Miatatude

New Napkin Holder

I took the caliper bracket that had the frozen slider pin in to work. An engineer there just knew it would be simple to fix. He toyed with it for awhile without success before giving it to the tool room for them to try. They turned a torch to it while hammering madly. It got so violent their supervisor told them to stop. A day later the engineer went back, put the bracket in a vice, clamped down on the hex head with a 12″ monkey wrench and twisted, the pin loosened and was removed. I tossed out the slider pin, but couldn’t bring myself to throw out the bracket for two reasons; 1) that sucker was expensive and 2) turns out it is ambidextrous – fits both driver & passenger sides. Bead blasting made it clean & shiny and I have found a new use for it.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 171

New Lawnmower

Every spring the lawnmower doesn’t start. Every year we buy a $2.50 spark plug and that fixes it. This year it didn’t.

In our continuing effort to drag America’s economy out of its doldrums, we bought a new lawnmower. And once again proved that on a sunny day a Miata is as good as a pickup truck.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 160

Breakfast and a Cache

For the second month in a row we combined the MMC breakfast event and some geocaching. We ate at a place that Donna and I have driven by hundreds of times since living here, but never ever thought to go in, the Hard Hat Cafe which sits on the hill going west out of Graniteville, SC. It is the sort of place that is just where one should eat breakfast and is what the originator of this idea for the club had in mind – Mom & Pop places with bottomless coffee for less than a buck (it was good too.) This one was a little different in that not only could you order off the menu, but they had a buffet and that is where the nine of us ate from.

After chow when everyone went their separate ways Donna and I went back down into downtown Graniteville to hopefully find a puzzle geocache – “Milling” Around Town which is sort of like the one we didn’t get in Waynesboro last month.

This one had 6 stages and at each one you had to read a sign or count something that gave a number that needed to be plugged into a spot in the coordinates for finding the next stage. We misinterpreted the very first clue, but didn’t find out until the very end because we had the instructions and are familiar enough with the town to know all the landmarks that the stages ended at. We got to stage 5 (pictured above) and solved the math problem giving us the last numbers for the coordinates, they turned out to tell us that the spot where the actual cache was 1.9 miles to the west. All the other clues were within a 1/4 mile of each other, so that just had to be wrong.

As we walked back to the car Donna was reading all the log notes that I printed out and noticed that someone a couple months back had missed the same clue as we did and sort of gave us the answer. Amazing how if you figure wrong on a clue and then reuse that clue in the addition or subtraction math of another clue, the check sum still comes out correct even when your numbers are off…

After refiguring out the math using this new information we were less than a quarter of a mile away, much better. When we got to the final coordinates, it was intimately familiar, we were just there. We walked around awhile looking for the described 6″ long cylindrical cache in frustration, then as we sat on a bench deciding whether to give up this whole geocaching thing entirely, I noticed in the bush behind us a green tube. Eureka!

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 149

4 Month Update

OK, we’ve had the new Robbins Streamline Top on the car for 4 months now, time for an update. The top has made well over a hundred transitions and it has stretched out just fine, making the raising and latching of the top a cinch. But putting it down is not the simple unlatch and throw it over your head the OEM was.

I still have to reach back and help the top (front) of the glass window down, by pushing slightly back and down. Doing the maneuver has become almost second nature and doesn’t slow down the operation (unless I fumble it, like I’m apt to do every dozen times or so.) My concern is to what this will do to the longevity of the top. I can’t help but think in a couple, three years that that extra push along with the aging of the fabric is going to cause a rip along the top or bottom of the glass.

