Miata Service

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For those of you who read everyday and also glance at the Instagram feed, you’ll be happy to know that the CTBNL is home tonight safe and sound tucked away in our garage. Turns out, that ugly noise was a crack in the exhaust pipe near the resonator and a loose clamp on the exhaust. While the mechanic was trouble shooting the exhaust he noticed that I had some severely deteriorated motor mounts, so those got replaced too.

I didn’t ask if the cracked exhaust pipe was because of the loose clamp or the broken motor mounts, but either way the car is now ship shape. To celebrate, Donna and I drove over to the Pink Dipper in North Augusta and had some ice cream.

That Went Easier Than I Thought


The CTBNL only had forty some-odd thousand miles on it when we got it, so the interior was still fairly new looking. In the thirty some-odd thousand miles we have put on it since, it still looks pretty good, but the cloth driver’s seat had started to fray in three spots over the summer. We figure the velcro closures on the pockets of my cargo shorts were most likely the culprit.

We hemmed and hawed about the possibility of buying leather replacement seat covers, but in the end decided to replace the covers with the OEM cloth. While we have been happy with leather seating in the previous two Miatas, I really like the not too hot or not too cold aspect of the cloth. And as a bonus you don’t slide around on them in spirited driving. The cost of buying new Mazda cloth covers is only marginally cheaper than aftermarket leather, $660 vs. $800, but for now, seeing as the passenger seat is fine and we are not replacing it, we are in for just $330.

The internet “experts” said changing the covers was easy as pie, but because I am not the most skillful person when it comes to do-it-yourself type projects I wasn’t so sure. I read all I could on the Miata forum, watched some youtube vids and figured taking my time, in a couple days I could do it.

Turns out it took me a just little over 4 hours to finish the job. And at least 30 minutes of that was returning inside to do further research in disassembly of the seat. All the videos I watched were of the 1st generation Miata seats and the NB versions, being that there have been ten years of advancement in seat technology since then, were different in several ways.

That $330 spent is really more like $395 because I spent $20 on some Hog Ring Pliers plus 150 rings. Another $20 was spent on a pair of dedicated hog ring cutters seeing as my 40-year old diagonal cutters are literally not the sharpest tool in the box. I also spent twenty-five dollars at the local auto upholstery shop to have them sew a small half moon of fabric on the top back of the seat cover. This will hopefully replace the squeak preventative cloth and look cleaner than what I have wrapped around the roll bar now.

In the above photo I have finished replacing the seat back and was mid way through putting the new cover on the bottom. The bicycle helmet with an LED headlight on it is there because I was working on the floor of the garage and the door opener lights and my hanging drop light never seemed to be enough or coming from the right direction.

Christmas Presents

We have been busy doing our part for Christmas commercialism this past week by filling our stockings with stuff.

1. Last Wednesday I noticed a very low left rear tire. I noticed it because all of a sudden I was bottoming out on my own personal speed bump again. The other 3 tires were at 24 p.s.i. and the left rear was half that. I backed the car out of the garage, jacked up the left side, removed the rear tire and found a nail head visible in the center of the tread area.

Initially I though to take it to a local independent tire store and have them put a plug in it, but dismissed that idea when I saw how shallow the tread depth was. The tire was worn pretty good, probably a few hundred mile until they reached the wear bars. Plus the inside of all the tires were way worn, probably from the more aggressive alignment from Panic Motorsports when they put on the new shocks and springs last year. It was time for a new set of tires and a more stock alignment.

Ordered another set of Toyo Proxies R1R‘s from TireRack and had them drop shipped to Aiken Discount Tire. By Friday at lunch the CTBNL was back in the garage on fresh rubber.

2. Over the weekend the 8-year Dell PC was acting all sluggish. I tried several clean-up operations without much success. Overnight I copied all our important documents off the main hard drive to the large 2TB secondary drive. On Monday the plan was to plug in an older 250GB drive that used to be the main drive in its spot and reload windows, but that fell through after the PC would not restart after turning it off.

This failure to restart has been an issue after an unplanned power failure several years ago. This is why we never turn the PC off, we’d shut the display off and walk away. On the occasional time I did have to turn it off for maintenance, and if it didn’t turn back on, I could coax it on, by holding the power button in, pulling the power cord and plugging the cord back in. When this problem first cropped up, I swapped out a power supply I had borrowed from the Valve Store and that didn’t solve the issue, so I figured this was a motherboard issue and decided it was time to replace the PC.

Because we live in a technological wasteland, if you need a PC in a day you have very few options. First up was the Staples right around the corner. I went online and found something that I thought would work, there was one in stock, so I put it on the charge card for in store pickup. When we got it home and I opened the box I realized it was a slim tower with no room to add my second hard drive. Back to the store it went. A quarter mile down the road was a Walmart, we peeked in there and nothing was on the shelf that would work.

We were headed to Augusta later in the evening for dinner out with friends, so we figured a visit to Best Buy was in order. So instead of dealing with actual people I did the same thing there as I did at Staples, online order for in store pickup. I’ve spent the last couple days uninstalling the multitudes of HP branded software crap and reloading all the programs I do use onto the new Pavilion 590-P0054.

