Soft Top Boot Mods

OCD: Doing this mod. True OCD: Blogging about it.

I received a couple comments about my hacked up boot (what we call the vinyl cover for the soft top here in the States) after my last post, so I thought I’d give a quick how-to before I remove the soft top and render the boot useless. There’s not a whole lot to this mod. Still, a half hour of searching on miata.net revealed that there was not a lot of info out there about this.

Also, I realize that only like .01% of the Miata-driving world actually uses the boot. Hopefully this post is of interest to them. I, quite honestly, never go anywhere without the boot if the top is down. The top rattles otherwise.

See, me and rattles don’t like each other very much.

Slice this seam. That's about it.

For real. This is all you have to do. Just slice the seam in the corner all the way up. It’s like Mazda planned for folks to put rollbars in their Roadsters. The boot pictured is for an NB. Sorry. I couldn’t find my spare, unmodified NA boot. The seam and modification is the same on both body types.

Optional stitching is optional.

Since the boot is vinyl, it won’t fray if you don’t stitch it up. But it sure does look nice with the stitching. Many thanks to my darling wife and her sewing machine for this finishing touch.

Clearance for the Beatrush hardtop latch.

Beatrush latch all booted and happy.

Those of us with Beatrush side latches get a choice of either folding the latch down when the boot is on and listening to it rattle (Remember what I said about me and rattles?) OR removing the latch entirely in the summer. I present this third option: a small boot mod to keep the latch secured, unrattly, and with no removal required.

You know you wanna mod your boot to look this spiffy.

There ya go. No more excuses for not using the boot. Rollbar? Fancy side latches? Bah! Boot up and drive around in style.

I’ll leave you with the shot that inspired this posting.

Rollbar + boot = hotness