Miatatude

51,000 Miata T-shirts

I’ve got a Blipshift problem. Like a junkie looking for another fix I check their site nearly every morning hoping that I’ll like their design, I need just one more car related T. They’ve done about a dozen Miata related shirts and I have 6 or 7 of them. I’ve also got at least 3 other random design shirts too. I’ve submitted a Miata design idea, which they used. I also submitted a photo using the hashtag #blipshifted that they used on the site.

For the design idea, I got a free copy of that particular shirt & and a big gift certificate of Blip Bucks (or what ever they call ’em.) For submitting the photo of socks-in-a-jar I got an additional smaller gift certificate. So when the design(s) in the thumbnail showed up on Wednesday I knew I had to get one. I still had money left over on the gift certificate from my Pop Up Blocker suggestion and it was burning a hole in my pocket, so I splurged and got a hoodie and a shirt (and a sticker.)

For the hoodie I bought the silver NC because that is what color my current car is. Besides no one but probably a Miata purist will know which generation it is anyway (and even in the MMC there are probably only 3 or 4 who would know.) Then I bought the red ND on the t-shirt. The green NB was too dark on the dark gray shirt, if they ever resto-mod the shirts I’d get the NB version if it was lighter in color or green on a lighter colored shirt.

On the way over to North Augusta for dinner out with friends the CTBNL past through its 51,000th mile.

Old New Old Clutch

Astute observers would have noticed my statement yesterday about the Miata spending the last week mostly outside and knowing that the Miata normally resides in a garage would have been asking themselves, “What happened here?” Well, it goes like this:

Early on in the ownership experience with the CTBNL I complimented the previous owner, and my current fairy godfather, on his Miata modification choices as they closely mirrored what I had done to and wanted to do to The Emperor. He thanked me for the ego boost and said that if he had to do it all over again there was on mod he wouldn’t do and that was the lightened flywheel/clutch set-up.

I liked the engine responsiveness from the lightened flywheel. I didn’t like that the clutch required a bit more leg muscle to operate and a lot of finesse to get a smooth start when backing up or from a standing start. I figured I would adjust, six months later and I still hadn’t. I guess the almost 27 years of using a stock Miata clutch was too ingrained to overcome, or that adage about old dogs and new tricks has some basis in fact.

After enough of my constant herky-jerky backing out of the garage, the Bogardus Enterprises CFO told me to go ahead and investigate the cost changing the clutch/flywheel out. That’s when I had a great idea on how to eliminate having to buy any parts. I thought Steve at Panic Motorsports could find a new home for the ACT Street-Lite flywheel and ACT performance clutch that had a mere 8 thousand miles on them. The sale of that would be enough to buy the replacement new OEM components. flywheel, a pressure plate and clutch so I would just need to cover the labor for the job. He thought so too, so a deal was set.

We dropped the car off at Panic in west Columbia last Saturday and just picked it back up. It was actually done last Thursday but circumstances prevented us from retrieving it until yesterday. Judging by the pollen layer on the car it probably spent since Thursday outdoors in the densely pine tree’d area where the shop is.

Moawr Gooder

Black Accent Stripes II

How do you make the already awesome stripes on your Miata more awesome? More stripes! You add some small black accent stripes to the big blue ones.

Black Accent Stripes

Another Caricature?

I have caricatures of the last two Miatas framed and hung on the wall in the computer room. They were done by a fellow over in Scotland, Dave Scott, who had a business called Carartz that would do personalized drawings of your car. When we were contemplated buying a 4th generation Miata I thought maybe I’d get him to do one of that car too. I couldn’t find him. The website carartz.com is for sale and searching for “Dave Scott artist Scotland” turns up a bunch of David Scott’s, but none in the caricature business.

Didn’t matter, we didn’t get a 4th gen Miata, we got another 2nd gen, so that caricature still stands for it. Today in my Miata Google Alert email along with the usual Redit posts and Craigslist ads were a few things from a site called RedBubble that wanted to sell me T-shirts or stickers or drawings. Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the drawings link and found a fellow called car2oons that does personalized caricatures of cars. Right there in his header image is not only a nice line art drawing of a 1st gen Miata, but a caricature of one as well. I looked through his portfolio and saw a line drawing of a 2nd gen car, but no caricature, so I contacted him. He replied within an hour saying he’d be happy to whip up a customized one for the CTBNL and asked for a photo.

