1992 RX-7 FD. A tale of two Rexes and several engines...
Discussion
Well, it's probably about time I got my s
t together and did a thread on my car, then. Since it's raining like The Crow and I can't get to working on it, I may as well write about it instead! At the moment it's all a bit up in the air. Literally
but there's quite a bit of story that leads up to this point. So if you're sitting comfortably?
Right, before I go on, I'd like to say that at no point was there a definite aim in mind, a strategy or a plan of any kind. I've just sort of blundered my way through, learnt a lot on the way, made some great mates in the process, wept tears of blood, had some of the lowest lows and the highest highs and I wouldn't change a thing. It's been epic. It does mean I've changed the same thing over and over in some cases, and you can take this as an example of how not to mod a car if you like, I could have done it a hell of a sight cheaper and quicker if I'd gone from A to B without diverting through C to Z en route
OK, then, our story starts over a decade back. My only transport for ten years had been two-wheeled, including a couple of years as a bike courier both in London Village and long-distance. I've moved on to working on the trains since then. It's winter, and I've just fallen off my winter hack Z400-4 (insert parenthesis with photo of offending article here;)
in the snow on the way to work at about 4 a.m. "Y'know what," I think to myself, struggling to heave the 400lb pigiron old Iron Barge off my leg while the 4-1 Motad slowly but painfully scorches my waterproofs indelibly into my flesh..."I think I might buy a sodding car..."
So off I went out shopping. Bear in mind my last four-wheeled transport had been a Morris Marina (fastback coupe mind, in sorta BRG if you squinted) back in the days of black and white (another wibbly-wobbly flashback parenthesis here)
and it'll be clear I've no bloody idea about sensible car purchasing strategy. So it seemed to me the only rational choice for practical, economical, every day transport was...drum roll...
A Ford Probe 2.5 litre V6 (which is at least basically a Mazda MX-6 in a fat suit). Yeah, have a good laugh, this is as good as this thread'll ever get
It's not all bad news, it was in metallic blue. With Shelby Cobra stripes. See;
Dang!
To be fair, despite the modifications of questionable taste, it was an excellent motor, sounded brilliant with that lovely v6 burble through a full Scorpion exhaust, and children used to laugh and point in the street, which is the only true measure of whether a car's cool or not. I will grant you the carbon fibre Big Gay Wing was possibly a bit overkill on a front wheel drive car...
No defence is offered, but it was a looooong time ago now.
Anyway, moving on. In the mess room at work, we're lounging around chatting about cars. One of the guys is selling his M3 Bimmer because he's fed up with people keying it and leaving footprints over the bonnet when it's sat in the carpark at work. He's thinking of a 944 and the conversation turns to whether the cachet of a Porsche is worth the premium they command over Japanese equivalents like 300ZXs, Supras, etc. I'm keeping quiet, I've got a Ford Probe with BGW and Viper stripes for God's sake... and I've also got a FireBlade that can break the National Speed limit in first gear so it's all a bit academic to me.
Fella pipes up his RX-7 would eat any 944 for breakfast... and he's got it up for sale because he can't afford the petrol.
It's mine.
I don't even have to drive it, it's mine the instant the words are out of his flapping stupid mouth. Most beautiful Japanese car ever made, ridiculous performance, unique power plant (I've been in love with rotaries ever since the days of bad-boy headbangers Haslam, Nation and Spray on the jet-black JPS Nortons, and of course the immensely talented late, great Steve Hislop giving the Hoover-pipe special absolute Larry over The Mountain). I'm besotted. And that's even before we mention that film with Mr Vincent Diesel and all those funny glow-in-the-dark cars.
Still, let's try to appear sensible about it, even if only to pacify the wife. Fella brings the Rex round so I can test drive it. Like, what the hell do I need to test drive it for? Just look at it...
...it's beautiful! Ahhh.... that's why I need to test drive it; the brakes are warped like Marilyn Manson. All of them by the feel of it, I get double vision from the vibration every time I use them... or is it the knackered wheel bearing doing that? The boot's full of water. You could keep tropical fish in the spare wheel well. There's a big dent in the bonnet where one of his neighbours hit it with a hammer to "teach him a lesson"
Wha...? Nice neighbourhood. Or utter bellend?
"Do you use high octane petrol?" No, he uses the cheapest he can get. "What oil do you use when you change it?" Oh, you don't bother changing it, huh? Oooooo-kay. Jesus, I'm even more determined to buy the poor thing. I'm not buying a car, I'm rescuing it.
Right, it's got the all-important piece of paper when buying a rotary, a receipt for a very expensive engine rebuild. In this case, a bill for over £5800 from reputable rotary experts Rotechnics in Reading. He wants five and a half for it, we shake hands on 4.6. I've bought a rotary engine with a free car thrown in. The wife will be pleased
. The Mighty Probe goes to an organic cattle farmer from Chichester way for a bargain price. Yeah, it actually did
K302BUD is mine
Oh yeah, did I mention the paint?...
She was a Japanese-market Type R grey import, as stated on a new engine and with new turbo pack from when the previous Neanderthal had grenaded the entire plot during a "watch this" moment with a mate. Must have been well impressed... Anyway, she was about as stock as an OXO cube;
I got on with the job of making it roadworthy, which was at least easy, if not exactly cheap. New discs all round replaced the warped ones, and a new NSF wheel bearing (have to buy the entire integral hub unit, thanks Mazda) sorted the chassis. The paddling pool in the boot took a bit more work. I had a glazier take the screen out and re-seal it. At some point the car had been painted, and the screen hadn't been sealed properly.
I decanted the fishpond and thought it fixed. Next time it rained, it was back. Dang! Further investigation showed the spoiler mounts had snapped (six out of eight, like; how!?). New secondhand spoiler and a gallon of Sikaflex solved that one. Sorted. Now to enjoy driving it...
Third time I drove to work in it the Racing Beat back box blew itself off the link pipe around the weld. It was stainless, but the weld must have been contaminated or something because it had rusted right through. The nice man at Racing Beat said he'd never heard of one doing that before. I should have taken it as an omen
Still, it gave me a chance to go shopping for my first "proper" mod;
The hilariously named HKS "Silent" Hi-Power. Evidently "Silent" is Japanese for "Indescribably, ridiculously loud". For some reason Neanderthal Boy had swapped the catalytic convertor for a straight-through midpipe (It was essentially an 80mm diameter drainpipe) and with the marginal baffling of the HKS, the car was like a Typhoon on reheat. I rather liked it, to be honest, but it did make the stereo a bit superfluous and I was a bit self-conscious when coming home from work at 2a.m.
