Miatatude

Personal Speed Bump

The driveway slopes down as it nears the end towards the door, rises up to the door and then drops again into the garage, forming a low wide pyramid. When we brought home the first stock Miata back in 1989, the car bottomed out with a quick thunk on the frame rail with both of us in the car. A coworker at the time helped me solve the issue by filling in most of the area in between the external down then up portion.

The Emperor was lowered slightly and with this fix in place it would only bump if I didn’t slow down a notch before entering. The CTBNL is just slightly lower than the Emperor and as a consequence of that I need to take more care entering the garage at all times. With just the driver it is not too bad. Add a trunk full of groceries and you really have to creep in slowly. Add a passenger and the car hits bottom every time on the high point where the garage door closes on right under my butt.

Donna has taken to not getting into the Miata before we leave and getting out before I drive in. This is fine in a way though, as long as it is not raining, because it makes it easier to get in or out. When I park the Miata in the garage I have to pull to left and just clear the tandem up against the wall on my side and there are cabinets on her side that leave barely 18 inches to open the door and then squeeze in (with the top up and holding a purse and travel mug this is a giant feat of gymnastics.)

At first I though my easy solution would be to extend the interior slope of my wide pyramid about a foot or maybe two with a few bags of Quikrete like we did in 1989. But the other day I had both of us ride into the garage just until we hit bottom. We squeezed out of the car because the doors lined up with the garage door. I then measured the length from the bottom of the pyramid to to the front tire and it came to about 5-1/2 feet. Wow. I’d have to raise the floor up, for at least a half inch about 6 feet into the garage. So much for a couple bags of Quikrete.

My next though was to get some of those 12″ x 12″ plastic tiles and lay them down. Because of the cabinets on one side and the inside of my personal speed bump 10′ x 16′ would cover the floor nicely. I think because the car is not hitting very hard the half inch thick tiles might just do the trick, I’d still have to slow down some, but both of us could ride inside. Total cost would be $420 to 430 depending on tile color selection. The black ones are cheaper. The new garage door has no windows so it is dark enough in there already color in the floor would be almost necessary. For grins I went to one of the sites design tools to see what it might look like. What do you think? Classic Checkerboard or Stripes?

Straps On, Straps Off

We have used a cockpit cover (the grey thing you see above) on the Miata for 15 years now. Not all the same cover, there have been several since the first in 2002. After awhile the car cover fabric that they are made of deteriorates due to sun exposure, and continually being folded and tucked into the side of the trunk, so they need replacing every now and then. The one above is a hold over from The Emperor and is only a couple years old, so it probably still has a couple more years left.

Do you see that black strap hanging down by the front of the door? It has a felt covered hook that is supposed to be hooked into the edge of the wheel well (sort of like the strap on the back.) These straps have a tendency to fall off like this if the cover doesn’t get hooked around the mirrors just so. I’ve tried adjusting them longer or shorter and re-positioned in the wheel well to no avail. Invariably, even though the seem solid when put on in the morning, one or the other will be dangling uselessly by lunch or quitting time.

Today both of them were just hanging by mid-day. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back. I am going to cut them off. They really aren’t needed because the front of the cover gets tucked under the windshield wipers. I’m thinking if the wind is strong enough that it can get under the cover with the wiper arms holding it down and lift it up, it then has to break the velcro bonds around both mirrors to make it flap off. And if this is the case it is way too windy to be using the cover in the first place.

Another Mileage Chart

At the beginning of the year I made a quick spreadsheet of the CTBNL’s thousand mile points and created a nifty little chart. Trouble was I neglected to save the file, so I couldn’t just add on to it a month ago when we hit 53,000 mile mark. Instead of just recreating it, maybe I could make it better.

If some data is good, more is better right?! When we bought the silver car I said that it felt like going back in time 10 years, this made me wonder how the mileage we were putting on this car compared to how many we drove The Emperor 10 years ago (August 2006 to May 2007.) As you can see, in 2006 we started a thousand less, but by 8 months later we were 4,000 higher. It is not really a fair comparison though because in 2006-7 we only had the one car while now we have 2 to chose from any time we go for a drive.

Maybe I should chart the Purple Whale’s miles for the same stretch of time, from say 5 years ago, and add that on top of the CTBNL’s mileage to even out the playing field.

Miata Ipsum

Twice a year the MMC has a Planning Meeting to fill up the Club Calendar. There are 2 standard events held each month, a dinner meeting on the first Thursday and a breakfast on the third Saturday. Most of the time the Club President spends the better part of the meeting trying to elicit volunteers to host the standard events and to pick the destination spot. Occasionally there are other random planned events by members, but the number of events that are brought to the meeting already partially formed are rare and the ones that are fully planned out rarer still.

