Miata: New wheels

Picked these up from a guy in Bradford who had them listed on Kijiji.  Turns out he's a long-time Mazda mechanic who for many years did runs down to the southern states to get Miata parts rust-free.  However, since the economy went bad and people driving Miatas up here tended to be cheapskates (his opinions), he's sold off all his parts - these were the last set of wheels he had.  They're in pretty nice shape, just slight curb rash on one or two, easily remedied.

I initially thought they were the hollow-spoke wheels, but turns out they are 'semi-hollow'.  These came on the 94-97 automatic Miatas.  BTW, the weights for hollow/semi-hollow/solid spoke wheels are 10.8/11.2/11.5lbs each.  Still a heck of a lot lighter than the 16" NB wheels Mia is currently rockin', at 15.3lbs each.

The unsprung weight reduction should lead to a number of benefits:

  1. Better mileage (less weight for the drivetrain to spin)
  2. Better ride quality (less work for the suspension to travel up/down, so easier to traverse bumps)
  3. Better handling (same reason above)
  4. Narrower than the 16", so better in the winter
Now, it'll be a little less fancy-lookin', but I believe I can help that cause.  (I do really like the look of the NB wheels, kinda like the Porsche Turbo-twist wheels)  Enter the 7-spoke wheels, some abrasive pads, sandpaper, paint, and clearcoat.  That's the theory, anyway.  I've always had a soft spot for bronze wheels (from my days at WheelsDirect, and the early Rota selections), and bronze w. polished lip = nom.

Something to do once all the maintenance is up to spec.

Bling.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning through failure - a keyboard creation journey

Image
tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many...
Read more

Learning Opportunities - Watching/listening list

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours).  Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between.  Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road.  First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective.  Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'.  So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world.  Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible...
Read more

DFSR - eventid 4312 - replication just won't work

This warning isn't documented that well on the googles, so here's some google fodder: You are trying to set up replication for a DFS folder (no existing replication) Source server is 2008R2, 'branch office' server is 2012R2 (I'm moving all our infra to 2012R2) You have no issues getting replication configured You see the DFSR folders get created on the other end, but nothing stages Finally you get EventID 4312: The DFS Replication service failed to get folder information when walking the file system on a journal wrap or loss recovery due to repeated sharing violations encountered on a folder. The service cannot replicate the folder and files in that folder until the sharing violation is resolved.    Additional Information:  Folder: F:\Users$\user.name\Desktop\Random Folder Name\  Replicated Folder Root: F:\Users$  File ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-v0  Replicated Folder Name: Users  Replicated Folder ID: 33F0449D...
Read more