Anyway, we were happy together, me and The Armageddon Rag as the car was called. (If you have any interest in 60's American counter-culture, or just like a damned good whodunnit, read The Armageddon Rag by George R R Martin - yeah, him of Game of Thrones fame. It's an excellent book, full of black magic, rock and roll and general rebellion and has the distinction of being the only book I know where the hero drives and RX-7). For a week or two. Then I washed her, and the wing mirror fell off. It had been glued on with Chemical Metal
Undeterred, I bought a present for her from a holiday in Crete... a holy Ikon of Agios Nikolaos, patron saint of the island and my saint, as a Greek Nik myself. The Ikon-seller assured me it would be madly lucky. I was beginning to think I needed it to be. It fitted nicely on the trans tunnel anyway;
and it seemed to work for a while. I got on with a bit of gentle modding, nothing wild. Fitted some HKS hardpipes for the side-mount stock intercooler, a beautiful work-of-art ARC alloy induction box, some uprated silicone hoses to replace perished stock ones, just a few little trinkets and baubles
As you can see, I fitted some American frog-eye fixed lights to try and uprate the feeble light output of the pop-ups. Seriously, the stock lights on an RX-7 are utter rubbish, especially for a car this fast. A firefly in a jamjar glued to the bonnet would make more light. The frog-eye ones had BMW-style angel eyes which looked great at night;
..but sadly were even more puny than the stock pop-ups. But they looked cool. ish. Actually, with hindsight, they looked terrible, but at the time... well
anyway, I spent a good deal of time generally trying to get the condition of the car back to an acceptable level. She'd been so neglected so long just bringing back the cosmetics was a serious challenge
My most indulgent purchase was a genuine RE-Amemiya steering column mount and boost gauge. Like, why Mazda thought a sequential twin-turbo given to boost issues didn't warrant a boost gauge is anyone's guess. On the '99 model-year upgrade they replaced the oil pressure gauge with a boost gauge. The RE-A one is a nice solution, fits like OE and leaves the other dials unobstructed;
And that was it, a year of ownership passed pretty uneventfully. I polished and waxed and loved her and eventually she started to look pretty good. Montego Blue is the colour name, it's a mica flip that goes from green to blue and easily my favourite FD colour.
Sadly, nothing short of a respray was going to save the nosecone. It's a common fault on this colour; the primer reacted with the paint at the factory and it just flakes off after a few years
but the rest of it looked fine
The efini badge, otherwise known as the Superman logo. As you probably know, this was going to be Mazda's upmarket brand to compete with Acura, Infiniti and Lexus and such, debuted on the FD... and then dropped
So, looking good. Until I was on my way to work one night, no especial hurry, had an easy hour to do the 45-minute trip, foul night, Biblical rain, hit standing water on the Lancing bypass, right about the time the turbo spooled up
Dang
OOoooF!
t together and did a thread on my car, then. Since it's raining like The Crow and I can't get to working on it, I may as well write about it instead! At the moment it's all a bit up in the air. Literally
but there's quite a bit of story that leads up to this point. So if you're sitting comfortably?
Right, before I go on, I'd like to say that at no point was there a definite aim in mind, a strategy or a plan of any kind. I've just sort of blundered my way through, learnt a lot on the way, made some great mates in the process, wept tears of blood, had some of the lowest lows and the highest highs and I wouldn't change a thing. It's been epic. It does mean I've changed the same thing over and over in some cases, and you can take this as an example of how not to mod a car if you like, I could have done it a hell of a sight cheaper and quicker if I'd gone from A to B without diverting through C to Z en route
OK, then, our story starts over a decade back. My only transport for ten years had been two-wheeled, including a couple of years as a bike courier both in London Village and long-distance. I've moved on to working on the trains since then. It's winter, and I've just fallen off my winter hack Z400-4 (insert parenthesis with photo of offending article here;)
in the snow on the way to work at about 4 a.m. "Y'know what," I think to myself, struggling to heave the 400lb pigiron old Iron Barge off my leg while the 4-1 Motad slowly but painfully scorches my waterproofs indelibly into my flesh..."I think I might buy a sodding car..."
So off I went out shopping. Bear in mind my last four-wheeled transport had been a Morris Marina (fastback coupe mind, in sorta BRG if you squinted) back in the days of black and white (another wibbly-wobbly flashback parenthesis here)
and it'll be clear I've no bloody idea about sensible car purchasing strategy. So it seemed to me the only rational choice for practical, economical, every day transport was...drum roll...
A Ford Probe 2.5 litre V6 (which is at least basically a Mazda MX-6 in a fat suit). Yeah, have a good laugh, this is as good as this thread'll ever get
It's not all bad news, it was in metallic blue. With Shelby Cobra stripes. See;Dang!
To be fair, despite the modifications of questionable taste, it was an excellent motor, sounded brilliant with that lovely v6 burble through a full Scorpion exhaust, and children used to laugh and point in the street, which is the only true measure of whether a car's cool or not. I will grant you the carbon fibre Big Gay Wing was possibly a bit overkill on a front wheel drive car...
No defence is offered, but it was a looooong time ago now.
Anyway, moving on. In the mess room at work, we're lounging around chatting about cars. One of the guys is selling his M3 Bimmer because he's fed up with people keying it and leaving footprints over the bonnet when it's sat in the carpark at work. He's thinking of a 944 and the conversation turns to whether the cachet of a Porsche is worth the premium they command over Japanese equivalents like 300ZXs, Supras, etc. I'm keeping quiet, I've got a Ford Probe with BGW and Viper stripes for God's sake... and I've also got a FireBlade that can break the National Speed limit in first gear so it's all a bit academic to me.
Fella pipes up his RX-7 would eat any 944 for breakfast... and he's got it up for sale because he can't afford the petrol.
It's mine.
I don't even have to drive it, it's mine the instant the words are out of his flapping stupid mouth. Most beautiful Japanese car ever made, ridiculous performance, unique power plant (I've been in love with rotaries ever since the days of bad-boy headbangers Haslam, Nation and Spray on the jet-black JPS Nortons, and of course the immensely talented late, great Steve Hislop giving the Hoover-pipe special absolute Larry over The Mountain). I'm besotted. And that's even before we mention that film with Mr Vincent Diesel and all those funny glow-in-the-dark cars.
Still, let's try to appear sensible about it, even if only to pacify the wife. Fella brings the Rex round so I can test drive it. Like, what the hell do I need to test drive it for? Just look at it...
...it's beautiful! Ahhh.... that's why I need to test drive it; the brakes are warped like Marilyn Manson. All of them by the feel of it, I get double vision from the vibration every time I use them... or is it the knackered wheel bearing doing that? The boot's full of water. You could keep tropical fish in the spare wheel well. There's a big dent in the bonnet where one of his neighbours hit it with a hammer to "teach him a lesson"
Wha...? Nice neighbourhood. Or utter bellend?"Do you use high octane petrol?" No, he uses the cheapest he can get. "What oil do you use when you change it?" Oh, you don't bother changing it, huh? Oooooo-kay. Jesus, I'm even more determined to buy the poor thing. I'm not buying a car, I'm rescuing it.
