1992 RX-7 FD. A tale of two Rexes and several engines...
Discussion
Absolutely cracking read, made me chuckle a few times, please keep the updates coming.
As a former owner of a FD I can understand the trials a tribulations of owning, in my eyes the best looking coupe to have ever come from Japan.
I guess another reason I can empathise with you is my beautiful type R FD also met a premature demise, in early 2000, a diesel spillage on a roundabout saw to that, also, like you I was not held responsible for the Armco, nation speed limit sign nor lamp post I took out in the resulting accident.
Luckily for me I didn't loose my ear which was torn off between the door frame and roof during the barrel roll, a rather nifty French surgeon managed to sew it back on rather well, on a slightly less serious note I never lost any of my NCB either, Win, win.
As a former owner of a FD I can understand the trials a tribulations of owning, in my eyes the best looking coupe to have ever come from Japan.
I guess another reason I can empathise with you is my beautiful type R FD also met a premature demise, in early 2000, a diesel spillage on a roundabout saw to that, also, like you I was not held responsible for the Armco, nation speed limit sign nor lamp post I took out in the resulting accident.
Luckily for me I didn't loose my ear which was torn off between the door frame and roof during the barrel roll, a rather nifty French surgeon managed to sew it back on rather well, on a slightly less serious note I never lost any of my NCB either, Win, win.
Drew986 said:
Absolutely cracking read, made me chuckle a few times, please keep the updates coming.
As a former owner of a FD I can understand the trials a tribulations of owning, in my eyes the best looking coupe to have ever come from Japan.
I guess another reason I can empathise with you is my beautiful type R FD also met a premature demise, in early 2000, a diesel spillage on a roundabout saw to that, also, like you I was not held responsible for the Armco, nation speed limit sign nor lamp post I took out in the resulting accident.
Luckily for me I didn't loose my ear which was torn off between the door frame and roof during the barrel roll, a rather nifty French surgeon managed to sew it back on rather well, on a slightly less serious note I never lost any of my NCB either, Win, win.
So that's why people have roll cages... Holy crap, that's scary.As a former owner of a FD I can understand the trials a tribulations of owning, in my eyes the best looking coupe to have ever come from Japan.
I guess another reason I can empathise with you is my beautiful type R FD also met a premature demise, in early 2000, a diesel spillage on a roundabout saw to that, also, like you I was not held responsible for the Armco, nation speed limit sign nor lamp post I took out in the resulting accident.
Luckily for me I didn't loose my ear which was torn off between the door frame and roof during the barrel roll, a rather nifty French surgeon managed to sew it back on rather well, on a slightly less serious note I never lost any of my NCB either, Win, win.
that's a sore-looking one 
These cars do actually crash pretty well, but the weak point is definitely the roof. A mate put his on its roof with similar consequences... they just squash like a beercan. Trouble with that is the "cockpit" is very much two separate bits with an almost shoulder-height transmission tunnel down the middle. Meaning diving into the footwells isn't really an option.
Anyway, I figured the wheels deserved a few beauty shots, and bunged them on with nice new Toyos. I'd forgotten how big they were, the 265-profile T1Rs were even a bit stretched on the back. A new sticky front numberplate and some American crystal sidelight/indicators finished the exterior transformation for now. Boom!
Jeez, what was I thinking with those damned frogeye lights!
The shopping list on the door was a bit of it's time I guess as well. Those bloody Fat and Furryarse films were still an influence, I suppose. Not that it's any defense, I'll allow
Still, wheels look nice, don't they? Good, we're all agreed on that then. It was about this time I started retracing my steps, the first of many examples when I found that greater knowledge and understanding meant I was re-doing things I'd already spent money on. If I'd bought more sensibly in the first place maybe I'd have only bought once.
If you cast your mind back to the pics with the intercooler, you'll notice that the airbox sits right on top of the radiator in its recumbent placement. The ARC airbox, lovely though it was, had a second panel filter mirroring the first one, but on the underside of the box. It doesn't take a profound grasp of physics to realise that it was sucking superheated air right out of the radiator. This clearly isn't what you want. I tried to introduce heatshielding, but there simply wasn't clearance for it. The only solution was to change the induction setup.
Again, the internetz came to my rescue. Research showed that the Apexi system was the most highly regarded for the RX-7 in general, so I eBayed a twin-cone setup. The only trouble with this was;
it looked utterly cack. Fortunately, I've done a fair bit of polishing before on bikes and stuff, and I'm just perverse enough to actually find it quite therapeutic. I mean, I reach my limit for crusty black nostril contents as quickly as the next man, but somehow it's a rewarding task in its own right; you can see the progress as it happens and you end up with lovely shiny things at the end. And we all like shiny things. Don't we?
I ended up with these;
Much improved, although I say so myself. I mean, I wouldn't do it for a living, but it's OK for a garage job
So the ARC box went onto eBay, back to the riverflow from whence I plucked it in the first place, and I got on fitting the Apexi setup. This was a bit of a faff, the sheer amount of plumbing and pipework on the twin turbo architecture means there are a lot of variables that all have to line up perfectly... and the filters themselves mount on really long and springy bent steel brackets which are a colossal pain in the arse to line up... but eventually we got there
As previously mentioned, I'd already started making up some ducting for the intercooler side of things, leaving a scoop to flow cool air from the nose airdam to the air filters.
Once I'd got the induction kits mounted, I could start to measure up for some heatshielding to divide them off from the heat of the radiator and intercooler. The first version was cardboard, for ease. Rather shockingly, it's plain old cardboard box. I realise I've let the side down here and really should have used something with Kellogg's logos on it
Then with the template made up, I started in with the alloy sheeting;
and after much swearing, tea breaks and sliced fingers, I ended up with something I felt ought to do the job fairly well. It was all done with hand tools, since then I neither had power tools nor power in the garage, hence the alloy cos that was easier to work. This also meant no welding, so it all had to be fastened together some other way
which wasn't such a bad thing, as it made it much easier to take in and out when the engine needed working on. I used quarter-turn Dzus fasteners to hold the three main pieces together, and it seemed a good job.
But, hang on, what's happened to my lovely wheels!
Dang!
This was about a month after getting them back. I mean, yeah, it was winter, but you'd hope the finish would last a bit longer than four weeks!. On closer inspection it was easy to see the problem. The shiny alloy of the rim had been too smooth for the lacquer to adhere to, and when the bolts had been torqued up, they'd crimped the lacquer in an entire sheet away from the alloy. Water gets in behind...
...accelerates the damage, and before I knew what was going on, the alloy was turning to white fur and there was a bead of water you could chase round the entire rim under the lacquer
I was gutted. Not to mention peeved, depressed, miffed, grumpy and many other words ending in "ed". Some of them suffixed by "off". To be fair to Abbey, they took them back straight away, but we agreed if they were going to send them back to the refurbishers I had to have them all-painted because the lacquer simply wasn't up to all-weather use and they weren't willing to refurbish them once a year for me. Fair enough.
This was a major bummer, though. The original wheels were gone, I'd sold them on to a mate (I've since got in the habit of never getting rid of anything, ever, in case, y'know?
) I needed the car as my daily driver, so it was no good without wheels. I searched for the cheapest set of 5x114.3 wheels and tyres I could find, and found a set being sold by one of the ....ahem... "reputable" traders in the rotary scene. He's so reputable I won't even give him the bad publicity of naming and shaming... and now vanished, hopefully for ever, trailing a string of bankruptcies and broken promises behind
He assured me they'd be fine to use, yes, there was loads of tread on the tyres. I explained the situation, he was reassuring. There was enough life in them to last as long as I needed. Yes, as it turned out he'd been truthful... to a point. They had plenty of tread because they were f
king snow tyres 
I blancmanged and wobbled my way around for what seemed a lifetime on the damned things, every boring commute to work a near-death experience, even popping to the shops for a pint of milk seemed a life-affirming achievement if I could manage it without crashing. In the end, while waiting for the interminable refurb to get done, the only option seemed to get rid of the car for a while before I put it through a hedge. The weather was nicer, so I could get around on the bike. With this in mind, I decided to move up a notch or two, bought some bodywork bits and packed the car off to a sprayshop
The incomparable Martin at Speedline Imports had turned up an FD with some lovely bodyparts on it. The engine was scrap so the panels were up for sale as he was breaking the car. These included a set of Border Racing Type II wings in FRP, which were unbelievably rare and just too good an opportunity to pass up. So I didn't pass, I had his arm off for them. Unfortunately, the equaly rare MazdaSpeed 15th Anniversary front bumper was out of my price range in the same month as the wings, and by the time I got paid again, it had gone. Bummer.
I'd especially wanted the 15th Anni bumper for five main reasons; 1) it was MazdaSpeed, and therefore it'd fit 2) it was MazdaSpeed, and was therefore developed to work efficiently in wind tunnel equipment, 3) it was MazdaSpeed, the same people who designed the incomparable Le Mans-winning 787B, and who knew a thing or two about aerodynamics and stuff, 4) it was MazdaSpeed and so was sympathetic to the original lines of the car, rather than a lot of aftermarket bumpers that are all fins and scoops and canards and widgets (and isn't a canard a French duck anyway?
) 5) it was MazdaSpeed
Well, it had gone, so tough. I had to content myself with just the Border wings. And in a rare display of taste, I re-fitted the pop-ups. This had as much to do with the frogeyes finally being on a car long enough to be MOTed which had never happened to them before... and whereupon they failed hopelessly for having no beam pattern and being generally cack
While the car was in the paint shop, I set about polishing a spare upper intake manifold to swap over when I got the car back. Inspired by my success with the Apexis and intercooler, hardpipes, etc, I'd perhaps underestimated just how nadgery the UIM was to polish properly.
It's all the curves and crannies, y'see, it makes it really hard to get a mop in there. Most of it had to be done by hand-sanding, with the Dremel doing as much work as the bench mop
but I tried to keep convincing myself I quite enjoy polishing really. No, really. I do. The end result justifies the means lol
Self portrait of the artist in alloy and Nikon.
anyway, eventually the car came back shortly before the wheels did. I couldn't get the damn thing off the snow tyres quickly enough, even if the Volks hadn't looked so awesome! Here's a pic of it on the Wise Sports after the shopping list decals had been taken off. To be fair, they were good wheels, made by Desmonds of RegaMaster fame, so very light and strong. If they hadn't been three-piece splitties, white and really tatty I might have been tempted to refurb them as well but the work in doing three-piecers is humongous and there'd be nothing more annoying than doing all that only for them to leak air and be out of true!
...but the Volks really looked excellent in all-anthracite. I'd been worried they'd lose something for having abandoned the polished lip, but I needn't have worried
To celebrate, I took the car out and tried to take some nice photos in the same place as I'd once taken the Monte Blue one, just to show how far we'd come.
Errrrm... not that far really
Once I started to get used to the Volks I felt they needed just a little... something to finish them. In the end, after much fiddling on photoshop, I got some rimtape relfective Scotchbrite like the le Mans bike racers use.
It's still to this day one of the mods I'm unsure about. Some days I love it, and because I'm a child at heart I like the way it lights up when headlamps shine on it and stuff. Other days I think it's chavvy and naff and I should grow up and strip it off.
Opinions amongst people who see it are equally divided, I've had as many people say they hate it as love it. Maybe I should start a poll
It's not often long you get to enjoy an FD in blissful complacency, and true enough I had more pressing concerns now. The boost pattern on the car had been getting very odd. It should run at about 1 bar on the first turbo, drop to 0.8 during the transition onto the secondary, then run back up to 1 bar. In fact, it was barely boosting on the first turbo at all. A quick phone call to J confirmed that the primary should always be on boost (it's one of the reasons for the ropey fuel economy) and if it wasn't, there was something wrong with it. I stripped the ancillaries down to find this
Clarted!
There was a groove all round the impeller housing where the blades had been so far out of balance due to the missing chunk that they'd been running around the compressor trumpet! This was a week before Rotorstock (back then the premier show for rotangs, organised by MRC at th' Pod). My car always seems to self-harm the week before Rotorstock. I managed to score a good used twin turbo pack from a mate in FDUK.
For those of you who want to see what a twin tub pack from an FD looks like
it's a humongous, unlovely lump of iron, sure enough. With little peewee turbos stuck in ungainly style on each end.
This is without the architecture that supports the Y-pipe to the intercooler, the up-pipes from the intake, the spigots for the charge relief and blow-off valves, and of course you can't see the flappery and wastegate stuff going on inside the manifold housing, nor the three actuators controlling them.. or the several miles of vaccum switching system known as the rat's nest... or the twenty-odd solenoids actuating it and keeping it working...
