Hello again. Merry Christmas!

I worked on only one thing this weekend. My grand experiment…

As most NA Miata owners know, (or soon will.) A big weakness that we have on our car is the rear license plate surround. That piece of plastic is starting to become hard to find. When you do find one on a salvage Miata. It’s often brittle and in poor shape. If you try to buy a new piece it can be quite expensive.

I wanted to try to save my piece and at the same time reinforce it. Sooooo…… I thought I would try fiberglass.

It didn’t turn out pretty, but dammit you could probably stand on the thing now.

Here is the original broken piece.

Tell me you haven’t seen this before!

In the next photo. you will see the major reason most of these pieces disintegrate.

Directly underneath the license plate there is a metal frame. It rusts and breaks in to several pieces.

The plastic, lacking support, starts to crack in several places soon afterward.

(Right above the clip. Yes I am using my engine as a stand.)

Here is the piece during the application of the fiberglass matting.

Here it is after…

Look Ma! No more broken bits!!!

As I said before, it’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be. You won’t see this when the piece is reattached to the car.

I would love to try this on an instrument cover. Another known problem with the NA’s

There are other ways to fix broken plastic bits. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone.

Finally, I thought I would share a final picture of the stripped engine bay…

Every time I see this picture, I question my sanity.

Well, that’s it for now, See you next week!