Miatatude – Page 14 – Life of Brian

Another Caricature?

Friday, October 21, 2016

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?

Friday, October 7, 2016

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

Monday, September 19, 2016

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

Friday, September 16, 2016

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. 😀

THEANSR

Sunday, September 11, 2016

I blogged yesterday about maybe getting a personalized plate, but I’ve already had a chance at one, it came on the CTBNL. David said I could keep it if I wanted and I thought about it, but in the end it was a personalized plate and he picked it personally, so it would have felt weird to keep it. My answer might have been different if I had thought it up without any outside influence, tried to get it for the Emperor, but couldn’t because it was already taken by David.

You sort of have to be a Miata enthusiast or a reader of Jalopnik to get the meaning of the plate. Maybe it did start with the Jalopnik piece, but the phrase it represents is all over the car related internet now and has spawned at least a half dozen Blipshift T-shirts (of which I own a couple.)

Car Name? (Part III)

Saturday, September 10, 2016

The weather has been kind of mild for the last couple weeks around here, but last Wednesday on the way home from our monthly haircut I decided to turn on the A/C in the CTBNL. The light came on in the button, but in the whole 15 minute drive home the temperature being blown out of the vents never cooled below the 95° outside air.

When we got home I popped the hood and cycled the on/off switch and the compressor never kicked on and the A/C fan on the radiator never started up. Then I noticed something out of place, well, something missing, the cap was gone off one of the A/C lines. Did this have anything to do with it?

The A/C worked when we bought the car. I’m sure of it because when the compressor came on it caused a bit of belt squeal. As a matter of fact I never could get rid of the that squeal so that eventually I took the car to the Automotive Workbench and paid $50 to have them fix it. Hey, they were working in this area tightening belts, did they knock off the cap and cause this no A/C issue? Probably not, so back the CTBNL goes to the fellows at Automotive Workbench.

I get the call, no freon in the system. They have to recharge the system and add some dye so that whatever leak the car has can be located. A hundred fifty dollars later and there is now very cold air coming from the vents. I have to take it back in about a week and see if they can look for the problem.

It took four days to get the windshield right, we are on our 4th attempt at getting mats to look the way we’d like, the whole silver paint on the bumper fiasco, the Grom Audio box to play MP3s is cutting out on hot days and it just seems like every little simple mod, previously easily done on past Miatas, are a struggle. Both Donna and I are starting to think this car is cursed.

Maybe it is trying to tell us its name. This is a Japanese car, so I fire up the trusty Google Translator and discover that cursed is Norowa Remashita (no row ah – re mawsh ta). That is too much of a mouthful, so I try a couple synonyms. Jinxed comes back as Tsuitemasen (soot e ma sen), OK but still a little much. The next two are a little better though, bewitched translares to Mewaku (me wha koo) and bedeviled is Nayama (nay yah ma). Mmmm, both of those would fit on a personalized plate…

Car Name? (Part II)

Friday, September 9, 2016

This is slightly tangential to the naming of the silver Miata…

Here at the Valve Store we use Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to run parts from the stockroom to the assembly lines in certain cases. Our first set of AGVs were about the size of a large Radio Flyer Red Wagon and it followed a 2″ wide metallic piece of tape laid out in loops in the aisles around the shop floor. These worked pretty good except it kept the Maintenance Department busy replacing the gaps in the tape from the wear and tear of foot and forklift traffic. Because humans need to anthropomorphize their mechanical underlings, these two AGVs were named Bubba and Bubbette.

They have decided to upgrade our AVGs to a more modern system. These babies are the size of a forklift and use an optical system that bounces a rotating beam off of reflective tubes stationed at intervals along the walls surrounding the assembly floor. The Stockroom Supervisor opened up the floor to submitting names for the new AGVs. She got 70 different pairs of names for consideration.

A lot of pop culture references (my entry is bolded and Donna’s is italicized) with a sprinkling of two word puns and a few robot inspired names. Another good reason not to ask the general public to name something, by either Internet or Post-It note.