The Emperor has a new right rear shock.

He didn’t need it though.

The one that came out is per­fectly fine. I made an assump­tion and you know the old saw about what that means.

At around 60,000 miles I replaced the worn OEM shocks with some Koni Yel­low Sport adjustable shocks. When it came time to to replace those worn Konis, I went with some Koni Orange STR-T non-adjustable ones. I had two rea­sons for this, one, I adjusted the yel­low sport shocks once, to the mid-point where they felt fine and two, the orange non-adjustable shocks were half the price at $70 vs. $140 each.

Because they came from the same man­u­fac­turer I thought they would be plug & play, but nope. The yel­lows because the adjust­ing mech­a­nism runs through the shaft it is slightly larger in diam­e­ter at 12mm, than the stock shaft’s 10mm, so the hole in the top plate of the shock mounts had to be enlarged to accom­mo­date it. The new orange shocks are meant as a slight upgrade to the OEM units, so its shaft is 10mm in diameter.

What I thought was shock fail­ure was really the new smaller shaft pok­ing through the enlarged mount­ing plate hole. My mechanic used a metal shim/washer with a 10mm hole in it to make things work. We are good for now, but we’ll take the car back to him next week and let him do the other three prophylactically.

When we left the Kroger store park­ing lot to go buy some gas for the still fanged Emperor, Donna asked, “Are the lights on?” I said, “Yes. It just looks like they aren’t on because we are in a well lit park­ing lot.” We filled up with gas and headed home. About halfway there I noticed that we seemed to be miss­ing the right head­light. That was con­firmed when we pulled into the garage.

This is the first time I have ever had a burnt out head­light in a Miata. Not just this one, but in the first two either. Twenty two years with­out a head­light going bad. Watch, one of the new ones will burn out in a week and I’ll never go another year with­out one or the other head­lights going bad.

Went back out in the Pur­ple Whale and drove to Advanced Auto to buy a new bulb. Before I went I checked the Own­ers Man­ual to see what bulb I needed, low beams on my year car are HB4. At the store there is an aisle full of bulbs and I searched and searched , but couldn’t find an HB4 bulb to save my life. I checked a cross-reference guide they had there and it said I needed a 9006 bulb for that appli­ca­tion. Those they had plenty of, just not in sin­gle packs. I ended up buy­ing a pair of Sylan­nia Sil­ver Star 9006 bulbs and left the store $38 poorer.

I sure hope I’m wrong about what I wrote in the 2nd paragraph.