Miatatude

Take the Long Way Home

A couple weeks ago I ordered yet another T-shirt from Blipshift and for the first time in a long time it is Miata related. I really wanted the Action Hero II shirt that was part of the Carch Madness T-shirt bracket on the site, and in spite of me voting for it a dozen times at least, it finished as a runner up to the four shirts that did get printed. So when the runner-up shirts were offered for sale over the Memorial Day weekend I jumped at the chance to own my favorite.

On Tuesday I received an email telling me that Action Hero II had shipped. When I looked up the tracking number it said it was coming from Columbia, SC. Oooh, cool, I might have it in time to wear to the Thursday’s Monthly Miata Club Meeting. When I checked the tracking on Thursday morning the shirt was in Raleigh, NC. WTF? Today it arrived in Forest Park, GA with a possible delivery tomorrow. I’m sure they have a good deal worked out with their shipping partners, but I can’t see how it is cheaper to send my T-shirt on an 810 mile loop instead of a 56 mile hop.

Note: shirt arrived in Saturday the 8th’s mail.

Track, Daily, Crush

On the last Everyday Driver podcast I listened to, one of the social media questions was “Track, Daily, Crush: a UPS truck, a FedEx truck or a DHL truck?”

Now I’ve heard of F#@k, Marry, Kill. It typically is 3 actors or actresses, but can be applied to most anyone. From the three guys or gals in your high school Biology class to the three Baristas at your local Starbucks.

But I’ve never heard Track, Daily, Crush before. Its the same principle, just applied to cars, so given a list of 3 different vehicles, which one would would take racing, which one would you use for everyday and which one would you sentence to the scrap heap. If I was to apply it to say, the first 3 generations of Miatas, it would be NA for the track, NB for daily (naturally) and crush the NC.

The three items idea works, but I think given a larger list of similar items might be fun too. How about this idea for Track, Daily, Crush. Go to the car auction web site Bring a Trailer on a certain day at a certain time and out of the couple hundred cars listed pick which one you’d track, which one you’d daily and which on you’d crush.

Okay, here you go, at Thursday, May, 23 2019 at 9:30 PM eastern time:

Track Daily Crush
1957 Porsche 356A 2003 BMW M5 2001 Jeep Cherokee Sport
No mistaking this look for a street car. Back when M5’s still had the sleeper vibe. No sleeper look, just pedestrian looking.

May the 4th Be With You


Our previous Miata was named The Emperor and this little “action” figure adorned its dash top for several years. The car may be long gone, but the figure still resides with us on a shelf in the computer room.

Coincidentally, I just noticed today that The Emperor’s twin brother is for sale on Bring a Trailer. Poor thing has been locked away for nearly its entire 16 year life, it has less that 7,000 miles on it. It listed for $26,195 new and right now the high bid is only $6,600 with 2 days left.

I was half tempted to bid on the thing, so much so, that I actually created an account on the site, but then figured the sale price would probably be more than $10 thousand in the end and it just wouldn’t be worth it. I am still going to keep an eye on the auction out of curiosity though.

12 Rules For Miata Life

A few days ago I blogged about the “12 Rules” phenomena and I mentioned I thought it would take a while to think about the subject before I could create my own set. So, off an on since then, I have been plugging away at doing just that with a little Miata spin. I had a good start, Rule #1, but then it all fell apart. It ended up more like 12 reasons to buy a Miata, so anyway…

  1. It’s a Convertible – Put the top down as often as possible.
  2. It’s Inexpensive – Until you start adding options, every new Miata is priced below the $34,000 average cost of a vehicle in 2019. Nice 5-7 year old ones can be had for $15-20k. Of course there are cheaper cars to be had, but nothing can touch it on a cost per mile of fun.
  3. It’s Reliable – Well taken car of early models are still going strong at over a quarter of a million miles. And not so well taken care of examples can easily be brought to life without breaking your bank.
  4. It’s a Sports Car – On any giving weekend at SCCA, NASA and autocross events there will more Miatas than practically every other make of car. Even if you just drive on the street, do not buy cheap tires, they limit the fun available.
  5. It’s a Slow Car – And it is leaps and bounds more fun to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow.
  6. It’s a Small Car – Always park at the end of a row so at least one side will be free of large vehicles to make it easier to back out.
  7. It’s a Great First Car – The open cockpit will make your teen driver feel vulnerable, so they will be paying attention to trying not to get crushed by the typically much larger vehicles around them, plus it is small, light-weight and maneuverable making it easy avoid them. As a bonus it is a two-seater thereby reducing the peer pressure to do something stupid by 66% as compared to the typical sedan.
  8. It’s as Good as a Pickup Truck – On a sunny day. With the top down it is amazing what can be carried in the passenger seat sticking up and/or back.
  9. It’s More Fun with Friends – So join a local Miata Club, they’re everywhere.
  10. It’s Infinitely Customizable – While some consider them perfect right out of the box, there is an aftermarket for these things that is staggering, from every possible performance modification you could think of to all manner of cosmetic stuff to nice things that Mazda probably should have put on one to begin with.
  11. It’s Photogenic – Like babies and pets. See above. 😉
  12. It’s not a Collector’s Car – So drive it..

