1992 RX-7 FD. A tale of two Rexes and several engines...

[Nik da Greek]

Well, it's probably about time I got my st together and did a thread on my car, then. Since it's raining like The Crow and I can't get to working on it, I may as well write about it instead! At the moment it's all a bit up in the air. Literally



but there's quite a bit of story that leads up to this point. So if you're sitting comfortably?




Right, before I go on, I'd like to say that at no point was there a definite aim in mind, a strategy or a plan of any kind. I've just sort of blundered my way through, learnt a lot on the way, made some great mates in the process, wept tears of blood, had some of the lowest lows and the highest highs and I wouldn't change a thing. It's been epic. It does mean I've changed the same thing over and over in some cases, and you can take this as an example of how not to mod a car if you like, I could have done it a hell of a sight cheaper and quicker if I'd gone from A to B without diverting through C to Z en route




OK, then, our story starts over a decade back. My only transport for ten years had been two-wheeled, including a couple of years as a bike courier both in London Village and long-distance. I've moved on to working on the trains since then. It's winter, and I've just fallen off my winter hack Z400-4 (insert parenthesis with photo of offending article here;)



in the snow on the way to work at about 4 a.m. "Y'know what," I think to myself, struggling to heave the 400lb pigiron old Iron Barge off my leg while the 4-1 Motad slowly but painfully scorches my waterproofs indelibly into my flesh..."I think I might buy a sodding car..."

So off I went out shopping. Bear in mind my last four-wheeled transport had been a Morris Marina (fastback coupe mind, in sorta BRG if you squinted) back in the days of black and white (another wibbly-wobbly flashback parenthesis here)



and it'll be clear I've no bloody idea about sensible car purchasing strategy. So it seemed to me the only rational choice for practical, economical, every day transport was...drum roll...

A Ford Probe 2.5 litre V6 (which is at least basically a Mazda MX-6 in a fat suit). Yeah, have a good laugh, this is as good as this thread'll ever get It's not all bad news, it was in metallic blue. With Shelby Cobra stripes. See;



Dang!

To be fair, despite the modifications of questionable taste, it was an excellent motor, sounded brilliant with that lovely v6 burble through a full Scorpion exhaust, and children used to laugh and point in the street, which is the only true measure of whether a car's cool or not. I will grant you the carbon fibre Big Gay Wing was possibly a bit overkill on a front wheel drive car...



No defence is offered, but it was a looooong time ago now.

Anyway, moving on. In the mess room at work, we're lounging around chatting about cars. One of the guys is selling his M3 Bimmer because he's fed up with people keying it and leaving footprints over the bonnet when it's sat in the carpark at work. He's thinking of a 944 and the conversation turns to whether the cachet of a Porsche is worth the premium they command over Japanese equivalents like 300ZXs, Supras, etc. I'm keeping quiet, I've got a Ford Probe with BGW and Viper stripes for God's sake... and I've also got a FireBlade that can break the National Speed limit in first gear so it's all a bit academic to me.

Fella pipes up his RX-7 would eat any 944 for breakfast... and he's got it up for sale because he can't afford the petrol.



It's mine.

I don't even have to drive it, it's mine the instant the words are out of his flapping stupid mouth. Most beautiful Japanese car ever made, ridiculous performance, unique power plant (I've been in love with rotaries ever since the days of bad-boy headbangers Haslam, Nation and Spray on the jet-black JPS Nortons, and of course the immensely talented late, great Steve Hislop giving the Hoover-pipe special absolute Larry over The Mountain). I'm besotted. And that's even before we mention that film with Mr Vincent Diesel and all those funny glow-in-the-dark cars.

Still, let's try to appear sensible about it, even if only to pacify the wife. Fella brings the Rex round so I can test drive it. Like, what the hell do I need to test drive it for? Just look at it...



...it's beautiful! Ahhh.... that's why I need to test drive it; the brakes are warped like Marilyn Manson. All of them by the feel of it, I get double vision from the vibration every time I use them... or is it the knackered wheel bearing doing that? The boot's full of water. You could keep tropical fish in the spare wheel well. There's a big dent in the bonnet where one of his neighbours hit it with a hammer to "teach him a lesson" Wha...? Nice neighbourhood. Or utter bellend?

