Miatatude

May the 4th Be With You


Our previous Miata was named The Emperor and this little “action” figure adorned its dash top for several years. The car may be long gone, but the figure still resides with us on a shelf in the computer room.

Coincidentally, I just noticed today that The Emperor’s twin brother is for sale on Bring a Trailer. Poor thing has been locked away for nearly its entire 16 year life, it has less that 7,000 miles on it. It listed for $26,195 new and right now the high bid is only $6,600 with 2 days left.

I was half tempted to bid on the thing, so much so, that I actually created an account on the site, but then figured the sale price would probably be more than $10 thousand in the end and it just wouldn’t be worth it. I am still going to keep an eye on the auction out of curiosity though.

12 Rules For Miata Life

A few days ago I blogged about the “12 Rules” phenomena and I mentioned I thought it would take a while to think about the subject before I could create my own set. So, off an on since then, I have been plugging away at doing just that with a little Miata spin. I had a good start, Rule #1, but then it all fell apart. It ended up more like 12 reasons to buy a Miata, so anyway…

  1. It’s a Convertible – Put the top down as often as possible.
  2. It’s Inexpensive – Until you start adding options, every new Miata is priced below the $34,000 average cost of a vehicle in 2019. Nice 5-7 year old ones can be had for $15-20k. Of course there are cheaper cars to be had, but nothing can touch it on a cost per mile of fun.
  3. It’s Reliable – Well taken car of early models are still going strong at over a quarter of a million miles. And not so well taken care of examples can easily be brought to life without breaking your bank.
  4. It’s a Sports Car – On any giving weekend at SCCA, NASA and autocross events there will more Miatas than practically every other make of car. Even if you just drive on the street, do not buy cheap tires, they limit the fun available.
  5. It’s a Slow Car – And it is leaps and bounds more fun to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow.
  6. It’s a Small Car – Always park at the end of a row so at least one side will be free of large vehicles to make it easier to back out.
  7. It’s a Great First Car – The open cockpit will make your teen driver feel vulnerable, so they will be paying attention to trying not to get crushed by the typically much larger vehicles around them, plus it is small, light-weight and maneuverable making it easy avoid them. As a bonus it is a two-seater thereby reducing the peer pressure to do something stupid by 66% as compared to the typical sedan.
  8. It’s as Good as a Pickup Truck – On a sunny day. With the top down it is amazing what can be carried in the passenger seat sticking up and/or back.
  9. It’s More Fun with Friends – So join a local Miata Club, they’re everywhere.
  10. It’s Infinitely Customizable – While some consider them perfect right out of the box, there is an aftermarket for these things that is staggering, from every possible performance modification you could think of to all manner of cosmetic stuff to nice things that Mazda probably should have put on one to begin with.
  11. It’s Photogenic – Like babies and pets. See above. 😉
  12. It’s not a Collector’s Car – So drive it..

Christmas Presents

We have been busy doing our part for Christmas commercialism this past week by filling our stockings with stuff.

1. Last Wednesday I noticed a very low left rear tire. I noticed it because all of a sudden I was bottoming out on my own personal speed bump again. The other 3 tires were at 24 p.s.i. and the left rear was half that. I backed the car out of the garage, jacked up the left side, removed the rear tire and found a nail head visible in the center of the tread area.

Initially I though to take it to a local independent tire store and have them put a plug in it, but dismissed that idea when I saw how shallow the tread depth was. The tire was worn pretty good, probably a few hundred mile until they reached the wear bars. Plus the inside of all the tires were way worn, probably from the more aggressive alignment from Panic Motorsports when they put on the new shocks and springs last year. It was time for a new set of tires and a more stock alignment.

Ordered another set of Toyo Proxies R1R‘s from TireRack and had them drop shipped to Aiken Discount Tire. By Friday at lunch the CTBNL was back in the garage on fresh rubber.

2. Over the weekend the 8-year Dell PC was acting all sluggish. I tried several clean-up operations without much success. Overnight I copied all our important documents off the main hard drive to the large 2TB secondary drive. On Monday the plan was to plug in an older 250GB drive that used to be the main drive in its spot and reload windows, but that fell through after the PC would not restart after turning it off.

This failure to restart has been an issue after an unplanned power failure several years ago. This is why we never turn the PC off, we’d shut the display off and walk away. On the occasional time I did have to turn it off for maintenance, and if it didn’t turn back on, I could coax it on, by holding the power button in, pulling the power cord and plugging the cord back in. When this problem first cropped up, I swapped out a power supply I had borrowed from the Valve Store and that didn’t solve the issue, so I figured this was a motherboard issue and decided it was time to replace the PC.

Because we live in a technological wasteland, if you need a PC in a day you have very few options. First up was the Staples right around the corner. I went online and found something that I thought would work, there was one in stock, so I put it on the charge card for in store pickup. When we got it home and I opened the box I realized it was a slim tower with no room to add my second hard drive. Back to the store it went. A quarter mile down the road was a Walmart, we peeked in there and nothing was on the shelf that would work.

We were headed to Augusta later in the evening for dinner out with friends, so we figured a visit to Best Buy was in order. So instead of dealing with actual people I did the same thing there as I did at Staples, online order for in store pickup. I’ve spent the last couple days uninstalling the multitudes of HP branded software crap and reloading all the programs I do use onto the new Pavilion 590-P0054.

