Another Berkelying Miata (92 SBY)

Today in things that are necessary but not that exciting - the car passed smog!

The first shop I took it to wouldn't even put it on the rollers, because of the coolant reroute. Which is clearly not related to emissions in any way .

The second shop had no problem, sniffer test was good, and he told me he likes my seats .

EZ Star Smog Test Only 2 in Berkeley, in case you're in the East Bay and need a smog check place that is not staffed by idiots.

I've probably driven the Miata less than 10 times in the last 3 months. I now do daycare dropoff for the kids in the morning, which makes it a little hard to take to work. I've been hoarding some parts though, and signed up for Track Night in America at Thunderhill in a couple weeks, so it's time to put some hours in.

First off - my air box was only sort of attached. I solved that by completely changing the intake - seems reasonable, right?

One small problem - it doesn't fit. The elbow makes hard contact with the adjuster for my coilovers, and the filter is too long for the allotted space. Still working on the fit, but I slotted the bracket to allow it to rotate a bit, and I have a shorter filter that is otherwise identical in dimensions on order.

While I had some space in the bay, I "fixed" this misstep from a while back. A leaking master cylinder had removed a bunch of paint, so I cleaned it up and spray bombed it yellow. Not the right yellow, just yellow. 

I bought some touchup paint a while ago when I was dealing with the rear fender debacle, so now it's all poorly painted the same color at least.

Yes I got some on the header. I imagine that will probably smell unpleasant for a while.

I was also getting some noise that I was pretty sure was coming from the power steering pulley. I was right.

That bolt is supposed to go all the way through that sleeve, and there's supposed to be a nut on the other side of it...oops. I got that sorted out and will keep an eye on it.

Before TNIA, I have to get some brake pads, slap those on with the rotors I have sitting on the shelf, nut and bolt everything, and if I have time I'd like to put in the bronze bushing retrofit I bought for the poly bushings a while ago. If not, I'll just run it as is - it has been fine since I drown them in lube pretty regularly.

I took a chance on this k&n filter from Amazon - it had the right part number, but the wrong picture, and was $30 cheaper than any other seller. 

This is p/n RC-4540, which is exactly the same as the filter that comes from Racing Beat, but a half inch shorter.

Now with more vroom vroom noises!

Track Night in America is cancelled, along with just about everything else. I can tell you, sheltering in place with 2 toddlers and 2 adults with full time jobs is... challenging. This afternoon instead of working, I got the older of the 2 to help me install some corner lights I got a while ago. I think they look pretty good. 

I just noticed the typo in the title of this thread. Yep, 4 years later. Whoops.

Exciting changes are coming!
Those corner lights came right back out to facilitate this:

Followed a few minutes later by this:

And, I discovered this:

So a new set of Continental ECS are on their way, or will be once Tire Rack gets them back in stock.

Project one: fix this.

This is the bottom driver's side of the bumper - it's been like that since I bought the car. I threw some zip ties in it to stop it from getting worse, but it has always bothered me. 

I cleaned it up and drilled out the end of the crack. After all, what's one more hole?

I bought these cheap carbide burrs for my dremel, which are pretty awesome. I used one to bevel the backside of the crack.

Then, I taped up the front side, aligning the 2 sides as well as I could. 

I used this stuff to repair it. It's supposed to be flexible, but dry hard enough to sand. We'll see how it works out. 

Slathered it on the back with some fiberglass tape for some structure. This was all last night, so I should know today if it's going to work or not. 

I think it worked!

It obviously didn't fully fill the front side, so I cleaned that up, gave it a quick scuff, and gooped up the front side too.

I tried to err on the side of having too much on there. Up next - sanding!

I think this is going to turn out OK. There was a pretty pronounced ridge, probably thanks to the combination of duct tape and zip ties that has been holding this together for at least the last 4 years, but I managed to get it pretty smooth and seamless. I sanded out a few nearby spots where the paint was all spider webbed, but I'm not repainting the whole bumper so I tried not to go too far. This is pretty damn far from a lot of the body work that's been on display in the build threads section recently but I think it's going to be good enough for me.

Now I have to wait for the paint I ordered to come in - I bought it May 4, but the company making it is in New Orleans, and they're a little behind right now. If they can't get it here next week I'll try and find something locally.

