Miata

Seasonal Tires

A couple of widely spaces days in the 60’s and I decided to go ahead and take the Mini’s all-season tires off the Miata and put the summer Toyo R1R’s back on. It is still going to be a while before the temperatures are reliably above 50’s in the afternoon for the Miata to get more constant use, but it was nice to have the proper tires and wheels back on the car for todays drive. No more scraping the plastic fender liners with tires on the sharper corners.

The all-seasons are stacked under the workbench in the garage for now. The winter tires remain on the Mini because it may still randomly drop some snow on us for the next few weeks. And we have a trip, that may be taken in the Mini, coming up at the end of the month that requires some high altitude mountain passes that have a higher probability snow chances than here.

10.9 mile errand trip to the Post Office.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 12

 

Plug-In Hybrid Miata?

The current rumors surrounding the next generation Miata is that it will be a plug-in hybrid or all electric. This post is not about that car, it is about the 2002 that we currently have.

We were going to take the Miata to Moore Park yesterday for our afternoon walk, but took the Mini instead. The Miata wouldn’t start, its battery didn’t have enough juice to even turn it over once. Just a click and nothing else.

I know I vowed to take it out once a week, but I looked back and the last time it was driven was 11 days prior. It has been too cold and we had a couple days of a light dusting of snow, so that we hardly left the house. A mere week and a half and the battery was, for all intensive purposes, dead. So I plugged in the battery charger and for this afternoon’s drive to go walking it started right up.

There must a fairly decent dark current somewhere…

16.5 mile round trip to walk 1.8 miles.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 10

 

Top Transitions

I bought a Miata in part because it is a convertible. For the first 20 years of owning one, it was our only car, so it was a daily driver and a weekend toy. Because of Aiken, South Carolina’s weather we would frequently put the top down for the drive to work, have to put it up while at work only to put it down for the drive home. We’d go to the store with the top down and if the sky looked iffy we’d put it back up. Sometimes the top would go up or down a half dozen times in a day. The Miata’s vinyl tops became like sticky tires, they were consumables. We probably averaged a new top every 4 years.

Back in 2005 I decided to keep track of how often I put the top up or down in a given year for fun. Each day when I blogged, at the end of the post, I add a little entry at the bottom that looked like below:

Started up, went down, went up, went back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 27

 
In 2005 the top moved one direction or another almost 400 times, in 2006 524 times, in 2007 a little over 500 times. In 2008 it changed status nearly 400 times before it was replaced in October. I did a little interpolation and figured that the cloth top on the 2003 transitioned 2,235 times until it was replaced. I started counting again from there and kept the count rolling until I quit counting inexplicably at the end of September 2013 at 1262 transitions.

Now that we are retired and living in the less temperate climate of southern Oregon the Mini has become our primary car and the Miata gets taken out only occasionally. And until then, it sits in the garage with the top down practically always, so counting top transitions would not be worth it.

Instead, for 2022, I’ve decided to just count the times the Miata gets driven. From now on when it does go somewhere, I’ll be adding a footnote to the post. Today, with the roads finally cleared of snow from our last storm, I unhooked the trickle charger and picked up our to go lunch order.

8.1 mile trip to Jimmy Johns and back.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 1

 

Miata Door Bushings

Back about 6-7 years ago, somebody thought up a neat and tidy way to try and stiffen the chassis of the Miata a bit, a pair of hard plastic door bushings. If you don’t know what I talking about, here is a little primer via the Flying Miata website:

The Miata doors are held closed by the latch, but they’re locked into place with a bracket that slides over a rubber bushing. That makes it easy to align everything, but it means the connection isn’t as strong as it could be. In a convertible, the doors provide a surprising amount of structural rigidity if they’re properly anchored.

Ours replace the soft rubber door bushings with a stiff, carbon fiber reinforced nylon replacement. The door is solidly locked into place, allowing it to reinforce the chassis. The effect is of a stiffer car with fewer squeaks. We have measured a 3% improvement in torsional rigidity on a 1990.