It was not all dull and unexciting gifts though…

3. We dropped into Academy Sports and bought Donna a couple new pairs of Fila Memory Threshold athletic shoes.

4. And I went online to Amazon and bought some new boxer briefs. 🙂

Gauges Installed


Hover over the picture above to see what they look like at night

Installation went off pretty smoothly, with just one little hiccup, I managed to “break” the needle of the Temp Gauge when I removed it. It was separated into its 3 little component parts, the cap and the needle popped off and the base stayed attached to the pin of the gauge. It was easy enough to put them all back together with some Gorilla Glue.

While I am definitely happy with the results, as befitting anything I do, I do have a couple of quibbles. One of which is not the color of the needles. Because I went with the amber baked in lighting, to keep the gauges matched to the rest of the stock interior lights, the red needles look right at home.

The first quibble is minor one and will probably disappear after a few weeks of looking at them, the faces are a bit shinier looking than shown on the gauge web page.

The second is also minor, but one notch higher, call it a grumble. At night there is a noticeable light intensity difference at the very bottom of the speedometer. Although it is hard to notice in my cell phone picture above, the area between zero and twenty is a little darker than everywhere else.

Just from remembering what the inside of the gauge cluster looks like, I’m guessing this darker area is caused by the shadow of the square plastic tube for the check engine light. Unlike my set, on most of the other gauges the CEL is relocated, so that shadow causing tube is nibbled away like the rest of the ones on the bottom of both the tach & speedo.

I’m going to drop Adam an email and see what my best option would be. Should I nibble just a little of the top of the tube off hoping that will increase the light without actually lighting the CEL all the time or do I paypal him five bucks and have him send me little gauge section for relocating the check engine light to the place where all the other gauges has it.

Four Points By The Skin of Our Teeth


On the way home from Hendersonville, North Carolina on Friday after we had spent Thanksgiving with my sister and her husband, we detoured through Spartanburg, SC to check on a skating rink that hosts roller derby. Sure enough, there was a sign out front of Skate Palace advertising a match from back in October. Unfortunately we were in the Mini not the Miata, so we vowed to drive the 100 miles one-way back there the following day. But Saturday was a cold, miserable, and rainy. Not a nice day for a drive, even with the top up.


We waited until today to make the trip. When we got there, the two people you see on the left were changing the sign to read Craft Fair Today (see the ladder…) and fortunately for us they had finished only one side. The other side still had the roller derby announcement on it. Pheew!

Made Up My Mind Mostly

I opted for a mildly modified Version 10AE. The blue was a little too bright for my taste, so I had Adam change it to the gray on the Delta gauges. Now comes the needle color quandary, the photo above shows what it will look like if I leave them alone, hover over it and see what it would look like if I do some extra work.

For those of you who would like your own eye candy gauges for your Miata, now is the time, every Thanksgiving week Adam runs a big sale called Sharksgiving Sale (named for his car Sharka.) All stock gauges (no custom work) are down to $99 instead of the regular $129. Other stuff is on sale too, so forget that cheap Black Friday TV, get your RevLimiter on.

Bad news for me was that my gauges weren’t sale eligible, but the good news is that I got my order in before the sale, because before the sale it was a 2 week wait for orders, now it is 5 to 8 weeks…

RevLimter Gage Face Paralysis

I’ve got a RevLimiter problem.

When I bought the CTBNL a couple of years ago, it came with some of Adam’s stuff. The previous owner (Hi David) had one of his GarageStar oil caps with the Prototipo2 logo already on the car and he also gave me 3 of the small Prototipo2 badges that he hadn’t used. For a while I considered using them as fender badges, ALA BMW, but never did. One of them would made a perfect replacement for the Mazda logo on the trunk lid, but I never did that until just recently, when my Fairy Godfather gifted me with the larger matching front badge.

When it came to brightening up the wheels a little I bought some Wheel Center Cap Inserts from the RevLimiter Store in the same Prototipo2 style.

But this RevLimiter problem is not new. I’ve wanted a set of his gauge faces for at least the last decade, but never could talk myself into spending the $150 entry fee. That problem has been recently solved because I sold my retirement watch for almost the exact amount needed to buy a set of RevLimiter gauges.

The money was not the only problem though, which style to pick is arguably the harder one to solve. For the NB (99-05) car I have, there are 32 different styles to choose from. It is even worse for the NA (90-97), as there are 41 stock styles available. To make matters worse he does custom work too, everything from minor color changes to complete custom for a price. I think I have narrowed my choices down to three styles, the 10AE, the Delta and the Apollo.

I like the 10AE because it has some blue in it to bring inside the stripe color, but the best thing is, it doesn’t require moving the high beam light from it’s stock location. In almost all the other custom gauge faces the high beam indicator light is moved to the location of the current cruise control light and for me, that light is mostly blocked by the steering wheel, and not too noticeable.

The Delta does move the the high beam light, but the color scheme is better suited to the black and silver interior of the car. I think I would have him do a bit of custom work and remove the inside arc of KPH numbers on the speedometer.

The thing with these two gauge styles is I think they both look best with the white needles as shown on his website because of their predominately black faces. White needles where stock only on the 1999-2000 models, while the 2001-2005 (mine is a 2002) has red needles. Hover over the above images for a second to see what they look like with red needles.

When I changed out the gauge faces in my old ’95 Miata the stock faces were were black with white needles. When I changed to white gauge faces, I scraped the white paint off the needles and painted them red. I guess I could do the same this time, in the opposite direction, but I’d rather not.

Of course if I’m willing to live with the relocated high beam indicator light, I could possibly go with the Apollo, which doesn’t look too bad with the red needles. Once again hover over the images to see a mock up.