This is a SIMPLIFIED diagram of the Rat's Nest;
You can see that swapping the twin turbos isn't something undertaken lightly lol. It's got a lot to do with why people regard the setup with such distrust. I wanted to do the work myself and learn the hard way, but I had to call in J's help at Super 7, I just got completely lost. He managed to even do it without taking the engine out, which I didn't think was possible, but that's why you go to an expert, I suppose
So, in a Cinderella stylee, I did get to go to the ball. Or Rotorstock, anyway. Despite my ABS failing on the way up (relay went). The ABS would have been really handy to have working, as it turned out. It was nice weather for ducks!
though it did eventually dry up and the usual excellent turnout of rotards made it all worthwhile
mmm, FD heaven
Plus the chance to see a few insane cars, like the Trial-built Cosmo triple rotor running a NOS system and Trust T88 turbo. It's a bit of an animal, despite 365 profile tyres they spin pretty much up to the legal speed limit when it's on full honk. One of my fondest memories in any context is of this thing utterly annihilating a 911 on the M1 going up
I came back with a load of new friends, and the rotary love re-kindled after all the tribulations of the last few months
You just know it's all going to head south again though, yeah?
These cars do actually crash pretty well, but the weak point is definitely the roof. A mate put his on its roof with similar consequences... they just squash like a beercan. Trouble with that is the "cockpit" is very much two separate bits with an almost shoulder-height transmission tunnel down the middle. Meaning diving into the footwells isn't really an option.Anyway, I figured the wheels deserved a few beauty shots, and bunged them on with nice new Toyos. I'd forgotten how big they were, the 265-profile T1Rs were even a bit stretched on the back. A new sticky front numberplate and some American crystal sidelight/indicators finished the exterior transformation for now. Boom!
Jeez, what was I thinking with those damned frogeye lights!
The shopping list on the door was a bit of it's time I guess as well. Those bloody Fat and Furryarse films were still an influence, I suppose. Not that it's any defense, I'll allow
Still, wheels look nice, don't they? Good, we're all agreed on that then. It was about this time I started retracing my steps, the first of many examples when I found that greater knowledge and understanding meant I was re-doing things I'd already spent money on. If I'd bought more sensibly in the first place maybe I'd have only bought once.
If you cast your mind back to the pics with the intercooler, you'll notice that the airbox sits right on top of the radiator in its recumbent placement. The ARC airbox, lovely though it was, had a second panel filter mirroring the first one, but on the underside of the box. It doesn't take a profound grasp of physics to realise that it was sucking superheated air right out of the radiator. This clearly isn't what you want. I tried to introduce heatshielding, but there simply wasn't clearance for it. The only solution was to change the induction setup.
Again, the internetz came to my rescue. Research showed that the Apexi system was the most highly regarded for the RX-7 in general, so I eBayed a twin-cone setup. The only trouble with this was;
it looked utterly cack. Fortunately, I've done a fair bit of polishing before on bikes and stuff, and I'm just perverse enough to actually find it quite therapeutic. I mean, I reach my limit for crusty black nostril contents as quickly as the next man, but somehow it's a rewarding task in its own right; you can see the progress as it happens and you end up with lovely shiny things at the end. And we all like shiny things. Don't we?
I ended up with these;
Much improved, although I say so myself. I mean, I wouldn't do it for a living, but it's OK for a garage job
So the ARC box went onto eBay, back to the riverflow from whence I plucked it in the first place, and I got on fitting the Apexi setup. This was a bit of a faff, the sheer amount of plumbing and pipework on the twin turbo architecture means there are a lot of variables that all have to line up perfectly... and the filters themselves mount on really long and springy bent steel brackets which are a colossal pain in the arse to line up... but eventually we got there
As previously mentioned, I'd already started making up some ducting for the intercooler side of things, leaving a scoop to flow cool air from the nose airdam to the air filters.
Once I'd got the induction kits mounted, I could start to measure up for some heatshielding to divide them off from the heat of the radiator and intercooler. The first version was cardboard, for ease. Rather shockingly, it's plain old cardboard box. I realise I've let the side down here and really should have used something with Kellogg's logos on it
Then with the template made up, I started in with the alloy sheeting;
and after much swearing, tea breaks and sliced fingers, I ended up with something I felt ought to do the job fairly well. It was all done with hand tools, since then I neither had power tools nor power in the garage, hence the alloy cos that was easier to work. This also meant no welding, so it all had to be fastened together some other way
which wasn't such a bad thing, as it made it much easier to take in and out when the engine needed working on. I used quarter-turn Dzus fasteners to hold the three main pieces together, and it seemed a good job.
But, hang on, what's happened to my lovely wheels!
Dang!
This was about a month after getting them back. I mean, yeah, it was winter, but you'd hope the finish would last a bit longer than four weeks!. On closer inspection it was easy to see the problem. The shiny alloy of the rim had been too smooth for the lacquer to adhere to, and when the bolts had been torqued up, they'd crimped the lacquer in an entire sheet away from the alloy. Water gets in behind...
...accelerates the damage, and before I knew what was going on, the alloy was turning to white fur and there was a bead of water you could chase round the entire rim under the lacquer
I was gutted. Not to mention peeved, depressed, miffed, grumpy and many other words ending in "ed". Some of them suffixed by "off". To be fair to Abbey, they took them back straight away, but we agreed if they were going to send them back to the refurbishers I had to have them all-painted because the lacquer simply wasn't up to all-weather use and they weren't willing to refurbish them once a year for me. Fair enough.
This was a major bummer, though. The original wheels were gone, I'd sold them on to a mate (I've since got in the habit of never getting rid of anything, ever, in case, y'know?
) I needed the car as my daily driver, so it was no good without wheels. I searched for the cheapest set of 5x114.3 wheels and tyres I could find, and found a set being sold by one of the ....ahem... "reputable" traders in the rotary scene. He's so reputable I won't even give him the bad publicity of naming and shaming... and now vanished, hopefully for ever, trailing a string of bankruptcies and broken promises behindHe assured me they'd be fine to use, yes, there was loads of tread on the tyres. I explained the situation, he was reassuring. There was enough life in them to last as long as I needed. Yes, as it turned out he'd been truthful... to a point. They had plenty of tread because they were f
king snow tyres I blancmanged and wobbled my way around for what seemed a lifetime on the damned things, every boring commute to work a near-death experience, even popping to the shops for a pint of milk seemed a life-affirming achievement if I could manage it without crashing. In the end, while waiting for the interminable refurb to get done, the only option seemed to get rid of the car for a while before I put it through a hedge. The weather was nicer, so I could get around on the bike. With this in mind, I decided to move up a notch or two, bought some bodywork bits and packed the car off to a sprayshop
The incomparable Martin at Speedline Imports had turned up an FD with some lovely bodyparts on it. The engine was scrap so the panels were up for sale as he was breaking the car. These included a set of Border Racing Type II wings in FRP, which were unbelievably rare and just too good an opportunity to pass up. So I didn't pass, I had his arm off for them. Unfortunately, the equaly rare MazdaSpeed 15th Anniversary front bumper was out of my price range in the same month as the wings, and by the time I got paid again, it had gone. Bummer.
I'd especially wanted the 15th Anni bumper for five main reasons; 1) it was MazdaSpeed, and therefore it'd fit 2) it was MazdaSpeed, and was therefore developed to work efficiently in wind tunnel equipment, 3) it was MazdaSpeed, the same people who designed the incomparable Le Mans-winning 787B, and who knew a thing or two about aerodynamics and stuff, 4) it was MazdaSpeed and so was sympathetic to the original lines of the car, rather than a lot of aftermarket bumpers that are all fins and scoops and canards and widgets (and isn't a canard a French duck anyway?
) 5) it was MazdaSpeedWell, it had gone, so tough. I had to content myself with just the Border wings. And in a rare display of taste, I re-fitted the pop-ups. This had as much to do with the frogeyes finally being on a car long enough to be MOTed which had never happened to them before... and whereupon they failed hopelessly for having no beam pattern and being generally cack
While the car was in the paint shop, I set about polishing a spare upper intake manifold to swap over when I got the car back. Inspired by my success with the Apexis and intercooler, hardpipes, etc, I'd perhaps underestimated just how nadgery the UIM was to polish properly.
It's all the curves and crannies, y'see, it makes it really hard to get a mop in there. Most of it had to be done by hand-sanding, with the Dremel doing as much work as the bench mop
but I tried to keep convincing myself I quite enjoy polishing really. No, really. I do. The end result justifies the means lol
Self portrait of the artist in alloy and Nikon.
anyway, eventually the car came back shortly before the wheels did. I couldn't get the damn thing off the snow tyres quickly enough, even if the Volks hadn't looked so awesome! Here's a pic of it on the Wise Sports after the shopping list decals had been taken off. To be fair, they were good wheels, made by Desmonds of RegaMaster fame, so very light and strong. If they hadn't been three-piece splitties, white and really tatty I might have been tempted to refurb them as well but the work in doing three-piecers is humongous and there'd be nothing more annoying than doing all that only for them to leak air and be out of true!
...but the Volks really looked excellent in all-anthracite. I'd been worried they'd lose something for having abandoned the polished lip, but I needn't have worried
To celebrate, I took the car out and tried to take some nice photos in the same place as I'd once taken the Monte Blue one, just to show how far we'd come.
Errrrm... not that far really
Once I started to get used to the Volks I felt they needed just a little... something to finish them. In the end, after much fiddling on photoshop, I got some rimtape relfective Scotchbrite like the le Mans bike racers use.
It's still to this day one of the mods I'm unsure about. Some days I love it, and because I'm a child at heart I like the way it lights up when headlamps shine on it and stuff. Other days I think it's chavvy and naff and I should grow up and strip it off.
Opinions amongst people who see it are equally divided, I've had as many people say they hate it as love it. Maybe I should start a poll
It's not often long you get to enjoy an FD in blissful complacency, and true enough I had more pressing concerns now. The boost pattern on the car had been getting very odd. It should run at about 1 bar on the first turbo, drop to 0.8 during the transition onto the secondary, then run back up to 1 bar. In fact, it was barely boosting on the first turbo at all. A quick phone call to J confirmed that the primary should always be on boost (it's one of the reasons for the ropey fuel economy) and if it wasn't, there was something wrong with it. I stripped the ancillaries down to find this
Clarted!
There was a groove all round the impeller housing where the blades had been so far out of balance due to the missing chunk that they'd been running around the compressor trumpet! This was a week before Rotorstock (back then the premier show for rotangs, organised by MRC at th' Pod). My car always seems to self-harm the week before Rotorstock. I managed to score a good used twin turbo pack from a mate in FDUK.For those of you who want to see what a twin tub pack from an FD looks like
it's a humongous, unlovely lump of iron, sure enough. With little peewee turbos stuck in ungainly style on each end.
This is without the architecture that supports the Y-pipe to the intercooler, the up-pipes from the intake, the spigots for the charge relief and blow-off valves, and of course you can't see the flappery and wastegate stuff going on inside the manifold housing, nor the three actuators controlling them.. or the several miles of vaccum switching system known as the rat's nest... or the twenty-odd solenoids actuating it and keeping it working...
This is a SIMPLIFIED diagram of the Rat's Nest;
You can see that swapping the twin turbos isn't something undertaken lightly lol. It's got a lot to do with why people regard the setup with such distrust. I wanted to do the work myself and learn the hard way, but I had to call in J's help at Super 7, I just got completely lost. He managed to even do it without taking the engine out, which I didn't think was possible, but that's why you go to an expert, I suppose
So, in a Cinderella stylee, I did get to go to the ball. Or Rotorstock, anyway. Despite my ABS failing on the way up (relay went). The ABS would have been really handy to have working, as it turned out. It was nice weather for ducks!
though it did eventually dry up and the usual excellent turnout of rotards made it all worthwhile
mmm, FD heaven
Plus the chance to see a few insane cars, like the Trial-built Cosmo triple rotor running a NOS system and Trust T88 turbo. It's a bit of an animal, despite 365 profile tyres they spin pretty much up to the legal speed limit when it's on full honk. One of my fondest memories in any context is of this thing utterly annihilating a 911 on the M1 going up
I came back with a load of new friends, and the rotary love re-kindled after all the tribulations of the last few months
You just know it's all going to head south again though, yeah?Right, back to the RX-7 then.
My gauges broke. Not sure why. One thing I've found with GReddy ones is they do seem fragile, I've since broken loads of them. It seems they don't cope with voltage spikes at all well, it just kills them. The concept of uncontrolled voltage levels will prove to be of significance to our story later on, but for now I managed to get a set of three electronic ones secondhand (water temp and oil temp/ pressure). A generic Scooby-style gauge pod allowed me to mount them on the dashtop, where the fifth speaker used to be.