A 12″ x 16″ is only a little more than $18 and if I watch the Hobby Lobby ads for 1/2price picture frames I can get it on the wall for around fifty bucks total. Maybe I can go ahead and complete the whole set of Miatas owned. Our first one never got modified in any appreciable way and I bet he’d be willing to lose the Euro style front plate of the one he already sells too.

Why That Color?

handicapped-parking-spot-paint

When people at work ask me why I picked that color for the stripes I have been telling them because it matches the paint splatter on the lower left side of the car just behind the front wheel from when a previous owner cut through a freshly painted handicapped parking spot. I am of course kidding, we wanted some color added to the silver car and what better color than something that closely resembled the color of our first Miata, but as you can see there is a germ of truth to my off-the-cuff answer.

Our Customers Are Important Us1

Received a response from the fine folks at automotivetouchup.com today:

Subject: RE: Color Code Help
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 08:34:10
From: skip magas
To: me

Unfortunately I cannot replace the paint because we mixed to the color code placed on your order. On top of that page states If do not see your color listed Call us (888-710-5192) & we probably have it.

The only thing I can do is place a new order for.

Thanks
Skip Magas
Customer Service Ext 109
504-818-2334
1-888-710-5192
Mon-Fri 8:00 – 5:00 CST
www.automotivetouchup.com

Like us on “facebook logo”
Check us out on “youtube logo”

Our customers are important us, let us know what you think.
http://www.automotivetouchup.com/feedback.aspx

I didn’t actually expect then to send me a new can of paint, maybe a 10% discount on my next purchase, I did at least expect to get a bit of concern about the confusing options on their order pages. Nope, all I got is a thinly disguised, “Should have paid better attention there bucko.” It didn’t take long to draft my reply to Skip:

Subject: RE: Color Code Help
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 17:14:51
From: me
To: skip magas

Skip,

I’ll be keeping this can of custom mixed paint on the shelf in my garage, so that if I ever need to order touch up paint again, I’ll remember who not to order from.

Brian

I know there are a couple other companies out there that sell custom color touch up paint (I’ve even used one), so I went out to see if I would have had better luck there.

At paintscratch.com the only choice was Miata and it returned 11 colors. There were 7 standard colors available in the US and two special edition colors, a blue and a yellow. They had all seven of the regular colors, but called two of them by some other market’s name and both of the special colors. The other two colors were Garnet Red which was a 2003 only color2 and a color called New Green with a very green color block next to it. It’s color code? 24V. You can bet I wouldn’t have picked that one, especially seeing as the had 22V Sunlight Silver Metallic listed.

At touchupdirect.com there were two choices. When selecting Miata you get 10 choices of colors, the exact same as from paintscratch except it was missing the blue special edition color. When you pick MX-5 Miata you get just the seven standard US colors. Couldn’t have made a mistake here either.

1. The omission of the word ‘to’ is intentional. It is a direct copy of part of the tagline in Skip’s signature block.
2. I found Garnet Red listed as a 2002 color on all three web sites, while Mazda swears it was only available in 2003. The only way I can possibly explain it is that my 2003 Garnet Red car was built August in 2002, so if I looked at the door tag and didn’t know any better, I would think my car was a model year 2002.

The Modifications List

Over on the left-hand side in the area marked “Pages” were a couple of links called Brian’s Basic Miata and Brian’s Miata Mods. Because they related specifically to the 2003 LS Emperor I pulled them down the other day. Today the Basic Miata page went back up because I edited it to match the base 2002 CTBNL.

I’ll probably resurrect the Mods page as well, but most of the current mods are David’s so maybe I’ll need to call it something other than “Brian’s Miata Mods.” Possibly The Miata’s Mods and keep it two sections, his and mine.

And in the mine section I’ll have to work out some sort of metric to keep track of how much of a pain in the butt they were to accomplish. đŸ˜€