Year: 2015

NA NA NA NB NB NB

na_na_na_DETAIL_grandeToday’s Blipshift shirt is another Miata design. Its a cute take on the minions from the Despicable Me movies because they always sound like they are going na na na when they laugh and it shows a minion in a first generation Miata, AKA the NA.

You only have a couple days to get in on owning one, so get out your charge card. There are now 5 Miata related designs from Blipshift, 4 of which feature the NA (all of which I own by the way) and one other featuring a 3rd gen car, the NC.

But I’m not falling for this one. Where is my car, an NB? Show me a 2nd generation Miata on a T-shirt and I’m buying a bunch of them.

A Day Early

And 4 days late.

The offset O2 sensor wrench from Harbor Freight came in the mail today. If I follow along with the USPS tracking page this tool left Los Angeles, CA and passed through Lake Havasu City, AZ, Vaughn, NM, Clarksville, AR, Graysville, AL and Atlanta, GA before arriving in Aiken, SC some 2,400 miles later. When I looked at the return address label on the padded envelope it arrived in it said; Harbor Freight, 224 Harbor Freight Rd, Dillon, SC 29536. Did it actually come from California in 7 days or did a Postal Service employee walk it the 160 miles from Dillon to my house in the same time frame?

I’m not sure just what I’m going to do with it right now. Do I mail it back to return it? Do I make a trip to Augusta to return it? Do I eat it and keep it as a backup in case the one I bought from Advanced Auto breaks when I’m trying to replace the front sensor when it inevitably fails in 6 months? Maybe I’ll give it away as a door prize at this Saturday’s MMC breakfast.

O2 Have Had A Lift

Changed out the faulty O2 sensor yesterday and it would have been munch easier if I had my very own lift in the garage, but seeing as we didn’t win the half-billion PowerBall jackpot on Wednesday…

Last Sunday I ordered the sensor and a wrench. PartsGeek shipped the sensor via the USPS from California last Monday. Harbor Freight shipped the wrench via FedEx from California last Wednesday. Friday the sensor arrived on my doorstep, the wrench was still in transit in Clarksville, Arkansas (ETA Thursday the 19th.)

Friday evening when we went out to do our weekly grocery shopping I stopped in at the Advanced Auto that was on the way to Krogers and bought an O2 sensor wrench. There were two kinds on the rack an offset wrench and a socket type, because the socket one was $11 and the offset was $14, and I’m cheap, I bought the socket style. As a side note these are the same two styles available from Harbor Freight, but the socket style from them is two dollars more than the offset wrench, so that is why I have a offset style wrench in Graysville, Alabama as of yesterday.

When we got home I went out in the garage and pulled the Miata out of the garage and pulled right back in aiming to park it towards the right side of our little one car garage to give the hydraulic jack better access to the driver’s side of the car. To get to the electrical connector inside the car for the sensor you need to remove the driver’s seat and pull back the two sections of carpet under and behind it. In preparation for Saturday I pulled out the seat, easy peazy, 4 bolts and the seatbelt electrical plug, then jacked up the side of the car as far as the jack would go to place a couple of stands under the car. I then crawled under and squirted penetrating oil on some bracket bolts and the sensor to ensure their easy removal tomorrow.

After lunch on Saturday I figured it was about time to do some actual work on the Emperor, so I started with the easy thing first, disconnecting the 4-prong electrical plug to the sensor. I flipped up the back piece of carpet, but when I tried to pry up the piece on the floor I couldn’t get it peeled back enough to get to the connector. I unsnapped the sill plate to get some slack in the carpet, but that wasn’t much help. Next step was to remove the center console so there would be more unrestricted pressure on the carpet.

Calling what lines the interior of this generation of the Miata carpet is exceedingly charitable. What it is is 1/16th of an inch thick plastic with the pliability of cardboard and a slightly fuzzy side up.

Once I got the carpet pulled back I still couldn’t see the connector. Because of this unfortunate downpour incident the 1/2 thick fiber padding that used to be under here was replaced with a nicely sealed covering of foil backed bubble insulation that needed to be carefully un-taped to gain access. Finally, there is the connector, but how does it separate? I pulled and pushed. I tried to both lift and push down on what I thought was the release tab, but it remained stubbornly joined together. I poked at both ends with a little screw driver and finally I managed to get it apart.

Now for the hard part. Crawling under the car I used the 10mm socket to remove the two brackets that keep the sensor wire in place and away from the exhaust. I twirled the wire through a spring-like contraption that further served the same purpose. All that was left to do was place my nifty O2 sensor socket on the sensor and…crap. I could get the socket on the sensor, but the PPF was in the way of putting the handle on the socket. I tried putting the short extension on it, but that was too long by an inch or so to allow the handle to get on it.

Fortunately the drive to Advanced Auto and the wait on a Saturday afternoon to exchange the socket plus three bucks for the offset wrench was short, so I was back under the Miata in about 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes later I was jacking the car down. Five minutes later the driver’s seat was in and I started it up. I ran horribly at first and I had to back it out into the driveway because of the smoke generated from burning off the penetrating oil. By the time I finished putting away the rest of the tools and swept out the garage, the Emperor had warmed up and was purring away with an unilluminated Check Engine light.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1463

Truck Day

B9pxktqIEAAtnsK.jpg largeHard to believe, but it is that time of the year already. Spring training is just around the corner. Can the Red Sox be the first team in history to go from worst to first to worst to first?