"Do you use high octane petrol?" No, he uses the cheapest he can get. "What oil do you use when you change it?" Oh, you don't bother changing it, huh? Oooooo-kay. Jesus, I'm even more determined to buy the poor thing. I'm not buying a car, I'm rescuing it.

Right, it's got the all-important piece of paper when buying a rotary, a receipt for a very expensive engine rebuild. In this case, a bill for over £5800 from reputable rotary experts Rotechnics in Reading. He wants five and a half for it, we shake hands on 4.6. I've bought a rotary engine with a free car thrown in. The wife will be pleased . The Mighty Probe goes to an organic cattle farmer from Chichester way for a bargain price. Yeah, it actually did

K302BUD is mine



Oh yeah, did I mention the paint?...





She was a Japanese-market Type R grey import, as stated on a new engine and with new turbo pack from when the previous Neanderthal had grenaded the entire plot during a "watch this" moment with a mate. Must have been well impressed... Anyway, she was about as stock as an OXO cube;



I got on with the job of making it roadworthy, which was at least easy, if not exactly cheap. New discs all round replaced the warped ones, and a new NSF wheel bearing (have to buy the entire integral hub unit, thanks Mazda) sorted the chassis. The paddling pool in the boot took a bit more work. I had a glazier take the screen out and re-seal it. At some point the car had been painted, and the screen hadn't been sealed properly.

I decanted the fishpond and thought it fixed. Next time it rained, it was back. Dang! Further investigation showed the spoiler mounts had snapped (six out of eight, like; how!?). New secondhand spoiler and a gallon of Sikaflex solved that one. Sorted. Now to enjoy driving it...

Third time I drove to work in it the Racing Beat back box blew itself off the link pipe around the weld. It was stainless, but the weld must have been contaminated or something because it had rusted right through. The nice man at Racing Beat said he'd never heard of one doing that before. I should have taken it as an omen

Still, it gave me a chance to go shopping for my first "proper" mod;



The hilariously named HKS "Silent" Hi-Power. Evidently "Silent" is Japanese for "Indescribably, ridiculously loud". For some reason Neanderthal Boy had swapped the catalytic convertor for a straight-through midpipe (It was essentially an 80mm diameter drainpipe) and with the marginal baffling of the HKS, the car was like a Typhoon on reheat. I rather liked it, to be honest, but it did make the stereo a bit superfluous and I was a bit self-conscious when coming home from work at 2a.m.

Anyway, we were happy together, me and The Armageddon Rag as the car was called. (If you have any interest in 60's American counter-culture, or just like a damned good whodunnit, read The Armageddon Rag by George R R Martin - yeah, him of Game of Thrones fame. It's an excellent book, full of black magic, rock and roll and general rebellion and has the distinction of being the only book I know where the hero drives and RX-7). For a week or two. Then I washed her, and the wing mirror fell off. It had been glued on with Chemical Metal

Undeterred, I bought a present for her from a holiday in Crete... a holy Ikon of Agios Nikolaos, patron saint of the island and my saint, as a Greek Nik myself. The Ikon-seller assured me it would be madly lucky. I was beginning to think I needed it to be. It fitted nicely on the trans tunnel anyway;



and it seemed to work for a while. I got on with a bit of gentle modding, nothing wild. Fitted some HKS hardpipes for the side-mount stock intercooler, a beautiful work-of-art ARC alloy induction box, some uprated silicone hoses to replace perished stock ones, just a few little trinkets and baubles



As you can see, I fitted some American frog-eye fixed lights to try and uprate the feeble light output of the pop-ups. Seriously, the stock lights on an RX-7 are utter rubbish, especially for a car this fast. A firefly in a jamjar glued to the bonnet would make more light. The frog-eye ones had BMW-style angel eyes which looked great at night;



..but sadly were even more puny than the stock pop-ups. But they looked cool. ish. Actually, with hindsight, they looked terrible, but at the time... well



anyway, I spent a good deal of time generally trying to get the condition of the car back to an acceptable level. She'd been so neglected so long just bringing back the cosmetics was a serious challenge



My most indulgent purchase was a genuine RE-Amemiya steering column mount and boost gauge. Like, why Mazda thought a sequential twin-turbo given to boost issues didn't warrant a boost gauge is anyone's guess. On the '99 model-year upgrade they replaced the oil pressure gauge with a boost gauge. The RE-A one is a nice solution, fits like OE and leaves the other dials unobstructed;



And that was it, a year of ownership passed pretty uneventfully. I polished and waxed and loved her and eventually she started to look pretty good. Montego Blue is the colour name, it's a mica flip that goes from green to blue and easily my favourite FD colour.