Right, it's got the all-important piece of paper when buying a rotary, a receipt for a very expensive engine rebuild. In this case, a bill for over £5800 from reputable rotary experts Rotechnics in Reading. He wants five and a half for it, we shake hands on 4.6. I've bought a rotary engine with a free car thrown in. The wife will be pleased
. The Mighty Probe goes to an organic cattle farmer from Chichester way for a bargain price. Yeah, it actually did K302BUD is mine
Oh yeah, did I mention the paint?...
She was a Japanese-market Type R grey import, as stated on a new engine and with new turbo pack from when the previous Neanderthal had grenaded the entire plot during a "watch this" moment with a mate. Must have been well impressed... Anyway, she was about as stock as an OXO cube;
I got on with the job of making it roadworthy, which was at least easy, if not exactly cheap. New discs all round replaced the warped ones, and a new NSF wheel bearing (have to buy the entire integral hub unit, thanks Mazda) sorted the chassis. The paddling pool in the boot took a bit more work. I had a glazier take the screen out and re-seal it. At some point the car had been painted, and the screen hadn't been sealed properly.
I decanted the fishpond and thought it fixed. Next time it rained, it was back. Dang! Further investigation showed the spoiler mounts had snapped (six out of eight, like; how!?). New secondhand spoiler and a gallon of Sikaflex solved that one. Sorted. Now to enjoy driving it...
Third time I drove to work in it the Racing Beat back box blew itself off the link pipe around the weld. It was stainless, but the weld must have been contaminated or something because it had rusted right through. The nice man at Racing Beat said he'd never heard of one doing that before. I should have taken it as an omen
Still, it gave me a chance to go shopping for my first "proper" mod;
The hilariously named HKS "Silent" Hi-Power. Evidently "Silent" is Japanese for "Indescribably, ridiculously loud". For some reason Neanderthal Boy had swapped the catalytic convertor for a straight-through midpipe (It was essentially an 80mm diameter drainpipe) and with the marginal baffling of the HKS, the car was like a Typhoon on reheat. I rather liked it, to be honest, but it did make the stereo a bit superfluous and I was a bit self-conscious when coming home from work at 2a.m.
Anyway, we were happy together, me and The Armageddon Rag as the car was called. (If you have any interest in 60's American counter-culture, or just like a damned good whodunnit, read The Armageddon Rag by George R R Martin - yeah, him of Game of Thrones fame. It's an excellent book, full of black magic, rock and roll and general rebellion and has the distinction of being the only book I know where the hero drives and RX-7). For a week or two. Then I washed her, and the wing mirror fell off. It had been glued on with Chemical Metal
Undeterred, I bought a present for her from a holiday in Crete... a holy Ikon of Agios Nikolaos, patron saint of the island and my saint, as a Greek Nik myself. The Ikon-seller assured me it would be madly lucky. I was beginning to think I needed it to be. It fitted nicely on the trans tunnel anyway;
and it seemed to work for a while. I got on with a bit of gentle modding, nothing wild. Fitted some HKS hardpipes for the side-mount stock intercooler, a beautiful work-of-art ARC alloy induction box, some uprated silicone hoses to replace perished stock ones, just a few little trinkets and baubles
As you can see, I fitted some American frog-eye fixed lights to try and uprate the feeble light output of the pop-ups. Seriously, the stock lights on an RX-7 are utter rubbish, especially for a car this fast. A firefly in a jamjar glued to the bonnet would make more light. The frog-eye ones had BMW-style angel eyes which looked great at night;
..but sadly were even more puny than the stock pop-ups. But they looked cool. ish. Actually, with hindsight, they looked terrible, but at the time... well
anyway, I spent a good deal of time generally trying to get the condition of the car back to an acceptable level. She'd been so neglected so long just bringing back the cosmetics was a serious challenge
My most indulgent purchase was a genuine RE-Amemiya steering column mount and boost gauge. Like, why Mazda thought a sequential twin-turbo given to boost issues didn't warrant a boost gauge is anyone's guess. On the '99 model-year upgrade they replaced the oil pressure gauge with a boost gauge. The RE-A one is a nice solution, fits like OE and leaves the other dials unobstructed;
And that was it, a year of ownership passed pretty uneventfully. I polished and waxed and loved her and eventually she started to look pretty good. Montego Blue is the colour name, it's a mica flip that goes from green to blue and easily my favourite FD colour.
Sadly, nothing short of a respray was going to save the nosecone. It's a common fault on this colour; the primer reacted with the paint at the factory and it just flakes off after a few years
but the rest of it looked fine
The efini badge, otherwise known as the Superman logo. As you probably know, this was going to be Mazda's upmarket brand to compete with Acura, Infiniti and Lexus and such, debuted on the FD... and then dropped
So, looking good. Until I was on my way to work one night, no especial hurry, had an easy hour to do the 45-minute trip, foul night, Biblical rain, hit standing water on the Lancing bypass, right about the time the turbo spooled up
Dang
OOoooF!
Thanks! 
So, as the back end span right round on me I thought "Whoops, I'll get this back". By the time I was facing back along the road the way I'd come and the rear end smashed into the Armco of the central reservation I thought "Hmmm, maybe I won't get this back" and by the time the car had spun back from that impact to face the original direction... and kept going round I was pretty sure I wasn't getting it back. Ever.
"Damn" I thought as the NSF wheel hit the four-inch kerb, jolting the steering wheel hard and causing me to smash the centre console with my elbow. "Bugger" I thought as my clublock bashed me round the back of the skull and the car headed into the verge like a badger shot from a steam catapult. "****" I thought, as it knocked down some post-and-rail fencing (I was starting to lose my sense of humour by now, imminent death does that to me). "****** ****!" I thought as the car broadsided a couple of small trees and knocked them over, finally coming to a halt buried deep in the undergrowth.
"Excellent" I thought as I climbed out and stood up in the middle of a thornbush thicket. "Pleased with that"
The ol Bill who came out and brought some very nice paramedics seemed surprised I was taking it so well given that in his words "your car looks like it was dropped from a crane". The ambulance dudes were surprised that the only injuries I had were a bump on the back of my thickly ossified cranium and the two little fingers on my left hand were numb. The tow truck dude who turned up an hour later to drag it out of the thorn bushes was surprised it was so far from the road... in fact, he rang me up to get me to turn the headlights on as he couldn't find it in the dark. It was a night of surprises, sure enough.
The numb fingers turned out to be nerve damage in the elbow where I'd smashed the console with it. It was no big deal, I'd broken the radius head off in that elbow once before when riding my motorbike upside-down so I was fairly used to it. After a few months they went back to more or less normal. Everyone told me how lucky I was. They always say that. I've always been lucky
The poor ol' Rex wasn't so lucky though...
