All the cool kids have known about Plasti Dip‘s awsomeness for years, me I’m just catching on. Continuing on with the black accent theme on the New & Improved Emperor I spent six bucks on a can of the stuff. A little masking tape, an hour of my Sunday afternoon and TADA! Blacked out Mazda Logo on the nose.
Instead of our usual bike ride and breakfast at Ridgecrest, we made a bagel run to Lexington this morning. Certainly not by bike, that’s over a hundred miles, we took the Emperor. On the way back, somewhere west of Red Bank, but not as far as Boiling Springs, let’s call it White Knoll, the Miata exceeded 153,000 miles since manufacture.
The new 4th generation Miata is going to have its A-pillars and windshield header be a gloss black, no matter what color the car is. The designers and/or Mazda marketing have stated the reason for this is to make the car appear visibly lower. That’s their story anyway. They aren’t the first to think of this idea either, the Honda S2000 came from the factory that way. And few folks on the Miata.net Forums have already done it on all three of the previous generations on their own. From the pictures I’ve seen, I don’t know about lower, but it does make the car look slightly different.
So after we got back from Lexington I bought a $20 stripe kit from Advance Auto and spent the rest of the morning into early afternoon carefully trimming and squeegeeing 153,000 tiny air bubbles out of one of the two 12′ stripes to do this to the Emperor. I can definitely see why it would cost a 3 to 4 grand to wrap a car and have it done right. I think this little project came out pretty decent for a first-timer, but hate to try anything more complex. The effect is subtle because of the car’s already dark color. Pictures tomorrow.
If anyone wants the other 12′ stripe it’s yours for the asking.
For the second time in two years I’ve bought a GROM AUX-IN Adapter for the Emperor. “Buy why Brian?”, you’re asking yourself, “Doesn’t your aftermarket Jensen HU play an SD card?”
It did. Well, it probably still does, it just doesn’t do it in the dash of the Miata anymore. The honeymoon with Jensen was short-lived. As a matter of fact it almost ended before it was even installed. One feature it had was pre-amp outputs, which were perfect for interfacing with the existing Bose amps, but they wouldn’t seem to work together. This prompted a trip to the local car audio store for a Scosche line leveler which would take the speaker level outputs and damp them down.
This worked real well and we had music, but I don’t know whether it was the rat’s nest of wiring that this combo created or the cheap Jensen radio, but there was always a high pitched whine in the background that’s sound varied along with the engine RPM. But the real killer was the display. No clock. The OEM radio had the option to always display the time and seeing as neither Donna nor I wear a watch we had become used to taking a quick glance and seeing the time. Oh, the Jensen had a clock, just no way to keep it on at all time. To get it to display the time all you had to do was take your eyes off the road to spot which one of the three buttons to the right of the center knob had the tiny little letters DISP on it and push with your finger. But you had to push it for just the right length of time to get it. Push it for too short a time and it paused the playback. Push it for too long a time and it would mute the sound. Donna never mastered it, so the job fell to me and after two years of practice I had about a 60% success rate of getting right the first time.
I’ve been looking for a replacement Bose radio on eBay for several months. Trouble is that The Emperor’s style radio was only available in the years 2002 & 2003 on the LS model. The 2004 & 2005 radios would work, but they had silver faces which would look a little odd in the car. They looked OK in the 04/05 cars because Mazda changed the whole center stack trim to silver faced stuff. I missed out on one unit that was Buy It Now for $100 by stewing in indecision a couple hours. Then a couple weeks ago one came up for $150 But It Now, but I didn’t want to spend that much. I bid $100. It went for $135 plus shipping to some one else. After work on Tuesday I noticed one come up for $59 + $15 for shipping. I bought it.
The only downside to this buy was it didn’t have the little black trim pieces that flank the radio and hide the removal holes. Who knows where I’ll be able to find those, but I’m willing to overlook those minor gaps because all I have to do is glance down and there the time will be.
Oh, the title, it refers to the cassette player that is at the bottom of the radio. It was an option, you could have added a mini-disc player or an MP3 player, but someone actually paid extra for a cassette deck.
The vinyl top makes a different sound when driving than the cloth did, but overall it seems slightly quieter. The previous cloth top, number two for the car, was always noisier than the original OEM top. I may have mentioned it here before, but top #2 was quieter at highway speeds when it was down and the windows up than it was when the top and windows were up.
The Emperor also got his second royal bath in 4 days once he got home. HRH had to spend last night outside under the stars with flying feathered creatures.
I had grand plans to paint the Emperor’s valve cover with red wrinkle paint when I had it off changing the gasket on Saturday. The local O’Reillys didn’t have the paint in stock in red when I called on Thursday, so they ordered some for me to pick up on Friday evening.
Standing there outside Kurt’s garage on Saturday morning looking down at the cover sitting on a garbage bag, noticing all the things I would have to clean and/or protect and/or mask off, I abandoned the plan. I just didn’t feel like investing the time, besides, it is not like I keep a “Car Show Shine” under the hood (as evidenced by the above photo.)
While removing the cover I had some big help from John “Clunk” Haff, but that help cost me the stock yellow handle of the dip stick as John snapped it off while twirling a ratchet. Not that it took much pressure to break, it is a known Miata issue, because the hard plastic it is made from turns brittle with age and the under hood heat. So much so that mine was not the only one broken on our Tech Day. Dave was having his timing belt & water pump proactively replaced had his break off too. John swore he had nothing to do with it and I believe him as he still had his head under the Emperor’s bonnet, but I suspect it was his partner in crime, Rudy “Thunk” Wilmoth.
John apologized profusely, but I told him, “No worries, mon. I’ve got jus da ting to be repairin it.” This has happened on my previous two Miatas and I had the perfect replacement at home. I still had two of the four heads left from on my Yellow Submarine Blue Meanie Bulldog figure.
We started the day with breakfast with the MMC at a Steak and Shake in Augusta and we’re ending it on the couch watching the FRS play playoff baseball. In between we walked around downtown Aiken to pay our bills followed by lunch on the porch of a small restaurant. This afternoon I finished up my center console modifications by installing a lighted push button that operates the garage door remote in the old cigarette lighter spot.
While I was in there I tried sliding the top of the upper shift boot up the shifter some. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that shifting into 1st and 3rd required a bit more oomph than it did with the old torn boot, well today, shifting into 5th was met with progressively more resistance. So much so that on this morning’s post breakfast drive the shifter popped out of 5th gear about three times just because of the tightness of the rubber boot wanting to force the shifter into neutral.
After dinner we took in the sights at the Western Carolina State Fair. It was a beautiful night for it as it actually felt like fall. They had quite a few awesome looking rides and that is pretty much all we did was look at them because even if we did want to try one out the lines were very long. The only thing we bought was a 1/4 pound of fudge from a vendor after 2 failed attempts to buy an ice cream cone from an outside cart.
