TurnerX19 said:I know I am in the minority by liking the looks of the Clown Shoe, but the name should stick.
I believe Clownshoe is the industry standard term for this car.
TurnerX19 said:I know I am in the minority by liking the looks of the Clown Shoe, but the name should stick.
I believe Clownshoe is the industry standard term for this car.
Keith Tanner said:TurnerX19 said:I know I am in the minority by liking the looks of the Clown Shoe, but the name should stick.
I believe Clownshoe is the industry standard term for this car.
I’ve also seen “elf hearse” used recently.
mazdeuce - Seth said:This led us to a conversation that revealed that of all the cars my friend owns, this is his wife's favorite and he's not allowed to mess with it to make it better. It was a fun day.
Funny Backstory on the comment from his wife, don't know if he told you this part.
He ruined their NB by modding it, and she grew to hate it because it became less and less comfortable.
Told me the story when I took him out in my ND shortly after I bought it in 2016.
Just got a call from Mrs. Deuce that the AC is blowing warm. 
mazdeuce - Seth said:Just got a call from Mrs. Deuce that the AC is blowing warm.
be thankful it's still a R134 car and not a R1234YF car...
well... here comes the fun part of deciding do you fix it yourself or take it to Mazda and attempt to warranty it? i believe you're still inside the 36 mo and 36k miles of factory warranty?
AC in February: Texas problems :)
The AC in the car should be fully stock, so there should be no warranty problems. We have had them discharge on a couple of NDs for some reason but we took care of it in-house.
It is possible that an AC line rubbing on a turbo component could damage the line - we’ve seen that on a customer install or two - but I’d like to think our guys wouldn’t do that.
I'll throw the gauges on it and see if we have pressure and go from there.
Mrs. Deuce left the car home for me to look at today. So I looked at it. With gauges.
Pressure was loooooooow. Not atmospheric, which is good because that means that moisture hasn't gotten in (probably) but it also means that the R134 is going somewhere. I put more in. It makes cold now. We'll see how long that lasts. I'll probably need to add some dye the next time it runs out so I can trace the leak. I could bring it to the dealer, but they'd do the same thing and then I wouldn't be able to drive it around.
Anyone who doesn't own a set of AC gauges is missing out. So far I've used these on:
911
R63
Insight
Forester
Crappy Mustang
NA Miata
ND Miata
and I'm almost certainly forgetting a few cars in there. AC guages are the best.
Learning to do AC work was one of the best/worst things ever, now my trash 300k beater cars even have AC.
I do wonder if Mazda has some funky seals in these cars, because something like this has happened a couple of times. Significant discharge, then when we recharge it's all good. I think Rufus might have done it a year+ ago, and I know Andy's done it at least once.
Professor_Brap said:Learning to do AC work was one of the best/worst things ever...
Accurate.
Mrs. Deuce finally left the car home long enough for me to work on, because it's the weekend. I put in dye. It was leaking where one of the hard lines attaches to the compressor. I pulled it apart, put a new O-ring on and put it back together. It's not leaking there any more. At least for now. Probably. Going to send Mrs. Deuce off into the world with it and see what happens. At least now there's dye in the system so I just have to look around with the UV light if it stops working again.
Annnnnndddd...... the R134 stayed in for two days and then pooped itself out the same O-ring as before. I guess I'll get ahold of my local Mazda dealer and see if they have a Mazda specific O-ring for that spot.
Shouldn’t this all be under warranty? The car is not very old and none of the mods impact the A/C system
I'm home and the car is home and I bought the proper Mazda O-ring which measures out exactly like an standard o-ring. Put it all back together, drew a vacuum, looks cool. Charged and.......leaking. I used an inspection mirror to poke around and I can see dye coming through the metal of the short hard line that bolts to the compressor. New part should be here tomorrow, $60. And yes, this should all be covered under warranty except I don't want to mess around with trying to get my wife and myself in the same place at the same time to drop off and pick up the car and I don't want to get in a situation where they deny something and I'm on the hook for labor. Also, I can see that the bolt on the other end of the line has had a wrench on it, so that has likely come apart at FM. Also, solving problems is kind of fun.
More to come..........
OH good! at least the parts you're needing aren't terribly expensive.
Seth, please send me some pictures of that pipe when you get it off. Our guys will be interested to see what's going on. We may have snugged it up the first (and only) time it leaked on us, but I'll get the history.
Re: the warranty suggestions. Have any of you guys actually had luck getting warranty coverage on cars highly modified with aftermarket parts? I generally stay away from modifying any of my vehicles with existing warranties because of the threat they’ll be voided.
When I was at a large ford dealer, they were pretty cool about it. Crazy obvious stuff like a grenaded diff when you rolled in on slicks and skinnies would get denied, but I saw some highly modified STs and Mustangs, where a completely reasonable argument could be made that the mods cause the problems and they were covered.
I think it depends on your tech
The manufacturer can only deny warranty on modified cars if the modifications could have caused the failure. So it would be pretty hard to deny an A/C warranty claim on a turbocharged car, but if it had a transmission failure that would be a different matter.
Keith Tanner said:The manufacturer can only deny warranty on modified cars if the modifications could have caused the failure. So it would be pretty hard to deny an A/C warranty claim on a turbocharged car, but if it had a transmission failure that would be a different matter.
I would imagine if the dealer determined the ac, or parts of it, had to be removed/reinstalled etc to install the part they could, or might try, to make a case that contributed to the failure. Regardless, I was just curious what others experiences were since I generally play it safe with warranties.
Ah, the MM Act. Yeah, that’s the law. However, when the dealer denies to fix your car you can spout the MM Act all you want to no avail.
at that point your choice is to take the car to another dealer and see if they’ll fix it, pay to fix it yourself or contact a lawyer and pay thousands to try and force the dealer to fix your car.
Been there, done that. Don’t modify the car if you need to keep your warranty in place
Here is the offending pipe. The right end bolts to the compressor and the left end bolts to the flexible line and goes forward. The leak is associated with the right end. What it looked like with my little inspection mirror was that refrigerant was escaping through some defect or porosity is the epoxy? that bonds the tube to the end. Of course it all looks cool now so I don't know. Maybe I just got a bunch of bum O-rings? Maybe there is an issue with the hole in the compressor? We'll see. For now it blows cold enough to make my hands hurt.
docwyte said:Ah, the MM Act. Yeah, that’s the law. However, when the dealer denies to fix your car you can spout the MM Act all you want to no avail.
at that point your choice is to take the car to another dealer and see if they’ll fix it, pay to fix it yourself or contact a lawyer and pay thousands to try and force the dealer to fix your car.
Been there, done that. Don’t modify the car if you need to keep your warranty in place
I'm assuming you went up the chain of command to the regional rep before calling a lawyer. I've seen this even with unmodified cars.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
No, I took the car to another dealer and they fixed it without any issue.
I've dealt with regional reps before and in my experience they back up the service departments of the dealers they handle.
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