Shade Awning Mechanic

Did the 30k service this morning. Donna and her mom went out to a couple local festivals and I put the Miata up on jack stands under the awning where mom’s MSV usually resides.

Changed the oil and filter. I have been changing these items in my Miata every 3 months or so for nearly a decade and a half and it never ceases to amaze me how much oil will drain out of a horizontally mounted filter. Even more puzzling is that I try and place an old t-shirt in the same spot in an effort to catch this flow and occasionally I succeed and others I stain the concrete driveway in several, sometimes large, spots.

As usual I rotated the tires while I change the oil. Checked their air pressure and topped off at 29 psi (60 in the spare) where required. I even sprayed the tires with some ArmourAll foaming tire cleaner. As an experiment I sprayed the inside of the wheel wells with the foaming stuff too. Worked a lot better, blacker, than when I use a sponge in there when washing the car.

Changed the air filter. It was quite dirty. The manual says clean it at 30k, but I think the 8 bucks for a new one is the least I can do for his highness.

Changed out the spark plugs. The old ones didn’t look too bad, I probably could have re-gapped them and put them back in, but a fresh set of NGKs is, like the air filter, cheap medicine. I also installed 2 new spark plug wires. That’s right two. On the old Miatas there was a coil pack with the typical 4 wires running to the 4 spark plugs and the OEM ones were notorious for starting to break down after 20 to 40k. The 2001-2005 Miatas have a coil directly mounted to two of the plugs and a standard wire from those coils to the other 2 plugs. Recently I have been noticing a slight bit of engine roughness in the mornings when the car is cold and it seemed like new wires were called for.

I also dumped a half a bottle of fuel injector snake oil into the gas tank.

For good measure I “washed” the car using some Quik Detailer and a towel.

Tonight when Donna and I went out for a drive and some clothes shopping, the rough running was gone. Was it the plugs, wires, fuel injector cleaner or a combination of all three?