Miatatude

20th Anniversary Miata

20AEMazda announced its 20th Anniversary Edition of the Miata the other day. Well, actually it is the 20th Anniversary Edition of the Roadster (what the car is called in Japan) because it is only for the home market, not for the US or anywhere else. All it really amounts to is a special white paint, two-tone red & black leather seats and some badges.

I was hoping for a repeat of the 10th Anniversary Edition, a worldwide limited production run of 7500 with a really cool blue with a bunch of special options, a scale model and some other stuff. If it had come in that blue I might have gotten Donna to let me shorten that 484 day countdown some.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 319

Time Travel

I went outside to get the paper this morning and discovered I had been magically transported to November. It was cold, well relatively, anyway. We even put the top up on the way to work and probably will again tomorrow when it is supposed to be in the middle 40s.

Tonight when we went out to pay bills we grabbed two on the other side of Aiken. Both of these were considered small in size. We are slowly integrating the smaller hides into our repertoire. We were six out of nine geocaching on Saturday morning with the fifth one being find #100. The three missed were in the small category, but we weren’t totally hopeless at that size, two of the six finds were considered small.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 198

How To Buy A Miata Battery In 10 Easy Steps

1. First thing Monday morning call a Miata.net vendor to purchase new battery. I chose MMMiata because they are 200 miles away, not Moss Motors which is 2000+ miles away, so I could get it before Thursday when I would return Rudy his battery at the MMC meeting.
2. Confirm with CSR that the battery is in stock.
3. Await emailed shipping confirmation.
4. Tuesday mid-morning call MMMiata to find out why no email. Turns out when they said it was in stock, it was in stock at the manufacturer and it would ship from Pennsylvania. My order was taken Monday morning and faxed to Westco on Tuesday, so it would probably ship Wednesday, with a 2 to 3 day delivery. Meaning if I’m lucky, I might get the battery Friday.
5. Hang Up in Disgust.
6. Get butt chewed by wife for not ensuring prompt delivery.
7. Call local dealer to see if they a Miata battery in stock. Augusta sold their last one yesterday and might get some more on Wednesday or Thursday. In Columbia they have two on the shelf.
8. Call MMMiata to see if they can expedite delivery. They have to call Westco and get back to me. Receive phone message that they could do it and it is not too late, just call and let them know if I want that. Call MMMiata back and be told it would be approximately $50 more (over the $18 already paid for delivery) to get it to me by Thursday.
9. Cancel order with MMMiata. Be told it will be at least Friday before my charge card is refunded because that is the day they do that.
10. Drive to Mazda dealer in Columbia and hand them my charge card.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 182

How Was Your Day?

I need to swap the bedroom set to the summer bedroom. I need to clean the pine pollen off the back deck. The garbage disposal in the kitchen has stopped working, so I need to take it apart and see what has jammed it up. I still have 12 days of vacation photos sort through.

So what did I do today? We went geocaching, on a Time Speed Distance Rally with the MMC, watched two episodes of West Wing and I’m listening to the FRS on the internet.

Oh, and I have to order a new battery for the Miata.

We finished a disappointing tied for fifth (out of 6 cars) in the rally this morning. We made one error due to a misleading statement from the rally masters misinterpretation and another because of a missed a clue. We felt that we had kept track of the time and mileage overruns, but even subtracting them from our totals we were still way over and lost big points. The capper was I worked a pounds to kilogram conversion the wrong way and blew the bonus question.

After lunch at the BBQ place one of the Club members had left his lights on and the car wouldn’t start. That is a picture of three of us trying to push start him. After about 4 or 5 attempts we gave up on that and went inside to see about borrowing some jumper cables. The jump start work its magic and off he went.

On the way home Donna and I stopped at a quick stop store in south Augusta to get a bottled water and a Sprite. When we got back in the car I turned the key and was met with silence. Hmm, did I have the clutch all the way in? Tried again and still nothing, but radio display flashed as I went by. The dome light was on, so I figured it wasn”t a dead battery. Funny thing was that with the ignition switch in the ACC position the radio display would flash and there was a clicking sound (like 2 relays) coming from the instrument cluster.

Pulled out the cell phone and called Rudy (AKA Clunk) (or is it Thunk) and his first thought was battery, even after I described the symptoms. He said hold on, I’ll get the truck and come take a look. Thirty minutes later Rudy and Patti pull up. He brought some wrenches so we could remove the battery and (for what I figured was for testing purposes) the battery out of his Mazdaspeed Miata. We swapped batteries and the car started right up. According to Rudy the newer batteries don’t give you any warning, like they used to in the olden days. now they just up and die. We called a couple places to see if they had any batteries for the car and one said we don’t carry ’em, called the dealer and the other had one, but for $90 and he was all the way on the other side of town. Rudy has his truck and Patti just got a new Lexus, so he let me babysit his battery for a while.

It is still going to cost a hundred bucks or so for the battery, but it won’t be a generic replacement from Autozone, it’ll be a quality Westco replacement that is designed for the Miata.

Thanks Rudy.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 180

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