This Has Now Become Commonplace

The Emperor is spending the night at an auto repair shop.

We got the Miata back on Friday evening and Saturday we drove to Augusta in it. Within the first couple of miles we both knew something just wasn’t right. There was zero rear diff noise, but under heavy throttle the exhaust sounded crazy loud and slightly under powered. Donna mentioned the noise right off and while my butt dyno felt a little power lag, I couldn’t be sure.

We made two trips to Augusta over the weekend and when I kept the throttle levels at neighborhood driving levels the car felt fine. But putting your foot in it, as they say, resulted in increased exhaust volume. A quick search on Miata.net on the issued resulted in several hundred not on point hits.

Monday we drove the Miata to work, but about a half mile from home the Check Engine Light came on. It was running fine and felt fine, but I pulled a U-turn and came home to get in the Sonata.

My first thought was I needed to find out exactly which things they changed at Wayne’s, so I could let the folks know at my new favorite shop know. This turned out to be harder than you would think it would be, but not surprising considering my actual repair experience there.¹

At a round cubicle discussion with co-workers discussing my continued Miata woes someone posits that maybe the new shop had to remove some part of the exhaust system to replace the differential and poked a hole in a pipe or cracked a gasket or something. So I called the Automotive Workbench and spoke to Holley and he said that they didn’t have to touch any exhaut components to do the swap, but please bring the car in and we’ll run the code.

After work Donna followed me over to the AW and Holley and I went for a test drive. The first thing he said to me once I buried my foot was, “A lot of people pay good money to get that sound.” I told him, “If I was 20 years-old, I wouldn’t be complaining. But the sound level is almost twice as loud as what it normally is.” When we got back to the shop he took it out back to put it on a lift to check for leaks and run the code.

With Holley’s code reading of Crank Position Sensor Issue, my description of symptoms and some spitballing with Brian the owner we have a possible problem (timing belt off a notch, possibly when Wayne’s installed the new sensor) and a plan of attack for them tomorrow, pull the valve cover to see if that is it and also re-weld around the pre-silencer on the mid-pipe that Steve at Panic had spot welded on a while back.