One other little nitpick (and it really is a nit) is that the original top had a short strap that went from the edge of the top between the first and second ribs and attached to the frame which the Robbins Streamline top lacks. The purpose of this was to pull on that bit of the top, tucking it inside the well when the top was lowered. With the Robbins, the top folds up fine, but there is a little ear sticking out of the well that needs poking under when putting the boot on. I think I need a picture to better illustrate my point, but to do so might elevate the nit to a full blown bother.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 131

Mother, Jugs & Speed

Every time the MMC goes out for a breakfast run I take a few pictures, usually shots of the cars in the parking lot, people at the tables, the place we are eating at, what we might be eating, etc. While standing outside the restaurant lining up one more photograph of a row of Miatas I decided no more generic photos. This picture is the result. Fresh & New? Or Lame & Amateurish?

Stumbled on the last half of M, J & S on Fox Movie Channel tonight and instead of watching the news we opted for classic cheese. The cast included a Battle of Network Stars Dream Team: Raquel Welch, Bill Cosby, Dick Butkus & Larry Hagman. The soundtrack listing was fun too, the only mid-seventies band missing was Geronimo Jackson.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 128

Weekly Book Review*

At the 1989 Chicago Auto Show Mazda unveiled its new sports car, the Miata. Right now twenty years later at the same Chicago Auto Show it is unveiling the freshened third generation version of that same sports car. Motorsports Books has recently published a new book by Larry Edsall, Miata 20 Years, that is an excellent guide to the history of my (and possibly your) favorite car.

If you would like to know how the Miata was born (an auto journalist?s response to a car executive?s question), how it got where it is today (Guinness World Record?s best-selling sports car with over 850,000 made) and everything in between, then this book is for you.

Even if you think you know everything there is to know about the Miata, this book is still for you, as you?re bound to find some stuff you didn?t know. I did, and that is a tall order because I?ve owned three Miatas since 1989, I have a 14 year collection of the original Miata Magazine, I used to read the big mailing list back when (can you say 200 emails a day) and now peruse the Miata.net Forum with regularity.

If you are thinking about buying your first book on the Miata, start with this one, for the list price of $25 you get nearly 200 pages full of information, color photographs and illustrations that will keep you entertained for days.

If you already have a bunch of books on the Miata, this would still make a nice addition just for its trick 2-layer front cover. Looking at the book you see an overhead view of the car with its top up, unfold the right side top flap (lightly magnetized) and now it is an overhead view with the top down.

You can get the book direct from the publisher, on Amazon or possibly your local big box bookstore.**

*I’m not really going to do a weekly book review, I have enough trouble keeping this blog thing filled with regular (and sometimes irregular words), I just wanted a nice title for this post.

**Ethics Disclaimer: The publisher gave me a copy of the book because I said I would write this review.***

***Ethics Disclaimer, Sub Paragraph B: Had I known Miata 20 Years existed before that happened, it would have already been on my Amazon Wish List…

French Toast

The MMC meet for their monthly breakfast event here in Aiken at the Sugar Magnolia Cafe (not to be confused with Sugar Magnolia’s Cafe in Lompoc, CA) and we got a nice turn out of 10 people in 7 cars, 5 Miatas and a Sebring (which counts as two Miatas), a much nicer turn out than the November one there which was just Donna and I.

Frakking Sony DVD player. I spent most of the late morning and early afternoon trying to get William & Mary burned on a DVD. No matter what I tried, none of the 4 discs produced would do anything but play the No Public Display warning, the production company logo and the “pirating is stealing” PSA before halting and giving an out of region error message.

All the forums posts I found on the net said that the programs I was using should take care of the Region Coding. Then I searched for a way to set the Sony DVD player to region free and found that there were no sure fire way of doing it with my model, but there were a couple of ways that I could try that worked on similar models. Ha, close, but oh so frustrating.

I’m not sure what prompted me, but about 3 o’clock I took one of the, what I thought were toast, discs into the other room and tried it in the old JVC player. It worked perfectly….

The JVC was exiled to the back bedroom a few months ago because it was refusing to play DVDs or lock up with increasing regularity. We bought a Sony DVP-NS57P for $40 at Walmart to replace it and it has been great; until now. I’ve moved the JVC back into the living room, now the two of them sit on top of each other in the cabinet ready for anything.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 100