Well, I found a good pair of red/black seats!
Fortunately for me, Mark in Arizona takes great care of his 04 Mazdaspeed Miata (often places it in car shows), and makes lots of modifications. He had 12k miles on the clock, and decided to install racing seats, and was looking to sell his factory red/black cloth seats. After all the details of what would be a long story, I bought the seats and he DHL'd them to me. They're in great condition except a couple minor deformations that happened during shipping to 2 metal parts on the bottom of the seat --I saw the DHL guy drop the first seat just 20 feet before handing it off to me-- but they're blemishes that don't matter at all.
When I took the original seats out, I saw all the grit and litter and leaf bits that had accumulated on the floorboard under the seats. Hmmmmm. Yeah, I think I'll make it. I drove the car seatless to the car wash a couple miles away to vacuum out the floorboard really well. A folded up blanket to sit on raised me just enough to see and drive well, and the two cops I saw didn't notice or didn't care that I had no seats in the car. Vacuumed, got it back home, installed the new seats.
I wonder: could mine be the only Black Mica 'Speed Miata with the red/black seats? I kinda hope so. But no matter -- I think these seats look even better with the black paint than with the Velocity Red or Titanium Gray (the only two exterior colors they came with from the factory).
In fact, I'm now satisfied enough with the look inside that I may never go to the trouble and expense of the door panels. If it happens fine, but I'm not looking hard.
To complete the red accenting of the car, I plan on painting the brake calipers red when I get around to it. Already bought the paint, now I just need to get it done.
3 comments:
Our mailman regularly throws boxes up onto our balcony instead of walking up one flight of stairs to place it nicely by the door. By "regularly" I mean I've seen/heard him do it twice. Anyway, your DHL man story reminded me of that.
Regarding door panels... if you ever do decide to replace them be careful when putting the new ones in... and make sure they weren't just ripped out of their previous car doors if you get them used. Ever since I took my door panels off to replace the speakers, I've never been able to get them completely and securely back on. The clips that hold the panel in place are a pain, easy to break or bend, but hard to put in properly... on my car anyway.
P.S. I love how you drove to the car wash without the seats. Almost any other driver or any other car would have rendered that feat impossible.
It reminds me of a story I heard once about a guy who was working on his project car and decided to take it for a test drive after completing some work. He got pulled over by a cop because he didn't have any windshield wipers, and the cop gave him a real hard time about it. They guy tried to reason that he was only out for a short drive, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky anyway, so the chance of rain was absolutely zero. The cop was pretty stubborn, but eventually gave in and let the guy go with just a warning. The best part, though, is that despite standing there arguing with the driver for quite a long time, the cop never noticed that the man had been sitting on milk crate because the seats weren't in the car. :)
By the way, does your car have a name? Are you one who names cars? My car's name is Savannah, but she also responds to "Deferred Maintenance".
Never noticing the milk crate: Hilarious.
The cop noticed no wipers while he was driving?? I don't know how good a driver you can be if you're inspecting other cars that closely. Maybe I'll have to keep my whole original wipers stored in the trunk just in case volunteering to mount them immediately would get me out of a potential ticket.
And Nope, I'm not a car namer. Well, actually, if I had gotten a Titanium Grey Miata, I was gonna call it The Grey Ghost - and maybe get GRY GHST on the license plate. Came up with nothin good for my Black Mica though.
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