Miatatude

Plug-In Hybrid Miata?

The current rumors surrounding the next generation Miata is that it will be a plug-in hybrid or all electric. This post is not about that car, it is about the 2002 that we currently have.

We were going to take the Miata to Moore Park yesterday for our afternoon walk, but took the Mini instead. The Miata wouldn’t start, its battery didn’t have enough juice to even turn it over once. Just a click and nothing else.

I know I vowed to take it out once a week, but I looked back and the last time it was driven was 11 days prior. It has been too cold and we had a couple days of a light dusting of snow, so that we hardly left the house. A mere week and a half and the battery was, for all intensive purposes, dead. So I plugged in the battery charger and for this afternoon’s drive to go walking it started right up.

There must a fairly decent dark current somewhere…

16.5 mile round trip to walk 1.8 miles.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 10

 

Since The New Year

Right now the Miata is getting driven on average about 1 out the 7 available days of the week. Since the beginning of 2022 it has traveled a bit less than 100 miles, 98 to be exact.

I would say we go for a 2 to 3 mile walk on average about 5 out the 7 available days of the week. Since the beginning of the year we have walked a few miles less the Miata has been driven, or 89 miles.

Because I’m a weird individual, even if I will have no use for one, I have to carry car keys in my left front pocket or I will feel unsettled. Usually when we go for a walk I carry the Miata key because it gets less use than the Mini’s, so that means that key has been walked nearly as far as it has been driven.

Top Transitions

I bought a Miata in part because it is a convertible. For the first 20 years of owning one, it was our only car, so it was a daily driver and a weekend toy. Because of Aiken, South Carolina’s weather we would frequently put the top down for the drive to work, have to put it up while at work only to put it down for the drive home. We’d go to the store with the top down and if the sky looked iffy we’d put it back up. Sometimes the top would go up or down a half dozen times in a day. The Miata’s vinyl tops became like sticky tires, they were consumables. We probably averaged a new top every 4 years.

Back in 2005 I decided to keep track of how often I put the top up or down in a given year for fun. Each day when I blogged, at the end of the post, I add a little entry at the bottom that looked like below:

Started up, went down, went up, went back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 27

 
In 2005 the top moved one direction or another almost 400 times, in 2006 524 times, in 2007 a little over 500 times. In 2008 it changed status nearly 400 times before it was replaced in October. I did a little interpolation and figured that the cloth top on the 2003 transitioned 2,235 times until it was replaced. I started counting again from there and kept the count rolling until I quit counting inexplicably at the end of September 2013 at 1262 transitions.

Now that we are retired and living in the less temperate climate of southern Oregon the Mini has become our primary car and the Miata gets taken out only occasionally. And until then, it sits in the garage with the top down practically always, so counting top transitions would not be worth it.

Instead, for 2022, I’ve decided to just count the times the Miata gets driven. From now on when it does go somewhere, I’ll be adding a footnote to the post. Today, with the roads finally cleared of snow from our last storm, I unhooked the trickle charger and picked up our to go lunch order.

8.1 mile trip to Jimmy Johns and back.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 1

 

Happy 32st Miataversary

Hard to believe it was thirty-two years ago when I drove home in a shiny new Mariner Blue Mazda Miata.

Decided to get the current Miata out of the garage this evening for a short drive. When we last drove it, sometime last week, it barely started, so I vowed to get behind the wheel for a drive at least once a week to keep the battery alive. Well, it just about started again this evening…

When we got back home and parked I hooked the CTBNL to an IV of battery tender.

Sunny Day

I know that Wednesday was just one of 300 advertised sunny days here in Klamath Falls, but because the mercury went higher than 50 in January, it was definitely time for a top down Miata drive. We dropped off a box to be mailed to Washington state, we bought a lottery ticket and then did a small loop south of town hoping to catch the F15s flying.

I think the Mini wheels don’t look too bad on the Miata. Speaking of the Mini, the weather was still nice enough after returning from the Miata drive to give the Mini an actual hand wash in the driveway. If you have ever had a flat vertical back on a vehicle, you know how dirty they can get. After the last snowstorm we had the combination of the crushed cinders used on the roads for traction and melted snow made for a very ugly combination on the back of the Mini.

Happy 31st Miataversary

Thirty-one years ago today, after a 108 day wait (story here) I drove home from Augusta, Georgia to Aiken, South Carolina in my first Miata. That’s me and it in New Orleans, Louisiana about a month later when we drove it down to visit Donna’s family for Christmas.

New Old Interior

Friend of the blog, previous owner of the CTBNL and my Fairy Godbrother, David, had an idea on how he wanted to customize the car when he first bought it in 2015 and preceded to buy up parts to do just that. Before he carried out that original direction, he changed his mind and went another way. Some of those parts were stuffed in a storage space and forgotten about. Fast forward to this year, David is pulling up stakes in our old home town and moving, so guess what he unearthed?

Those forgotten boxes full of Miata goodies. He and I think alike in that the selling unused or unwanted items is a colossal pain. The lookie-loos & lowballers of Craig’s List or Ebay are frightening. Giving out your phone number & meeting with random strangers from the internet, scarier still. Yard sales? Forget about that hassle. Giving the items away to someone who’ll use and appreciate is the way to go. So David texted me and asked if I was interested in a full Nakamae interior for the CTBNL.

