New tires are on! The MZ3 iSport-original Bridgestone Ecopias fought me coming off, though it may be more the fact that the OE steel wheels have such a pronounced ridge in the bead seat area. One of the new tires gave me a little bit of grief to seat, also. I ended up leaving the standard rubber valve stems for now, replacing only the one that proved to be damaged, but will likely continue to seek info on replacement rubber TMPS thingies sometime in the future. Of course I couldn't locate my homemade bead breaker, so it was back to the extremely tedious bumper jack routine (the more so since I had to run it up and down several times for each bead instead of just once like it should have been).
The new tires are Kelly Edge HP in 225/55/16 (same height as the tires I've been running in 205/60/16, which in turn I liked better than the 205/55/16 that was the first "-1" size I tried), V rated apparently, that I found for $77/each on Amazon with free shipping. One advantage to the odd size was that it came with a slightly higher load rating, which seemed like a good idea on a 3500# vehicle. This is probably my second time voluntarily buying an "off brand" tire, the first being a set of Kumho Venture light truck tires many years ago. I don't really count the pair of Cooper Lifeliners a shop sold me in the '90s, since they didn't give me a choice. They drove well enough on a test drive, and one balanced out on my new bubble balancer with no weight added (I do recommend the balancer mod some guys on YouTube are talking about where you drill the pin hole in the head out so it makes contact where it's supposed to and greatly reduces friction). It will be interesting to see how they do over the winter, but they should be better than Baldinis.
I did end up clearancing the gigantic bump stop looking thing depending from the swaybar endlink attachment point, since it was dragging heavily on the sidewalls the first time I pulled into the street. Since these tires are only slightly wider than stock, I'm thinking those blocks must have been extremely close to the tires originally, but I never noticed since it wasn't a problem. Interesting that we didn't have clearance problems I'm aware of when we put 225/50/17 tires on the "3".
I did do a few other things with this car recently. One was that I discovered if you remove the center row seats entirely, there's just enough clearance to move a Hammond A100 series organ. I may have posted about figuring out how to make a roof rack for about $10 out of old 2x4s and four m6 bolts from the hardware store - this allowed me to transport my extension ladder to my church's old building so I could take down the outdoor sign. Also, I removed the rear seats and trim panels to troubleshoot the fuel door not wanting to stay closed - turns out the remote cable, even though it looks fine, just won't move freely anymore. I've left it off for now since with the panels out you can just reach in and release the fuel door manually with the built in little hook thing (that for some reason Mazda didn't provide a way to access without disassembly like they apparently did on other models), but I'll need to fix it better eventually. The cable isn't actually that expensive to replace, just doesn't seem like a high priority with the whole suspension wanting to be rebuilt!
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