The combination of kerbs, armco, fencing, trees and probably a few tall bunnies bouncing off her had dented (or mullered) every single panel, even the roof.
There was a fencepost through where the numberplate used to be, wedged through the diff carrier. Good job it missed the fuel tank, then
My lovely *ahem* "Silent" exhaust was mangled, the connecting-pipe crushed flat and even the recently-purchased quietening bung (expensive too, it was) was knackered
Note how the OSF wheel is cheekily cocked at a full-lock angle whilst the NSF is straight ahead? That'll be the utterly destroyed suspension then
The wheel is testament to the force of some of the impacts...
Even my Yank-tastic bugeye lights had been FUBARed
and no amount of T-cut was gonna buff this out
To be fair, I thought I'd done well. I had every hope for resurrecting the car, the insurance assessor muttered about it probably being beyond economy but the shell seemed straight and I trailered it up to my local RX-7 expert (Jason at Super 7) who'd worked on it a few times. He gave it a look-over (once he'd stopped shaking his head, looking at me in wonder, and swearing a lot).
It was dead. Underneath was a mess, the suspension mounts were destroyed, even two of my (new and reassuringly expensive) Black Diamond brake discs had shattered. There was no way. The car was dead. I'd killed it.
So, as the back end span right round on me I thought "Whoops, I'll get this back". By the time I was facing back along the road the way I'd come and the rear end smashed into the Armco of the central reservation I thought "Hmmm, maybe I won't get this back" and by the time the car had spun back from that impact to face the original direction... and kept going round I was pretty sure I wasn't getting it back. Ever.
"Damn" I thought as the NSF wheel hit the four-inch kerb, jolting the steering wheel hard and causing me to smash the centre console with my elbow. "Bugger" I thought as my clublock bashed me round the back of the skull and the car headed into the verge like a badger shot from a steam catapult. "****" I thought, as it knocked down some post-and-rail fencing (I was starting to lose my sense of humour by now, imminent death does that to me). "****** ****!" I thought as the car broadsided a couple of small trees and knocked them over, finally coming to a halt buried deep in the undergrowth.
"Excellent" I thought as I climbed out and stood up in the middle of a thornbush thicket. "Pleased with that"
The ol Bill who came out and brought some very nice paramedics seemed surprised I was taking it so well given that in his words "your car looks like it was dropped from a crane". The ambulance dudes were surprised that the only injuries I had were a bump on the back of my thickly ossified cranium and the two little fingers on my left hand were numb. The tow truck dude who turned up an hour later to drag it out of the thorn bushes was surprised it was so far from the road... in fact, he rang me up to get me to turn the headlights on as he couldn't find it in the dark. It was a night of surprises, sure enough.
The numb fingers turned out to be nerve damage in the elbow where I'd smashed the console with it. It was no big deal, I'd broken the radius head off in that elbow once before when riding my motorbike upside-down so I was fairly used to it. After a few months they went back to more or less normal. Everyone told me how lucky I was. They always say that. I've always been lucky
The poor ol' Rex wasn't so lucky though...
The combination of kerbs, armco, fencing, trees and probably a few tall bunnies bouncing off her had dented (or mullered) every single panel, even the roof.
There was a fencepost through where the numberplate used to be, wedged through the diff carrier. Good job it missed the fuel tank, then
My lovely *ahem* "Silent" exhaust was mangled, the connecting-pipe crushed flat and even the recently-purchased quietening bung (expensive too, it was) was knackered
Note how the OSF wheel is cheekily cocked at a full-lock angle whilst the NSF is straight ahead? That'll be the utterly destroyed suspension then
The wheel is testament to the force of some of the impacts...
Even my Yank-tastic bugeye lights had been FUBARed
and no amount of T-cut was gonna buff this out
To be fair, I thought I'd done well. I had every hope for resurrecting the car, the insurance assessor muttered about it probably being beyond economy but the shell seemed straight and I trailered it up to my local RX-7 expert (Jason at Super 7) who'd worked on it a few times. He gave it a look-over (once he'd stopped shaking his head, looking at me in wonder, and swearing a lot).
It was dead. Underneath was a mess, the suspension mounts were destroyed, even two of my (new and reassuringly expensive) Black Diamond brake discs had shattered. There was no way. The car was dead. I'd killed it.
Well, it probably goes without saying that this was something of a low point in my Rex ownership. It was particularly galling because I'd spent so much time getting it looking and going well, and then rather unimaginatively decided to sternly and fatally interface it with some very unyielding scenery. I know I had only myself to blame, but it was still irritating.
It wasn't all bad news, the police kindly got in touch to let me know that they weren't going to prosecute me for due care, and the Highways Agency got in touch to tell me the post-and-rail fence I'd demolished was scheduled for replacement anyway, so they weren't going to charge me for it. They generously swallowed the cost of the Armco I'd mashed in the fencing costs as well.
I had a major problem with the insurance, who didn't want to pay out anywhere near what the car was worth. They offered three grand, when the insured value was five. This was at a time when a good stock FD was six to eight grand minimum, and a decent single turbo conversion car was ten. I basically bombarded them with ads (well, such as I could find, this was early '97 and they were hardly common cars) to prove the value, and adopted the policy of phoning my case handler every single day and being such a complete pain in the backside they eventually gave me the full five grand just to get me to go away and leave them in peace.
I agreed to buy back the wrecked car from them, which cost a grand and a quarter (25% of the payout value) but I knew the engine was sound because I had Neanderthal Boy's receipts showing the comprehensive rebuild only a year before I'd bought it from him. I knew I was never going to find a good runner for even the full 5k I'd been paid out, so my only hope was to get a decent shell with a knackered engine and make one good car out of the two. Lets face it, an FD with a knackered engine is hardly an unlikely state of affairs...
So, I got J at Super 7 on the case and he turned up a car that was already in the UK. It was part of the late unlamented RX-Heaven's stock left behind when the owner did a flit to Turkey. It'd never been registered, had an engine in the throes of water seal failure but was in cosmetically good nick. Quick rotary engine 101; it's a Scooby Sandwich made up of an endplate, then a housing with the rotor in it, then a centre plate, then a housing, then another endplate, all bolted together through their length and sitting longitudinally in the car. The water seals are basically giant O-rings between each section of the engine and do what you'd expect; seal in the coolant. They often fail at the bottom of their circumference in cars that aren't regularly used because the coolant gathers there and corrodes the alloy of the housing around the O-ring channel. This is especially bad when the wrong coolant's been used that isn't alloy-friendly, and when the car's been stood for a long time.
