Saturday, May 28, 2011

Milestones don't appear without surprises.

Today, my trusty (?) Miata rolled over 250,000 miles. Regular readers will remember when I hit a fifth of a million miles. Now that I've done a full quarter mil, the miles will be racking up much more slowly. I've moved to Florida and am working about 5 miles from where I live (as opposed to 60 miles back in Illinois). This is all on the heels of an engine overhaul, which uncovered many, many more broken parts. The car made it the 1200 miles to Daytona Beach without incident, but now that I'm here -- almost as though the car knew its odometer was reaching this particular number -- a fuel injector O-ring lost its will to seal and the cooling system sprung a leak somewhere on the back of the cylinder head.

This afternoon I got a new set of O-rings (to be installed when the engine and sun both cool) and added some chemical stop leak to the cooling system. Hopefully these will take care of the problem. For now, I'm going to enjoy one of the perks of living down here: fixing my farmer tan and getting sand in my shorts.
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Thursday, May 19, 2011

If you know of a better way...

... to pack a Miata, I'd like to hear it.
(Surco luggage rack, Axius cargo bag, passenger seat removed.)

Leaving for Florida

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Aha!

I believe I have finally found the source of all my electrical problems! This is (was!) a copper connector in the posistive lead of my Miata's trunk-mounted battery. It runs to the main fuse in the fuse box. I'm off to the store to get a new piece of cable and some heavy duty welding-grade connectors to splice in a replacement.