Miata Service

Mechanically Induced Coma

The CTBNL is very sick. Right now it is sitting at a local auto repair shop in a mechanically induced coma for the next week or two while awaiting an opening.

A week ago today on the way home from a shopping trip over in Medford we were only a couple of miles from home when calamity struck. Cruising along at 50 MPH behind a BMW 3 Series when what should appear from right underneath the back of this car, but a softball sized chunk of concrete! With zero chance to avoid it, I held my breath.

Boom Bang Crunch Clang! I looked in the rearview mirror and could see the chunk tumbling behind me, along with a trail of smoke leading back to it. I instantly knew what had happened. A busted oil pan.

We were in the left lane preparing to turn off towards home in about 100 yards anyway, so I eased on over into the turn lane right behind the BMW. We both pulled into an unmanned fuel center. I immediately shut off the car and we had been leaking oil for only maybe 10-12 seconds.

The BMW driver got out and looked under his car. I don’t know whether the concrete piece actually hit anything under the BMW, but if it did, it was just incidental contact because he got back in his car and drove off (he did ask if we needed any help first.) I looked under our car even though I already knew what I’d see and I wasn’t disappointed, it looked like I had removed the drain plug. Our only option was to call a tow truck.

After the BMW drove off I got out and pushed the Miata several feet forward because where I stopped I wasn’t totally into the lot. The CTBNL had left a nice sized oil spot behind and oil was still slowly leaking. I called a local shop that had done some work on the Mini for us and they said they could do the work, but it wouldn’t be until June sometime.

I then called for a tow and about 30 minutes later the truck showed up. Once the car was on the flatbed, there was another slightly smaller spot left behind there too. I thought for sure that was all 4 quarts of oil, but when the car was offloaded at Emmett’s there was a small slick of oil on the flatbed.

Now we wait to see just how much it is going to cost to fix the CTBNL. Trying to determine what the breaking point is where we say, @%#! it, and save that money for the Wrangler.

Four Wheels Off

No, I didn’t take up racing and emulate Clunk (or was it Thunk) by over or under cooking a corner and ending up off the pavement. I decided to change the oil in the Miata today, even though it has been less than 2,600 miles since I last did it. Normally I change it every 5,000 miles and it was changed not too long before we left Aiken, when I had Automotive Workbench do the 75,000 mile service. Trouble is that was over 8 months ago…

As I usually do when the oil is changed, I change the location of tires from front to back and vice versa. That is why “four wheels off”, they are off the car.

While they were off I succumbed to luxury car anal retentiveness and lined up the center cap logos with the valve stems…

CTBNL Update

When they got around to looking at the car in the shop on Monday it would not start for them either. The first thing they did was take my trusty backup Cam Angle Sensor out of the trunk and put it in. What do you know, the car started right up. With the car not showing a Check Engine Light nor having a stored code in car’s Engine Control Unit the tech suspected it was the main engine relay or the ECU itself. Because the ECU would be expensive and a nightmare to replace they opted to change the hundred dollar relay first.

After replacing the part they parked it outside and left it running for about 30 minutes and it never shut off. Then in the afternoon the tech drove it around for 25-30 miles. It never quit. He repeated the process again the following morning with the same positive results. I picked up the car on Thursday afternoon and Donna followed me right home.

Since then it has been backed out of the garage and parked out under the awning twice. Once yesterday and once today because we had some looky loos visit the house and we wanted to make our paltry one-car garage look large. Full testing will be on Monday morning. After I do my morning walk, and with Donna at the gym, I’m going to take the car on an adventure tour of about 40 miles. she is suggesting that I just circle our one mile block 40 times, but I’m going to throw caution to the wind and venture out into Aiken County.

Even if it passes that test, both of us, one more than the other, will still not trust the car to get us to Hilton Head and back at the end of the month. There are just too many places while travelling through South Carolina’s Lowcountry where the road is two lanes with no paved shoulders, just maybe a half a car width of soft grass, bordered by water (and possibly gator) filled ditches of indeterminate depth.

We have started doing some of the pre-prep work on our alternatives, tune in tomorrow for details.

3 Strikes and You’re Out?

Strike 1, Two Months Ago – A Cooked CAS Sensor and Smoked Pig Butts
Strike 2, A Week Ago – Was That Money Well Spent?
Strike 3, Yesterday – Someone was coming to look at the house between 12 and 1 so we hopped in the Miata to vacate the place. We didn’t really have a solid plan on what to do to kill the roughly 1-1/2 hours we needed to stay away, but one was, unfortunately, thrust upon us.

We were a mile away from home, waiting patiently for the light to change and give us our left turn arrow and I noticed a minor roughness in the car’s idle. When the light changed I eased out the clutch and as soon as I depressed the gas pedal the car died. I briefly thought perhaps I had stalled it, but it didn’t feel like that, the car just shut off. When I went to restart it, it wouldn’t. Great. We were first in line with about four cars behind us, talk about major embarrassment.