Folks in the Miata community were quick to adopt this little gizmo. Opinions on their worth though ranged from ‘snake oil’ to ‘really tightens things up’. Around this time the Emperor had about a 150,000 miles on it I thought, “I could use a little chassis stiffening, what the heck, for $35 its worth a shot.”

When they arrived I went right out into the garage to install the Garage Star black Delrin bits. It was pretty simple, take out the OEM rubber pieces and install the firmer plastic pieces semi-tight, close the doors so they get centered properly and tighten fully. The passenger side door closed as before, but the drivers door had to be almost slammed hard to get it closed. I took the car out for a quick spin to see if I could feel a difference. As I backed out of the driveway and took the little dip at the road, I could swear the car felt tighter, so I took a drive to the closest set of railroad tracks. The there results were the same.

Now I can’t swear there was actual improvement, might just have been the placebo effect, but I wanted to keep them on the car none the less. I looked for advice on the M.net forum and tried a couple things I found there to get a slam-free door closing. Swap the sides of the bushings, sand the bushing a little and bend the metal door cup out some, but nothing helped. I left them on the car and settled into having to semi-slam the door shut. About a week and a half later, I took them off and put the stock rubber pieces back in. The Delrin bushings went on the shelf in the garage.

Fast forward a year and the Emperor gets replaced by the CTBNL. When I bought the car it came with a box of random stuff, the stock horn (it had air horns installed) a selection of plastic Miata related fasteners and a set of Delrin door bushings! This peaked my interest in the bushings again. The “new” Miata, even though a model year older than the car it replaced, had only 43,000 miles on it so maybe the effect wouldn’t be as great. And why did the previous owner have some in a plain marked up plastic baggie? So I tried out both my old bushings and these new ones. This time it was the passenger side that now needed a semi-slam to close. I fiddled around just a little to try and cure the slam requirement and gave up. Both of them went back in their respective bags and then into the “box-o-parts” on the garage shelf.

Well, here we are a couple of years later and that box with those two sets of Delrin bushings still sits on a shelf, but in a different garage. So you would you think that the last thing I would ever need to buy would be a set of Delrin door bushings and you’d be right.

I bought some door bushings made of Polyurethane.

Polyurethane is a slightly softer material compared to Delrin, but it is still a lot stiffer than the OEM rubber bushing. Sooo…there might be a bit more chassis rigidity achieved with them, but that is just OK, because these are more of a fashion accessory than a performance upgrade. These poly bushings are of course offered in black, but the big draw is that they come in 7 colors, plus clear, to dress up your door opening. I went with Translucent Blue which sort of mirrors the blue stripes on the car.

These bushings worked great first time. To make it a little easier to open and close the doors I put a little Armor-All on them and now they need just a scooch more effort to open and close than before, but no semi-slam required. Get your own colored Miata door bushings at Spiked Performance.

The Prodigal Miata Returns

The CTBNL is back in the garage tonight after exactly a month in the car hospital.

Knew it was going to be soon because I got a call from Emmett’s yesterday, they wanted to know where the key for the aftermarket lug nuts was. This afternoon at about 2:30 they called again to say I could come pickup the car.

They had to put the car on a battery charger because it wouldn’t start for them yesterday (that’ll happen when The car sits for nearly a month.) So, today when we paid the tab they left it running outside for me and suggested we take for a bit of a drive on the way home.

When I got in the car the windows were filthy. Kind of to be expected because it was parked outside while waiting to be worked on. But not only was the outside dirty, but the inside was almost worse (how that happens I don’t want to know.)

We caravanned home and I left the car running while I cleaned the windows so we could go for a couple dozen mile trip.

It does seem like they wiped the back of the car clean of all the vaporized oil, but I don’t think they cleaned the undercarriage because when we did park in the garage after our short drive, you could smell burnt oil. I will give the Miata a bath tomorrow, but I’m not sure how I will get the chassis de-oiled.

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.