So, for the price of about 6.5 grand including the work swapping the motor, I had a Vintage Red Type R to my name
We dragged the car down to the workshop and basically swapped the good (and salvageable) bits from the old Montego Blue wreck into the new car. I went and registered it with the DVLA. I had the expected battle where they refused to register it as a 1.3, insisting it be a 2.6. Which it isn't, but some bright spark has decided to use the number of power strokes per revolution to justify putting it into a higher tax bracket. I argued till I was blue in the face, but the computer said NO. The robot on the desk was unmoved by my protestations that it was the SAME BLOODY ENGINE that they'd registered as a 1.3 when it was in the old car
Bureaucracy
Love it. Not sure I can spell it though Anyway, I wasn't going to let the Machineries of The State bring me down, I had a Rex sitting on my drive again...
Until we swapped the engine and a few other bits in, she was as stock as the last one had been at first. The only modifications were a hideous back box about the same size and weight as the digestive tract of a cow, rusty as the Titanic and generally a blasphemy on the bum of my nice new car. Oh, and a very Japanese "PERFORMANCE BY LOTALY" rear screen decal;
Which was a bit odd, but very JDM-y0!
I was forced by the rather tedious attentions of the local Babylon to nail some sort of number plate to the front of it, but to be fair it looked utterly cack 
Usually there'd be a big plastic plate holder (for letter-box style UK plates) but the car was missing this completely, and the plate looked catastrophically daft just sitting there. I took it off after a while and wedged it in the windscreen, which mollified the worst of the ol Bill's feelings.
For some reason, despite being the same engine from the blue car, this one ran a lot better. I knew (in hindsight) ten percent of rock-all about how these cars worked back then. I still thought the internetz was for industrial-grade grot and eBay, but I was starting to discover forums and blogs and stuff... and learning about how little I knew. The reason the old car had run so badly was the straight-through exhaust and the lack of boost control.
These cars are sooooo sensitive to mods, the stock ECU can only cope with so much. Basically the lack of backpressure was letting the car overboost and then the fuel cut would kick you in the nuts. Coupled with as-yet undiagnosed wastegate switching problems, the boost pattern was all over the place, and again in hindsight had probably contributed to my cavalierly firing the last car into the undergrowth because the boost pattern was all over the place. Especially the transition from primary to secondary turbo. Sometimes it'd come in smoothly, sometimes it'd come in like a Motorhead concert and sometimes it wouldn't come in at all. Well, that was my excuse, anyway.
This new car still had the catalyst pipe in place, and the backpressure put a lid on the worst of the overboosting. Inspired by my new-found knowledge, and the safety margin from the cat pipe, I replaced the cow's intestine with a lovely shiny Nur-Spec stainless pipe from Blitz.
which brought some lovely sound effects to the party, though nowhere near as ridiculous as the HKS one had been with a straight-through midpipe! Inspired by my success, I moved on to further mods.
The synchros in FD gearboxes area famous weak point, coupled with the fact all the rotary motion of the engine is linear with its mountings. This means on full-bore gearchanges, the whole engine tries to rotate, and especially on third gear, you find the box has rotated through a few degrees and instead of a gear, you belt the synchro. Pretty soon it's graunching more than a tramp scratching their fleabites. The blue car suffered from this, and I'd bought a short-shifter to try and aleiviate it... which I'd never fitted because I then scored a secondhand gearbox... which I'd also never fitted, because the car died before I could.
The box in the red one was fine, but I had the shifter, and it was a gorgeous B&M one so it seemed rude not to...
..although my wife did want to know why it had "BUM" embossed on it
Compare and contrast the rhapsody in blue anodised alloy with the crusty stock one and you'll see why I was tempted just to put it on the mantleshelf instead
Fitting was a bit odd, however. The gearbox didn't seem to line up with the hole in the trans tunnel, and I was forced to Dremel some relief to get the bolts all out. I've never actually worked out why this is; the car seems straight in all respects, the engine and box have since been out several times and always end up back in the same place. All I can assume is the actual hole in the tunnel is in the wrong place, though that does seem odd. There's a lot odd about this car...
Anyway, got it fitted, and it was excellent. The gearchange action is great on these cars, but with the B&M it was more like a PlayStation controller than a mechanical device. Lovely
On a roll now, I treated the car to a dump valve for that irritating toilet flushing turbo noise. In actual fact, this is about as redundant a mod as its possible to make, since Mazda fitted a perfectly good dump valve as standard... but it vents into the airbox so you can't hear it. And it wasn't a nice shiny alloy one like my Blitz one!
As you can see, the pipes and everything had all come from the blue car and were...well, blue. I'd also scored a beautiful and very rare MazdaSpeed alloy strut brace to replace the stock painted steel one, and this had gold anodised endplates. The engine bay was fast becoming a harlequin acid trip of colours! I'm honestly at a loss to explain what the hell I was thinking, but I also repaired the frog-eye headlights and fitted them instead of the pop-ups. I dunno why, one of the things I liked about the car in the first place was that it had pop-ups. I can only put it down to a funny horoscope that month
The next purchase was an absolute steal. I stumbled upon a set of genuine Volk Racing GT-P split rims on eBay. I think the seller had listed them in the wrong section, so there wasn't much interest, and when I scored them for £187 I couldn't believe my luck
Yeah, they were scabby, but they were massive, 17x10.5 on the back and 17x9 front. They'd come from a MkIV Supra this very nice but slightly dim lad had imported from Japan. He lived with his parents in a mansion near Fleet, and didn't like the Volks. He'd swapped them for some chrome "fashion" wheels from Halfrauds
TBH, I'm not sure he had any idea what he was almost giving away. He even left me off the odd £7 when I collected them, and I actually felt a tiny bit guilty about stealing them from him.Mind you, they were undeniably pretty crusty and definitely needed a refurb;
...but by gad they suited the car. The stock wheels are 16x8, so hardly a disgraceful size for the times, but they suffer from a terrible offset blight of +50, which is clearly no good to man nor beast!
I was still very much finding my way in the world of the car aftermarket; bear in mind I'd only had motorbikes for the last ten years. I didn't fancy trying to assemble splitrim wheels on my own... and it turned out neither did any of the refurbishers I'd tried. They don't want the work, the hours of fiddling, and the inevitable warranty claims when they go wrong. A mate had just had his Skyline GTR splitties refurbed as part of a load of work through Abbey Motorsports, and on his reference, they reluctantly agreed to get mine done too. Winner
While the wheels were away, I got on with some other DIY stuff to the car. At no point did I have a definite aim in mind; I didn't want the car to be madly radical, I just was enjoying tinkering and improving bits here and there. It had come with some Jap-spec GET coilovers which sorta proved a bit of a mistake leaving them on.
Great mission statement, but like most Japanese suspension, they got the spring rates hopelessly wrong, equating "sporty" with "Insanely hard". Combined with the alloy top mounts banging and crashing away, the ride was kidney-pulverisingly hard on a car where many feel the stock springs to be on the rough side of firm already. They also had alloy topmounts so banged and crashed like your mum over bumps. They were undeniably very well-made, though and the ones off the Monte car were mullered, so they stayed.
