Clocks
Don’t hate me, OK? I usually listen to Radio Paradise while sitting in front of the computer and just now they played “Clocks” by Coldplay. I love that song.
Month: April 2004
We’re Back
Two major events over the last 4 days to report:1) It has only taken 5 months for me to realize I can’t see very well close up. Way back when I had a the Splash Green loaner, I wrote about The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and under Bad #3 I mentioned that the speedo was calibrated in 2MPH increments between the major numbers making it hard to know how fast I was going. Today on the trip home while trying to set the cruise control at 65 I noticed that it wasn’t in the center. Upon closer inspection I realized that there are only 3 ticks, not four, between every 10 mile per hour mark. Doh!2) File this one under ugly. The night we left I slightly misjudged the location of a curb and drove right across the corner of one in a Hardee’s parking lot. The front tire went up and over and when it went back down I hit the bottom of the car hard on the curb and then the back tire went up and over. Big thud! I managed to slightly bend over the 1/4″ thick seam that sticks down along the outside edge of the car. Didn’t hit the red painted portion of the body, just the flat black area.
For Future Reference
Just turned over 6,000 miles on the car today, so we are getting close to the first Mazda recommended service at 7,500.When I do take it in, probably after vacation, don’t let me forget a couple things. Have the them oil the trunk hinges as they are starting to creak when opening and closing the lid. Also, I noticed a couple of those plastic pins that hold in the splash liner in the right front wheel well are missing when I washed the car the other day. Nothing is going to fall out or anything, but hey some engineer thought they ought to be there and he must have had a good reason. The driver’s top latch still feels way to easy to close, no leaks or wind noises or anything, but something is not exactly right (maybe the passenger side is too tight?)
Fog Lights As DRLs Revisited
Finally accomplished what I set out to do all those weeks ago. To prevent to possible immolation of the dashboard I hooked the same +12v that goes to the fog light relay to where the voltage would be applied to the switch normally (how Mazda does it, just with a different source.) I then hooked the ground from the switch directly to the metal frame where the relays are mounted, bypassing the headlight switch, allowing the fog lights to operate without the need for the low beams to be on. Now if the ignition is on and the switch is pressed, the fog lights are on. I will now train myself to turn them on in the day and off at night, unless of course there is fog.
While I had the combination cruise control and fog light switch out of the dash I swapped the two colored light bulbs. For some odd reason the fog lights had a green lamp and the cruise had an orange one, while when the cruise is active there is a green light in the speedo cluster that says, oddly enough, CRUISE to let you know it is, well, active. My swapperoo matched greens for the cruise. The orange for the fog lights will make sense too when I do the future mod of getting some of that protective film in yellow to put over lights…
Toilet Paper On Your Shoe
Donna and her Mom usually go grocery shopping for the week on Sunday. Yesterday Mom was cooking Easter dinner, so I went with Donna. We took the Miata and because the trunk is a lot smaller than the Civic’s it was a lot fuller. No real problem fitting everything in there, but careless tucking in of the bags left us with the automotive equivalent of toilet paper on the bottom of your shoe, a couple inches of one of the plastic grocery bags stuck out of the trunk and flapped in the wind as we drove down the street. If the store had been more than the mile away it is, I might have pulled over and tucked it in, but we just continued on home hoping no one we knew would see us.
Clean Top
On one hand I like the cloth top on the new Miata, but on the other…It sure looks nice, but because it is a light tan in shows dirt easily. Not only that, but what do you clean it with? The vinyl top was easy, practically whatever was readily available worked fine. You sure can’t use Windex to clean off the bird doo off a cloth top. After some research in the Tops, Windows, Tonneaus, and Boots forum over on Miata.net I bought a 303 Cloth Top Care Kit. It consists of some cleaner specially designed for cloth and then a protectant that helps keep it that way and it restores the waterproofing too.It came via FedEx ground a couple days ago and maybe tomorrow afternoon I’ll go out and wash the car and then use my kit on the top.
Painting The Room Red
Don’t do it. The girl at the paint counter at Home Depot tried to warn us, but we were undaunted. We had picked out a nifty maroon paint color called Vin Rouge to redo our bedroom in and went out last evening to get the paint. The girl, before she even mixed the paint up, explained that red based paints use an ink base for the color as opposed to clay based for the rest of the spectrum. She pointed to a board that was divided into 4 squares, one white , one a light pink, one a dark pink and another a light red. She explained that represented a white wall with one, then two and finally 3 coats of red paint. We want that color we told her and we will see her tomorrow if we needed another can. She also warned us not to panic when we opened the can because the paint would look kind of pink, but would dry dark.
After this morning’s one coat, it looks like we will need at least three coats. The first coat even when dry looks magenta except where there was some overlapping which looks more like the finished maroon. Good news is that it only took a half a gallon to do that first coat. We will be able to get by even if we need four coats on the can we bought yesterday (and the one we bought today.)
Now I know why you see red walls in rich peoples houses, they can afford to hire someone to do all this painting and all the paint they will need to do it. So take my advise if you decide to paint a room red, don’t do it, use wallpaper, one coat will do.