If you’ve ever worked on your own car, you’ve probably injured yourself working on your own car. Engine bays are a hotbed of tight spaces, sharp edges, and searing liquids ready to tear into your skin – ask me how I know. Brake jobs, exhaust swaps, clutch replacements – you name it, I’ve been injured in some way while performing common maintenance and repair tasks, leaving scars in places like my arms, legs, and chest. I’m sure anyone who’s turned a wrench has a few healed wounds of their own.
Now I can add my face to that list, thanks to a tow hook I just happened to forget existed while I was underneath the rear end of my 2003 Mazda MX-5 Miata.
Here’s how it all started: About a month ago, I began hearing a clanking sound coming from the rear end of my car. I figured it must be something loose, seeing as it only happened when I went over a bump, and wasn’t speed-dependent. I got on the ground and poked around the rear end, but couldn’t immediately find anything wrong – the suspension was all connected correctly, and nothing seemed to be obviously flopping around.
So I decided to go up to my parents’ house, where I work on my cars, and chuck the Miata onto some jackstands for a real diagnosis. With the car was in the air, it took about five seconds for me to discover the problem: A heat shield that sits over the muffler had mostly rotted away due to rust.
Rust: The Great Eraser
I live in the Northeast, which means I have to deal with rust. As far as Miatas go, mine actually isn’t terribly rusty, at least by Northeastern Miata standards. There’s some rust on the subframe and the trunklid, but other than that, it’s pretty clean—at least, that’s what I thought before I saw the muffler’s heat shield.
There’s a piece of metal bolted to the underside of the Miata’s trunk space meant to absorb the heat from the muffler, which rests just below. It shields the trunk area, which would otherwise cook your groceries if the shield weren’t there. It’s a simple item, bolted to the car via four bolts. Here’s what it’s supposed to look like:
The shielding itself is pretty thin, which means the rust ate through it far more quickly than any other metal on the car. The sound was coming from the front-most part of the shield (the middle area of the shield, where it’s darkest, in the photo above), which had rotted so badly that it was hanging off and slapping the top of the muffler over every bump. This part of the shield is tucked up and away above the muffler, so there’s no way I could’ve spotted it while the car was on the ground.
The Moment Of Contact
Rather than just remove the entire shield and let the exhaust cook everything in my trunk, I elected to remove the driver’s side portion of the shield, letting the part that hadn’t totally succumbed to rot remain in place. I undid the two 10-millimeter bolts on the left side and started tearing away at what was left of the metal.
The rust was bad enough that a good chunk of the shield crumbled away in my hands. I was able to rip most of it from the car with no tools at all. Here’s what the situation looked like:
And here’s a piece of the former heat shield that fell onto the ground:
Note the two pieces of rusted heat shield hanging from either side of the muffler. It was at this point that the shield could no longer be ripped away by hand. So I had to get a pair of heavy-duty snippers to slice out the rest of the cancerous metal that was too far gone. This is when disaster struck.
I was under the car at this point, poking at the shield, and when I realized I needed the tool, I quickly leaned up to go to my toolbox. While I thought my head would clear the bumper just fine, I forgot the metal tow hitch mounted to the frame was hanging in my path. I proceeded to thwack my face, specifically the area next to my eye, on the tow hook. It hurt a lot.
Here’s the culprit:
Sadly, my parents’ ring camera didn’t capture the moment of impact, which means my several minutes of screaming expletives weren’t recorded. Funnily, the bone beneath this area is called the zygomatic bone, which makes up the lower part of your eye socket and the outer part of your cheek. To me, zygomatic sounds more like a brand name for a ’50s-era three-speed transmission than a piece of skull.
Once I knew I hadn’t broken anything, I simply got back to working on my car (as is tradition whenever I injure myself on the job). I cut off the remainder of the panel that needed to be removed, and was left with this strikingly beautiful remains:
Though this injury has caused me mild discomfort over the past few days, I’m in no way mad at my Miata (despite initially hurling a few of those expletives in its direction at the time). It was, of course, fully my fault for putting my face into that piece of metal, not the car’s. I’d never fault a car for having readily accessible, permanently mounted tow hooks (something many new cars simply don’t have).
After I finally got the job done, I threw a pack of frozen green beans on my bruise and laid on my parents’ couch for a couple of hours contemplating my life choices while in seething pain. As always, I came to the same conclusion: No regrets… so long as the car is fixed.
Top graphic photos: Brian Silvestro
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