Today’s Kludge

A few weeks ago, I dropped the Miata off at the service station for some suspension work. My usual mechanic Paul wasn’t there, but I left it with the other guys. A short while after I picked the car up, they closed the service station and cleared it out to replace it with a minimart. I guess Paul knew what was coming.

Yesterday I went out to swap the snow tires on. I quickly discovered that they hadn’t returned the wrench for the center caps of my alloy wheels! It’s a real oddball wrench that I’ve never seen anywhere. The bolt has a 3/8″ hole with an off center 1/8″ hole in the bottom. I wasn’t going to be able to pick one of those up at the hardware store, so I set out to make my own.

Here’s the kludge I came up with. It’s a piece of 3/8″ rod with a 1/8″ tension pin tapped into a hole in the end.

It may look ugly, but it worked great.

Once I got the center caps off, I found that the guys at the garage had let their pet gorilla use his impact wrench on the lugnuts and reduced them to mush.

The one bit of good news is that while it was up on the jackstands, I found the rattle which has been bothering me lately. It was just a loose heatshield, which was really easy to fix.