New tire day!

Gonna be a while before I can try these out, but I'm excited. The tires that came on these wheels had lots of tread but were pretty old.

In reply to cmcgregor (Forum Supporter) :

bumper repair looks great and you're going to like the ECS! 

glad to be able to follow your thread now! 

spacecadet (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to cmcgregor (Forum Supporter) :

bumper repair looks great and you're going to like the ECS! 

glad to be able to follow your thread now! 

Hey thanks! Paint is supposed to be here tomorrow, so I'm excited to get it wrapped up. 

I don't know how many times I've worked on these bushings, but this had better be the last time. This is a bronze bushing retrofit that adds a surface that's a lot more amenable to rotation than metal on poly. The challenge is that for the front upper control arm, you have to drill the bushing out to 7/8". As it turns out, drilling out a poly bushing is a pain in the ass. 

After a bunch of trial and error, I ended up with the control arm set up like this. I used my angle gauge to make sure the drill bit and bore were square with each other, then used a bunch of lube and went slowly. 

I had 4 bushings that came out of the arms, and I bought 6 more from energy suspension hoping that I could get 4 usable ones. It took me all 10 to get 4 - the first two weren't held in the bore well enough, so I made these little pins that fit into the threaded hole for the grease zerk.

Then I had a really hard time getting them set up square and clamped securely - that burned up at least 3 more while I messed around with clamps and the vise and all kinds of other ideas. Finally, they were finished. 

So that's one more thing crossed off the list. I'm hoping to have some time to work on the car this week. It would be nice to get a few things actually...done. 

I had an hour long all-hands meeting today, so I threw on some headphones and went out to the garage while listening in. That let me get the new front brake lines installed (Supermiata this time), and I also got the bushings into the front upper control arm that I already had off the car. I'm waiting for some new ball joint boots and the installer tool that Flyin Miata just released, then that will go back on and I'll pull off the other side as well. 

Any progress feels good.

Long ago when I overhauled the suspension on this car, I replaced the upper ball joints but failed hard at getting the boots on. So, I used these energy suspension ball joint boots. They suck.

Flyin Miata recently released this handy little tool for pressing the boots on, so I ordered it the other day. It showed up this morning.

Couldn't have been easier. 2 big thumbs up.

Are these pictures annoyingly enormous? I just upload them straight from Google photos to the forum, but I could resize them if they're obnoxious.

No, they look just fine in Safari. Nice progress and that ball joint press tool is neat!

In reply to newold_m (Forum Supporter) :

Hey thanks! And thanks for chiming in. 

I took a few minutes out of my workday this afternoon and got the passenger side reassembled, so now I just need to add the bronze bushings to the lower control arm and that side is done. Then, it's on to the driver's side - which should go faster, since I already drilled the bushings out. 

I've been trying to do something every day, even if I only have a few minutes. Yesterday I spent 10 minutes pulling the driver's side front upper control arm. Today I had about 20, so I got the old bushings out, the new ones in, and slapped it all back together. No pictures, because you all know what a Miata suspension looks like, but any progress is good progress. 

30 minutes today. I got all the bronze bushing sleeves into the rear suspension on the passenger side (there was shade over there), except the ones for the alignment eccentrics. I couldn't find a paint marker to mark their position, so I left those alone for now. The others were so easy that I wish I had done this ages ago.

Battery's dead. Unlikely that it will come back to life for real, but we're going to give it a shot.

I've been continuing to work on this at a glacial pace. All of the bushings are in, save the rear lower control arm inners. The paint came, though I haven't gotten around to actually... you know... using it. I did spend some time sanding the bumper cover. Its certainly not up to the standard of bodywork that has been happening around here, and it might turn out to be a complete disaster, but I'm hoping it at least looks ok from 10 feet. All of these spots had cracking in the paint, so hopefully using some adhesion promoter solves the problem. 

Here's an update

And onto the main event

I sprayed some primer to see if it was going to react with the paint that's on there. It seems fine, so I'm not going to worry about stripping it to metal. 

The bumper looks good!

Thanks! I'm like...90% happy with it. It's a hell of a lot better than it was though.