In snow flurries an 18-wheeler truck full of baseball equipment left Boston today on its way south to Fort Meyers, Florida. Pitchers and catchers report to camp in a week with the rest of the mokes reporting on the 24th.

All I know is I’m just going for the $15 radio package this year. If they are in contention near Labor Day I might opt for the TV package at a much reduced rate for the final couple months. Last year it was painful viewing those end of season games when they were firmly entrenched in the cellar of the American League East, but I felt obligated to maximize my dollar to games watched ratio.

Who’s Your Caddy

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McTKSbG6Jrg

One of the destinations this year for the Motoring Challenge is “Location Filmed in Movie.” Our first thought was Heavy’s BBQ near Crawfordville, GA. It was used as the bar Stella’s Roadhouse in Sweet Home Alabama, but remembering our lousy meal we had there and it doesn’t look on the outside much like it did in the movie any more, we shot it down.

My next thought was the 1994 movie Nell because some of the scenes were filmed in Robbinsville, NC the gateway to the Tail of the Dragon. Any excuse to get to the mountains of western North Carolina & east Tennessee.

Thinking back closer to home, Disney remade the 1965 movie, That Darn Cat in Edgefield, SC just 25 miles up the road. The 1997 version of That Darn Cat starred Christina Ricci in the Haley Mills role and the production company painted practically every business building that fronted the town square.

Then I remembered there was a movie filmed even closer to home, because it was filmed right here in our Fair City, Aiken, SC. The cinematic masterpiece Who’s Your Caddy, that has a 6% score on Rotten Tomatoes, was the talk of the town back in 2007.

I was fully prepared to watch the whole movie just so I could find a recognizable Aiken landmark, but was spared the ignominy when within a minute and a half the hip hop moguls pull up to the clubhouse of the “Carolina Pines Golf & Polo Club” and it is The Wilcox, a historic Inn that was voted one of top 50 small hotel by readers of Condé Nast Traveler.

Now I just have to figure out how to get a half dozen stogy old white guys smoking cigars to be sitting in the white rocking chairs out front when I take the photo.

Car 54k Where Are You?

On the way to the Valve Store(tm), that is where. The Purple Whale needed just to travel 1 mile from our driveway to reach the 54,000 mile total and it happened this morning on the way to work.

I’ve been hanging on every word and photo of the next generation Miata. Our first 2 Miatas were 1st generation models. The first car we kept for 6 years and the second one stayed around for eight. The current car is a 2nd generation model and has been in the family for going on a dozen years. We thought we were going to get a 3rd generation model about 4 years ago, until we sat in and drove one. Neither of us liked the look, the bath tub like feeling and the fact that they stole passenger foot well room for routing of the exhaust. Plus, the couple of inches it did gain in all directions made it appear a lot larger than the previous versions of the car.

The 4th generation car is supposed to be smaller than the 3rd in a most areas and is actually shorter than the tiny first car, but you can’t tell it from the pictures below, it looks larger.


On the plus side I like the looks, except for those tail lights, and a leak of the Japanese market brochure shows that it will quite possibly be available in something called Dynamic Blue Mica. On the down side, I can’t imagine the “bath tub” feel has improved any from looking at the door height in those photos and I’ve read that the seat has been lowered in the car for more head room and improved balance. We will definitely go sit in and drive a 4th generation model later this year when they become available and even though right now I think I want one, odds are the reign of the Emperor will continue…

P0037

Lizard

Faulty Heated Oxygen Sensor (H2OS) Bank 1 Sensor 2

The nice young man at Advanced Auto down the street used his nifty OBDII scanner to read the code which caused the Check Engine light that short circuited our plans to drive the Emperor to Florida. The Miata is an inline 4 cylinder engine, so Bank 1 is the only possible option, Sensor 2 meant it is the downstream sensor, AKA the one after the catalytic converter.

I searched the Miata.net Forums for what this all meant for me. Sensor 2 just monitors the effectiveness of the cat and if you live in a non-Smog Check state it is not a real problem because the data is not used in changing any ignition parameters. You could just not fix it and leave the Check Engine light illuminated all the time, but the downside to that is you could throw another possibly important code and not know it. I’m going to be a good boy and fix it.

From reading the forum it seems like I might even be able to do the repair myself, so I ordered a new sensor from Parts Geek, $80 plus $9 for shipping. According to hive memory of the forum I’ll also need a O2 Sensor wrench to get this thing out, so I ordered one of them from Harbor Freight, $6 plus $7 for shipping.

Why, oh, why would I spend more for shipping than I did for the tool? The closest Harbor Freight is in Augusta and it would cost more in gas and aggravation to go get it when the postman will bring it right to my door. I suppose I could have borrowed one from a MMC member, but this way I’ll have the wrench when I need to replace the front sensor. Which would invariably have happened right after I returned the borrowed wrench.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1462