Sadly, nothing short of a respray was going to save the nosecone. It's a common fault on this colour; the primer reacted with the paint at the factory and it just flakes off after a few years



but the rest of it looked fine



The efini badge, otherwise known as the Superman logo. As you probably know, this was going to be Mazda's upmarket brand to compete with Acura, Infiniti and Lexus and such, debuted on the FD... and then dropped






So, looking good. Until I was on my way to work one night, no especial hurry, had an easy hour to do the 45-minute trip, foul night, Biblical rain, hit standing water on the Lancing bypass, right about the time the turbo spooled up



Dang



OOoooF!

[Nik da Greek]

declasm said:

I have been scanning the classifieds for an FD again since I read this thread on retrorides!

Sorry You ought to know by now though; you can never sell them cos that only means you'll be starting again from scratch a few years later

[Nik da Greek]

Thanks!

So, as the back end span right round on me I thought "Whoops, I'll get this back". By the time I was facing back along the road the way I'd come and the rear end smashed into the Armco of the central reservation I thought "Hmmm, maybe I won't get this back" and by the time the car had spun back from that impact to face the original direction... and kept going round I was pretty sure I wasn't getting it back. Ever.

"Damn" I thought as the NSF wheel hit the four-inch kerb, jolting the steering wheel hard and causing me to smash the centre console with my elbow. "Bugger" I thought as my clublock bashed me round the back of the skull and the car headed into the verge like a badger shot from a steam catapult. "****" I thought, as it knocked down some post-and-rail fencing (I was starting to lose my sense of humour by now, imminent death does that to me). "****** ****!" I thought as the car broadsided a couple of small trees and knocked them over, finally coming to a halt buried deep in the undergrowth.

"Excellent" I thought as I climbed out and stood up in the middle of a thornbush thicket. "Pleased with that"

The ol Bill who came out and brought some very nice paramedics seemed surprised I was taking it so well given that in his words "your car looks like it was dropped from a crane". The ambulance dudes were surprised that the only injuries I had were a bump on the back of my thickly ossified cranium and the two little fingers on my left hand were numb. The tow truck dude who turned up an hour later to drag it out of the thorn bushes was surprised it was so far from the road... in fact, he rang me up to get me to turn the headlights on as he couldn't find it in the dark. It was a night of surprises, sure enough.

The numb fingers turned out to be nerve damage in the elbow where I'd smashed the console with it. It was no big deal, I'd broken the radius head off in that elbow once before when riding my motorbike upside-down so I was fairly used to it. After a few months they went back to more or less normal. Everyone told me how lucky I was. They always say that. I've always been lucky

The poor ol' Rex wasn't so lucky though...



The combination of kerbs, armco, fencing, trees and probably a few tall bunnies bouncing off her had dented (or mullered) every single panel, even the roof.



There was a fencepost through where the numberplate used to be, wedged through the diff carrier. Good job it missed the fuel tank, then



My lovely *ahem* "Silent" exhaust was mangled, the connecting-pipe crushed flat and even the recently-purchased quietening bung (expensive too, it was) was knackered



Note how the OSF wheel is cheekily cocked at a full-lock angle whilst the NSF is straight ahead? That'll be the utterly destroyed suspension then



The wheel is testament to the force of some of the impacts...



Even my Yank-tastic bugeye lights had been FUBARed



and no amount of T-cut was gonna buff this out



To be fair, I thought I'd done well. I had every hope for resurrecting the car, the insurance assessor muttered about it probably being beyond economy but the shell seemed straight and I trailered it up to my local RX-7 expert (Jason at Super 7) who'd worked on it a few times. He gave it a look-over (once he'd stopped shaking his head, looking at me in wonder, and swearing a lot).

It was dead. Underneath was a mess, the suspension mounts were destroyed, even two of my (new and reassuringly expensive) Black Diamond brake discs had shattered. There was no way. The car was dead. I'd killed it.

[Nik da Greek]

Well, it probably goes without saying that this was something of a low point in my Rex ownership. It was particularly galling because I'd spent so much time getting it looking and going well, and then rather unimaginatively decided to sternly and fatally interface it with some very unyielding scenery. I know I had only myself to blame, but it was still irritating.

It wasn't all bad news, the police kindly got in touch to let me know that they weren't going to prosecute me for due care, and the Highways Agency got in touch to tell me the post-and-rail fence I'd demolished was scheduled for replacement anyway, so they weren't going to charge me for it. They generously swallowed the cost of the Armco I'd mashed in the fencing costs as well.

I had a major problem with the insurance, who didn't want to pay out anywhere near what the car was worth. They offered three grand, when the insured value was five. This was at a time when a good stock FD was six to eight grand minimum, and a decent single turbo conversion car was ten. I basically bombarded them with ads (well, such as I could find, this was early '97 and they were hardly common cars) to prove the value, and adopted the policy of phoning my case handler every single day and being such a complete pain in the backside they eventually gave me the full five grand just to get me to go away and leave them in peace.

I agreed to buy back the wrecked car from them, which cost a grand and a quarter (25% of the payout value) but I knew the engine was sound because I had Neanderthal Boy's receipts showing the comprehensive rebuild only a year before I'd bought it from him. I knew I was never going to find a good runner for even the full 5k I'd been paid out, so my only hope was to get a decent shell with a knackered engine and make one good car out of the two. Lets face it, an FD with a knackered engine is hardly an unlikely state of affairs...

So, I got J at Super 7 on the case and he turned up a car that was already in the UK. It was part of the late unlamented RX-Heaven's stock left behind when the owner did a flit to Turkey. It'd never been registered, had an engine in the throes of water seal failure but was in cosmetically good nick. Quick rotary engine 101; it's a Scooby Sandwich made up of an endplate, then a housing with the rotor in it, then a centre plate, then a housing, then another endplate, all bolted together through their length and sitting longitudinally in the car. The water seals are basically giant O-rings between each section of the engine and do what you'd expect; seal in the coolant. They often fail at the bottom of their circumference in cars that aren't regularly used because the coolant gathers there and corrodes the alloy of the housing around the O-ring channel. This is especially bad when the wrong coolant's been used that isn't alloy-friendly, and when the car's been stood for a long time.

So, for the price of about 6.5 grand including the work swapping the motor, I had a Vintage Red Type R to my name



We dragged the car down to the workshop and basically swapped the good (and salvageable) bits from the old Montego Blue wreck into the new car. I went and registered it with the DVLA. I had the expected battle where they refused to register it as a 1.3, insisting it be a 2.6. Which it isn't, but some bright spark has decided to use the number of power strokes per revolution to justify putting it into a higher tax bracket. I argued till I was blue in the face, but the computer said NO. The robot on the desk was unmoved by my protestations that it was the SAME BLOODY ENGINE that they'd registered as a 1.3 when it was in the old car

Bureaucracy Love it. Not sure I can spell it though

Anyway, I wasn't going to let the Machineries of The State bring me down, I had a Rex sitting on my drive again...



Until we swapped the engine and a few other bits in, she was as stock as the last one had been at first. The only modifications were a hideous back box about the same size and weight as the digestive tract of a cow, rusty as the Titanic and generally a blasphemy on the bum of my nice new car. Oh, and a very Japanese "PERFORMANCE BY LOTALY" rear screen decal;



Which was a bit odd, but very JDM-y0! I was forced by the rather tedious attentions of the local Babylon to nail some sort of number plate to the front of it, but to be fair it looked utterly cack



Usually there'd be a big plastic plate holder (for letter-box style UK plates) but the car was missing this completely, and the plate looked catastrophically daft just sitting there. I took it off after a while and wedged it in the windscreen, which mollified the worst of the ol Bill's feelings.


For some reason, despite being the same engine from the blue car, this one ran a lot better. I knew (in hindsight) ten percent of rock-all about how these cars worked back then. I still thought the internetz was for industrial-grade grot and eBay, but I was starting to discover forums and blogs and stuff... and learning about how little I knew. The reason the old car had run so badly was the straight-through exhaust and the lack of boost control.

These cars are sooooo sensitive to mods, the stock ECU can only cope with so much. Basically the lack of backpressure was letting the car overboost and then the fuel cut would kick you in the nuts. Coupled with as-yet undiagnosed wastegate switching problems, the boost pattern was all over the place, and again in hindsight had probably contributed to my cavalierly firing the last car into the undergrowth because the boost pattern was all over the place. Especially the transition from primary to secondary turbo. Sometimes it'd come in smoothly, sometimes it'd come in like a Motorhead concert and sometimes it wouldn't come in at all. Well, that was my excuse, anyway.

This new car still had the catalyst pipe in place, and the backpressure put a lid on the worst of the overboosting. Inspired by my new-found knowledge, and the safety margin from the cat pipe, I replaced the cow's intestine with a lovely shiny Nur-Spec stainless pipe from Blitz.



which brought some lovely sound effects to the party, though nowhere near as ridiculous as the HKS one had been with a straight-through midpipe! Inspired by my success, I moved on to further mods.

The synchros in FD gearboxes area famous weak point, coupled with the fact all the rotary motion of the engine is linear with its mountings. This means on full-bore gearchanges, the whole engine tries to rotate, and especially on third gear, you find the box has rotated through a few degrees and instead of a gear, you belt the synchro. Pretty soon it's graunching more than a tramp scratching their fleabites. The blue car suffered from this, and I'd bought a short-shifter to try and aleiviate it... which I'd never fitted because I then scored a secondhand gearbox... which I'd also never fitted, because the car died before I could.

The box in the red one was fine, but I had the shifter, and it was a gorgeous B&M one so it seemed rude not to...



..although my wife did want to know why it had "BUM" embossed on it

Compare and contrast the rhapsody in blue anodised alloy with the crusty stock one and you'll see why I was tempted just to put it on the mantleshelf instead



Fitting was a bit odd, however. The gearbox didn't seem to line up with the hole in the trans tunnel, and I was forced to Dremel some relief to get the bolts all out. I've never actually worked out why this is; the car seems straight in all respects, the engine and box have since been out several times and always end up back in the same place. All I can assume is the actual hole in the tunnel is in the wrong place, though that does seem odd. There's a lot odd about this car...



Anyway, got it fitted, and it was excellent. The gearchange action is great on these cars, but with the B&M it was more like a PlayStation controller than a mechanical device. Lovely



On a roll now, I treated the car to a dump valve for that irritating toilet flushing turbo noise. In actual fact, this is about as redundant a mod as its possible to make, since Mazda fitted a perfectly good dump valve as standard... but it vents into the airbox so you can't hear it. And it wasn't a nice shiny alloy one like my Blitz one!



As you can see, the pipes and everything had all come from the blue car and were...well, blue. I'd also scored a beautiful and very rare MazdaSpeed alloy strut brace to replace the stock painted steel one, and this had gold anodised endplates. The engine bay was fast becoming a harlequin acid trip of colours! I'm honestly at a loss to explain what the hell I was thinking, but I also repaired the frog-eye headlights and fitted them instead of the pop-ups. I dunno why, one of the things I liked about the car in the first place was that it had pop-ups. I can only put it down to a funny horoscope that month

The next purchase was an absolute steal. I stumbled upon a set of genuine Volk Racing GT-P split rims on eBay. I think the seller had listed them in the wrong section, so there wasn't much interest, and when I scored them for £187 I couldn't believe my luck



Yeah, they were scabby, but they were massive, 17x10.5 on the back and 17x9 front. They'd come from a MkIV Supra this very nice but slightly dim lad had imported from Japan. He lived with his parents in a mansion near Fleet, and didn't like the Volks. He'd swapped them for some chrome "fashion" wheels from Halfrauds TBH, I'm not sure he had any idea what he was almost giving away. He even left me off the odd £7 when I collected them, and I actually felt a tiny bit guilty about stealing them from him.

Mind you, they were undeniably pretty crusty and definitely needed a refurb;



...but by gad they suited the car. The stock wheels are 16x8, so hardly a disgraceful size for the times, but they suffer from a terrible offset blight of +50, which is clearly no good to man nor beast!

[Nik da Greek]

I was still very much finding my way in the world of the car aftermarket; bear in mind I'd only had motorbikes for the last ten years. I didn't fancy trying to assemble splitrim wheels on my own... and it turned out neither did any of the refurbishers I'd tried. They don't want the work, the hours of fiddling, and the inevitable warranty claims when they go wrong. A mate had just had his Skyline GTR splitties refurbed as part of a load of work through Abbey Motorsports, and on his reference, they reluctantly agreed to get mine done too. Winner

While the wheels were away, I got on with some other DIY stuff to the car. At no point did I have a definite aim in mind; I didn't want the car to be madly radical, I just was enjoying tinkering and improving bits here and there. It had come with some Jap-spec GET coilovers which sorta proved a bit of a mistake leaving them on.



Great mission statement, but like most Japanese suspension, they got the spring rates hopelessly wrong, equating "sporty" with "Insanely hard". Combined with the alloy top mounts banging and crashing away, the ride was kidney-pulverisingly hard on a car where many feel the stock springs to be on the rough side of firm already. They also had alloy topmounts so banged and crashed like your mum over bumps. They were undeniably very well-made, though and the ones off the Monte car were mullered, so they stayed.



...but I kept an eye open for a replacement setup!

Meanwhile, like I said, I got on with some Blue Peter stuff. To wit, I set about the rear light setup with some paint, a heat gun, and some Sikaflex! The early-model lights on the FD were a sort of weird lozenge shape for the tails, as can be seen in this pic of the blue car;



On later cars, '96 onwards, they were changed to two circles for the stop/tail and a third for the indicator which I think is the defining look for the FD. So, given that genuine late-spec lights were a) rarer than a Tory politician who isn't into amyl nitrate and cross-dressing and b) hideously expensive... whereas glue and paint are almost free, I resolved to do a homebrew conversion. While I was at it, I had to change the foglight on the car. If you look at earlier pics on this thread, you'll notice it was a horrid Halfrauds jobbie self-tappered to the bumper trim. Most of the time it was folded up inside the bumper otherwise it clouted speedbumps.

The one on the blue FD had been a rather crafty conversion to one of the rear reflector set-ups, thus;



^^ step one, cut away the rear casing of the reflector. Step two, bodge a bulb holder into the (very narrow) aperture within;



with the results you can see in the pic earlier. It was neat solution, but I wanted to try something else simply because I'd already done that once and I'm easily bored. By the way, any of you eagle-eyed car buffs out there ever spotted where those iconic Mazda reflector/reverse light units have since made an appearance?

Here ya go;



'90s Mazda light unit on ultra-modern Swedish money-no-object supercar bizzareness shocker!

So anyway, I got a universal racing rain light LED jobbie and a bit of rudimetary bracketry in stainless;



then all that was needed was to take some man-up pills and work up the courage to take a holesaw to an otherwise perfectly good rear bumper trim



Meanwhile, by the simple expedient of a heat gun, a bucket of searingly hot water, and a couple of pry levers, I separated the rear light units. They're held together by eight screws and a gallon of weird mastic that the heat softens to the point you can separate it. It sounds easy, but the real job is scraping all the mastic out of the joins once apart. It took a few evenings in front of the telly with a heat gun and screwdriver to get rid of it all. Eventually you're left with this...



Then it's simplicity itself to mask off some circles the right diameter on the coloured inserts, and whizz them over with a few coats of satin black paint



Mounted the foglight in my new manly hole, lol



Boshed the rear lights back together with Sikaflex (so they'll never come apart ever again lol but at least they won't fill up with water) and ta-da!



Sorted!