...but I kept an eye open for a replacement setup!
Meanwhile, like I said, I got on with some Blue Peter stuff. To wit, I set about the rear light setup with some paint, a heat gun, and some Sikaflex! The early-model lights on the FD were a sort of weird lozenge shape for the tails, as can be seen in this pic of the blue car;
On later cars, '96 onwards, they were changed to two circles for the stop/tail and a third for the indicator which I think is the defining look for the FD. So, given that genuine late-spec lights were a) rarer than a Tory politician who isn't into amyl nitrate and cross-dressing and b) hideously expensive... whereas glue and paint are almost free, I resolved to do a homebrew conversion. While I was at it, I had to change the foglight on the car. If you look at earlier pics on this thread, you'll notice it was a horrid Halfrauds jobbie self-tappered to the bumper trim. Most of the time it was folded up inside the bumper otherwise it clouted speedbumps.
The one on the blue FD had been a rather crafty conversion to one of the rear reflector set-ups, thus;
^^ step one, cut away the rear casing of the reflector. Step two, bodge a bulb holder into the (very narrow) aperture within;
with the results you can see in the pic earlier. It was neat solution, but I wanted to try something else simply because I'd already done that once and I'm easily bored. By the way, any of you eagle-eyed car buffs out there ever spotted where those iconic Mazda reflector/reverse light units have since made an appearance?
Here ya go;
'90s Mazda light unit on ultra-modern Swedish money-no-object supercar bizzareness shocker!
So anyway, I got a universal racing rain light LED jobbie and a bit of rudimetary bracketry in stainless;
then all that was needed was to take some man-up pills and work up the courage to take a holesaw to an otherwise perfectly good rear bumper trim
Meanwhile, by the simple expedient of a heat gun, a bucket of searingly hot water, and a couple of pry levers, I separated the rear light units. They're held together by eight screws and a gallon of weird mastic that the heat softens to the point you can separate it. It sounds easy, but the real job is scraping all the mastic out of the joins once apart. It took a few evenings in front of the telly with a heat gun and screwdriver to get rid of it all. Eventually you're left with this...
Then it's simplicity itself to mask off some circles the right diameter on the coloured inserts, and whizz them over with a few coats of satin black paint
Mounted the foglight in my new manly hole, lol
Boshed the rear lights back together with Sikaflex (so they'll never come apart ever again lol but at least they won't fill up with water) and ta-da!
Sorted!
While the wheels were away, I got on with some other DIY stuff to the car. At no point did I have a definite aim in mind; I didn't want the car to be madly radical, I just was enjoying tinkering and improving bits here and there. It had come with some Jap-spec GET coilovers which sorta proved a bit of a mistake leaving them on.
Great mission statement, but like most Japanese suspension, they got the spring rates hopelessly wrong, equating "sporty" with "Insanely hard". Combined with the alloy top mounts banging and crashing away, the ride was kidney-pulverisingly hard on a car where many feel the stock springs to be on the rough side of firm already. They also had alloy topmounts so banged and crashed like your mum over bumps. They were undeniably very well-made, though and the ones off the Monte car were mullered, so they stayed.
...but I kept an eye open for a replacement setup!
Meanwhile, like I said, I got on with some Blue Peter stuff. To wit, I set about the rear light setup with some paint, a heat gun, and some Sikaflex! The early-model lights on the FD were a sort of weird lozenge shape for the tails, as can be seen in this pic of the blue car;
On later cars, '96 onwards, they were changed to two circles for the stop/tail and a third for the indicator which I think is the defining look for the FD. So, given that genuine late-spec lights were a) rarer than a Tory politician who isn't into amyl nitrate and cross-dressing and b) hideously expensive... whereas glue and paint are almost free, I resolved to do a homebrew conversion. While I was at it, I had to change the foglight on the car. If you look at earlier pics on this thread, you'll notice it was a horrid Halfrauds jobbie self-tappered to the bumper trim. Most of the time it was folded up inside the bumper otherwise it clouted speedbumps.
The one on the blue FD had been a rather crafty conversion to one of the rear reflector set-ups, thus;
^^ step one, cut away the rear casing of the reflector. Step two, bodge a bulb holder into the (very narrow) aperture within;
with the results you can see in the pic earlier. It was neat solution, but I wanted to try something else simply because I'd already done that once and I'm easily bored. By the way, any of you eagle-eyed car buffs out there ever spotted where those iconic Mazda reflector/reverse light units have since made an appearance?
Here ya go;
'90s Mazda light unit on ultra-modern Swedish money-no-object supercar bizzareness shocker!
So anyway, I got a universal racing rain light LED jobbie and a bit of rudimetary bracketry in stainless;
then all that was needed was to take some man-up pills and work up the courage to take a holesaw to an otherwise perfectly good rear bumper trim
Meanwhile, by the simple expedient of a heat gun, a bucket of searingly hot water, and a couple of pry levers, I separated the rear light units. They're held together by eight screws and a gallon of weird mastic that the heat softens to the point you can separate it. It sounds easy, but the real job is scraping all the mastic out of the joins once apart. It took a few evenings in front of the telly with a heat gun and screwdriver to get rid of it all. Eventually you're left with this...
Then it's simplicity itself to mask off some circles the right diameter on the coloured inserts, and whizz them over with a few coats of satin black paint
Mounted the foglight in my new manly hole, lol
Boshed the rear lights back together with Sikaflex (so they'll never come apart ever again lol but at least they won't fill up with water) and ta-da!
Sorted!
My understand of the voodoo workings of the rotary (it's like two Doritos on a pencil 
) was ever-expanding, mostly thanks to J's patient tutelage and reading up on the various rotary forums. This led me to address another rotary weak link; cooling. The wankel (snigger) always runs hot due to the three power strokes per revolution. The radiator in the FD is not superb; it's adequate, no more. As much as anything it's a packaging issue. The rad is laid down at 45% to keep the bonnet line low; if the rotary lump wasn't so compact that it mounts behind the front wheel-line, this would have been a real nightmare for the designers.
However, the standard Side-Mount intercooler is a pathetic device about the size of a numberplate, waffffferr-thin, and mounted in the engine bay with a bit of plastic ducting giving it only marginal airflow. I kept an eye on the Bay of E , and eventually a Trust (GReddy's parent company) stock-mount I/C came up for sale. This seemed ideal given the stock tune of the car and the fact this wouldn't need the radiator moving like a front-mount would have.
If you compare the Trust and stock I/Cs together you can see quite easily why it's much more betterer:
Fitting ought to be as simple as taking one out and putting the other in, but of course nothing's ever that straightforward! This pic shows the laid-down position of the radiator, and you can see how compromised the airflow is into the bay from the nose of the car.