It was not all dull and unexciting gifts though…

3. We dropped into Academy Sports and bought Donna a couple new pairs of Fila Memory Threshold athletic shoes.

4. And I went online to Amazon and bought some new boxer briefs. 🙂

Hot Lazy Cupholder

The other week, on one of the frequent trips to the north for bagels, we both noticed that the center console area of the CTBNL was hotter than normal. From past experience, I know that it is most likely caused by torn shift boots. Under the console are two rubber boots, one that closes the hole from the bottom of the car and one that closes the top of the transmission. I ordered them both from Jeff Bezos.

I’ve had the parts for a while now and yesterday I finally got around to replacing them. Much to my surprise the top boot was not ripped. This is the usual cause and because a torn bottom boot really has nothing to do with heat I was prepared to ship them both back for refunds. But I figured, as I was most of the way there, I’ll check the bottom one. It was ripped to pieces, so I changed it. It might have nothing to do with the extra heat in the cockpit, but the small boot does serve an essential purpose, to keep dirt and crap out of the transmission turret. Mazda hadn’t just put it there willy nilly.

Seeing as I still had half a roll of reflectix left over from my 2006 quest to reduce cockpit heat on the Emperor I thought now might be a good time to do the interior of the CTBNL. The console was out, so I went ahead and removed the two seats. I then pulled out a gazillion of those Christmas tree style fasteners holding the interior carpet in place. I peeled the carpet back and used the rest of the roll on the rear self, under both seats and around the transmission tunnel. I didn’t have enough to cover every square inch, but I hope what I did use helps a little bit.

In between my ordering the two boots and getting around to changing them, I received a second reason to pull the center console, the back cup holder lid wouldn’t snap closed. It closed, but might open from a slight graze of your arm or a sharp bump. I knew right away what the problem was because I had the same issue with the Emperor several years back. The tab that holds the bottom of the cup holder’s tension spring in place has broken off.

To fix it with the console out of the car, was a matter of removing the half dozen screws holding the cup holders to the underside of the console to free them up. The original fix from the Miata Net was drill a small hole to tie the bottom of the spring in place, but I have been using the Mark Booth method (found towards the bottom of this thread) of a washer and small screw into the boss. While I was there, I prophylactically applied the fix to the front cup holder.

Miata Maintenance Day

Seeing as the CTBNL hit the 65,000 mile plateau on Saturday, the other day when Donna went off to the gym, I jacked up the Miata, rotated the tires and changed the oil.

I was going to give the car a bath too, but after eating lunch I didn’t want to go back outside. Besides I did not want to violate Russ’s Rule for Retirement. To wit: Do one thing a day. You have all sorts of things you need to do and have been waiting until you more free time, there are all the things you want to do for yourself and then there is all to things your wife wants for you to do. It can overwhelming, so pick one thing and do just that one thing, don’t try to do too much.

Now you might think that changing the oil and rotating tires is two different items, but to me, I have always combined them. This is because to only real easy way to get to the oil filter in the Miata is to remove the right front wheel. And while I guess quite possibly you could jack up that front side and remove the one wheel, but then you would need to make sure the car is level to allow all the oil to drain out. That and you are now already 1/4 of the way to rotating the tires anyway…

Lucked Out

Pulled off the inside door panel this morning to see what was going on with the door not opening from the inside. The worse case scenario would have been that the cable from the inside handle to the latch would be broken. I did a little search on the Miata.net Forum and it seems like the cable is not available by itself, you have to buy the entire inside door handle assembly which included the handle and the two cables (one each for the latch and the lock.) The best case scenario would have been that the interior door handle itself had broken somehow.

I got lucky. Back a couple of years ago, just a couple months after we bought the CTBNL, I had worked out a deal where I got the OEM silver interior bits from a newer Miata to brighten up the cockpit some. I saved the old black pieces those items replaced, so I actually had an extra set of interior door handles in a box in the garage.

The top picture is of the back side of the passenger handle. The blue and yellow plastic pieces are where the cable ends hook into the mechanism. If you hover over the image you can see the arm that the yellow piece is on has physically separated the part you pull on to open the door.

63,000 Missing Free Electrons

I guess the CTBNL was jealous of the Ladybug because she went for a trip across the country while he was left behind all alone in a dark garage for a month, so it ate all the free electrons in its battery. Last Friday morning I went to pop open the trunk for something and it didn’t open, at first I thought it might be the fob, but when I opened the car door to pull the lever to open the trunk the “dome” light didn’t come on.

I hooked up our cheap-o battery charger and let it run until that night. The dome light still didn’t come on and it is an LED, so you know the battery was really dead. Turns out the charger is more of a maintainer for car batteries, so it is something I should have hooked up before we left for a month. Saturday morning we went down the street to an Advance Auto and bought a new battery.

The starting of this post has been sitting in the drafts folder since April 25th, which is longer than the CTBNL sat unattended in the garage and is when it crossed the 63,000 mile milestone.