September 2016 – Page 3

Car Name? (Part III)

Saturday, September 10, 2016

The weather has been kind of mild for the last couple weeks around here, but last Wednesday on the way home from our monthly haircut I decided to turn on the A/C in the CTBNL. The light came on in the button, but in the whole 15 minute drive home the temperature being blown out of the vents never cooled below the 95° outside air.

When we got home I popped the hood and cycled the on/off switch and the compressor never kicked on and the A/C fan on the radiator never started up. Then I noticed something out of place, well, something missing, the cap was gone off one of the A/C lines. Did this have anything to do with it?

The A/C worked when we bought the car. I’m sure of it because when the compressor came on it caused a bit of belt squeal. As a matter of fact I never could get rid of the that squeal so that eventually I took the car to the Automotive Workbench and paid $50 to have them fix it. Hey, they were working in this area tightening belts, did they knock off the cap and cause this no A/C issue? Probably not, so back the CTBNL goes to the fellows at Automotive Workbench.

I get the call, no freon in the system. They have to recharge the system and add some dye so that whatever leak the car has can be located. A hundred fifty dollars later and there is now very cold air coming from the vents. I have to take it back in about a week and see if they can look for the problem.

It took four days to get the windshield right, we are on our 4th attempt at getting mats to look the way we’d like, the whole silver paint on the bumper fiasco, the Grom Audio box to play MP3s is cutting out on hot days and it just seems like every little simple mod, previously easily done on past Miatas, are a struggle. Both Donna and I are starting to think this car is cursed.

Maybe it is trying to tell us its name. This is a Japanese car, so I fire up the trusty Google Translator and discover that cursed is Norowa Remashita (no row ah – re mawsh ta). That is too much of a mouthful, so I try a couple synonyms. Jinxed comes back as Tsuitemasen (soot e ma sen), OK but still a little much. The next two are a little better though, bewitched translares to Mewaku (me wha koo) and bedeviled is Nayama (nay yah ma). Mmmm, both of those would fit on a personalized plate…

Car Name? (Part II)

Friday, September 9, 2016

This is slightly tangential to the naming of the silver Miata…

Here at the Valve Store we use Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to run parts from the stockroom to the assembly lines in certain cases. Our first set of AGVs were about the size of a large Radio Flyer Red Wagon and it followed a 2″ wide metallic piece of tape laid out in loops in the aisles around the shop floor. These worked pretty good except it kept the Maintenance Department busy replacing the gaps in the tape from the wear and tear of foot and forklift traffic. Because humans need to anthropomorphize their mechanical underlings, these two AGVs were named Bubba and Bubbette.

They have decided to upgrade our AVGs to a more modern system. These babies are the size of a forklift and use an optical system that bounces a rotating beam off of reflective tubes stationed at intervals along the walls surrounding the assembly floor. The Stockroom Supervisor opened up the floor to submitting names for the new AGVs. She got 70 different pairs of names for consideration.

A lot of pop culture references (my entry is bolded and Donna’s is italicized) with a sprinkling of two word puns and a few robot inspired names. Another good reason not to ask the general public to name something, by either Internet or Post-It note.

Car Name? (Part I)

Thursday, September 8, 2016

I have been referencing the new silver Miata by the acronym CTBNL which means Car To Be Named Later, but what if later never comes? Our first two Miatas never had names, while the thrid one did, The Emperor. It got its name because it was an LS, the top of the line with leather seats, a cloth top and other goodies, plus it was such smooth riding car compared to the previous one, it just felt royal.

Cars are supposed to tell you their names subliminally by their deeds/actions or by your reaction to them, so far nothing has come to mind. I thought maybe I’ll just create one for it with a starting point of the 5 letters of the acronym – CTBNL. What words could I create that had those particular letters in that particular order with other letters in between and around them?

My first step was to write the 5 consonants out with gaps between them, start plugging in vowels and then searching the internet to see if they might be real words. Not much luck. Step 2 was to search the internet for a sort of word generator that would use my criteria and come up with words that fit. It took a couple tries before I found dCode and bingo, 13 words.

CONTUBERNAL
CONTUBERNIAL
CONTUBERNYAL
CONTRIBUTIONAL
RECTOABDOMINAL
CERATOBRANCHIAL
CRYOTURBATIONAL
CERATOBRANCHIALS
PECTINIBRANCHIAL
COUNTERBALANCINGLY
OCTACHLOROBIPHENYL
OCTACHLOROBIPHENYLS
ACETYLMETHYLCARBINOL

I really like the first one, CONTUBERNAL because it means literally “living in the same tent” or living in close proximity; intimate, familiar and this certainly fits Donna and I in the Miata. But the trouble is that first N – Car Named To Be Named Later – doesn’t work. Looking down the list the only word that has the 5 magic letters in the right order with no extras is – RECTOABDOMINAL – and that certainly won’t fly.

I’d open it up to internet voting, but I’m afraid that Miaty McMiataface would win. So for now, CTBNL it is.