Christmas Presents

We have been busy doing our part for Christmas commercialism this past week by filling our stockings with stuff.

1. Last Wednesday I noticed a very low left rear tire. I noticed it because all of a sudden I was bottoming out on my own personal speed bump again. The other 3 tires were at 24 p.s.i. and the left rear was half that. I backed the car out of the garage, jacked up the left side, removed the rear tire and found a nail head visible in the center of the tread area.

Initially I though to take it to a local independent tire store and have them put a plug in it, but dismissed that idea when I saw how shallow the tread depth was. The tire was worn pretty good, probably a few hundred mile until they reached the wear bars. Plus the inside of all the tires were way worn, probably from the more aggressive alignment from Panic Motorsports when they put on the new shocks and springs last year. It was time for a new set of tires and a more stock alignment.

Ordered another set of Toyo Proxies R1R‘s from TireRack and had them drop shipped to Aiken Discount Tire. By Friday at lunch the CTBNL was back in the garage on fresh rubber.

2. Over the weekend the 8-year Dell PC was acting all sluggish. I tried several clean-up operations without much success. Overnight I copied all our important documents off the main hard drive to the large 2TB secondary drive. On Monday the plan was to plug in an older 250GB drive that used to be the main drive in its spot and reload windows, but that fell through after the PC would not restart after turning it off.

This failure to restart has been an issue after an unplanned power failure several years ago. This is why we never turn the PC off, we’d shut the display off and walk away. On the occasional time I did have to turn it off for maintenance, and if it didn’t turn back on, I could coax it on, by holding the power button in, pulling the power cord and plugging the cord back in. When this problem first cropped up, I swapped out a power supply I had borrowed from the Valve Store and that didn’t solve the issue, so I figured this was a motherboard issue and decided it was time to replace the PC.

Because we live in a technological wasteland, if you need a PC in a day you have very few options. First up was the Staples right around the corner. I went online and found something that I thought would work, there was one in stock, so I put it on the charge card for in store pickup. When we got it home and I opened the box I realized it was a slim tower with no room to add my second hard drive. Back to the store it went. A quarter mile down the road was a Walmart, we peeked in there and nothing was on the shelf that would work.

We were headed to Augusta later in the evening for dinner out with friends, so we figured a visit to Best Buy was in order. So instead of dealing with actual people I did the same thing there as I did at Staples, online order for in store pickup. I’ve spent the last couple days uninstalling the multitudes of HP branded software crap and reloading all the programs I do use onto the new Pavilion 590-P0054.

It was not all dull and unexciting gifts though…

3. We dropped into Academy Sports and bought Donna a couple new pairs of Fila Memory Threshold athletic shoes.

4. And I went online to Amazon and bought some new boxer briefs. 🙂

Gauges Installed


Hover over the picture above to see what they look like at night

Installation went off pretty smoothly, with just one little hiccup, I managed to “break” the needle of the Temp Gauge when I removed it. It was separated into its 3 little component parts, the cap and the needle popped off and the base stayed attached to the pin of the gauge. It was easy enough to put them all back together with some Gorilla Glue.

While I am definitely happy with the results, as befitting anything I do, I do have a couple of quibbles. One of which is not the color of the needles. Because I went with the amber baked in lighting, to keep the gauges matched to the rest of the stock interior lights, the red needles look right at home.

The first quibble is minor one and will probably disappear after a few weeks of looking at them, the faces are a bit shinier looking than shown on the gauge web page.

The second is also minor, but one notch higher, call it a grumble. At night there is a noticeable light intensity difference at the very bottom of the speedometer. Although it is hard to notice in my cell phone picture above, the area between zero and twenty is a little darker than everywhere else.

Just from remembering what the inside of the gauge cluster looks like, I’m guessing this darker area is caused by the shadow of the square plastic tube for the check engine light. Unlike my set, on most of the other gauges the CEL is relocated, so that shadow causing tube is nibbled away like the rest of the ones on the bottom of both the tach & speedo.

I’m going to drop Adam an email and see what my best option would be. Should I nibble just a little of the top of the tube off hoping that will increase the light without actually lighting the CEL all the time or do I paypal him five bucks and have him send me little gauge section for relocating the check engine light to the place where all the other gauges has it.