I hit the flasher button and started waving people around me. We were in a nose up attitude because of the slight incline, so if everyone would clear out behind us we could possibly coast back into the parking area of the corner quick stop. Those behind me all made the light, but the lane to the right of me didn’t fully empty before the light changed back to red. At the next light change there were fewer cars behind us and they all made the light, so I let off the parking brake and starting coasting back. I was almost completely into the lot when a white pickup truck decided to exit the lot. He hit his horn, but I kept backing up, so he stopped moving and I managed to get the car 98% off the road. He rolled down his window and when I told him why I did what I did he mellowed out and backed up a bit to allow Donna and I to finish pushing the CTBNL into the lot.

So, first, a quick update from Strike 2: I took the car back to the shop and they ran their code reader on the car and received no fault codes either, the only questionable reading they got was a slightly elevated charging voltage. So I told them that I would just order a new Cam Angle Sensor and see what happens. The new one arrived on Wednesday afternoon and I had been driving with it in there several small trips (all longer than a mile!) and the car had behaved fine. It also ran fine with the back up CAS in it from Saturday to Wednesday.

Because it was midday this Saturday, the repair shop was still open and they have their own tow truck, so I gave them a ring and told them my tale of woe and where we were. They promised to send the truck right over. While we waited Donna went into the quick stop and bought us each an ice cream bar to enjoy. Just as we were finishing our treat our knight in shining truck arrived. After the car was loaded up he offered to drop us off at home as he took the car in. We declined because we still couldn’t go back there for at least 45 or 50 minutes.

There was a Zaxby’s a couple hundred yards further down the road, so we told the driver that we were going to get lunch and when I got home I’d drive over and talk with them. When I arrived at the shop the head mechanic was eating lunch in the front lounge area and I asked him what he’d found out. They had plugged in the code reader and once again there were no stored codes. They were in the middle of finishing up some promised jobs, so he promised to do some troubleshooting on Monday. He also said that if the car started and ran fine on Monday, he would take it for at least a twenty minute drive in the heat of afternoon before he gave it back to me.

At this point, even if he finds another sensor or something bad, Donna has vowed never to get in the car again. She won’t trust it to get to the store and back, let alone an evening drive, or a day trip or a weekend get away. It has now left us stranded on the side of the road three times in the last 10 weeks. The next time it happens it may be in a place or time where or when we don’t want to be. Frankly I am quite near to that point myself.

Was That Money Well Spent?

The Miata Club’s Bug Splat is coming up and this year we thought we might return to the loop where it all began. We used to start after a meal at a Zaxby’s in Evan, GA by heading north and crossing over the Strom Thurmond Dam into SC before turning south and returning to Georgia for ice cream at a Dairy Queen. It has beeen at east a dozen years since we’ve run that route, so yesterday evening we thought it might be a good idea to run the loop to make sure that suburban sprawl hadn’t obliterated those long stretches of uninhabited roads.

About halfway to Zaxby’s for dinner, after a right turn the Miata hiccuped. Several feet later it hiccuped again. Donna said, “Turn around and take me home.” I took the next right to prepare to make a u-turn and the car died. I coasted to a stop a the side of the road. Like homicide detectives, I don’t believe in coincidences, so I called the shop who just did the work on the car. We were about an hour past their Saturday closing time, but we were hoping someone was still there, maybe catching up on paperwork. No such luck, so I left a long disappointed sounding message about our situation.

Before making the second call for a tow truck, Donna said, “Try and start it back up.” I did and it did. We drove home slowly all the while waiting for the car to stop running again. It didn’t quit, but we did get two widely separated hiccups that causing some breath holding. It was a very hot afternoon, the hiccups and the engine dying, made me get a big whiff of déjà vu. A little more than two months ago, the CTBNL did the same thing on the way to lunch with the Club.

This time it didn’t trigger the Check Engine Light. When we got home I ran Torque Light app and it too showed no fault codes. Anyway for now, I did what I did last time, I put my backup Cam Angle Sensor back in the car. I’m not sure if I should buy a new one or what. Right now the plan is to take it back to the shop to have them look at it. Maybe their OBDII reader will show a code…

On the bright side, the Moto g7 phone is still working after more than a week.

Not a Charcoal Briquette

The CTBNL has returned from its stint in the car hospital. There was nothing really wrong with it, this was some much over due preventative maintenance. In the past 35 months and twenty-eight thousand miles in the family the only real service it has had is oil changes and tire rotations every 5,000 miles in my driveway.