In my duties as Web Guy for the MMC I am called to post the events on the Club Calendar for most everyone. The people who know how to post are rare and of those that do know how, and do, are rarer still. So what usually happens I get a copy of the meeting minutes a date and a name and that is it. In the past I have inserted a stock sentence along the lines of, “Come out and join your fellow Club members for breakfast/dinner and a meeting/drive.”

The other day when entering a breakfast event I wanted a little something different, so I thought, “Why not use some Lorem Ipsum instead. So I Googled it and the resulting page had the link to the Wikipedia page defining it, a few links to Lorem Ipsum generators and further down the page something called Bacon Ipsum, so you know where I went. The event description was a short paragraph of Latin words mixed with words for meat.

Bacon ipsum dolor amet venison sausage est short loin beef. Ipsum turducken quis tail turkey deserunt. Tempor in deserunt fugiat in irure veniam in cillum laborum dolor incididunt ullamco kielbasa. Consequat pork belly turkey porchetta, pig prosciutto kevin non pariatur lorem ground round rump pork loin.

Well, it turns out the fine folks behind Bacon Ipsom have a WordPress plug-in entitled Any Ipsom which allows you to create your own themed Ipsom Generator, so you know what I did. Behold, Miata Ipsum!

Miata ipsum dolor amet et adipisicing consequat dolore speeding in. Slow car fast minim zoom, dragon shocks excepteur nostrud sunt. Exercitation irure dipstick aliquip duis. Adipisicing cas speeding torsen barndoor shifter shocks eyeball vents swaybar rspeed mollit titanium na top down. Cupidatat touring duis nc lorem club ex proident, miata titanium gopro aliquip esse sint.

51,000 Miata T-shirts

I’ve got a Blipshift problem. Like a junkie looking for another fix I check their site nearly every morning hoping that I’ll like their design, I need just one more car related T. They’ve done about a dozen Miata related shirts and I have 6 or 7 of them. I’ve also got at least 3 other random design shirts too. I’ve submitted a Miata design idea, which they used. I also submitted a photo using the hashtag #blipshifted that they used on the site.

For the design idea, I got a free copy of that particular shirt & and a big gift certificate of Blip Bucks (or what ever they call ’em.) For submitting the photo of socks-in-a-jar I got an additional smaller gift certificate. So when the design(s) in the thumbnail showed up on Wednesday I knew I had to get one. I still had money left over on the gift certificate from my Pop Up Blocker suggestion and it was burning a hole in my pocket, so I splurged and got a hoodie and a shirt (and a sticker.)

For the hoodie I bought the silver NC because that is what color my current car is. Besides no one but probably a Miata purist will know which generation it is anyway (and even in the MMC there are probably only 3 or 4 who would know.) Then I bought the red ND on the t-shirt. The green NB was too dark on the dark gray shirt, if they ever resto-mod the shirts I’d get the NB version if it was lighter in color or green on a lighter colored shirt.

On the way over to North Augusta for dinner out with friends the CTBNL past through its 51,000th mile.

Old New Old Clutch

Astute observers would have noticed my statement yesterday about the Miata spending the last week mostly outside and knowing that the Miata normally resides in a garage would have been asking themselves, “What happened here?” Well, it goes like this:

Early on in the ownership experience with the CTBNL I complimented the previous owner, and my current fairy godfather, on his Miata modification choices as they closely mirrored what I had done to and wanted to do to The Emperor. He thanked me for the ego boost and said that if he had to do it all over again there was on mod he wouldn’t do and that was the lightened flywheel/clutch set-up.

I liked the engine responsiveness from the lightened flywheel. I didn’t like that the clutch required a bit more leg muscle to operate and a lot of finesse to get a smooth start when backing up or from a standing start. I figured I would adjust, six months later and I still hadn’t. I guess the almost 27 years of using a stock Miata clutch was too ingrained to overcome, or that adage about old dogs and new tricks has some basis in fact.

After enough of my constant herky-jerky backing out of the garage, the Bogardus Enterprises CFO told me to go ahead and investigate the cost changing the clutch/flywheel out. That’s when I had a great idea on how to eliminate having to buy any parts. I thought Steve at Panic Motorsports could find a new home for the ACT Street-Lite flywheel and ACT performance clutch that had a mere 8 thousand miles on them. The sale of that would be enough to buy the replacement new OEM components. flywheel, a pressure plate and clutch so I would just need to cover the labor for the job. He thought so too, so a deal was set.

We dropped the car off at Panic in west Columbia last Saturday and just picked it back up. It was actually done last Thursday but circumstances prevented us from retrieving it until yesterday. Judging by the pollen layer on the car it probably spent since Thursday outdoors in the densely pine tree’d area where the shop is.

Moawr Gooder

Black Accent Stripes II

How do you make the already awesome stripes on your Miata more awesome? More stripes! You add some small black accent stripes to the big blue ones.

Black Accent Stripes