The wheels that I had painted almost two months ago finally had the Dunlop Direzza III tires mounted on them. I had gotten it done at a local Mavis Discount Tire store for about $70.
However, I did not get them to mount the wheels on the Miata so that I could learn to do it myself. The reason I waited this long to get the wheels on was that I wanted to replace the brake pads and also buy a portable 20V DeWalt high torque impact wrench for about $250. But today I decided that it was time to mount the wheels and drive the car in those performance tires. Good weather makes you do that !
Without an impact wrench, you can use a 21mm deep socket, a socket extension, a breaker bar, a ratchet and a torque wrench to do the work. You also need a jack and jack stands, but since I have a mid-rise lift I used that. It took me about 2 hours to do this as it was the first time.
Read More →One of the relatively easy improvements to your engine’s performance besides an oil change is to replace the spark plugs and the plug wires which is what I did today.
The recommended spark plugs for the NB Miata are the NGK Iridium IX plugs as seen in Figure 1. I also decided to replace the plug wires with NGK blue plug wires, both of which I purchased from Rockauto.com.
For the 1999 NB Miata, which has a 4-cylinder engine we need 4 spark plugs (Figure 2).
Read More →The Miata’s headlights were not as clear as I liked, so I decided to try to clean them with Meguiar’s headlight restoration kit (Figure 1), which I purchased at my local auto parts store.
Chris Fix has a video (and another) on how to clean up the headlights but I did not follow his method, and instead bought a restoration kit to see if it did the job. I think it did a decent job.
Read More →I purchased the Miata almost a year ago, and it was time to change the oil. Since I had never done it before, I expected it to take longer than normal as I would need to familiarize myself with the process. It was quite easy to drain the oil, but removing the installed oil filter took a long time and I struggled with it, but eventually got it off. This post describes step-by-step how to do it.
Read More →The wheels I bought earlier were from different cars, and I wanted to paint them bright red to get a unique look on my silver Miata. It took about 12 hours of work spread across 3 days to get it done. In this post, I describe how to paint wheels at home for cheap.
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