When the grille was prised out I found there was no speaker under it anyway, which was weird. No idea where it had gone, some previous owner had removed it and I've no clue as to why.
Encouraged by my new-found friends and now finally waking up to the wide webby world of forum life, I plodded along to a tunnel-run meet up in that London Village. It was a top night out, and ended up deeply mad. Word had got around the forums and what was meant to be a small rotary meet at the Ace and then a prowl through the tunnels of the Smoke ended up as a huge extravaganza with all sorts of modified cars. I especially remember one Escort where the twin fuel pumps were louder than the engine. You could hear it from inside my car! Most of my pics from the night were pitifully bad ...
there was a halt at the Tate to let stragglers catch up that brought the Embankment to a halt
chaos at petrol stations trying to fight for the high-octane
extreme noise terror in the tunnels out East
and eventually burnouts and lunacy with all sorts of highly-modified metal under Canary Wharf in Westferry Circus
But when I was sorting through the photos afterwards, the picture that really drew my attention was this one from when we were meeting up before the run;
can you see what I mean? Yeah, the front bumper had started doing that bizarre RX-7 shrinking thing. No-one quite knows what causes it, whether it's the heat from the turbos, or Mazda using rubbish plastics, or simple age degradation. The bumper starts to wrinkle up, and dents between the lights. This causes it to shrink in towards the middle, and eventually the panel gaps around the outside edges of the pop-ups closes up. In really bad cases they begin to touch, making the headlight operation notchy.
It was now not a case of being fashionable, I had to replace the bumper whether I liked it or not. In a strange bit of serendipity the guy who'd bought the MazdaSpeed 15th Anniversary bumper before I could afford it had now sold his FD without ever fitting the bumper. He now had an Evo III instead, which the bumper didn't fit. Obviously. So it was fate, I wheedled the bumper off him. Mwahahaha, it was mine at last
I mean, yeah, it was the wrong colour, but that was a minor detail. And it wasn't like the car had just come out of the paint shop having had the wings fitted... oh no, that's wrong, it had just done that. Oh well. Did I ever mention that there's rarely any kind of plan behind my actions?
In a perverse way of trying to force it all to make sense putting the car straight back in to paint, I also picked up a set of genuine Mazda sideskirts. They were an option from the factory when you bought a new RX-7. They're also about the most subtle of the skirts for the car; none of the huge swoops and scoops that often blight such things in the aftermarket. I wanted to change the look of the car slightly, but not so far that it lost its original lines and the sexy shape that first attracted me to the FD. The skirts are made of foam rubber with a smooth skin on top, and these had been peeled off another car, so they needed a lot of fixing with flexible filler to make good. The bodyshop guy did say he'd never do another set, they were so hateful to work on!
A couple of weeks later it came back like this;
only things weren't quite right with the back end now;
The great big low-mounted Blitz back box exaggerated how much higher the rear end stood above the line of the front and sideskirts. Hmmm. I've still not found a rear bumper skin I really like for the FD, so I set myself scouring the interweb world for a suitable solution...
But first things first. The car promptly developed a strange issue. Every time I flipped the headlights up, the entire bumper would lift up too, accompanied by a horrible graunching noise. It took some diagnosing, but eventually I realised that the 'Murican-made crystal sidelights had the bulbholder mounted at a different angle to the stock Mazda sidelights. Because they were now recessed behind the 15th Anni bumper covers, they sat back far enough that the bulbholders were catching on the front lip of the headlight trim as it cycled upwards. Like, who'd expect something like that!?
This needn't have been a big deal, except all the early model sidelights are now at least 15 years old, and they tend to go cloudy and yellowed and look rubbish. I ended up with about eight of the things, buying them up off eBay and club sales threads, before I got a pair that were still roughly transparent. Maybe I'm too OCD (can you ever be too OCD?) but these things become a mission when you set your heart on them. I knew I'd gone too far and needed to calm down when I got excited about scoring a N.O.S. unused lens still in its Mazda packaging
Anyway, once I'd stepped back from the brink of my OCD sidelight nightmare I realised I'd have to de-fried-eggify them before fitting.
It's another Mazda example of them over-engineering something trivial for no easily understood reason. Take one apart (heat gun and screwdrivers works) and you end up with this;
The orange insert I could forgive, because this was the days before orange indicator bulbs were commonplace, but the sidelight, WTF! Couldn't they have just painted the plastic silver rather than putting in a metal reflector bowl, plus a diffusing lens to spread the light PLUS another one for the indicator? Madness.
At the last minute I had a moment of madness of my own and stuffed a long flexible white LED chain into each sidelight unit before siliconing them back together
Much better. Even the cat approved. The LED conversion certainly did the job at night, it was about as bright as the feeble stock headlamps...
...but most importantly, I could use the headlights again without the fear of ripping the front bumper off in an embarrassing fashion.
In the meantime, a solution presented itself to the rear-end problem. The car's, not mine. There's no cure for what I got I got a set of Abflug rear spats from an FDUK member. They were yellow, and tempted though I was by the rhubarb-and-custard look, I decided it would have to be the paint shop again. In another one of those lovely unexpected bonus quirks of fate, I'd bought a spare set of pop-up headlight covers. These are one of those legendary RX-7 weak spots, being thermoplastic and held on by four screws, they have a tendency for people to over-tighten the screws, crack the plastic, and then they use their light on the motorway or whatever... only to see their headlight cover take off like a far-out pigeon, fly over the roof and land in the fast lane to be run over by a caffeine-crazed Pole in an eighteen-wheeled Scania
Therefore, a spare set is a must for the inevitable flap ejection (euwwww
). I bought a set off some guy on the forums, and he emailed me to say one seemed to be vented, did that matter? He'd refund my money if I wanted. No, it was fine. Honestly, fine. When it arrived it proved to be an incredibly rare Border Racing vented cover to match my wings. Lovely. Now I had two bits of bodywork it was enough to justify more paint. Wasn't it?
As you can see, I also put a sticky plate on, I'd forgotten how irritating it was having a plastic one wedged in the windscreen, never quite sure if the next corner was going to turn it into a ballistic decapitating missile, Omen-style. Also, I put an efini "Superman" RX-7 badge on the MazdaSpeed bumper. I've noticed people almost never do this on aftermarket bumpers, but I think it's the finishing touch, and makes it look like the bumper was always meant to be there, like maybe it's a special edition RX-7 or something
Looking good, the line of the skirts now continued front and rear. As far as I was concerned, that was the bodywork done now, and after three visits to the paintshop in a year, it would have been more sense if I'd just waited till I'd collected all the parts in one big lump. See what I mean about having no plan means you do the same thing several times? As it turned out, it wasn't the last time the car would see paint, either!
Anyway, I got on with minor detailing and stuff, just prettifying and enjoying driving the car. First was to fit a decent stereo. My wife had brought me into the twentieth century (though it was eight years into the twenty-first by now) by getting me an MP3 player. Wow! It was like witchcraft, I could fit three thousand of my most execrable tracks on one little doodad! To celebrate I splashed out on a stereo that I could plug the MP3 player into. It even played CDs How modern! Treated myself to a Trust/GReddy alloy knob which colour-matched better than the old blue Sparco one but suffered a bit from being ice-cold in winter and scorching hot in summer. Annoyingly, the stereo still sounded bloody awful, too 
Under the bonnet I got on with changing all the old blue hoses and stuff for red, and generally trying to get it looking as nice as the bodywork now did. Some beauty shots to convince you...
Convinced yet? Basically I set myself to polishing everything that could be polished, and painting or swapping to red everything that couldn't
Polished
Red
Red and polished
Fitted an engine torque damper. This is a little friction damper that resists the twisting action of the engine under gear changes or power transfer. Very simple, very effective and some nice under-bonnet bling
My mania even extended to the oil filler cap. Or maybe I'm just a magpie-like saddo with no self control when it comes to shiny bits...
Annoyingly, the Cusco brake servo brace was anodised in blue These are worth having in any colour though. You never realise how much using the brakes causes the firewall to flex under the pressure until you brace the nose of the master cylinder against the strut turret with one of these. The brake feel is transformed, so much more consistent and the pedal travel firms up massively.
I even managed to get a GReddy intake elbow in shiny alloy to replace the stock Mazda plastic one which I'd never felt the love for, even after I'd sprayed it red.
It wasn't all plain sailing, though. I managed to break the PowerPlant Frame. The PPF is a steel device that ties the rear end of the gearbox and engine to the diff carrier at the back, a sort of lattice spine running along the backbone of the car. You can see it in this pic from Mazda extolling the race pedigree of the FD by comparing a chassis (rather optimistically I feel ) with one of the le Mans racers;
The nose where it mounts to the diff carrier is a weak point, and mine had broken both tangs off. This means the diff can leap about on its bushes, you can tell it's happened because the car goes sideways every time you let the clutch up and you can hear it banging around like a priest at choir practice It's annoying to change; means getting the car up in the air and dis-assembling a lot of the underside. I got Super 7 to weld the seams on my replacement one, hopefully to stop it breaking again as well as adding a bit of torsional strength to the chassis.
In addition I had loads of rough running problems caused by bits breaking in the rats' nest (*shudder*, remember that diagram?). Any bit of split vacuum line or broken solenoid will give all sorts of mutant boost issues, causing actuators to not open at the right time... or at all... all kinds of stuff. At one point the switch-gear in my manifold seized so the wastegate would stay open, and when the flap opened to bring the secondary turbo on-line it just dumped all its boost straight out of the open wastegate and down the exhaust. It was sooooooo annoying, it'd boost fine...fine.. fine....then PHOOOooooooo.... nothing and the car would slow like a yacht spilling its sail.
Not only is trouble-shooting the rats' nest a total nightmare because there's so much of it and you can't always replicate the conditions to provoke the fault on the bench, once you do find the fault, you tend to break something else trying to fix it. For example, this is a typical rats' nest solenoid;
Say for the sake of argument one of the vacuum lines to it has split so you decide to replace them all. They've been there for twenty years, cooked by rotary furnace heat. Two of the lines will come off fine. The third will snap off the spigot flush with the solenoid body so there's no way on earth you can fix it. Now you're looking for a new solenoid, too. *sigh*
And this;
is just part, not all by any means, of the rat's nest removed from the car. This rack of solenoids, complete with metres of bent and tortuous vacuum hose, lives under the top inlet manifold, above the engine, where it can be roasted by superheated air just to ensure the most damage is caused to its delicate balance
My gauges broke. Not sure why. One thing I've found with GReddy ones is they do seem fragile, I've since broken loads of them. It seems they don't cope with voltage spikes at all well, it just kills them. The concept of uncontrolled voltage levels will prove to be of significance to our story later on, but for now I managed to get a set of three electronic ones secondhand (water temp and oil temp/ pressure). A generic Scooby-style gauge pod allowed me to mount them on the dashtop, where the fifth speaker used to be.
When the grille was prised out I found there was no speaker under it anyway, which was weird. No idea where it had gone, some previous owner had removed it and I've no clue as to why.
Encouraged by my new-found friends and now finally waking up to the wide webby world of forum life, I plodded along to a tunnel-run meet up in that London Village. It was a top night out, and ended up deeply mad. Word had got around the forums and what was meant to be a small rotary meet at the Ace and then a prowl through the tunnels of the Smoke ended up as a huge extravaganza with all sorts of modified cars. I especially remember one Escort where the twin fuel pumps were louder than the engine. You could hear it from inside my car! Most of my pics from the night were pitifully bad
...there was a halt at the Tate to let stragglers catch up that brought the Embankment to a halt
chaos at petrol stations trying to fight for the high-octane
extreme noise terror in the tunnels out East
and eventually burnouts and lunacy with all sorts of highly-modified metal under Canary Wharf in Westferry Circus
But when I was sorting through the photos afterwards, the picture that really drew my attention was this one from when we were meeting up before the run;
can you see what I mean? Yeah, the front bumper had started doing that bizarre RX-7 shrinking thing. No-one quite knows what causes it, whether it's the heat from the turbos, or Mazda using rubbish plastics, or simple age degradation. The bumper starts to wrinkle up, and dents between the lights. This causes it to shrink in towards the middle, and eventually the panel gaps around the outside edges of the pop-ups closes up. In really bad cases they begin to touch, making the headlight operation notchy.
It was now not a case of being fashionable, I had to replace the bumper whether I liked it or not. In a strange bit of serendipity the guy who'd bought the MazdaSpeed 15th Anniversary bumper before I could afford it had now sold his FD without ever fitting the bumper. He now had an Evo III instead, which the bumper didn't fit. Obviously. So it was fate, I wheedled the bumper off him. Mwahahaha, it was mine at last
I mean, yeah, it was the wrong colour, but that was a minor detail. And it wasn't like the car had just come out of the paint shop having had the wings fitted... oh no, that's wrong, it had just done that. Oh well. Did I ever mention that there's rarely any kind of plan behind my actions?