The Trust one was eventually persuaded to fit, with some bracketry *adjustment*. Some of this involved a hammer. The airducting also needed trimming to accomodate the wider intercooler core
but the end result was well worth it. Well, I assumed it was well worth it, of course I had no way of measuring intake temp but the car definitely seemed to run slightly happier. And it was beginning to look half-decent, as well;
Although I did make up a little alloy deflector plate to cover the nasty black plastic crap that was all that was left of the stock intake setup
Another weak point in the cooling system is the AST, or Air Separator Tank. This is a plastic tank that is supposed to ...well, it does what it says on the tin. It allows air bubbles to be lost from the coolant without actually having to lose pressure in the system. Unfortunately, after a decade of being cooked by righteous turbo rotary furnace temperatures, the plastic splits along the moulding seams, and it's a common engine killer. The stock temperature gauge isn't really any indicator of actual temp, it never budges from "Normal" until it's too late, then it sorta goes right round to Defcon One in the blink of an eye and flashes at you to let you know you just overheated and blew your engine up
So, I bought a very expensive but undeniably beautiful RE-Amemiya one from Japan...
..to replace the distinctly suspicious-looking cruddy plastic rubbish Mazda blighted the car with...
..and when it was fitted along with the new intercooler...
Bingo! Impossible to get the presssure cap off. Good. Well, you're supposed to fill the system from the waterpump housing anyway, and at least it brought peace of mind that it wasn't going to grenade unexpectedly and let the engine blow
Inspired by my new-found Blue Petering skills, I turned my hand to trying to improve the interior a bit. Although this thread may end up sounding like I've got silly amounts of money to chuck at the car, this isn't the case at all. Don't get me wrong, if I have it, I'm happy to spend it... it's just that I don't seem to have it very often. With that said, I've always got more money than sense .
The steering column is unadjustable, and though I'm a non-freakish 5'10", I'm massive compared to the jockey-sized Japs who designed it. It was a struggle fitting my legs under the bus-sized steering wheel, so even though it had a nice embossed efini logo, it had to go. Most of the stuff on the car had come from eBay, and my... ahhhem... carefulness (I refuse to say tightness) meant I often bought tatty stuff in the hope of cleaning/fixing it up for cheaps. With this in mind, I took a punt on a used Sparco steering wheel with tatty alcantara trim. It was like £20 and I thought "how hard can it be to re-cover?"
The answer, of course, is "unbelievably hard"!
I had some Alcantara in the garage left over from a previous project, but I'd never used it on a compound curve. The wheel, obviously, is curved in cross-section as well as in circumference. Alcantara, for those who've never used it, doesn't stretch or give. At all. This meant I'd wasted several yards, a gallon of contact adhesive, and given my few remaining hairs a serious percentage of grey buy the time two days later I conceded defeat. I think I actually invented some new swear words, as time after time I was peeling off sticky, manky, wrinkled bits of material and starting again. It's a job I will never attempt ever again, and the sick part of the joke is there are probably thousands of Chinese eight-year olds chained to a desk in some eBay sweatshop knocking the damn things out at twenty an hour with their eyes shut.
However, I hate to lose, so I steeled myself for one more try...
Oh, thank God! Just the one wrinkle, it was good enough. In my defense, the repair has lasted these five years and has only just started to peel off and need re-gluing. I'm happy with that... but I think I may buy a new wheel rather than try to stick it back down
Prophetic...
I added a bit of relief to the coal-hole interior by transferring some bits from the old blue car, the "lucky" ikon, of course, the Sparco Paul Walker-stylee gearknob that gives you seventeen forward speeds just like in F&F, that kinda thing. I got some red leather gear and handbrake gaiters, since the Mazda ones were that flaky faux-leather vinyl stuff and they'd pretty much fallen to bits. Also got a nice DIN blanking plate with the efini logo laser-cut from that fella on eBay in Wales who does all these sorta things out of work hours.
Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the cassette deck, the blue car had come with a CD changer in the boot, so that was good enough for me, I swapped that over too. The sound system was terrible anyway, the speakers rattled and hummed worse than U2 so I didn't use it as often as not.
As I mentioned earlier, the stock temperature gauge is utter rubbish, not so much an early-warning as a gloat-after-the-event. Faithful ol' eBay scored a pair of gauges, water temp and oil pressure (equally important on a Rex where the oil does a lot of work), and an RX-7 specific A-pillar mount.
They were nice and simple mechanical GReddy gauges, which are still my favourite style, so clear and pleasant to look at. The pillar mount, however, was a total pain in the bum. A Rex cockpit is hardly spacious, and with two 60mm gauges mounted on the pillar, all it meant was that I continually banged my big hairy knuckles on them when trying to steer, which was hardly ideal
Dang. One more thing to sort out. Sometimes it's two steps forward, two back... the RE-Amemiya boost gauge had gone west too, so was replaced by a little HKS one that I'd assumed was 52mm but turned out to be like 40mm I didn't even know such a thing existed, and it was very nice and accurate and all that but at about the size of a wristwatch, hardly easy to read the 0.8 to 1 to 0.8 bar boost pattern of a sequential turbo FD. One step forward, two back then...
A bit like fitting some bonnet hydraulic dampers. That part went perfectly well, and let me lose the steel bonnet prop. It was great opening the bonnet now, like a posh Merc or something. But, while fitting them I noticed the vacc line to the brake servo was perishing, so I sacked it out into the bin and replaced it with a nice braided steel one with alloy finishers. Looks nice don't it?
Yeah, it looks nice. Didn't work so well, though. I'd forgotten there's a one-way valve in the original line, so the brakes were now not only no longer servo-assisted, I stood a good chance of putting manifold pressure of a bar through the servo and blowing it up like a fat frog on a footpump
"Sometimes my own stupidity amazes even me", I thought as I went through the bins for the old pipe. "But only sometimes, because some of the time I know what I'm going to do next" I continued as I retrieved the one-way valve from the pipe and glued it into the new braided line. Phew! Brakes again, hurrah!
Then, some good news
Finally, the wheels were back
I usually try to avoid text-speak as it's an atrocity on the English language, but on this occasion...OMG!
) was ever-expanding, mostly thanks to J's patient tutelage and reading up on the various rotary forums. This led me to address another rotary weak link; cooling. The wankel (snigger) always runs hot due to the three power strokes per revolution. The radiator in the FD is not superb; it's adequate, no more. As much as anything it's a packaging issue. The rad is laid down at 45% to keep the bonnet line low; if the rotary lump wasn't so compact that it mounts behind the front wheel-line, this would have been a real nightmare for the designers.However, the standard Side-Mount intercooler is a pathetic device about the size of a numberplate, waffffferr-thin, and mounted in the engine bay with a bit of plastic ducting giving it only marginal airflow. I kept an eye on the Bay of E , and eventually a Trust (GReddy's parent company) stock-mount I/C came up for sale. This seemed ideal given the stock tune of the car and the fact this wouldn't need the radiator moving like a front-mount would have.