Another Can Of Disappointing Silver Paint

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

So Sunday afternoon I got around to the dark wheel dress-up project. I had the plan all laid out, but it needed a change mid-process, so it went sort of like this:

Remove the 4 black lug nuts
Remove wheel from car
Pop out the center cap by pushing from the back
Remount wheel on car
Install new chrome lug nuts
Repeat 4 times
Mask middle of center caps
Paint center caps with shiny silver paint
1. shiny silver paint dries not so shiny
2. apply second coat
3. shiny silver paint still not so shiny
4. instructions say to not use clear coat on top
5. shrug and paint over the non-shiny silver with the car color-matched silver
6. don’t clear coat this either or it will turn green
Remove masking tape from caps
Apply new RevLimiter badges
Snap center caps back on wheels
Stand back and ~~admire~~ sigh

And while the center cap is not very chrome-like, the plain silver, along with the chrome lug nuts, does help brighten up the place. But it is just one another example of how all the little mods I’m trying to do to this car turn out to be harder to accomplish or end up not nearly as well as imagined.

47,000 Shades of Silver

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

They say on the internet that silver is the fastest color, that is debatable, and it is, ad nauseum. They also say that when painting, silver is the hardest color to match. I can now speak from experience and I’m in full agreement to that statement.

When we bought the CTBNL it had a few ding and dangs, including a couple of big black parallel marks on the rear bumper along with some other random scrapes. Donna did not like them at all so she asked if I would try and paint over them.

I had some silver paint that I had used to fix the yellowing center caps of the OEM wheels that were on the Emperor for awhile. I took a clear plastic juice bottle and sprayed several coats of silver on it and compared it to the stock color. Hmmm, not bad. So I masked off os square of the bumper and gave it a go. Three coats of silver and 3 coats of clear coat and the results weren’t too bad, just a bit darker.

I thought not bad, but maybe if I ordered a custom can of touch-up paint from automotivetouchup.com I could get it even closer. Twenty five dollars and a week later I was ready to go again. Masked off a slightly larger square and sprayed the bumper area with 4 light coats of the new silver paint. Let it dry about 5 hours in the afternoon sun and then applied three coats of clear. After dinner I went out to pull off the masking tape and the colored square had a markedly green cast to it.

I’m now thinking that maybe I should have burned every one of my Atta Boy points on this one and told Donna to leave well enough alone. I’m fairly sure I could have put up with the scratches as they were naturally occurring, so only one of us would have been frowning when looking at the back of the car. Now there are two of us not happy with the rear view of the CTBNL and me worse than her, because this disaster is by my own hand. Don’t ask what the next step will be because neither one of us has the faintest idea…

This afternoon the odometer of the CTBNL marched past the 47,000 mile mark.

Once More Unto The Breach

Monday, September 5, 2016

Ever since we took possession of this silver Miata we have been wavering back and forth as to whether we wanted to start all over again doing the Moss Motoring Challenge because of the different car or just let it go.

When we went on our usual Sunday morning bike ride yesterday the many puffy clouds were turning pink and orange with the sunrise and this got us thinking about the Sunrise “Destination” photo requirement for this year’s Challenge. So I suggested that we should get up early when we head to Lexington for bagels on Labor Day and if there is another interesting sunrise that will be a sign that we should start the Motoring Challenge again.

When we left the house this morning the sky was just starting to lighten up. By the time we had driven the few miles to the spot we had picked out for the sunrise photo we could tell there was not a single cloud in the sky. Well, that’s that, I guess we won’t do the Challenge with the CTBNL.

We have owned this Miata now for 27 days and Donna has yet to sit in the left seat, but on the way home she says, “I think it is about time I tried to drive this thing. Pull over here.” She was pointing at a stretch of asphalt along the side of the road that had no apparent reason for being there, except maybe as a spot to park cars with For Sale signs in the window. The one car for sale this morning was a VW New Beetle convertible. As I was stopping, Donna said, “That’s a cool car from another country.”

So, as my good friend King Henry V said, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

: Destination – Cemetary

: Destination – Fruit/Vegetable Stand

: Destination – Grain Silo

Motoring Challenge II Points Today 4, Total So Far: 4 points.

Third Time’s Not The Charm

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Our first two attempts at floor mats came from the cheap throw rug aisle at Wally World. Both the red and the gray didn’t look as nice in the car as they did in our heads while looking at them in the store. Plus they were a bit flimsy and moved around when they were stepped on getting in and out of the car.

Last weekend we were in Home Depot looking at their in-stock commercial grade carpet because we had so much success with the remnants from the Valve Store’s office remodeling. No luck there as everything was browns and tans with nothing in gray. But over in the rack with some other stuff we thought we had the perfect solution to our mat desires. There was something that might have been an outdoor mat or an internal dirt catching carpet protector that was a solid gray, not too dark and not too light with a nice square high-low texture, so we bought it.

When I got home I used my usual procedure to turn carpet into mat: Trace the upside down OEM mats onto the back of the newly purchased mat material with a sharpie. I cut out the new mats using a utility knife and a retired pair of kitchen shears. Then the finishing touch, running around the edges with my butane charcoal grill fire starter to seal them. They were just the right weight and stiffness, plus the back side was covered in a rubbery #10 grit sandpaper-like stuff. They seemed perfect. After several days of use the mat’s Achilles heel showed itself though, the fine fibers it was made from started to shed like the fur of an Angora cat in the summertime.

So, we’ve now tried three different times to find a floor mat that would meet all our stringent criteria, spent around $50 and are nowhere near happy. Might be time to go ahead and bite the bullet by spending the $130 on the Zeromotive Checkered Floor Mats in black/light gray I’ve been eyeing for a while now.

Life of Brian

a proud part of the 90%

Month: September 2016