In a perverse way of trying to force it all to make sense putting the car straight back in to paint, I also picked up a set of genuine Mazda sideskirts. They were an option from the factory when you bought a new RX-7. They're also about the most subtle of the skirts for the car; none of the huge swoops and scoops that often blight such things in the aftermarket. I wanted to change the look of the car slightly, but not so far that it lost its original lines and the sexy shape that first attracted me to the FD. The skirts are made of foam rubber with a smooth skin on top, and these had been peeled off another car, so they needed a lot of fixing with flexible filler to make good. The bodyshop guy did say he'd never do another set, they were so hateful to work on!
A couple of weeks later it came back like this;
only things weren't quite right with the back end now;
The great big low-mounted Blitz back box exaggerated how much higher the rear end stood above the line of the front and sideskirts. Hmmm. I've still not found a rear bumper skin I really like for the FD, so I set myself scouring the interweb world for a suitable solution...
But first things first. The car promptly developed a strange issue. Every time I flipped the headlights up, the entire bumper would lift up too, accompanied by a horrible graunching noise. It took some diagnosing, but eventually I realised that the 'Murican-made crystal sidelights had the bulbholder mounted at a different angle to the stock Mazda sidelights. Because they were now recessed behind the 15th Anni bumper covers, they sat back far enough that the bulbholders were catching on the front lip of the headlight trim as it cycled upwards.
Like, who'd expect something like that!?This needn't have been a big deal, except all the early model sidelights are now at least 15 years old, and they tend to go cloudy and yellowed and look rubbish. I ended up with about eight of the things, buying them up off eBay and club sales threads, before I got a pair that were still roughly transparent. Maybe I'm too OCD (can you ever be too OCD?) but these things become a mission when you set your heart on them. I knew I'd gone too far and needed to calm down when I got excited about scoring a N.O.S. unused lens still in its Mazda packaging
Anyway, once I'd stepped back from the brink of my OCD sidelight nightmare I realised I'd have to de-fried-eggify them before fitting.
It's another Mazda example of them over-engineering something trivial for no easily understood reason. Take one apart (heat gun and screwdrivers works) and you end up with this;
The orange insert I could forgive, because this was the days before orange indicator bulbs were commonplace, but the sidelight, WTF! Couldn't they have just painted the plastic silver rather than putting in a metal reflector bowl, plus a diffusing lens to spread the light PLUS another one for the indicator? Madness.
At the last minute I had a moment of madness of my own and stuffed a long flexible white LED chain into each sidelight unit before siliconing them back together
Much better. Even the cat approved. The LED conversion certainly did the job at night, it was about as bright as the feeble stock headlamps...
...but most importantly, I could use the headlights again without the fear of ripping the front bumper off in an embarrassing fashion.
In the meantime, a solution presented itself to the rear-end problem. The car's, not mine. There's no cure for what I got
I got a set of Abflug rear spats from an FDUK member. They were yellow, and tempted though I was by the rhubarb-and-custard look, I decided it would have to be the paint shop again. In another one of those lovely unexpected bonus quirks of fate, I'd bought a spare set of pop-up headlight covers. These are one of those legendary RX-7 weak spots, being thermoplastic and held on by four screws, they have a tendency for people to over-tighten the screws, crack the plastic, and then they use their light on the motorway or whatever... only to see their headlight cover take off like a far-out pigeon, fly over the roof and land in the fast lane to be run over by a caffeine-crazed Pole in an eighteen-wheeled Scania Therefore, a spare set is a must for the inevitable flap ejection (euwwww
). I bought a set off some guy on the forums, and he emailed me to say one seemed to be vented, did that matter? He'd refund my money if I wanted. No, it was fine. Honestly, fine. When it arrived it proved to be an incredibly rare Border Racing vented cover to match my wings. Lovely. Now I had two bits of bodywork it was enough to justify more paint. Wasn't it?As you can see, I also put a sticky plate on, I'd forgotten how irritating it was having a plastic one wedged in the windscreen, never quite sure if the next corner was going to turn it into a ballistic decapitating missile, Omen-style. Also, I put an efini "Superman" RX-7 badge on the MazdaSpeed bumper. I've noticed people almost never do this on aftermarket bumpers, but I think it's the finishing touch, and makes it look like the bumper was always meant to be there, like maybe it's a special edition RX-7 or something
Looking good, the line of the skirts now continued front and rear. As far as I was concerned, that was the bodywork done now, and after three visits to the paintshop in a year, it would have been more sense if I'd just waited till I'd collected all the parts in one big lump. See what I mean about having no plan means you do the same thing several times? As it turned out, it wasn't the last time the car would see paint, either!
Anyway, I got on with minor detailing and stuff, just prettifying and enjoying driving the car. First was to fit a decent stereo. My wife had brought me into the twentieth century (though it was eight years into the twenty-first by now) by getting me an MP3 player. Wow! It was like witchcraft, I could fit three thousand of my most execrable tracks on one little doodad! To celebrate I splashed out on a stereo that I could plug the MP3 player into. It even played CDs
How modern! Treated myself to a Trust/GReddy alloy knob which colour-matched better than the old blue Sparco one but suffered a bit from being ice-cold in winter and scorching hot in summer. Annoyingly, the stereo still sounded bloody awful, too Under the bonnet I got on with changing all the old blue hoses and stuff for red, and generally trying to get it looking as nice as the bodywork now did. Some beauty shots to convince you...
Convinced yet? Basically I set myself to polishing everything that could be polished, and painting or swapping to red everything that couldn't
Polished
Red
Red and polished
Fitted an engine torque damper. This is a little friction damper that resists the twisting action of the engine under gear changes or power transfer. Very simple, very effective and some nice under-bonnet bling
My mania even extended to the oil filler cap. Or maybe I'm just a magpie-like saddo with no self control when it comes to shiny bits...
Annoyingly, the Cusco brake servo brace was anodised in blue
These are worth having in any colour though. You never realise how much using the brakes causes the firewall to flex under the pressure until you brace the nose of the master cylinder against the strut turret with one of these. The brake feel is transformed, so much more consistent and the pedal travel firms up massively.I even managed to get a GReddy intake elbow in shiny alloy to replace the stock Mazda plastic one which I'd never felt the love for, even after I'd sprayed it red.
It wasn't all plain sailing, though. I managed to break the PowerPlant Frame. The PPF is a steel device that ties the rear end of the gearbox and engine to the diff carrier at the back, a sort of lattice spine running along the backbone of the car. You can see it in this pic from Mazda extolling the race pedigree of the FD by comparing a chassis (rather optimistically I feel
) with one of the le Mans racers;The nose where it mounts to the diff carrier is a weak point, and mine had broken both tangs off. This means the diff can leap about on its bushes, you can tell it's happened because the car goes sideways every time you let the clutch up and you can hear it banging around like a priest at choir practice
It's annoying to change; means getting the car up in the air and dis-assembling a lot of the underside. I got Super 7 to weld the seams on my replacement one, hopefully to stop it breaking again as well as adding a bit of torsional strength to the chassis.In addition I had loads of rough running problems caused by bits breaking in the rats' nest (*shudder*, remember that diagram?). Any bit of split vacuum line or broken solenoid will give all sorts of mutant boost issues, causing actuators to not open at the right time... or at all... all kinds of stuff. At one point the switch-gear in my manifold seized so the wastegate would stay open, and when the flap opened to bring the secondary turbo on-line it just dumped all its boost straight out of the open wastegate and down the exhaust. It was sooooooo annoying, it'd boost fine...fine.. fine....then PHOOOooooooo.... nothing and the car would slow like a yacht spilling its sail.
Not only is trouble-shooting the rats' nest a total nightmare because there's so much of it and you can't always replicate the conditions to provoke the fault on the bench, once you do find the fault, you tend to break something else trying to fix it. For example, this is a typical rats' nest solenoid;
Say for the sake of argument one of the vacuum lines to it has split so you decide to replace them all. They've been there for twenty years, cooked by rotary furnace heat. Two of the lines will come off fine. The third will snap off the spigot flush with the solenoid body so there's no way on earth you can fix it. Now you're looking for a new solenoid, too. *sigh*
And this;
is just part, not all by any means, of the rat's nest removed from the car. This rack of solenoids, complete with metres of bent and tortuous vacuum hose, lives under the top inlet manifold, above the engine, where it can be roasted by superheated air just to ensure the most damage is caused to its delicate balance
So, you'll appreciate any diagnosis is a bit hit-or-miss at best - as well as time consuming and extremely fiddly. Much as I loved the feel of the twins (ooooer) when they were working properly all too often they weren't working properly and I was beginning to look for alternatives. First step...
The general accepted rule of thumb on FDs is you can change intake or exhaust, but if you do both then you really need to look at the ECU as well. The stock one isn't the worst in the world, but it does get a bit out of its depth reigning in the boost when the exhaust is freer-flowing and its getting more air in as well.
Since I'd already changed both, it was long past time to address the fueling. To this end once the rats nest problems seemed to be sorted, for a while at least, I invested in an Apexi Power Fuel Computer. This is a standalone ECU replacement, the sorta world standard for RX-7s to be fair. It works very well without being exceptional. They have some nice features like the Power Commander, which is a handheld device that lets you change certain parameters yourself without needing a datalogit, though it is a very tedious way of doing it. You could even map using it, but you'd need the patience of an entire canon of saints.
You can use it to display up to eight engine parameters in real time, taken from the sensor feeds into the ECU, which is dead handy. It enables you to monitor things you'd never find a dial gauge for, like injector duty, and all sorts of useful things like battery voltage or air intake temperature without filling the dash with a million gauges.
You can see the Commander on the dash in this pic. I spent out on a genuine R-magic holder for it, which is a Japanese tuning house who run awesome competition cars in drift and grip racing... which is why they justify charging £100 for a glorified mobile phone holder presumably! I also changed to my third gearknob variation (I'm so fickle ), a FEED (Fujita Engineering Developement, another legendary Japanese rotary tuning house) one in duracon. Mmmm, a gearknob that didn't strip the skin off my hand with temperature variations at last!
With the ECU in it needed mapping, so my man J sorted it out.
Well 270 bhp at the wheels wasn't earth-shattering, but it was more than the car had left the factory with, so that was good enough. The car ran an awful lot smoother, too, which was more important than the outright power. Isn't it?
Nope, of course not. Too much is never enough.
It really isn't I've got a sticker that says so, so it must be true
The Power Commander had a two-edged cut about it; it was nice having all this information at my disposal, but it also made me paranoid. I kept thinking "blimey, that injector duty's a bit high" or "intake temp's too hot" when I was stuck in traffic and could do naff-all about it. Or could I? The OE intake vent for the stock intercooler was a sad compromise at best, and investigation showed that the extra depth of the MazdaSpeed bumper had partially blocked it anyway. So I set to with some scraps of carbon and alloy I had lying around...
...got all Blue Peter on their ass and fashioned a intake snout thing
Which to be fair did look a wee bit, but I was sure it'd make a difference. It was also nice and light, so I didn't feel too guilty about mounting it to the bumper
It made a difference... intake temps dropped by at least two entire degrees
. Oh well, it was on there now, might as well stay.
Got a set of Ganador Super Mirrors. It never fails to make me chuckle the way the Japanese love throwing words like "Super" at everything. These presumably fill a gap in the Ganador range between "Average" and "Astounding" mirrors. There's nothing wrong with the stock FD mirrors, other than they look a bit like errrmmm... spaniels' ears, if you know what I mean... but the Ganadors are proper JDM cool and pay homage to that style icon that made a thousand M*x P*wer Saxos and Corsas, the M-style mirror.
What a pig to fit, though . The stockers are held on by these two bolts here;
The Ganador have smaller diameter studs that slip through the threaded inserts that the originals bolted into, rather than actually using the captive thread themselves. Because they're studs, not bolts and you therefore can't screw them in from outside, the mirror end. This means you have to tighten up nuts on the ends of the studs, and this means you have to get the doorcard off...
...and then get your arm up through the hole where the speaker mounts, inside the door, and working blind, screw nuts onto the studs for the mirrors.