I was very interested in the door panels because they are basically flat and I have to be careful when bending my left leg for comfort on trips as it barely fits between the stock molded door pull and the steering wheel. I was unsure of all the rest of the items, because I felt it would be too much diamond quilting. But I said send them anyway, I could the stuff in and if it was too much, I could always take it back out.

UPS dropped off two big boxes on Monday afternoon, so you know for sure, Tuesday right after breakfast I was down in the garage.

First I went in for something easy, the trunk liner. I was amazed at how much “essential gear” I was carrying around in there… After removing the cargo net, the padded “carpet piece”, pulling all the stuff out of the pocket on the left and the things hiding around the spare tire I was ready to put the quilted goodness in.But, not yet, I had to remove the spare and jack to vacuum out the cavity. I have to say it took a lot of jockeying to get the jack to lock down because of the padding, but I got it.

While it looks really good there was no place to put the jack crank arm that used to be attached to the piece that covers the battery or to hide the lug wrench. Plus under there I hid a small tool kit and the tire pressure gage. The cargo net that held the spare ball cap, the Bluetooth OBD reader, the extra CAS, a nut driver for installing the CAS and the stock headlight bulbs (I recently upgraded to LED) looked awful there, so I decided to keep the trunk the way it was before. The Nakamae trunk stuff would look good if I was driving a show car and I think it might have been a nicer item if it just covered that flat stock piece… On the brightside I did clean off the spare tire and pump it back up to the required 60psi from its existing meager 35.

After a quick coffee break I started on the interior in earnest. The first thing to go was the driver side sill piece and then I started in on the driver’s door. I am an expert in taking off the door cards, having done it before a few times to lube the window tracks, all except for the tweeter connector. I always stumble on the, just a bit too short wire, to get the panel oriented to press the tab. You have to take out two small screws to remove the tweeter, so you can put in the flat Nakamae panel. You also have to remove two plastic angle pieces that hold the back of the stock panel. These items are easily installed on assembly because they have an expanding pin that snaps into a hole, but there is no way to get to the back (inside the door) to squeeze the pins to get them back out. I used a big screwdriver to pry them out by breaking them. This required peeling back the plastic sheet, held in place by black tarry goo, that keeps water out of the car’s interior and saves the fiberboard door cards to get the plastic pin piece out so it wouldn’t rattle around in the door. Suffice to say latex gloves and Goo-B-Gone are required here.

The driver’s door took me literally an hour and a half, but the passenger door took maybe 20 minutes because I knew what to do. Did mention that the minimal instruction sheets, with a total of three small photos, were in kanji? The passenger side sill piece was a two minute job. Just the quilted door card in combination with the sill piece was looking very sharp.

Next up was the console. To make this job easier I opted to remove the seats from the car (as a bonus I could vacuum out from under them.) I pulled out the stock console and dropped the retro looking Nakamae piece in its place. Hmmm. Not really feeling that look, plus it would mean losing the cup holders and a small storage bin which we do use (also need that to hold the stuff that was stored in the OEM door pockets.) So, I’m sure in a move that would have made the JDM/retro purists on the Miata.net Forum cry out in anguish, I pulled the quilted piece off the fiberglass base. I lined up the bottom edges of the upholstery on the bottom of the transmission tunnel and cut a slit right down the center. I then carefully trimmed out a section of the middle, leaving just enough, so that I could put our stock console back in its place.

Before putting the seats back in I put in the Nakamae back wall piece and the strip that goes around the back under the convertible top. The only thing left is the back shelf piece, but as I said that will wait until I can get it to an upholstery shop to get it cut to fit around the roll bar. I was worried about the ZeroMotive checked mats not looking good with the diamond quilting, but I think they do go together pretty well.

Couple of not so quick related installation stories:

Underneath the trunk carpet right next to the spare tire was my favorite small putty knife. When we got here I discovered it missing and I was bummed. I bought a new one here and it just wasn’t the same… I remember purposely not wanting to ship it because I wanted to use it to patch all the holes in 778 Boardman Road, but couldn’t ever figure what happened to it.

When the Miata arrived back in January everything was fine, but the stubby radio antenna was missing. I figured it got pilfered while on the cross country ride on an open bay truck. No big deal, so for $10-15 I bought an even stubbier one (I never listen to radio, so what does it matter if it actually works.) Well guess what I found in the driver’s door card pocket.? Got it one, the original stubby antenna… Three possibilities, with the first being the most likely; One, I put it there so it wouldn’t get stolen, two, David it so it wouldn’t get stolen, or three, the transport truck driver did for the same reason.

I was doing this in the garage in just my stocking feet and somewhere while traveling back and forth from the workbench to the car I accidently stepped on the passenger door card as it lay on the floor. I did absolutely zero damage to the card. It was laying flat with the side that goes to the door facing up. The bottom of my right foot was not so lucky. I stepped right on one of the plastic expansion pins that would lock it in place. Owww. I came away with about a quarter inch long gash. After two minutes of direct pressure to stop the bleeding and a makeshift bandage of paper towel and duct tape I kept working until lunch. The only casualties were one sock and my ability to walk around barefoot in the garage anymore.