If you compare the Trust and stock I/Cs together you can see quite easily why it's much more betterer:
Fitting ought to be as simple as taking one out and putting the other in, but of course nothing's ever that straightforward! This pic shows the laid-down position of the radiator, and you can see how compromised the airflow is into the bay from the nose of the car.
The Trust one was eventually persuaded to fit, with some bracketry *adjustment*. Some of this involved a hammer. The airducting also needed trimming to accomodate the wider intercooler core
but the end result was well worth it. Well, I assumed it was well worth it, of course I had no way of measuring intake temp but the car definitely seemed to run slightly happier. And it was beginning to look half-decent, as well;
Although I did make up a little alloy deflector plate to cover the nasty black plastic crap that was all that was left of the stock intake setup
Another weak point in the cooling system is the AST, or Air Separator Tank. This is a plastic tank that is supposed to ...well, it does what it says on the tin. It allows air bubbles to be lost from the coolant without actually having to lose pressure in the system. Unfortunately, after a decade of being cooked by righteous turbo rotary furnace temperatures, the plastic splits along the moulding seams, and it's a common engine killer. The stock temperature gauge isn't really any indicator of actual temp, it never budges from "Normal" until it's too late, then it sorta goes right round to Defcon One in the blink of an eye and flashes at you to let you know you just overheated and blew your engine up
So, I bought a very expensive but undeniably beautiful RE-Amemiya one from Japan...
..to replace the distinctly suspicious-looking cruddy plastic rubbish Mazda blighted the car with...
..and when it was fitted along with the new intercooler...
Bingo! Impossible to get the presssure cap off.
Good. Well, you're supposed to fill the system from the waterpump housing anyway, and at least it brought peace of mind that it wasn't going to grenade unexpectedly and let the engine blowInspired by my new-found Blue Petering skills, I turned my hand to trying to improve the interior a bit. Although this thread may end up sounding like I've got silly amounts of money to chuck at the car, this isn't the case at all. Don't get me wrong, if I have it, I'm happy to spend it... it's just that I don't seem to have it very often. With that said, I've always got more money than sense
. The steering column is unadjustable, and though I'm a non-freakish 5'10", I'm massive compared to the jockey-sized Japs who designed it. It was a struggle fitting my legs under the bus-sized steering wheel, so even though it had a nice embossed efini logo, it had to go. Most of the stuff on the car had come from eBay, and my... ahhhem... carefulness (I refuse to say tightness) meant I often bought tatty stuff in the hope of cleaning/fixing it up for cheaps. With this in mind, I took a punt on a used Sparco steering wheel with tatty alcantara trim. It was like £20 and I thought "how hard can it be to re-cover?"
The answer, of course, is "unbelievably hard"!
I had some Alcantara in the garage left over from a previous project, but I'd never used it on a compound curve. The wheel, obviously, is curved in cross-section as well as in circumference. Alcantara, for those who've never used it, doesn't stretch or give. At all. This meant I'd wasted several yards, a gallon of contact adhesive, and given my few remaining hairs a serious percentage of grey buy the time two days later I conceded defeat. I think I actually invented some new swear words, as time after time I was peeling off sticky, manky, wrinkled bits of material and starting again. It's a job I will never attempt ever again, and the sick part of the joke is there are probably thousands of Chinese eight-year olds chained to a desk in some eBay sweatshop knocking the damn things out at twenty an hour with their eyes shut.However, I hate to lose, so I steeled myself for one more try...
Oh, thank God! Just the one wrinkle, it was good enough. In my defense, the repair has lasted these five years and has only just started to peel off and need re-gluing. I'm happy with that... but I think I may buy a new wheel rather than try to stick it back down
Prophetic... I added a bit of relief to the coal-hole interior by transferring some bits from the old blue car, the "lucky" ikon, of course, the Sparco Paul Walker-stylee gearknob that gives you seventeen forward speeds just like in F&F, that kinda thing. I got some red leather gear and handbrake gaiters, since the Mazda ones were that flaky faux-leather vinyl stuff and they'd pretty much fallen to bits. Also got a nice DIN blanking plate with the efini logo laser-cut from that fella on eBay in Wales who does all these sorta things out of work hours.
Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the cassette deck, the blue car had come with a CD changer in the boot, so that was good enough for me, I swapped that over too. The sound system was terrible anyway, the speakers rattled and hummed worse than U2 so I didn't use it as often as not.
As I mentioned earlier, the stock temperature gauge is utter rubbish, not so much an early-warning as a gloat-after-the-event. Faithful ol' eBay scored a pair of gauges, water temp and oil pressure (equally important on a Rex where the oil does a lot of work), and an RX-7 specific A-pillar mount.
They were nice and simple mechanical GReddy gauges, which are still my favourite style, so clear and pleasant to look at. The pillar mount, however, was a total pain in the bum. A Rex cockpit is hardly spacious, and with two 60mm gauges mounted on the pillar, all it meant was that I continually banged my big hairy knuckles on them when trying to steer, which was hardly ideal
Dang. One more thing to sort out. Sometimes it's two steps forward, two back... the RE-Amemiya boost gauge had gone west too, so was replaced by a little HKS one that I'd assumed was 52mm but turned out to be like 40mm
I didn't even know such a thing existed, and it was very nice and accurate and all that but at about the size of a wristwatch, hardly easy to read the 0.8 to 1 to 0.8 bar boost pattern of a sequential turbo FD. One step forward, two back then...A bit like fitting some bonnet hydraulic dampers. That part went perfectly well, and let me lose the steel bonnet prop. It was great opening the bonnet now, like a posh Merc or something. But, while fitting them I noticed the vacc line to the brake servo was perishing, so I sacked it out into the bin and replaced it with a nice braided steel one with alloy finishers. Looks nice don't it?
Yeah, it looks nice. Didn't work so well, though. I'd forgotten there's a one-way valve in the original line, so the brakes were now not only no longer servo-assisted, I stood a good chance of putting manifold pressure of a bar through the servo and blowing it up like a fat frog on a footpump
"Sometimes my own stupidity amazes even me", I thought as I went through the bins for the old pipe. "But only sometimes, because some of the time I know what I'm going to do next" I continued as I retrieved the one-way valve from the pipe and glued it into the new braided line. Phew! Brakes again, hurrah!
Then, some good news
Finally, the wheels were back
I usually try to avoid text-speak as it's an atrocity on the English language, but on this occasion...OMG!
People at neighbouring desks have been wondering why I've been quietly chuckling for the last few minutes as I read that lot. Very entertaining, keep it up.Gassing Station | Readers' Cars | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff