Sunday, June 25, 2017

I Have a Confession to Make - 94 Miata Paint

I have this thing that's eating away at me. It's been happening for about a year now. I don't advertise it although it's not a secret; but it's time I do something about it.

The paint on my '94 Miata has failed. The clear coat just fell off. If you look back in this blog to the end of 2011 you'll see I did this paint job myself in my garage. It turned out ok. Not great but ok. For the $500 I spent on it, it was fine. I started to see the first indications of a problem in late 2015, just as we moved from Tampa to Knoxville. There was a single small bubble in the clear coat on the hood. It was the size of a pin head but I knew what it meant. Once in Knoxville, the car had to be parked outside. The damage unfolded quickly from there. By spring of 2016 the car still looked ok from 10 feet away, but the de-lamination of the clear coat was progressing apace. By the spring of 2017 the destruction was pretty much complete. So, my DIY budget paint job lasted between 4 and 5 years. I'm fine with that. I didn't take care of the paint and I didn't expect it to last forever. It was a stopgap measure from the start.

So, a paint job is forthcoming. I will not be doing it myself. I also have a place to store the car indoors now, so once this is fixed the issue should not come back.

Large areas of the clear coat are completely gone. I've been encouraging it to come off by pressure-washing every few weeks to remove loose paint. I figure the more I can get off, the less work the paint shop will have to do.
While I'm at it, I'm going to install this RSpeed officially-licensed Garage Vary style trunk spoiler.

Here I've just stuck it on with some painter's tape so I could see what it looked like. I also have some small fender flares from Rev9. I don't have a photo of those so you'll have to wait until they're painted and installed. I'm still debating on color. I'd like to restore the car to the original color, but at the same time I'd also like to do something different. Tough life decisions...

More soon...

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