “car­pet” and they started to come apart right where you place your first foot down when enter­ing the car. The shed­ding I could han­dle and I worked around the fray­ing on the driver’s side by art­fully snip­ping out the offend­ing strays, but now that that mal­ady has effected the pas­sen­ger side too, it was time for them to come out.

Our glove box is full of maps. Really full. One thing of sun­tan lotion, a travel pack of Kleenex, a Big Chill Sound­track CD (for the rare times Donna dri­ves) and lots and lots of maps. Oh yeah, a small lighted mag­ni­fy­ing glass for night map read­ing, plus more maps. There might be a pen in there some­where near the bot­tom too.

Because you never know where you will end up once you start a drive in the Miata we have an Aiken city map and an Augusta city map. Two South Car­olina state maps, a Barn­well county map, Colum­bia, Charleston, Sumter, Ander­son and Greenville city maps. A Geor­gia state map, a Geor­gia moun­tains map, Atlanta, Rome and Savan­nah city maps, North Car­olina state map and an Asheville city map. Florida, Ten­nessee and Vir­ginia state maps. Plus a ratty old copy of one that cov­ers the east­ern US that I think we are keep­ing for sen­ti­men­tal reasons.

In an effort to cre­ate some room in the GB we decided to take out some of the maps from the fur­ther away places that really don’t need to be handy. My first thought was keep them on the counter in the garage that we walk right by to get in the car, but I knew we’d for­get to bring them and then end up spend­ing another $5 for a map we already had. My sec­ond thought was the win­ner. Mazda came out with a neat lit­tle cargo net for the back of the trunk. I had con­tem­plated buy­ing it a while back to hold the CB radio in that I use on MMC events, but never got around to it. They are like $20 and I think a nice bar­gain. Turns out they were on sale at Trussville for $15.60 and to top it off they are offer­ing free reg­u­lar ground ship­ping through the end of the year. Ordered it Sun­day night on the web page and it was at my doorstep at 6 this evening.

Watched a cou­ple of episodes of MXC today, can’t believe that show actu­ally exists. It would never get pro­duced in the US, thank heaven for those wacky Japanese.

Speak­ing of wacky Japan­ese, my bumper sticker from Cafe­Press arrived last night. The maroon color was nowhere near the car color, so I used an xacto knife and cut out the kanji let­ters and stuck them on the front small sec­tion of the side sills, one set on each side. From my lim­ited (read none) under­stand­ing of Japan­ese kanji one sim­ple char­ac­ter stands for emperor, but it is mostly used to mean the Emperor of Japan. The sec­ond sym­bol rep­re­sents sov­er­eign, so the com­bi­na­tion means sov­er­eign emperor, or The Emperor. Now that I’ve gone to all the trou­ble I’m not sure it is going to stay on the car. The tan is a tad too bright for the basi­cally dark sided auto­mo­bile. I may remake the sticker with black char­ac­ters which should be a lit­tle more sub­tle. I’ll have to get a pic­ture of the car with the tan let­ters on there first, so I can add it to my Hall of Shame along with the Japan­ese license plate.

Flan: “It’s in the can.”
Vic: “Next is Flan Peters. He devel­oped the aro­mather­apy prod­uct ‘Zoo in a Can’.”
Kenny: “Yeah, I’ve got ‘Mon­key Enclo­sure’.”
Vic: “Good for you and it looks like he’s got a pretty good run going.”
Kenny: “He’s into a full San Quentin.” {Flan is strad­dling two tim­bers with his butt in the air}
Vic: “Right you are. Oh he’s step­ping up there … Oh. There he’s into a defrocked bishop. {Flan is strad­dling two tim­bers with his butt in the air again.} And I think he might be try­ing for a dirty nurse. Yes. Oh he can’t quite pull it off.”
Kenny: “Not every­one can do a dirty nurse.”
Vic: “Right you are Ken. And… Flan can­not. It’s over for him.”

I had 3–1/2 hours free this morn­ing after we returned from the store, so I decided the time had come to paint the brake calipers. I loos­ened the lug nuts on all four wheels a half turn and put the car on jack stands. I pulled the right side wheels off and when I started on the back left there was one lug nut that required a lot of force to back off. I quit after a half turn know­ing just what that meant, stripped or cross threaded lug nut. It felt just like the last time back in April. So much for paint­ing calipers.

What the heck, I thought, I’ll do the pas­sen­ger side this morn­ing and do the other side at another time. I removed the bolts hold­ing the right front caliper on and lifted it off. Sprayed it real good with brake cleaner, so the paint would adhere to it and rested it on top of the rotor. I then went in search of some­thing to hold it or hang it from while I sprayed it. First I was going to paint it with some sil­ver I had as an under­coat before hit­ting it with my Gar­net Red in a can. Couldn’t find the old coat hanger I thought I had in the garage, so I went back to the car to study my options some more. The more I looked, the more I thought it would be hard to mask all the spots I needed to and make it easy to paint with­out get­ting over­spray on places I didn’t want to. I relubed the slider pins and put the brakes back together.

Because I had the wheel off in back I lubed those slide pins too before mount­ing the wheels back on the car. I used some of my recently pur­chase anti-size com­pound on the lug nuts as a good mea­sure. For the heck of it, I also put some anti-seize on the left front lug nuts before putting it back on the car. That left me with the left rear and it’s stuck lug nut. I tight­ened the other three down and slowly backed off the offend­ing nut. Maybe because the car was a lit­tle cooler or the other nuts being tight, but I could slowly back it off the stud. When I looked inside the nut I could see that it was very man­gled. The stud had a few mis­placed grooves but oth­er­wise it looked OK. I put the anti-seize on all of them and care­fully tight­ened up that scarred nut on the scarred stud.

I have zero proof that this is what hap­pened, but from recent expe­ri­ence it cer­tainly seems likely. The knuck­le­head who changed out my pre­vi­ous stripped stud decided he didn’t want to put a half man­gled lug nut on his nice new stud, so he walked around the back of the car, removed a ran­dom lug nut off the left rear wheel and using his impact wrench force fed the bad nut on hop­ing that would re-form the threads. Instead he just cre­ated another prob­lem as I am going to have to have the one on the left replaced, plus it might be a good idea to get a new lug nut. You can bet that even though they should do the work for free at the LTS, I’m going to cut my loses and go some­where else and pay to have it done.

I haven’t given up entirely on paint­ing the calipers yet either. I think instead of the exact match thing I will go get a small can of the liq­uid Rus­toleum in maroon and use that. I had a real good expe­ri­ence with that stuff when I did my old Laguna Blue’s calipers in yel­low.

I didn’t put any­more than the 6 coats I did yes­ter­day on the mir­ror. When I got up this morn­ing I was tempted to paint it sil­ver and start again, but didn’t. When I held it up to the car in the garage it was def­i­nitely Gar­net Red, just kind of peb­bly and matte and uneven. I decided I should spray some clear coat over the top and see if that helped. Of course I had to run to Auto­zone and spend another $4.43 on a can of paint. After 4 light coats of clear it cured the matte and uneven­ness. The tex­ture, I knew, was there to stay.

Re-installed the mir­ror and look­ing at it in the garage you can’t even tell. The color is so dark and the angle of the wind­shield make it look as if noth­ing was done. Even out­side in the day­light, if you didn’t know it was painted, you would never know. Per­haps on a bright day and with the sun at the right angle.…I do like sub­tle mods, but this one is per­haps a lit­tle too understated.

I’m not sorry I did it, but this mod would prob­a­bly be much more not­i­ca­ble on a lighter col­ored car like, white or sil­ver. Should look real good on the pri­mary col­ors too, clas­sic red, mariner blue, or a 10AE. Of course if your Miata is black, this mod is already done for you at the fac­tory.

If all you see are lit­tle squares for the title of this post it must be because you don’t have the Far East­ern Lan­guage Sup­port Pack installed. What it says, accord­ing to Babel Fish is, Good­bye License Plate in Japan­ese. What amounts to the short­est Mod rever­sal in my Miata career occurred tonight, after only 9 days I took off my Faux Japan­ese Plate.

I thought I might have had a taker for it in the Miata.net com­mu­nity, but I haven’t heard back, so I guess not. May try and sell it on eBay. I’ll box it up on Mon­day and see what it weighs, then I’ll list it. Unless some­body read­ing this wants it, $25 plus ship­ping that is the plate and the cus­tom mount for a Miata.

I have always thought that the proper color for fog lights was yel­low, so I bought some of those Lamin-x fog light pro­tec­tors in yel­low. They would pro­tect the lenses, make them the proper color and tie in the amber side mark­ers and yel­low turn sig­nal bulbs. Ah, the best laid plans…

The OEM fog lights aren’t very good as fog lights and the amber color is dif­fer­ent from either the turns sig­nals or the side mark­ers. Step one was to turn the use­less fogs into some­thing maybe use­ful, day­time run­ning lights. Step two I accom­plished today, removed the yel­low Lamin-x, added some clear side mark­ers in the front and a pair stealth bulbs for the turn sig­nals. A sub­tle dif­fer­ence to be sure, but hey I’m happy, and when Brian is happy, everybody’s happy.

Here are some com­par­i­son images:

Jacked up one side of the car this morn­ing and mounted the other side sill. Amaz­ing how quickly the whole process goes when you know how to do it and have a nice sharp drill bit. I sprayed each hole drilled with some flat black rus­toleum I had lay­ing around. I’m sure some folks would have gone out and bought some nice zinc based primer (and still some peo­ple might have had the proper stuff to begin with) but because we don’t live in a state that has salted roads in the win­ter and my tenure with each Miata is about 7 years, I’m def­i­nitely not going to be wor­ried about any rust. The effect is sub­tle, but in my hum­ble opin­ion a nice improve­ment on the looks of the car.

