A little cleaning - and spoiler removal (Originally posted 6/7/10)

While I wait to get the parts I need to put the transmission and LSD in the car, I’m working on doing some cleaning.  As everyone knows that has ever worked on a car, it’s always much easier and nicer when the car is clean.  Since all of my other MX-5s were new, they were super clean and easy to work on.

This car however, has about 95,000 miles on it, and thus has accumulated a lot of dirt, sand, and other muck.  The front is pretty nice under the car because of the new subframe and right suspension pieces, but the rear isn’t so nice.  So, tonight after cleaning up my Goodwin Racing muffler, I started on some of the parts I’ve pulled off the car.  First up was the powerplant frame followed by the rear hubs which are already off of the car to do the differential swap.  Next up, I got under the car and started brushing off the grit figuring that I could clean the multi-links and subframe while they were in the car.   This lasted all of a couple of minutes.  I think we’ve all cleaned things in this fashion and there are always missed spots.  So, I decided to just pull off the subframe and then take off each of the links.   This way I’m able to clean everything much more thoroughly.  Additionally, this will allow me to clean the unibody properly.  So, I got the right side links cleaned and will finish the rest of the parts over the next couple of days.

Since I’ll be putting a “proper” rear spoiler on the rear decklid, I had to take off the stock spoiler.  I spent last night working on this.  The stock spoiler is held on mostly with double sided tape.  There is also a tab that goes through the trunk lid.  In order to remove the spoiler, I had to cut through the double sided tape and pry up on the spoiler to work my way around.  The tab was the easy part, as there is an access hole on the underside of the trunk lid.  Once removed, I took a heat gun to the portion of the tape still attached to the trunk to ease the removal.  After that was off, a little Goof Off was used to get all of the adhesive off, and then this was followed up with some Quick Detail.  Finally I used some Griot’s Garage polish to remove the remainder of the residues.  Now other than the hole from the spoiler, you can’t tell there was ever a spoiler on the lid.