18 Holes

I bought the side sills from Trussville Mazda. They are a regular sponsor of Miata.net and they have real good prices on Mazda parts and accessories. Cheaper even than the local dealer who gives us Master’s Miata Club members 20% off. Still with all that discounting, the sills were more than twice the price, quasi-regular reader, Ernest wanted for a set of used one he had. I was scared off by Ernest’s for two reasons, first was they needed painting in my color and second he had no fasteners for mounting them. Ernest got them from a Mazda recycler in a trade that was as complicated as the Nomar Garciaparra deal because he was going to add them to his new Mazdaspeed MX-5. Ernest was selling them because he found out to mount them you had to drill holes in your car. Seven holes on each side that your mid $20k car didn’t come from the factory with. Well, Ernest, after reading the 12 page instruction book that came with my factory fresh sills, I can say you are wrong about needing seven holes, you need 9 or 18 total.

Painting Ernest’s side sills didn’t scare me as the front spoiler painting came out top notch, so they would have done just as good a job again, but the no fasteners thing really scared me. Turns out I had good reason, there are like 4 bits each per those 18 holes, plus a half dozen other screws, clips, etc per side. There is a mounting strip to hook the top front edge of each sills to. There are four different paper templates for locating the parts. There is a tube of some adhesive stuff. The bag of stuff you get is worth $100 easy.

For funsies I scanned all 12 pages and then combined them into one big ol’ 2-1/2 megabyte pdf file. So if you would like to see why I want to set aside a whole day for this project and have a fat pipe to the net: Genuine Side Air Dam Instruction (Installation) Manual