The Miata is stay­ing overnight at the recov­ery room/body shop. The instruc­tions say: The vehi­cle may not be dri­ven in the first 12 hours to the glu­ing. (wash road at the ear­li­est after 48 hours). And at first, I inter­preted that to mean don’t drive it for 12 hours and don’t wash it for 48 hours, but I think they really mean, don’t drive it at all for 12 hours and don’t drive on rough roads for 48 hours. They were sup­posed to sil­i­cone on the spoiler this after­noon and I tried to call and find out the progress, but Liza was appar­ently too busy to call back, so I’m not sure if they did it or not. I’ll find out tomor­row morn­ing and see if they did get it on. If they don’t glue it on until tomor­row, I might not be able to pick it before Fri­day as the sil­i­cone needs to set. Donna’s mom needs her car back for Fri­day to go to dial­y­sis, but I guess at worse case I might have to duck out in the AM and drive her.

Comet Incu­ba­tion Period: 12 days

The Fam­ily CFO allowed me to go ahead and buy some fresh tires for the 15″ wheels. So wasn’t real happy with me for get­ting myself into this posi­tion, but agreed to spend the money for tires now as long as I con­sider them my birth­day (today), anniver­sary (Wednes­day) and Christ­mas (12/25) gifts for this year. And if I don’t behave myself, maybe next years as well. It works out bet­ter finan­cially fur­ther down the road, because if I went back to the 16″ wheels, when those tires wore out later next year I would have been ask­ing for the $300 for tires and an addi­tion $400 for after mar­ket wheels.

Now if all 10 of my occa­sional read­ers would donate $5 via Pay­Pal to sales@barndoorfanclub.org I’ll be able to get them mounted.

I ordered 4 Toyo T1-S in 195/50–15 from my pals at OnlineTires.com who have that size on spe­cial for $59 a piece. For that price and that tire you can’t get bet­ter back for your buck in a high per­for­mance tire. I just hope they are still sell­ing them for that price around Jan­u­ary 2006, because that is when I’ll prob­a­bly need another set. Of course, if the Miata.net rumors are cor­rect, by then Toyo will be sell­ing the replace­ment tire called T1R and it will prob­a­bly be a bit costlier.

Comet Incu­ba­tion Period: 3 days

After 52 days of incu­ba­tion I had my first labor pain today. Steven from New State Cor­po­ra­tion called to say my front lip spoiler had arrived and they would ship it out to me today, or Mon­day at the lat­est. If I get lucky it may be here by the end of next week. Stoked. Now to see how much it will cost to get it painted.

Called and set up a date to get the 15K ser­vice next Thurs­day, but for­got to ask how much they want for that. The 7,500 check was $72.13, does that mean, twice the mileage, twice the price. They are basi­cally the same except in the 15K they clean the air fil­ter and they inspect the freon in the AC.

Comet Ges­ta­tion Counter: 52 days

Been think­ing about get­ting a front spoiler to make the front a lit­tle more aggres­sive look­ing and a touch lower to the ground. I don’t care for either Mazda offer­ing as they look way too tacked on for my tastes. Really look­ing for one that looks like the one Mazda used on the 99–00 mod­els. I always keep an eye on the interior/exterior sec­tion of the miatafo­rum for leads. about a week ago some posted about a spoiler he saw on a Swiss web site and won­dered if any one could get it for him. When I went to the link, there it was, what I have been look­ing for, the ATH Hins­berger Comet.

I wrote to the con­tact email and asked if they shipped to the US. The answer came back no, but I should try the spoiler company’s US dis­trib­u­tor. I emailed them and heard noth­ing back for 3 days. An inaus­pi­cious start to our busi­ness rela­tion­ship. I did a lit­tle search­ing on the com­pany and found a forum that they spon­sor, it is for Tiburons, but from what I read not too many peo­ple are pleased with them. More research was required. Went to the spoiler manufacturer’s web site and found they have a dis­trib­u­tor in Canada and Scot­land that I thought I’d give a try. The Canadian’s replied to my email in a mat­ter of min­utes (more like it.) They do ship to the US, but the price was about $50 higher than the relaxed and dodgey Cal­i­forn­ian. They also men­tioned that this was a new prod­uct that they don’t stock so the lead-time could be as much as 2 months. None of this was men­tioned by the CA com­pany. I wrote back to both with some more ques­tions and I’m wait­ing…
The Scot­tish fel­low replied to my orig­i­nal request and he said, “ATH Hins­berger has a dis­trib­u­tor in USA and asks that we respect the dis­trib­u­tor ter­ri­to­ries.” Which may be cor­rect, but see­ing as Mr. Canada said OK, I fig­ure this was a polite brush off and that he didn’t want the has­sle of over­seas ship­ping (and some­thing that can be a pain in the a$$.)

The Cana­dian has already replied to my fur­ther ques­tions, so you can guess where I will be spend­ing my money. If I pull the trig­ger. With paint­ing this lit­tle mod will be in the mid­dle 400 dol­lar range. This is not chump change for me and sounds like a major invest­ment for some­thing that will occa­sion­ally be scraped on park­ing lot dividers. The Mazda unit I put on the old blue car was like a hun­dred and a quar­ter. Stay tuned.