Saturday, December 18, 2010

Now my work begins

The Mazda is parked in my garage; made it home with ease. Given that I drove it an hour home after I bought it, and it's been sorted out since then, I wonder why the shop is still cautious about me going on a trip out of town in the 323. However, I'll follow their advice for a few weeks. In the meantime, I'm going to do some easy work on the GTX.

1- now that the extra parts have been inventoried, I need to offload them from the trunk. The list I have says to toss some of the parts as being bad, so I wonder why they were kept in the first place?
2- order a stud for the rear hatch, as my right one broke off.
2a- make sure the strut holding the broken stud can be reused. That is, can the broken stud be popped out of the hole.
3- Replace the headlight. This (according to the shop manual) requires removal of the grill.
4-Dome light. The cover fell off on the way up the first day, but the light was working. Last night when I was rooting around inside, it wasn't. Figure out why and fix it.
5- CLEAN interior
6- CLEAN exterior. They're both worse than I've ever seen a vehicle. When I closed the hatch today, it raised a cloud of dust.
7- Check air filter. The box is marked that it has a K&N. Does it? Dirty?
8- Tire Stud. I noticed that on the rear right wheel one stud is short, and that it seems to have a different style lug nut. I'm surprised that the shop, which worked on the rear brakes didn't notice or mention it to me. Check and see if it looks shiny, indicating recent (the shop's) damage.
9- Plug wires. I'm told the wireset on the car are rusted. It's easy to swap a new set. There seem to be generic wires that fit, and specific wires that also plug holes in the manifold. As LW says on the GTX group:

...the SOHC & the DOHC wires are totally different, although they might physically work, the DOHC have seals on the wires to seal to the cam cover.

So, it looks like I should spend the extra $ to get the correct set. Looks like around $50 instead of $25.

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