Miata Door Bushings

Back about 6-7 years ago, somebody thought up a neat and tidy way to try and stiffen the chassis of the Miata a bit, a pair of hard plastic door bushings. If you don’t know what I talking about, here is a little primer via the Flying Miata website:

The Miata doors are held closed by the latch, but they’re locked into place with a bracket that slides over a rubber bushing. That makes it easy to align everything, but it means the connection isn’t as strong as it could be. In a convertible, the doors provide a surprising amount of structural rigidity if they’re properly anchored.

Ours replace the soft rubber door bushings with a stiff, carbon fiber reinforced nylon replacement. The door is solidly locked into place, allowing it to reinforce the chassis. The effect is of a stiffer car with fewer squeaks. We have measured a 3% improvement in torsional rigidity on a 1990.

Folks in the Miata community were quick to adopt this little gizmo. Opinions on their worth though ranged from ‘snake oil’ to ‘really tightens things up’. Around this time the Emperor had about a 150,000 miles on it I thought, “I could use a little chassis stiffening, what the heck, for $35 its worth a shot.”

When they arrived I went right out into the garage to install the Garage Star black Delrin bits. It was pretty simple, take out the OEM rubber pieces and install the firmer plastic pieces semi-tight, close the doors so they get centered properly and tighten fully. The passenger side door closed as before, but the drivers door had to be almost slammed hard to get it closed. I took the car out for a quick spin to see if I could feel a difference. As I backed out of the driveway and took the little dip at the road, I could swear the car felt tighter, so I took a drive to the closest set of railroad tracks. The there results were the same.

Now I can’t swear there was actual improvement, might just have been the placebo effect, but I wanted to keep them on the car none the less. I looked for advice on the M.net forum and tried a couple things I found there to get a slam-free door closing. Swap the sides of the bushings, sand the bushing a little and bend the metal door cup out some, but nothing helped. I left them on the car and settled into having to semi-slam the door shut. About a week and a half later, I took them off and put the stock rubber pieces back in. The Delrin bushings went on the shelf in the garage.

Fast forward a year and the Emperor gets replaced by the CTBNL. When I bought the car it came with a box of random stuff, the stock horn (it had air horns installed) a selection of plastic Miata related fasteners and a set of Delrin door bushings! This peaked my interest in the bushings again. The “new” Miata, even though a model year older than the car it replaced, had only 43,000 miles on it so maybe the effect wouldn’t be as great. And why did the previous owner have some in a plain marked up plastic baggie? So I tried out both my old bushings and these new ones. This time it was the passenger side that now needed a semi-slam to close. I fiddled around just a little to try and cure the slam requirement and gave up. Both of them went back in their respective bags and then into the “box-o-parts” on the garage shelf.

Well, here we are a couple of years later and that box with those two sets of Delrin bushings still sits on a shelf, but in a different garage. So you would you think that the last thing I would ever need to buy would be a set of Delrin door bushings and you’d be right.

I bought some door bushings made of Polyurethane.

Polyurethane is a slightly softer material compared to Delrin, but it is still a lot stiffer than the OEM rubber bushing. Sooo…there might be a bit more chassis rigidity achieved with them, but that is just OK, because these are more of a fashion accessory than a performance upgrade. These poly bushings are of course offered in black, but the big draw is that they come in 7 colors, plus clear, to dress up your door opening. I went with Translucent Blue which sort of mirrors the blue stripes on the car.

These bushings worked great first time. To make it a little easier to open and close the doors I put a little Armor-All on them and now they need just a scooch more effort to open and close than before, but no semi-slam required. Get your own colored Miata door bushings at Spiked Performance.

10¢ A Dance

We drink a fair amount of canned soda here at the House of Bogardi. We split a 7-Up with our morning snack, we each have a soda with our lunch, Ginger Ale for her, a Coke Zero for me, and there is another split 7-Up in the afternoon. There is a second Ginger Ale as a nightcap for her occasionally. This means we generate about 30 empty cans a week.

Back in South Carolina, these cans went into our recycle bin, but here in Oregon there is a ten cent bounty on every can, so they go into a plastic bag to be redeemed at the local Bottle Drop.

When we first got here, we would fill up a couple (or three) tall kitchen trash bags and go early one weekday morning when it was less busy. Donna used to go inside feed the machines a can, or bottle, at a time. The machine would spit out a ticket and she’d walk across the room and redeem it for cash money. Each kitchen garbage bag would yield on average $7.50.

But every since the Covid Pandemic started, it seems like there is no non-busy time anymore. A couple of times we’ve donated the bags away to some neighborhood Boy Scouts. This last time it was so busy when we got there and we didn’t feel like lugging the two bags home, so Donna gave them to a homeless fellow that was in line outside the building.

This last incident was the tipping point. Forget this whole going inside thing, they have something called the Green Bag program where you can just drop off a bag full of cans and bottles in a door outside, so no waiting. The downside to it is that you don’t get your cash right then and there, it shows up in your account within a week. Also you lose 6 cans a bag in a way, they subtract 20¢ for the bag (you buy a roll of 10 for for $2) and 40¢ for each bag for processing.