As you can see, that's quite a distance for someone who, like most humans, only has the two major joints per arm. Plus there isn't clearance to get a ratchet on, it all had to be done by spanner, five degrees per turn at a time. It caused me quite significant damage to the meat of my arms on the sharp edges of the doorskin, not to mention the number of fags I had to smoke in an effort to calm down between attempts. Fair to say, I hope they never come loose, I'm not sure I could face doing that again
Here's the car rocking the prizefighter cauliflower ear look
Another purchase that was too good to miss came up when a club acquaintance sold his FD and bought a nice, sensible Bimmer. Takes all sorts He was selling up all his good aftermarket stuff, and who could possibly resist one of these....
yep, it's another OMG moment, a full ARC titanium exhaust system
Its sooooooooooo beautiful and soooooo light, I didn't care if it worked like rubbish, I had to have it. I met the guy half-way, at Clackett lane services to collect it. In the snow. In a 300bhp RX-7, that's how much I wanted it. I nearly died eight times on the way, but it was worth it
Every single part of it was pure titanium, every part. I get tumescent just looking at the photos, is that wrong?
Even the little plate where some Japanes artisan had to etch the company logo and slogan was made from lovely Ti. And what a slogan it is too, gotta love Japlish. Or is it Engrish?
It was pleasantly quiet, too, made the car have a lovely growl far removed from the boomy roar of the Nur Spec. It did mean the cat had to go, but hey. It's not as though wankels (snigger) are bad on emissions anyway Oh, that's right, they're terrible. Worry about that come MOT time.
The summer was good, we made it to loads of shows and the car performed well. Here she is at Rotorstock;
There was a cloud on the horizon, though. Quite literally. The car had been smoking for a while now, and not the usual FD smoke on start up (they're filthy till they get warm). In fact, the warmer it got, the worse it got. Getting stuck in traffic was a nightmare, the longer I was stationary, the thicker the blue clouds of oil smoke from the exhaust became. Now what the hell was causing that, then? there's no valve guides to fail, no piston rings to blow-by and I knew the turbos were good because we'd put them on just that year. It was a mystery, so I did the only sensible thing, ignored it and hoped it'd go away
Needless to say, it didn't. It got worse.
Undeterred, I bought a set of HID light upgrades to treat the car in the hope she'd stop misbehaving after being rewarded with a bit of luuurrrve. The lights, dunno if I made the point strongly enough, are wretched on FDs. Here by way of contrast;
before
after
before
after
That's right, they were still rubbish
. They were better than they were, but it was hardly a night-and-day difference if you'll pardon the pun. I've found out there's no real cure for the fact the reflector bowl just isn't very well designed. It doesn't matter how much light output you're throwing into it, it just can't focus it well enough. Dang!
And then a moment of epiphany came during the immense, stupid queues trying to get into the Trax show 2009...
the car was smoking so bad it was just embarassing, people were pointing and laughing for all the wrong reasons. I had to keep pulling over and waiting with the engine off to cool it down and stop the huge plumes of oil covering everything. The car was now using about a litre of oil every 500 miles, which clearly is ridiculous.
the show was great once we finally got in though, FDUK stand as awesome as ever
but it was clear something had to be done. The fault had to be either the rotor housings were worn beyond limit or the oil control ring side seals were failing and letting oil compress into the chambers. Whichever it was, the engine was going to have to come apart. And, I figured, if we were going to that much trouble, we may as well go for massive overkill.
Go large or go home
Coming soon..... shiny turbo goodness as modelled here by my lovely wife
The general accepted rule of thumb on FDs is you can change intake or exhaust, but if you do both then you really need to look at the ECU as well. The stock one isn't the worst in the world, but it does get a bit out of its depth reigning in the boost when the exhaust is freer-flowing and its getting more air in as well.
Since I'd already changed both, it was long past time to address the fueling. To this end once the rats nest problems seemed to be sorted, for a while at least, I invested in an Apexi Power Fuel Computer. This is a standalone ECU replacement, the sorta world standard for RX-7s to be fair. It works very well without being exceptional. They have some nice features like the Power Commander, which is a handheld device that lets you change certain parameters yourself without needing a datalogit, though it is a very tedious way of doing it. You could even map using it, but you'd need the patience of an entire canon of saints.
You can use it to display up to eight engine parameters in real time, taken from the sensor feeds into the ECU, which is dead handy. It enables you to monitor things you'd never find a dial gauge for, like injector duty, and all sorts of useful things like battery voltage or air intake temperature without filling the dash with a million gauges.
You can see the Commander on the dash in this pic. I spent out on a genuine R-magic holder for it, which is a Japanese tuning house who run awesome competition cars in drift and grip racing... which is why they justify charging £100 for a glorified mobile phone holder presumably! I also changed to my third gearknob variation (I'm so fickle
), a FEED (Fujita Engineering Developement, another legendary Japanese rotary tuning house) one in duracon. Mmmm, a gearknob that didn't strip the skin off my hand with temperature variations at last!With the ECU in it needed mapping, so my man J sorted it out.
Well 270 bhp at the wheels wasn't earth-shattering, but it was more than the car had left the factory with, so that was good enough. The car ran an awful lot smoother, too, which was more important than the outright power. Isn't it?
Nope, of course not. Too much is never enough.
It really isn't
I've got a sticker that says so, so it must be trueThe Power Commander had a two-edged cut about it; it was nice having all this information at my disposal, but it also made me paranoid. I kept thinking "blimey, that injector duty's a bit high" or "intake temp's too hot" when I was stuck in traffic and could do naff-all about it. Or could I? The OE intake vent for the stock intercooler was a sad compromise at best, and investigation showed that the extra depth of the MazdaSpeed bumper had partially blocked it anyway. So I set to with some scraps of carbon and alloy I had lying around...
...got all Blue Peter on their ass and fashioned a intake snout thing
Which to be fair did look a wee bit
, but I was sure it'd make a difference. It was also nice and light, so I didn't feel too guilty about mounting it to the bumperIt made a difference... intake temps dropped by at least two entire degrees
. Oh well, it was on there now, might as well stay. Got a set of Ganador Super Mirrors. It never fails to make me chuckle the way the Japanese love throwing words like "Super" at everything. These presumably fill a gap in the Ganador range between "Average" and "Astounding" mirrors. There's nothing wrong with the stock FD mirrors, other than they look a bit like errrmmm... spaniels' ears, if you know what I mean... but the Ganadors are proper JDM cool and pay homage to that style icon that made a thousand M*x P*wer Saxos and Corsas, the M-style mirror.
What a pig to fit, though
. The stockers are held on by these two bolts here;The Ganador have smaller diameter studs that slip through the threaded inserts that the originals bolted into, rather than actually using the captive thread themselves. Because they're studs, not bolts and you therefore can't screw them in from outside, the mirror end. This means you have to tighten up nuts on the ends of the studs, and this means you have to get the doorcard off...
...and then get your arm up through the hole where the speaker mounts, inside the door, and working blind, screw nuts onto the studs for the mirrors.
As you can see, that's quite a distance for someone who, like most humans, only has the two major joints per arm. Plus there isn't clearance to get a ratchet on, it all had to be done by spanner, five degrees per turn at a time. It caused me quite significant damage to the meat of my arms on the sharp edges of the doorskin, not to mention the number of fags I had to smoke in an effort to calm down between attempts. Fair to say, I hope they never come loose, I'm not sure I could face doing that again
Here's the car rocking the prizefighter cauliflower ear look
Another purchase that was too good to miss came up when a club acquaintance sold his FD and bought a nice, sensible Bimmer. Takes all sorts
He was selling up all his good aftermarket stuff, and who could possibly resist one of these....yep, it's another OMG moment, a full ARC titanium exhaust system
Its sooooooooooo beautiful and soooooo light, I didn't care if it worked like rubbish, I had to have it. I met the guy half-way, at Clackett lane services to collect it. In the snow. In a 300bhp RX-7, that's how much I wanted it. I nearly died eight times on the way, but it was worth it
Every single part of it was pure titanium, every part. I get tumescent just looking at the photos, is that wrong?
Even the little plate where some Japanes artisan had to etch the company logo and slogan was made from lovely Ti. And what a slogan it is too, gotta love Japlish. Or is it Engrish?
It was pleasantly quiet, too, made the car have a lovely growl far removed from the boomy roar of the Nur Spec. It did mean the cat had to go, but hey. It's not as though wankels (snigger) are bad on emissions anyway
Oh, that's right, they're terrible. Worry about that come MOT time.The summer was good, we made it to loads of shows and the car performed well. Here she is at Rotorstock;
There was a cloud on the horizon, though. Quite literally. The car had been smoking for a while now, and not the usual FD smoke on start up (they're filthy till they get warm). In fact, the warmer it got, the worse it got. Getting stuck in traffic was a nightmare, the longer I was stationary, the thicker the blue clouds of oil smoke from the exhaust became. Now what the hell was causing that, then? there's no valve guides to fail, no piston rings to blow-by and I knew the turbos were good because we'd put them on just that year. It was a mystery, so I did the only sensible thing, ignored it and hoped it'd go away
Needless to say, it didn't. It got worse.
Undeterred, I bought a set of HID light upgrades to treat the car in the hope she'd stop misbehaving after being rewarded with a bit of luuurrrve. The lights, dunno if I made the point strongly enough, are wretched on FDs. Here by way of contrast;
before
after
before
after
That's right, they were still rubbish
. They were better than they were, but it was hardly a night-and-day difference if you'll pardon the pun. I've found out there's no real cure for the fact the reflector bowl just isn't very well designed. It doesn't matter how much light output you're throwing into it, it just can't focus it well enough. Dang!And then a moment of epiphany came during the immense, stupid queues trying to get into the Trax show 2009...
the car was smoking so bad it was just embarassing, people were pointing and laughing for all the wrong reasons. I had to keep pulling over and waiting with the engine off to cool it down and stop the huge plumes of oil covering everything. The car was now using about a litre of oil every 500 miles, which clearly is ridiculous.
the show was great once we finally got in though, FDUK stand as awesome as ever
but it was clear something had to be done. The fault had to be either the rotor housings were worn beyond limit or the oil control ring side seals were failing and letting oil compress into the chambers. Whichever it was, the engine was going to have to come apart. And, I figured, if we were going to that much trouble, we may as well go for massive overkill.
Go large or go home
Coming soon..... shiny turbo goodness as modelled here by my lovely wife
Great storytelling, your fresh (and often unprintable) metaphors make for good reading, much better than the beige waffle that newspapers are filled with.
And you're well capturing the ups and downs of FD ownership. The car is really a triumph of optimism. When it works, it's fantastic, but there are quite a few ways it can all go wrong.
Looking forward to subsequent episodes !
And you're well capturing the ups and downs of FD ownership. The car is really a triumph of optimism. When it works, it's fantastic, but there are quite a few ways it can all go wrong.
Looking forward to subsequent episodes !
This has been a brilliant read over the past few days. Always happy when this is at the top of my bookmarks to show you have updated this thread.
You haven't helped in my desire to buy one, even though you have reinforced the reality that you never stop spending money when you own one!
You haven't helped in my desire to buy one, even though you have reinforced the reality that you never stop spending money when you own one!
To my mind a rotary is like a 2-stroke bike. A highly strung high maintenance beast that has you cursing rebuild costs but at the same time there is nothing like it when it's on song and all it's foibles are forgotten..... until it goes pop.
I still have a hankering after an RX-7, although after having an RX-8 which was an utterly reliable awesome car (really!) where the worst thing in five years of ownership was a knackered arb drop link I can't see being as lucky with an RX-7!
PS Awesome thread!
I still have a hankering after an RX-7, although after having an RX-8 which was an utterly reliable awesome car (really!) where the worst thing in five years of ownership was a knackered arb drop link I can't see being as lucky with an RX-7!
PS Awesome thread!
Wow, I never expected this level of interest! Thanks for the kind words, guys, it's much appreciated 
Cutting this long and tragic tale over from the rotary forum and editing it for sense (not always easy after all these years) has been fun for me, and reminded me that I really do love this car, even though it's kicked my arse so many times!
Fastdruid, your thoughts are the same as mine; I always fancied a rotary not just because they're so different to every other car but also because of my love for the old two-stroke bikes of my youth. it was basically the closest thing I could find on four wheels to my old YPVS 350. All hail Elsie
Right...
I'd decided I'd simply had enough of all the rats nest problems; the split vacc lines, the broken solenoids, the weird boost faults, broken turbos, all the niggling annoying little faults that had kept the car on the constant verge of breakdown for over a year. By going to a big single turbo conversion, you lose all the complicated switching system and gain... simplicity. And we all know, simple is the holy grail of the mechanic. K.I.S.S. and all that.
You lose a bit of driveability, in terms of the seamless power of the twins from tickover, but that was small loss since mine had seldom been smooth. I'll take a bit of turbo lag over unreliability and ficticious smoothness, ta, especially since my power delivery had usually been lumpier than my nan's tits. Once the decision was made to go single I needed to source a load of parts... not least of which was a turbo kit... but also the ancilliaries to support it. Plus, I needed to budget for an engine, including opening up the ports inside to spool up a big turbo quicker. It was a challenge but one I relished.
My first purchase was...
....drum roll....
....an H-reg 2nd gen Toyota MR2 T-Bar in a fetching shade of Salmon-pink Neglect. I think it's an official Toyota colour
Bit odd, I suppose you'd say, but I needed transport while the Rex was sick/in bits, and a guy at work was flogging the Mister Two for 500 quid, so it seemed even if it only lasted as long as its MOT it'd solve a lot of problems. Of course, with a £500 car there's always gonna be some stuff wrong. The paint not the least and possibly the most obvious deficiency. I set to with a mop borrowed from the semi-tame mechanic next door
took a fair bit of elbow grease, but I finally managed to convince it to be red
And some new McPherson strut top mounts replaced the ones that looked like they'd started life on the Titanic. This was nice because it meant the suspension no longer fell over sideways at 45 degrees in every corner due to the utter lack of bearings in the casings.
One day I'll buy a car that hasn't been owned by a Neanderthal Anyone who's ever owned an MR2 (hi there!) will confirm that the cooling system is about as straightforward as quantum physics... only slightly harder to understand. It's about eight miles of random pipes, expansion bottles, several bleed points, god knows what else. To work it out you need to be able to think your way through a corkscrew without turning your head or using your finger. The previous owner clearly hadn't bothered, they'd just filled the system with radweld. And when I say filled, I mean filled.
Good job we weren't in one of those funny English droughts where it rains for forty days and nights yet you still have a hosepipe ban I'd never have manged to flush all that crap out of it Besides these faults, the Mister Two was a fun car in its way. Actually, that's an outright lie. It was awful; really shocking handling and no feel of connection to the steering at all (dunno if they're all like that or it was just my usual luck). The driving position is a bit like sitting on the floor in a broken deckchair with your legs out flat in front of you. Every time you gas it, it feels like it might either wheelie of chuck you through a hedge and it's the thrill of uncertainty that makes it so absorbing to drive. But it was kind of a fun awful, and I didn't give two hoots about it so I drove it at full throttle everywhere and it took it all without complaint. Right up until it completely ate its own electrical system six months later. But they all do that, sir, and it had served its purpose by then.
Its purpose, as I said, was to take the strain off the ailing Rex while I gathered parts for the extravaganza rebuild, but that didn't mean I wasn't working on the FD in the meanwhile. Since this was now the depths of winter it was perhaps an odd choice to fit the vented bonnet on the coldest day of the year... still, the Mister Two made a great bonnet stand
The bonnet I'd scored was a KnightSports vented one (another of those famous Japanese lotary tuning houses). It's fairly similar to the MazdaSpeed one I'd always coveted, and fairly sympathetic to the original shapes of the car. You keep the lovely wing-bonnet-wing triple bulge of the original that's your view from the driver's seat, it's just got a whacking great vent in the middle
and yeah, it was brown. Well, it wasn't actually; it was some kind of no doubt hideously expensive House of Kolor-style mica burgundy and in the sun it was beautiful. Sadly, in anything other than bright sunlight, it was brown. Never mind, it wouldn't be staying that way.
I got on with some more Blue Petering in the garage to while away the winter hours. I found a spare alternator, since my very manky one was letting the polished engine bay theme down rather badly. I managed to persuade it to come apart ( a hammer was involved, yeah) and cleaned about a kilo of carbon and clag out of it
Wow! Loads of bits, hope I can get the bloody thing back together! Managed to break one of the webs trying to lock it with a screwdriver and stop the armature spinning so I could get it apart... before I realised there's a specially strengthened hole in the casing for doing this :? Doh! Annoys me every time I look at it
I think that polishing an alternator is one of those jobs I'm unlikely to want to do again. Lets just say its intricate and leave it at that, yeah?
Worth it? Yeah
With the addition of a lovely anodised pulley from Kev at Billet Bitz... who used to mill out work-of-art components for F1 teams and was now turning his hand to flashy bits for streetcars since all the F1 teams brought everything in-house... it looked dead glam!
Kev is awesome, because he's done CNC work for F1 teams and every piece he turns out is pretty much flawless. I remember him explaining that if a piece still had marks on it from where it had been clamped for finishing, they'd send it back, even if the mark was the faintest reminder of a washer. Just beautiful, as the rotor-shaped pulley shows. He also has a 20B triple-rotor Cosmo he's self-converting to peripheral ports in his spare time. Which clearly is a Massively Clever Thing
Anyway, so that was the alternator sorted. I hoped the damned thing still worked when I bolted it on...
Moar clever parts. I wouldn't be able to trust the Apexi ECU's rather rudimentary boost control with a big single, so forked out on probably the best boost controller for a rotary, the snappily-named "GReddy Profec B Spec II". Trips of the tongue, doesn't it!
Some DM Motorsports quality hubcentric spacers, front and rear. I'd never even realised the Border wings were wide-arched until someone told me, but it explained why my wheels were less manly-looking than I'd remembered
A DM Motorsport idler pulley. The FD has an airpump that is supposed to blow air into the lower manifold and the catalyst to lean out the emissions to an acceptable level. Since I no longer had a cat, this was redundant space and it was going. This means the belt driving the water pump is no longer going around 60% of its circumference, more like 20% and this can lead to the water pump slipping. This is clearly A Bad Thing, so this idler pulley restores the grip of the belt by fitting where the airpump pulley did
The main piece of the jigsaw came up with a bit of patience; sooner or later it was inevitable. A FDUK mate was selling his turbo setup after his car blew up and needed breaking for parts (while he was mapping it, gutted!). So I managed to get hold of the rustiest, mankiest-looking Garret T04S turbo, HKS cast manifold, HKS wastegate, downpipe and the scabbiest heatshield evar
Sadly, on closer inspection, it transpired that when his engine blew, it had fired a bit of apex seal out through the turbine vanes before exiting the exhuast. This is a common problem with blown FD engines, they often clout the hotwheel in the process
De nada, I threw it into (one of) the boot(s) of the Mister Two and drove it down to Turbo Dynamics for a rebuild. We also agreed a price on ceramic coating the turbine housing, downpipe and screamer. The compressor housing I kept hold of. Yep, my polishing fetish needed feeding again
Next, a set of the scabbiest-looking Ohlins coilovers in the world. But they were OHLINS
At last, the scaffold-pole kidney-pulping GET ones would be a thing of the past! Needless to say, the Ohlins were leaking and the springs on them were more suited to suspending a bus or maybe a suspension bridge. You could stand all your weight on one and it wouldn't visibly compress by so much as one millimetre. I was put on the incomparable Aurok who are Ohlins geniuses and work on everything from Paris-Dakar trucks to DTM cars to single-seaters to pushbikes and kindly lowered their standards to refurbish my humble coilovers
Aerocatches to stop my nice KnightSports bonnet from flying open and breaking the windscreen...
An HKS Twin Spark ignition amp to boost the signal to the sparks. Ignition is something you can never have too much of on an FD
More clever electronics, an Innovate standalone wideband lambda sensor and display unit;
Should make for a nice Christmas tree flashing away on the dash!
But I wouldn't want you to think this is just going to be a shopping list from here on lol. I still used the car as much as I dared given the horrific oil usage. Here are some nice pics from a photoshoot I did for a mate to keep y'all awake lol. Circumstances mean the had to sell on his £80k+ GTR and we commemorated it by doing a little shoot, since both cars were Border-kitted
What's that? More of the GTR? Yeah, OK then
I tell you, this thing was the Starship Enterprise. It went sooooooo fast, so easily. It just rearranged time and space. Awesome car, finished to the highest standard
v-Cam variable cam setup alone cost more than many lesser Skylines in toto
Lovely.
Wow, this post went sorta off at a bit of a tangent, didn't it! I promise there'll be some progress in the next one. No, really.
Cutting this long and tragic tale over from the rotary forum and editing it for sense (not always easy after all these years) has been fun for me, and reminded me that I really do love this car, even though it's kicked my arse so many times!Fastdruid, your thoughts are the same as mine; I always fancied a rotary not just because they're so different to every other car but also because of my love for the old two-stroke bikes of my youth. it was basically the closest thing I could find on four wheels to my old YPVS 350. All hail Elsie
Right...
I'd decided I'd simply had enough of all the rats nest problems; the split vacc lines, the broken solenoids, the weird boost faults, broken turbos, all the niggling annoying little faults that had kept the car on the constant verge of breakdown for over a year. By going to a big single turbo conversion, you lose all the complicated switching system and gain... simplicity. And we all know, simple is the holy grail of the mechanic. K.I.S.S. and all that.
You lose a bit of driveability, in terms of the seamless power of the twins from tickover, but that was small loss since mine had seldom been smooth. I'll take a bit of turbo lag over unreliability and ficticious smoothness, ta, especially since my power delivery had usually been lumpier than my nan's tits. Once the decision was made to go single I needed to source a load of parts... not least of which was a turbo kit... but also the ancilliaries to support it. Plus, I needed to budget for an engine, including opening up the ports inside to spool up a big turbo quicker. It was a challenge but one I relished.
My first purchase was...
....drum roll....
....an H-reg 2nd gen Toyota MR2 T-Bar in a fetching shade of Salmon-pink Neglect. I think it's an official Toyota colour
Bit odd, I suppose you'd say, but I needed transport while the Rex was sick/in bits, and a guy at work was flogging the Mister Two for 500 quid, so it seemed even if it only lasted as long as its MOT it'd solve a lot of problems. Of course, with a £500 car there's always gonna be some stuff wrong. The paint not the least and possibly the most obvious deficiency. I set to with a mop borrowed from the semi-tame mechanic next door
took a fair bit of elbow grease, but I finally managed to convince it to be red
And some new McPherson strut top mounts replaced the ones that looked like they'd started life on the Titanic. This was nice because it meant the suspension no longer fell over sideways at 45 degrees in every corner due to the utter lack of bearings in the casings.
One day I'll buy a car that hasn't been owned by a Neanderthal
Anyone who's ever owned an MR2 (hi there!) will confirm that the cooling system is about as straightforward as quantum physics... only slightly harder to understand. It's about eight miles of random pipes, expansion bottles, several bleed points, god knows what else. To work it out you need to be able to think your way through a corkscrew without turning your head or using your finger. The previous owner clearly hadn't bothered, they'd just filled the system with radweld. And when I say filled, I mean filled.Good job we weren't in one of those funny English droughts where it rains for forty days and nights yet you still have a hosepipe ban I'd never have manged to flush all that crap out of it
Besides these faults, the Mister Two was a fun car in its way. Actually, that's an outright lie. It was awful; really shocking handling and no feel of connection to the steering at all (dunno if they're all like that or it was just my usual luck). The driving position is a bit like sitting on the floor in a broken deckchair with your legs out flat in front of you. Every time you gas it, it feels like it might either wheelie of chuck you through a hedge and it's the thrill of uncertainty that makes it so absorbing to drive. But it was kind of a fun awful, and I didn't give two hoots about it so I drove it at full throttle everywhere and it took it all without complaint. Right up until it completely ate its own electrical system six months later. But they all do that, sir, and it had served its purpose by then.Its purpose, as I said, was to take the strain off the ailing Rex while I gathered parts for the extravaganza rebuild, but that didn't mean I wasn't working on the FD in the meanwhile. Since this was now the depths of winter it was perhaps an odd choice to fit the vented bonnet on the coldest day of the year... still, the Mister Two made a great bonnet stand
The bonnet I'd scored was a KnightSports vented one (another of those famous Japanese lotary tuning houses). It's fairly similar to the MazdaSpeed one I'd always coveted, and fairly sympathetic to the original shapes of the car. You keep the lovely wing-bonnet-wing triple bulge of the original that's your view from the driver's seat, it's just got a whacking great vent in the middle
and yeah, it was brown.
Well, it wasn't actually; it was some kind of no doubt hideously expensive House of Kolor-style mica burgundy and in the sun it was beautiful. Sadly, in anything other than bright sunlight, it was brown. Never mind, it wouldn't be staying that way.I got on with some more Blue Petering in the garage to while away the winter hours. I found a spare alternator, since my very manky one was letting the polished engine bay theme down rather badly. I managed to persuade it to come apart ( a hammer was involved, yeah) and cleaned about a kilo of carbon and clag out of it
Wow! Loads of bits, hope I can get the bloody thing back together! Managed to break one of the webs trying to lock it with a screwdriver and stop the armature spinning so I could get it apart... before I realised there's a specially strengthened hole in the casing for doing this :? Doh! Annoys me every time I look at it
I think that polishing an alternator is one of those jobs I'm unlikely to want to do again. Lets just say its intricate and leave it at that, yeah?
Worth it? Yeah
With the addition of a lovely anodised pulley from Kev at Billet Bitz... who used to mill out work-of-art components for F1 teams and was now turning his hand to flashy bits for streetcars since all the F1 teams brought everything in-house... it looked dead glam!
Kev is awesome, because he's done CNC work for F1 teams and every piece he turns out is pretty much flawless. I remember him explaining that if a piece still had marks on it from where it had been clamped for finishing, they'd send it back, even if the mark was the faintest reminder of a washer. Just beautiful, as the rotor-shaped pulley shows. He also has a 20B triple-rotor Cosmo he's self-converting to peripheral ports in his spare time. Which clearly is a Massively Clever Thing
Anyway, so that was the alternator sorted. I hoped the damned thing still worked when I bolted it on...
Moar clever parts. I wouldn't be able to trust the Apexi ECU's rather rudimentary boost control with a big single, so forked out on probably the best boost controller for a rotary, the snappily-named "GReddy Profec B Spec II". Trips of the tongue, doesn't it!
Some DM Motorsports quality hubcentric spacers, front and rear. I'd never even realised the Border wings were wide-arched until someone told me, but it explained why my wheels were less manly-looking than I'd remembered
A DM Motorsport idler pulley. The FD has an airpump that is supposed to blow air into the lower manifold and the catalyst to lean out the emissions to an acceptable level. Since I no longer had a cat, this was redundant space and it was going. This means the belt driving the water pump is no longer going around 60% of its circumference, more like 20% and this can lead to the water pump slipping. This is clearly A Bad Thing, so this idler pulley restores the grip of the belt by fitting where the airpump pulley did
The main piece of the jigsaw came up with a bit of patience; sooner or later it was inevitable. A FDUK mate was selling his turbo setup after his car blew up and needed breaking for parts (while he was mapping it, gutted!). So I managed to get hold of the rustiest, mankiest-looking Garret T04S turbo, HKS cast manifold, HKS wastegate, downpipe and the scabbiest heatshield evar
Sadly, on closer inspection, it transpired that when his engine blew, it had fired a bit of apex seal out through the turbine vanes before exiting the exhuast. This is a common problem with blown FD engines, they often clout the hotwheel in the process
De nada, I threw it into (one of) the boot(s) of the Mister Two and drove it down to Turbo Dynamics for a rebuild. We also agreed a price on ceramic coating the turbine housing, downpipe and screamer. The compressor housing I kept hold of. Yep, my polishing fetish needed feeding again
Next, a set of the scabbiest-looking Ohlins coilovers in the world. But they were OHLINS
At last, the scaffold-pole kidney-pulping GET ones would be a thing of the past! Needless to say, the Ohlins were leaking and the springs on them were more suited to suspending a bus or maybe a suspension bridge. You could stand all your weight on one and it wouldn't visibly compress by so much as one millimetre. I was put on the incomparable Aurok who are Ohlins geniuses and work on everything from Paris-Dakar trucks to DTM cars to single-seaters to pushbikes and kindly lowered their standards to refurbish my humble coilovers
Aerocatches to stop my nice KnightSports bonnet from flying open and breaking the windscreen...
An HKS Twin Spark ignition amp to boost the signal to the sparks. Ignition is something you can never have too much of on an FD
More clever electronics, an Innovate standalone wideband lambda sensor and display unit;
Should make for a nice Christmas tree flashing away on the dash!
But I wouldn't want you to think this is just going to be a shopping list from here on lol. I still used the car as much as I dared given the horrific oil usage. Here are some nice pics from a photoshoot I did for a mate to keep y'all awake lol. Circumstances mean the had to sell on his £80k+ GTR and we commemorated it by doing a little shoot, since both cars were Border-kitted
What's that? More of the GTR? Yeah, OK then
I tell you, this thing was the Starship Enterprise. It went sooooooo fast, so easily. It just rearranged time and space. Awesome car, finished to the highest standard
v-Cam variable cam setup alone cost more than many lesser Skylines in toto
Lovely.
Wow, this post went sorta off at a bit of a tangent, didn't it!
I promise there'll be some progress in the next one. No, really.As the car wasn't being used all that much I took the opportunity to do some mods that I'd put off for want of time, such as changing the speakers. Not that it's particularly difficult, it's more that it requires a pretty comprehensive strip of the interior and it was nice to have the luxury of taking it to bits and not having to get it all back together in the same day so I could drive to work the next. When I'd taken the doorcards off to change the mirrors I'd noticed the front speakers were in a pretty bad way, but nothing prepared me for the state of the rears!
The butyl rubber holding the paper cone to the cage....well, it simply wasn't there!
time had completely rotted it away, no wonder the speakers flapped and buzzed like Bez "on one" at anything over a whisper's volume
The rears are a very funny size in FDs, in a 6x9 ratio but smaller all round. More like 5x8 then. I found some JBL GTO series ones that fitted more or less perfectly
and the fronts were easy peasy. I chose Sony just because all the rest of the stereo equipment was Sony, but they could have been anything, I'm certainly no ICE buff. So long as it sounds good, I couldn't care less. And these upgrades sounded phenomenal compared to what had gone before, as you can well imagine!
The last real outing for the car before it went away for major surgery was a run to Brighton with elements of the rotary club
and damn! did it rain. But then, it was February, I suppose. Nothing can damp the shine of a Spirit R-white FD though
and I'd like you all to meet Ralph, the insane bridgeported RX-4, flip-painted and louder than Armageddon yet driven by the nicest blonde young lady you'd ever meet
and he certainly takes an awesome photo in the rain...
mind you, there was a lot of it about. We're hardcore, us rotards lol, whatever the weather
Despite the weather, which had Noah looking nervously to the skies and muttering that he hoped he'd converted his cubits to millimeters accurately, my poor old Rex was still smoking like a Sisters of Mercy gig, and it convinced me if I didn't stop using it, she was going to soil herself in an ugly and terminal fashion, and that would be A Bad Thing. I was still hoping there might be useable components left in the engine, but there definitely wouldn't be if I blew it up!
So I sent the car away to Super 7 for J to start stripping her down, and concentrated on finishing and collecting the last few parts for the jigsaw. Plenty of stuff I won't bore you with pictures of, injectors for example... two 850s and two 1680s The damn things must look like a fire hydrant when on full honk. But you all know what an injector looks like. J made up a billet fuel rail to hold the primaries. A fuel pump was procured, apparently from an R33 GTR Skyline, which should have been good for several hundred horsepowerz but again is a really boring thing to photograph, a complete set of braided steel lines with Aeroquip fasteners to replace the stock rubber oil cooler lines (an R-Type RX-7 has twin oil coolers, one each corner of the front bumper so there's quite a bit of associated plumbing). Oooh, so many things I can hardly even remember them all. We all like shiny new toys, don't we?
I finished off polishing the compressor housing of the T04S. I guess it's a pretty large turbo for most applications, but it's considered fairly small on an FD. Rotaries flow a LOT of gas due to the more frequent power "strokes" and they can spool up really huge turbos quite fast compared to a piston engine of the same displacement. Anyway, it looked like this when I'd finished;
Pretty pleased with that, to be fair
Of course, once I'd spent hours polishing the intake trumpet I realised no-one would ever see it because it'd be covered by the airfilter. But here's a pic just to prove to the world that I did it anyway lol
Jumped into the long-suffering Mister Two and ran back down to the New Forest to collect the finished refurbed turbo. They'd put a new hotwheel on it, re-welded the flange (oooh, flange ) for the downpipe, ceramic coated the parts, new bearings, loads of work. It looked...
....well, it looked pink, to be honest . It was supposed to be red. Ah, well, guess it'll work just as well, but had I known, I think I'd probably have gone for the classic motorsports white coating. Mind you, even the slightly bi-curious hue of the coating wasn't going to depress me, compared to what it looked like before it was an object of great beauty!
Before;
After;
I mean, hell yeah!
This was the horrid, scabby downpipe before coating;
...and after;
I mean, yeah, it might be pink but I hope you'd agree it was a hell of an improvement!
I also blattered over to Aurok to collect the refurbished Ohlins suspension. It was on this occasion that the poor little Toyota finally gave up the ghost at being given absolute Larry everywhere and ate its electrical system (that famous Toyota jolly jape of putting the alternator under the engine bay vents... exactly in the best place for it to fill up with water every time it rains). The nice RAC man took us both home after I'd sat waiting for a couple of hours on the A27, but at least it was a scenic spot. I tried again, stealing the wife's Hahhhhnda Jazz Sport, which was frankly just embarassing. Most. Wretched. Car. Ever. The coilovers were refurbed beautifully, setup with proper Ohlins springs, and with a little booklet guiding me through adjustment for rebound and compression, a service par excellence
I dropped all these parts off at Super 7 where Jason had finished building the new engine up. I don't mind having a go at stuff, but I wasn't about to learn engine building by doing my own! Yes, it's comparatively straightforward to build a rotary compared to a "boinger" piston engine. It's the expertise and experience of an expert that makes it a good engine; finding out waht works in terms of port shape and size; where to leave metal in place is as important as where to cut it out! It was on a big streetport. Thought about a bridgey, but this would have been overkill for my street application. A bridgeport isn't the most user-friendly of engines, the overlap makes emissions filthy, it's horribly untractable at low revs, lumpy and nasty. It's basically a race engine, and though they can be made more civilised for the road, there was no need for my humble car. A streetport was more than adequate.
INTERLUDE... rotary porting 101!
If all this streetport...bridgeport nonsense is making your head spin, let me give a mega-brief explanation. This is what half an engine looks like - a rotor spinning in a housing, turning the eccentric shaft through its centre (analagous to the crank on a piston engine). This is my demo engine made up from one of my blow-ups. We take it to shows so people can see how they work (and trap their fingers in it )
As the rotor spins round it uncovers ports cut into the end walls of the housing. The way to get more power from a rotary is to alter the size and shape of these ports. This is analagous to altering the cam profile on a piston lump. By extending and changing the outline of the port, you extend the duration and lift essentially; the rotor exposes the port for longer and opens earlier and/or later than standard, thus allowing more air/fuel in. This is known as a streetport, and can be anywhere from mild to wild.
When you reach the limits of streetporting but still want more gas flow, the only option is to bridgeport. This is where the hole becomes so huge, you need to leave a little spur of metal in the plate wall for the apex seal of the rotor to run on. Without this "bridge", the seal would fall into the port, and the engine would turn itself into a very expensive paperweight within seconds. This is a bridgeport that I photographed for a friend who is essentially the rotary equivalent of Yoda and Buddha rolled into one and does this sorta thing for a living;
The only way you can go from here is a "J" or mega-port, which means cutting away the housing wall... which means welding up the water jackets and gets incredibly elaborate and complex. Plus the engine will have a lifespan measurable in minutes rather than hours and it's only used on race motors. The more you get crazy with porting, the less tractable the engine becomes; it has huge overlap, will idle like a tractor and generally become more unpleasant to street.
So, now we're all cool with the basics of porting...
In addition to all the mechanical parts, I'd scored an incredibly rare MazdaSpeed Type I rear spoiler, and just as well. The tailgate on my car had developed some rust spots around the screen, and rather than try to repair it was decided it'd be easier and quicker to just replace it. We sourced a good secondhand liftgate, deleted the wiper and washer for extra smoooooothness and fitted the MazdaSpeed spoiler. It was purple metalflake (yeah, honestly!) but this didn't matter because it was all getting sprayed anyway
Not that you can really tell in that rather rubbish photo
nope, nor that one lol. But we were getting there, I was starting to see light at the end of the tunnel!
The butyl rubber holding the paper cone to the cage....well, it simply wasn't there!
time had completely rotted it away, no wonder the speakers flapped and buzzed like Bez "on one" at anything over a whisper's volume
The rears are a very funny size in FDs, in a 6x9 ratio but smaller all round. More like 5x8 then. I found some JBL GTO series ones that fitted more or less perfectly
and the fronts were easy peasy. I chose Sony just because all the rest of the stereo equipment was Sony, but they could have been anything, I'm certainly no ICE buff. So long as it sounds good, I couldn't care less. And these upgrades sounded phenomenal compared to what had gone before, as you can well imagine!
The last real outing for the car before it went away for major surgery was a run to Brighton with elements of the rotary club
and damn! did it rain. But then, it was February, I suppose. Nothing can damp the shine of a Spirit R-white FD though
and I'd like you all to meet Ralph, the insane bridgeported RX-4, flip-painted and louder than Armageddon yet driven by the nicest blonde young lady you'd ever meet
and he certainly takes an awesome photo in the rain...
mind you, there was a lot of it about. We're hardcore, us rotards lol, whatever the weather
Despite the weather, which had Noah looking nervously to the skies and muttering that he hoped he'd converted his cubits to millimeters accurately, my poor old Rex was still smoking like a Sisters of Mercy gig, and it convinced me if I didn't stop using it, she was going to soil herself in an ugly and terminal fashion, and that would be A Bad Thing. I was still hoping there might be useable components left in the engine, but there definitely wouldn't be if I blew it up!
So I sent the car away to Super 7 for J to start stripping her down, and concentrated on finishing and collecting the last few parts for the jigsaw. Plenty of stuff I won't bore you with pictures of, injectors for example... two 850s and two 1680s
The damn things must look like a fire hydrant when on full honk. But you all know what an injector looks like. J made up a billet fuel rail to hold the primaries. A fuel pump was procured, apparently from an R33 GTR Skyline, which should have been good for several hundred horsepowerz but again is a really boring thing to photograph, a complete set of braided steel lines with Aeroquip fasteners to replace the stock rubber oil cooler lines (an R-Type RX-7 has twin oil coolers, one each corner of the front bumper so there's quite a bit of associated plumbing). Oooh, so many things I can hardly even remember them all. We all like shiny new toys, don't we?I finished off polishing the compressor housing of the T04S. I guess it's a pretty large turbo for most applications, but it's considered fairly small on an FD. Rotaries flow a LOT of gas due to the more frequent power "strokes" and they can spool up really huge turbos quite fast compared to a piston engine of the same displacement. Anyway, it looked like this when I'd finished;
Pretty pleased with that, to be fair
Of course, once I'd spent hours polishing the intake trumpet I realised no-one would ever see it because it'd be covered by the airfilter. But here's a pic just to prove to the world that I did it anyway lol
Jumped into the long-suffering Mister Two and ran back down to the New Forest to collect the finished refurbed turbo. They'd put a new hotwheel on it, re-welded the flange (oooh, flange
) for the downpipe, ceramic coated the parts, new bearings, loads of work. It looked.......well, it looked pink, to be honest
. It was supposed to be red. Ah, well, guess it'll work just as well, but had I known, I think I'd probably have gone for the classic motorsports white coating. Mind you, even the slightly bi-curious hue of the coating wasn't going to depress me, compared to what it looked like before it was an object of great beauty!Before;
After;
I mean, hell yeah!
This was the horrid, scabby downpipe before coating;
...and after;
I mean, yeah, it might be pink but I hope you'd agree it was a hell of an improvement!
I also blattered over to Aurok to collect the refurbished Ohlins suspension. It was on this occasion that the poor little Toyota finally gave up the ghost at being given absolute Larry everywhere and ate its electrical system (that famous Toyota jolly jape of putting the alternator under the engine bay vents... exactly in the best place for it to fill up with water every time it rains). The nice RAC man took us both home after I'd sat waiting for a couple of hours on the A27, but at least it was a scenic spot. I tried again, stealing the wife's Hahhhhnda Jazz Sport, which was frankly just embarassing. Most. Wretched. Car. Ever. The coilovers were refurbed beautifully, setup with proper Ohlins springs, and with a little booklet guiding me through adjustment for rebound and compression, a service par excellence
I dropped all these parts off at Super 7 where Jason had finished building the new engine up. I don't mind having a go at stuff, but I wasn't about to learn engine building by doing my own! Yes, it's comparatively straightforward to build a rotary compared to a "boinger" piston engine. It's the expertise and experience of an expert that makes it a good engine; finding out waht works in terms of port shape and size; where to leave metal in place is as important as where to cut it out! It was on a big streetport. Thought about a bridgey, but this would have been overkill for my street application. A bridgeport isn't the most user-friendly of engines, the overlap makes emissions filthy, it's horribly untractable at low revs, lumpy and nasty. It's basically a race engine, and though they can be made more civilised for the road, there was no need for my humble car. A streetport was more than adequate.
INTERLUDE... rotary porting 101!
If all this streetport...bridgeport nonsense is making your head spin, let me give a mega-brief explanation. This is what half an engine looks like - a rotor spinning in a housing, turning the eccentric shaft through its centre (analagous to the crank on a piston engine). This is my demo engine made up from one of my blow-ups. We take it to shows so people can see how they work (and trap their fingers in it
)
As the rotor spins round it uncovers ports cut into the end walls of the housing. The way to get more power from a rotary is to alter the size and shape of these ports. This is analagous to altering the cam profile on a piston lump. By extending and changing the outline of the port, you extend the duration and lift essentially; the rotor exposes the port for longer and opens earlier and/or later than standard, thus allowing more air/fuel in. This is known as a streetport, and can be anywhere from mild to wild.
When you reach the limits of streetporting but still want more gas flow, the only option is to bridgeport. This is where the hole becomes so huge, you need to leave a little spur of metal in the plate wall for the apex seal of the rotor to run on. Without this "bridge", the seal would fall into the port, and the engine would turn itself into a very expensive paperweight within seconds. This is a bridgeport that I photographed for a friend who is essentially the rotary equivalent of Yoda and Buddha rolled into one and does this sorta thing for a living;
The only way you can go from here is a "J" or mega-port, which means cutting away the housing wall... which means welding up the water jackets and gets incredibly elaborate and complex. Plus the engine will have a lifespan measurable in minutes rather than hours and it's only used on race motors. The more you get crazy with porting, the less tractable the engine becomes; it has huge overlap, will idle like a tractor and generally become more unpleasant to street.
So, now we're all cool with the basics of porting...
In addition to all the mechanical parts, I'd scored an incredibly rare MazdaSpeed Type I rear spoiler, and just as well. The tailgate on my car had developed some rust spots around the screen, and rather than try to repair it was decided it'd be easier and quicker to just replace it. We sourced a good secondhand liftgate, deleted the wiper and washer for extra smoooooothness and fitted the MazdaSpeed spoiler. It was purple metalflake (yeah, honestly!) but this didn't matter because it was all getting sprayed anyway
Not that you can really tell in that rather rubbish photo
nope, nor that one lol. But we were getting there, I was starting to see light at the end of the tunnel!
Edited by Nik da Greek on Monday 23 May 10:24
See? progress!
You can tell we were working hard by how filthy the poor ol girl got!
The engine went in no problems, and all the nice new ancilliaries got stuck on. I'd splashed on a set of pulleys from Billet Bitz to match the alternator one, simply because I couldn't resist
I'm not sure the pick-up style FD body will ever quite catch on though
The battery had to be relocated into the boot. This isn't too much of a loss, because the boot of an FD is about two inches deep and a really funny shape, even with the seats folded down the strut brace is in the way so you can't fit any luggage bigger than a briefcase, unless it squishes. Squishy is different, I've packed tent, sleeping bags, overnight gear, copious amounts of gin... all the essentials when I've had to
The reason the battery had to go boot-mounted was that the space it used to take up in the engine bay was now needed for a piperun to
the new HKS-made FEED front-mount intercooler. There was no way my little Trust stock-mount would manage the temperatures generated by a T04S on full shove
In fact, I'd learned plenty of my original thinking had been pretty flawed. All the titting about with ducting and heat shields and such was a total waste of time. The "cold air" feed in the I/C ducting to feed the airfilters was totally pointless. Yes, the filters might be getting air that was one or two degrees cooler because of it... and it was then being squashed by twin turbos and heated right back up to exactly the same temperature as if it hadn't been cooled in the first place. It would have been better to ensure that all the air from the nose was being forced through the I/C for greater efficiency. As for the heatshield around the filters, most of the heat from the engine bay is sucked backwards under the car and down the transmission tunnel, so that was totally redundant as well. Live and learn, eh!
Anyway, I now had a proper front-mount so it was all academic. A copper FEED uprated radiator complimented the new cooling power of the intercooler. We kept the aircon system - not that it worked, but that seemed to be down to the clutch on the compressor. I'd pressure tested the system, and it was fine, held pressure perfectly. So I had it re-gassed... and it still didn't work. We put it down to the pump clutch, and spent years been on the "to do" list to sort out. There always seemed to be something more pressing to spend time and money on. Anyway, the aircon rad was sandwiched between the I/C and water radiator in case by some miracle I should ever get round to sorting it out.
My shiny new alternator took pride of place on top of the build (fortunately it still worked, too)
The magic sparks box was found a home behind the ABS and wired in
the braided lines for the oil system were plumbed in
suspension bolted up, along with braided steel brakelines all round
and new Racing Brake discs and pads. From 'Murica
whilst underneath ceramic met titanium in a rainbow riot of colours
and a Dragon Performance diff brace fitted to give the diff bushes a slightly easier time holding it all together under hard launches
the plumbing for the intercooler was fitted together up front
and a giant Blitz stainless airfilter covered up my beautiful shiny trumpet. Ooooer, trumpet... snigger.
the Innovate AFR gauge found a new home on the last spare bit of dashboard, along with a sensible-sized boost gauge to match the other GReddys... in a single pod mount on the A-pillar with adequate hairy knuckle clearance this time
tailate and new spoiler went on, the right colour now
and the bonnet was now the right colour as well, with its aerocatches fitted
Oooooooh, we're getting close now can you feel the excitement?
You can tell we were working hard by how filthy the poor ol girl got!
The engine went in no problems, and all the nice new ancilliaries got stuck on. I'd splashed on a set of pulleys from Billet Bitz to match the alternator one, simply because I couldn't resist
I'm not sure the pick-up style FD body will ever quite catch on though
The battery had to be relocated into the boot. This isn't too much of a loss, because the boot of an FD is about two inches deep and a really funny shape, even with the seats folded down the strut brace is in the way so you can't fit any luggage bigger than a briefcase, unless it squishes. Squishy is different, I've packed tent, sleeping bags, overnight gear, copious amounts of gin... all the essentials when I've had to
The reason the battery had to go boot-mounted was that the space it used to take up in the engine bay was now needed for a piperun to
the new HKS-made FEED front-mount intercooler. There was no way my little Trust stock-mount would manage the temperatures generated by a T04S on full shove
In fact, I'd learned plenty of my original thinking had been pretty flawed. All the titting about with ducting and heat shields and such was a total waste of time. The "cold air" feed in the I/C ducting to feed the airfilters was totally pointless. Yes, the filters might be getting air that was one or two degrees cooler because of it... and it was then being squashed by twin turbos and heated right back up to exactly the same temperature as if it hadn't been cooled in the first place. It would have been better to ensure that all the air from the nose was being forced through the I/C for greater efficiency. As for the heatshield around the filters, most of the heat from the engine bay is sucked backwards under the car and down the transmission tunnel, so that was totally redundant as well. Live and learn, eh!
Anyway, I now had a proper front-mount so it was all academic. A copper FEED uprated radiator complimented the new cooling power of the intercooler. We kept the aircon system - not that it worked, but that seemed to be down to the clutch on the compressor. I'd pressure tested the system, and it was fine, held pressure perfectly. So I had it re-gassed... and it still didn't work. We put it down to the pump clutch, and spent years been on the "to do" list to sort out. There always seemed to be something more pressing to spend time and money on. Anyway, the aircon rad was sandwiched between the I/C and water radiator in case by some miracle I should ever get round to sorting it out.
My shiny new alternator took pride of place on top of the build (fortunately it still worked, too)
The magic sparks box was found a home behind the ABS and wired in
the braided lines for the oil system were plumbed in
suspension bolted up, along with braided steel brakelines all round
and new Racing Brake discs and pads. From 'Murica
whilst underneath ceramic met titanium in a rainbow riot of colours
and a Dragon Performance diff brace fitted to give the diff bushes a slightly easier time holding it all together under hard launches
the plumbing for the intercooler was fitted together up front
and a giant Blitz stainless airfilter covered up my beautiful shiny trumpet. Ooooer, trumpet... snigger.
the Innovate AFR gauge found a new home on the last spare bit of dashboard, along with a sensible-sized boost gauge to match the other GReddys... in a single pod mount on the A-pillar with adequate hairy knuckle clearance this time
tailate and new spoiler went on, the right colour now
and the bonnet was now the right colour as well, with its aerocatches fitted
Oooooooh, we're getting close now
can you feel the excitement? I'd always wondered why people went down the single turbo route for them rather than keeping/upgrading the twins. I hadn't realised *quite* how complicated the twins were.
I suspect a modern implementation with computer controlling them would take all that grief out of the mix but not something as a modification to be attempted lightly.
I suspect a modern implementation with computer controlling them would take all that grief out of the mix but not something as a modification to be attempted lightly.
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