Our Dumb Blog

miss miata’s all back together and running quite nicely. Still in need of a wheel allignment, so I haven’t gone for an extensive drive yet, but all seems well.

I got it all together at about 1pm yesterday. Smiled, sighed, and turned the key. It turned over and over. No fire. Damn.

Then I saw that I’d failed to plug the wiring harness back up to the crank angle sensor, so the computer never got the signal to fire the plugs… Riiiight. Pluged it in, turned the key and it started right up.

And ran like shit. With an awful clicking noise. I rotated the CAS back and forth and it steadied out a bit, but still wasn’t running very smooth. And when I disabled the timing advance to check the baseline timing & idle, it nearly died.

I couldn’t figure it out, so without any other choices, I decided to take the timing belt off and redo it. When I got all the covers off, I carefully examined the timing belt, and it looked to be lined up perfectly. Regardless, I pulled it off, spun the cams & crank, and lined it back up while fitting the belt back on. Spun the crank with the belt on, everything seemed to still be lined up. Put it all back together and turned the key.

It ran just fine, only smoked all over the place because of all the gear oil I spilled on the exhaust.

As Kevin of the miata list said, “Sometimes the autommotive gods just want you to do it twice.”

Today I successfully installed an S2000 starter button. So I guess my car has some Honda blood now. Man is it a sweet switch. I had to refrain from sitting in the garage and repeatedly starting my car, it’s so much fun now.

More progress on the miata today… I would have finished tonight, but it’s a real pain to work in that garage once the sun goes down. The lighting is less than helpful. I can see the car. I can’t see much else.

I’ve gotten to the point where I have a small handfull of bolts and quite a few more parts waiting to be installed than I have bolts to install them with. I’m not sure why this happened, as I usually have bolts left over. I tried buying some replacement bolts at home depot, but was less than successful. Metric bolts aren’t easy to come buy. (And then there’s the issue of my understanding bolt size and thread guage, and so on… which we won’t get into)

All that’s left is a few more bits of the cooling system as well as the intake system… and we’ll be in business. We can hope. Course, after that I’ve got to get a wheel allignment because I not only disturbed the front suspension by replacing the tie rod ends, but also the rear suspension got mucked with in the differential remove/install.

I’m hungry.

I’ve also discovered that I will never be able to do crossword puzzles. Dad gives me clues from them occaisionally if I’m nearby, and he thinks I might know the answer… This one he asks just to piss me off because he knows I hate it, and I forget the answer everytime. “Neighbors with a radius”. “A chord?” I ask, trying to go through all the parts of a circle I can think of that might qualify. The previous clue, for which “A chord?” was the best answer I could come up with was “parallel to a radius”. Now, in the strictest sense, the answer wouldn’t be chord because there’s no reason a chord would HAVE to be parallel to a radius, but the sense of crossword puzzles is never strict. so they drive me nuts. I’m not sure why dad likes them. They’re full of trickery, and it’s not about what you know, it’s about knowing how to play their stupid little game. The answer is “ulna”, which I hope I won’t forget next time he asks me.

Slashdot amuses me greatly sometimes. This picture, linked to from the front page, is great: http://www.dreamhack.org/dh01/photos/PB300345.JPG. Not sure I’d want to be there, no. Well, yeah. I mean, it can’t be as bad as a concert, and you’ve probably got somethign in common with the guy next to you, which is hardly the case with concerts.

It seems U2 has sold out in Atlanta yet again tonight. I think they’re playing tomorrow night too? I’d like to see them sometime, but I’m not about to pay the ticket price a band like U2 fetches. And most of their concerts tend to sell out within a few hours of tickets going on sale. I’ll go see them when I’m an old fogey, and only old fogeys are going to their concerst. Easier to get into. I mean, a Moody Blues concert isn’t ever much of a problem…

Then there’s the think geek ads. They always catch my attention. Course, this is the firsttime I’ve seen the ads in a long time since I’m typically running with some sort of ad blocker program. “Your video card sucks. / Unless it’s this one—>. / Suckage is bad. / We can help.” I almost got offended.. My video card is only a Geforce2, but still… I mean… but.. I don’t even game!

I wonder if there’s a way to archive all this journal stuff, or if it’ll stay on slashdot forever. I wonder if I really care.

Well, that’s about all I’ve got to type about for the moment…

Berck

Miata’s differential has been installed! It wasn’t easy, but it was easier than I thought it would be. Manuevering 80lbs of bulky metal to a position 2 feet above the ground while on one’s back under one’s car is difficult. Even when using a cheap hydraulic jack.

In the meantime it seems I’ve got something in my eye, which is driving me nuts.

In addition to reinstalling the differential, I’ve resintalled everything I had to take apart to initially remove it. I was qutie impressed that I spent a minimal amount of time crawling around the garage floor looking parts. As to what goes where, I was a bit worried about finding all the right bolts for the right parts, but that seems to work itself out… When actually putting it back together, it becomes fairly obvious what bolt goes with what. I was just beginning to wonder since I had no idea what went with what by looking at the enormous tupperware container full of them.

I’m not homefree yet, I still must reinstall the timing belt and all associated covers. Completetion of this task depends on waiting for (yet another) shipment from Mazda South containing the tensioner and idler pulleys… which I didn’t realize needed replacing until a few days ago. Which is better than a few days after I put it all back together, I suppose.

Argh.. me eye is troubling me. That’s all for now, then.