We think that sixty cent deduction a bag is worth it, for no longer having to try and guess when it is not busy and having to feed the cans and bottles in one at a time.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Just Another Edition of SORT
As of Monday, August 16, 2021 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
1990 Mazda MX-5 Miata 1958 Chevrolet Suburban 2005 Aston Martin DB9
I’ve always said that my ideal Miata would to be time travel to 1990, buy a brand new one and bring back to the future with me. And speaking of back in time, this thing practically shouts, “Look at me, I’m from the past when trucks were just trucks.” Name’s Bogardus…
Brian Bogardus.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: Beck Replica 550 Spyder Sold for $45,000 on 8/12/21
Off-Road: 1999 Jeep Wrangler Sahara Sold for $32,000 on 8/13/21
Touring: 1936 Buick Series 40 Sold for $43,000 on 8/11/21

Sport, Off-Road, Touring: Year 1 by the Numbers

Last week as I finished my Monday trolling of Bring A Trailer looking for my perfect 3-car garage I realized that it was week fifty-two. I told myself that I should do a wrap-up of all the cars I “bought” during that year as my next post. I promptly forgot all about it.

So, this week on Monday as I started the next Sport, Off-Road, Touring post I stopped and went ahead and started to record all my “purchases.” Turns out it takes a pretty long time to go back and look up the information on that many cars, so about half way through I abandoned the count and went ahead and picked my 3 cars for week one of year two.

So, here we go: The 156 cars I picked, if I actually won their auctions, would have cost me $11,127,321. That is an average of $71,389 for each vehicle, so obviously I was not bargain hunting.

The most expensive car I picked was in the Sport category, a 1957 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing at $1,152,0001. The second most expensive auto was in the Off-Road category, a 2014 Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG 6×62 at $901,333. The next 22 cars in order of price were all in the 6-figure range, so this probably skews that average car cost up.

The least expensive car I picked was from Off-Road category, a 2003 Land Rover Discovery II SE at a mere $6,200. It took until the sixth next highest cost car before we got to the ten-thousand-dollar mark.

The oldest car I picked was a 350-Powered 1940 Ford Deluxe Coupe. There were 4 more cars selected from the 40’s, fourteen from the 50’s, eighteen from the 60’s and 28 from the 70’s. Taking all cars into account, the average model year car would be from 1986, even though just 20 of the 156 cars came from the 80’s. There are 18 cars from the 90’s, the 2000’s had the most cars chosen with 31 and there were nineteen picked from 2010-2019. The newest cars were from the year 2020, two Chevy C-8 Corvettes and a replica Land Rover Defender 90 NAS.

The cars came from 41 separate manufacturers. The most popular make was BMW with 17. Mercedes-Benz was the runner-up with 13. Porsche, Toyota and Ford were 3rd with twelve cars & trucks each. There were 17 one car manufacturers, including 3 that make just make replicas of cars that in original form can no longer be afforded by anyone but billionaires. And finally, one of those 1 car manufacturers, knowing me, would be probably be considered a surprise, Mazda. I only picked one Miata, but that is probably tempered a bit by the fact that I already have one.

The most chosen model name was Land Cruiser (Toyota) with 8 and the runner-up was Corvette with 6. Apropos of nothing, there were 48 car names that started with numbers and 38 more that were mostly number based.

Now for some nonsense3. The most popular car, if it existed, would be a 2004 Mercedes-Benz Land Cruiser that costs $23,000 and the most average car, if it existed, would be a 1986 Honda 914 that costs $71,389.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Yellow & Brown Edition of SORT
As of Monday, August 9, 2021 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
Beck Replica 550 Spyder 1999 Jeep Wrangler Sahara 1936 Buick Series 40
James Dean died in an original Porsche Spyder 550, weirdly enough just 3 days after I was born. Only driven by the owner’s daughters when they visited for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Wait a minute, the clock doesn’t work! Maybe I shouldn’t buy it…

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: 1998 Chevrolet Corvette Indy 500 Pace Car Bid to $30,000 on 8/4/21
Off-Road: Safari-Style 2007 BMW Z4 M Coupe Sold for $30,001 on 8/4/21
Touring: 1996 Volkswagen Golf Harlequin Sold for $25,500 on 8/6/21

Visual Proof

We got the power bill in our email yesterday. Pacific Power includes lots of helpful charts and stuff to help you monitor your energy usage. Turns out oneparticular graph is visual proof of just which day our home A/C was repaired, mid afternoon on the 3rd of August.

All through July when we ran fans to suck in cool air at night to make the house bearable you can see we were spending an average of a little over 2 bucks a day on electricity. On the day it was fixed it jumped to nearly to a sawbuck. And the next day when it ran for the full day it $8.

Found It

Thursday is grocery shopping day for us. As usual we take the Mini so that no one has to ride home with any groceries on their lap

On the way to Fred Meyer she went to put some hand cream on and realized her small tube of the stuff wasn’t in the the bag. We spent the next few minutes guessing as to where the tube of hand cream might be. Back home on her desk? In the smaller alternate yellow knapsack? Maybe it was in dedicated Geocaching knapsack?

When we got back home, she started all the unpacking and I headed back out in the Miata to fill up the car with gas. As I backed out of the garage I head a cracking noise. I looked back and saw several dead leaves had blown into the garage and figured they were the source of the noise.

When I returned and opened the garage door I noticed something else on the garage floor along with the leaves that I didn’t notice before. So I stopped the Miata and got out to see what it was.

I found the hand cream.

While standing around in garage getting ready to go grocery shopping this morning Donna’s knapsack had slid off the the trunk of the Miata onto the floor. She picked it up and we got in the Mini to head to Fred Meyer. The tube must have popped out and slid under the Miata where I ran over it as I went back out.