Good Will Mud Flaps

To mount the small side sills I had to remove the perfectly good front mud flaps. Well they were no good to me any more, but they probably would be great for someone else with a Garnet Red Mica Miata. It did take too long to find a match, someone in Orlando, Florida will be the lucky recipient and all it will cost them is some postage. I saved all the hardware when I pulled them off, but I couldn’t really remember what went where at first. Then I went out to the garage and started to piece it all together and I’m pretty sure I got everything where it should go. The only problem is that the double sided tape has lost most of it’s stick when it was pulled off the car. Guess they’ll just have to go get a bit of it from an auto parts store.

A World Topsy Turvy

If things were as they should be, tonight would be game seven of the 2004 World Series where the Red Sox would lose and once again have been mere outs from being Champions. My whole world is upside down.

Thanks:
Bronson Arroyo
Mark Bellhorn
Orlando Cabrera
Johnny Damon
Alan Embree
Keith Foulke
Gabe Kapler
Curtis Leskanic
Derek Lowe
Pedro Martinez
Doug Mientkiewicz
Kevin Millar
Doug Mirabelli
Bill Mueller
Mike Myers
Trot Nixon
David Ortiz
Manny Ramirez
Pokey Reese
Dave Roberts
Curt Schilling
Mike Timlin
Jason Varitek
Tim Wakefield
Kevin Youkilis

And of course manager Terry Francona and coaches Ron Jackson, Lynn Jones, Brad Mills, Euclides Rojas, Dale Sveum, Dave Wallace.

Done

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.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery

Saves the day. I went to the Aiken Exotic Car Festival this morning and took a bunch of pictures. Tonight when I stuck the card in the reader it showed that I had used 40 Meg of the 128, but listed no files in the directory. Crap. So for the second time in about a year I fired up PC Inspector Smart Recovery and within minutes I had all 50 pictures. If you don’t have this program in your tool kit, you should. The price is even right, FREE!

One Down, One To Go

It only took me 3-1/2 hours to get one side sill on. To be fair, some of that time was taking the front mud flaps off. A big chunk of that time spent, even though I pre-read the directions, was reading and re-reading the instructions. They are not exactly clear in a lot of ways. I’m sure that comes from them being originally in Japanese and then translated into English. And you definitely want to make sure you understand exactly how things are supposed to go when you are drilling holes into you car.

Speaking of drilling you were supposed to use a 1/8 drill for a pilot hole and then a 21/64 for the finish hole. Raise your hand if you have a 21/64 drill bit handy. I didn’t. I did have a 5/16, which is close enough for my shade tree mechanicing. Trouble was it was kinda dull making it slow going drilling out the 10 holes. That’s right 10 holes, it was supposed to be 9, but for some reason I insisted on drilling out a perfectly good threaded hole. No wonder I broke my 1/8 drill bit…

Tomorrow morning I’ll do the other side. Should only take about an hour and a half now that I know what I’m doing.

Pretty Quiet On The Political Front

All the hoopla over the swing states, has left those of us in the states that pollsters say are solid for candidate X, just a little out of the loop. Because it has been determined by polling that South Carolina is going to be won by Bush, neither candidate feels any real reason to spend any money here. We are not even going to get a brief airport runway rally while their plane refuels on its way to Ohio or Florida. If this sort of thing gets much worse, Asimov may have been spot on with a story he wrote in 1955 called Franchise. In the then future, polls and the giant computer Multivac will winnow out all the unnecessary people who they have determined to vote one way or the other and pick just one individual to choose the next president.

17,000 Miles

Passed through 17k on the way home from work tonight. Because there is a Master’s Miata Club event with an early start tomorrow I broke out the Quik Detailer and “washed” the car in the driveway before parking for the night. We meet at 8:00AM for the drive to Newberry Street to see the inaugural Aiken Exotic Car Festival. There were supposed to be over a hundred cars, but this morning’s paper said just over 50 are registered. You have got to start somewhere, so I hope there is enough attendance to prompt another one next year.