Mudflap+

The Midas was fitted with plastic type of mudflaps to the front. The front offside one split and was hanging down. I removed it and asking on the Facebook page what it came off no one was sure. I posted a photo of the broken one and the Chinese style characters on it. One of the Facebook members showed the photo to a colleague who identified it as come from a Mazda that was sold as a Mazda 6 in the UK. I looked online and on eBay I found photos of a set for sale and it looked identical. I ordered a set and they arrived a week later and unfortunately there were 3 rears and only 1 front. I returned them and a week later I got a replacement set with the 4 correct ones in.

The original one was mounted with 3 screws and a load of black sealer. I scraped off the sealer and went to fit the new one. I found that the new fixing screws were much larger in diameter and so had to drill out the holes in the wheel arch to a larger size. I fitted new new mudflap and it went on well without any sealer. There is a slight gap on the top outer edge and I will try some heat on this to see if I can get it to sit closer to the body. I tried the rear ones on the rear and they are too large and the wrong shape, however, it looks like with a modification the front ones could also fit on the rear. I am not sure that I will bother as it is, of course, front wheel drive.

As the cooler weather is now here I decided to fit the hard top back on the Midas and found that it would not seat properly. After some head scratching I found that the issue was with the windblocker that I had fitted It sticks out past the roll hoop on the side at the top and as a result the hard top would not drop down far enough at the rear. As a result I had to remove the windblocker to fit the hard top. The problem area is highlighted in red in the photo below. I will have to see if I can lower the windblocker by making some different brackets so that I can leave it in place with the hard top on.