The Miata purchase last Saturday wasn’t the only automotive excitement of the day.
I had a 9:30 appointment at the Mazda dealer, so when I hopped in the Mini to drive over and flipped the start toggle switch it almost didn’t start. Rrrr…rrrr…cough…cough…catch. Pheew. I made a slightly longer ride over to the Mazda dealer in hopes that it would charge the battery up some.
I forgot all about the battery until when all the Miata paperwork was done and was going home to wait out the retrieval of my new car from McMinnville. Rrrr…rrrr…click. Rrrr…rrrr…click. So, I went over to my salesman and asked if someone could give me a jump. While I waited, I searched for an auto parts store and luckily enough, there was an Autozone just up the street on the corner. Successfully started, I made a beeline to the parts store. The fellow waiting on me showed me a long line of batteries they had in stock that would fit and I opted for a couple notches up from the cheapest at $250. He asked if I was taking it with me and I said, “The one in the car is dead, don’t you offer to put it right now for free?” He grabbed their tool kit and we headed out to the parking lot.
I had changed out the battery on our previous Mini easy-peasy. Two plastic latches, peel back the cover, undo the the two terminals and remove the nut holding it in. Well, that was a 2nd generation Mini and this is a 3rd gen car, which as it turned out, was a whole new ball of wax. First you need to peel back half of the hood seal. Then there were 2 plastic nuts that hand turned off and then three 1/2 twist screws so the cover could be removed. Instead of the typical 10mm nuts holding the wires to the battery posts there were a couple of auxiliary wires coming off the posts too. Looking at the opening, the battery was too big to pull straight up thru it, but it looked like lifting up one end and angling it out would be fine. The battery had a couple of fold up handles to facilitate this, but tug as hard he could the battery just wouldn’t budge.
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know what’s holding it in there, but I can’t get it out.” I told him, “Fine, refund the battery cost and I’ll buy one of those jump packs to get me home.” So, I bought something at half the cost of an actual car battery to get me going. And there was just enough juice in it to do just that. When I got home, I plugged the jump pack in and called the Minin dealer to set up and appointment for a replacement battery.
On Wednesday I used my new toy to start the Mini for the drive over to Beaverton. They changed out the battery and as it turned out the Mini battery cost almost exactly the same as the Autozone one, but the installation cost was as much as the battery itself. But hey, that was the original battery, so 8 years is a pretty good life for as much all the electrical crap on cars nowadays.