With the car fast approaching 75 thousand miles it was time to do the real big 60,000 mile service. This includes changing practically every vital fluid on the car and replacing the timing belt. In the Miata it is pretty safe to extend the usage of the rubber timing belt because the engine is the non-interference type. If the belt breaks you don’t mash the valves into pistons or anything, you just end up coasting to a stop. Plus, in California the timing belt change interval is 90,000 miles because it is considered part of the emission system and has to be warrantied for that long, the part number for the California belt is the same as for everyone other state.

When the mechanic called to tell me the car was ready he told me that when they pulled the valve cover off to do the timing belt they noticed these large chunks of congealed oil on top of the cylinder head. He then asked me on what oil I used and how often I changed it, etc. He then dissed my brand choice told me I should be using a synthetic blend instead of pure dino oil. Whatever.

This car had only 40 something thousand miles on it when the previous owner bought it at 12 years old. I bet the original owner was a little old lady who drove it to church on Sundays. And church was only a half a mile away. I believe this caused the build up, but then again I believe UFOs exist an aliens walk among us.

A Cooked CAS Sensor and Smoked Pig Butts

Cross posted from the Masters Miata Club web site:

There were 4 almost entirely gray scale flavored Miatas gathered at the almost entirely re-branded Sprint quick stop for today’s Drive-Eat-Drive event. They only thing that remains of the previous Greg’s Gas Plus is just the big giant sign out by the street. The assembled consisted of the Masons who were there in their Sparkling Black NC, the Garners who were there in their Brilliant Black NC, the Scotts who were there in their Galaxy Gray NC and we were there in our Sunlight Silver NB with a touch of blue.

The Garners were the lead car and off we went north on SC230. Determined not to have any Interstate miles on the trip, they set up their GPS to plot a route. After several miles of not being able to get the GPS to find our lunch destination, Shealy’s Bar-B-Que in Batesburg-Leesville, they broke out the phone and Google had no problem plotting a course. Well they must have had “shortest route” selected as an option because about 90% of the way there, it popped us off the main road onto a little dirt road over some railroad tracks. Less than 50 yards ahead was a stop sign, so we figured it must be paved at that point. Nope. But after another 1/2 mile of driving down what seemed to be farm paths through rows of peach trees we turned right onto blacktop and the road the restaurant was on.

With a bit more than 3 miles to go, car #3, that would be us, inexplicably lost forward momentum. The car hiccuped, the CEL came on and while the engine was still running, there was no power to be had. We coasted to a wide shady spot along the road. Car #4, the Masons, slowed and pulled in behind us. I unlatched the hood and while Dennis was under there looking for anything obvious I went to the trunk and got out my Bluetooth OBD II dongle. We called ahead to the two leading cars to let then know what happened, almost to the BBQ place, they both turned around and soon we had 4 Miatas parked along the road. I had the dongle, but the app to use with it was no longer loaded on my phone, so I attempted to download it.

Someone suggested it was bad gas, I had purchased a couple gallons at Sprint. I wondered out loud how come the Garner’s car wasn’t acting up, they bought gas at the Sprint too. After more than a few minutes of not finding anything obvious under the hood, someone asked for me to start it up to see what the engine was doing. The car fired right up, I mashed the go pedal a few times and the car responded as it should. We decided to see if our car would make the last three miles to Shealy’s. It did. Still no download.

Because Shealy’s is a buffet, I always feel as if I don’t polish off 2 heaping plates of food I haven’t gotten my money’s worth and based on a quick sample of the dining room, I’m not the only one. As the rate of food consumption, as well as the conversation, at the table waned every one started making after lunch plans. Of course, they offered to follow us home to make sure we made it, Donna and I declined. We knew the trick, if it acts up again, stop, set a spell, and try again. Still no download.

Wouldn’t you know it, but just a touch more than a mile from home, the car started to stutter again. I pushed the clutch in and coasted a bit hoping to make it around the next corner where there was place to pull off. Realizing we were going to be a bit short, I down shifted to second and eased the clutch out. The engine returned to normal. The two of us held our breath and tried to levitate off the seats to lessen to load so we could make it home. We did.

After we got home, the Torque Light app I was trying to get ever since the Miata first stalled, finally downloaded. My phone was set to auto update its apps and in its infinite wisdom would not let me add a new app until the 5 that needed updating were through. Once the car cooled off I ran the code – P0340: Camshaft Angle (or Position) Sensor circuit malfunction. A quick search of the Miata.net forums let me know that a failing cam position sensor will generate the symptoms we had. When it gets hot it acts up, then when it cools off it might work fine (for a while.)

None of the auto parts stores in the area (at least according to their web sites) have a one of these beauties in stock, so I guess I will have to order one. It was then, that I remembered I have an extra one of these items in the garage. It was a left over from a couple years ago when I was having issues with the maroon car. Turns out I did, so I’ve swapped it out and we’ll see how it one goes.