[Nik da Greek]

My understand of the voodoo workings of the rotary (it's like two Doritos on a pencil ) was ever-expanding, mostly thanks to J's patient tutelage and reading up on the various rotary forums. This led me to address another rotary weak link; cooling. The wankel (snigger) always runs hot due to the three power strokes per revolution. The radiator in the FD is not superb; it's adequate, no more. As much as anything it's a packaging issue. The rad is laid down at 45% to keep the bonnet line low; if the rotary lump wasn't so compact that it mounts behind the front wheel-line, this would have been a real nightmare for the designers.

However, the standard Side-Mount intercooler is a pathetic device about the size of a numberplate, waffffferr-thin, and mounted in the engine bay with a bit of plastic ducting giving it only marginal airflow. I kept an eye on the Bay of E , and eventually a Trust (GReddy's parent company) stock-mount I/C came up for sale. This seemed ideal given the stock tune of the car and the fact this wouldn't need the radiator moving like a front-mount would have.

If you compare the Trust and stock I/Cs together you can see quite easily why it's much more betterer:



Fitting ought to be as simple as taking one out and putting the other in, but of course nothing's ever that straightforward! This pic shows the laid-down position of the radiator, and you can see how compromised the airflow is into the bay from the nose of the car.



The Trust one was eventually persuaded to fit, with some bracketry *adjustment*. Some of this involved a hammer. The airducting also needed trimming to accomodate the wider intercooler core



but the end result was well worth it. Well, I assumed it was well worth it, of course I had no way of measuring intake temp but the car definitely seemed to run slightly happier. And it was beginning to look half-decent, as well;



Although I did make up a little alloy deflector plate to cover the nasty black plastic crap that was all that was left of the stock intake setup



Another weak point in the cooling system is the AST, or Air Separator Tank. This is a plastic tank that is supposed to ...well, it does what it says on the tin. It allows air bubbles to be lost from the coolant without actually having to lose pressure in the system. Unfortunately, after a decade of being cooked by righteous turbo rotary furnace temperatures, the plastic splits along the moulding seams, and it's a common engine killer. The stock temperature gauge isn't really any indicator of actual temp, it never budges from "Normal" until it's too late, then it sorta goes right round to Defcon One in the blink of an eye and flashes at you to let you know you just overheated and blew your engine up

So, I bought a very expensive but undeniably beautiful RE-Amemiya one from Japan...



..to replace the distinctly suspicious-looking cruddy plastic rubbish Mazda blighted the car with...



..and when it was fitted along with the new intercooler...



Bingo! Impossible to get the presssure cap off. Good. Well, you're supposed to fill the system from the waterpump housing anyway, and at least it brought peace of mind that it wasn't going to grenade unexpectedly and let the engine blow


Inspired by my new-found Blue Petering skills, I turned my hand to trying to improve the interior a bit. Although this thread may end up sounding like I've got silly amounts of money to chuck at the car, this isn't the case at all. Don't get me wrong, if I have it, I'm happy to spend it... it's just that I don't seem to have it very often. With that said, I've always got more money than sense .

The steering column is unadjustable, and though I'm a non-freakish 5'10", I'm massive compared to the jockey-sized Japs who designed it. It was a struggle fitting my legs under the bus-sized steering wheel, so even though it had a nice embossed efini logo, it had to go. Most of the stuff on the car had come from eBay, and my... ahhhem... carefulness (I refuse to say tightness) meant I often bought tatty stuff in the hope of cleaning/fixing it up for cheaps. With this in mind, I took a punt on a used Sparco steering wheel with tatty alcantara trim. It was like £20 and I thought "how hard can it be to re-cover?"



The answer, of course, is "unbelievably hard"! I had some Alcantara in the garage left over from a previous project, but I'd never used it on a compound curve. The wheel, obviously, is curved in cross-section as well as in circumference. Alcantara, for those who've never used it, doesn't stretch or give. At all. This meant I'd wasted several yards, a gallon of contact adhesive, and given my few remaining hairs a serious percentage of grey buy the time two days later I conceded defeat. I think I actually invented some new swear words, as time after time I was peeling off sticky, manky, wrinkled bits of material and starting again. It's a job I will never attempt ever again, and the sick part of the joke is there are probably thousands of Chinese eight-year olds chained to a desk in some eBay sweatshop knocking the damn things out at twenty an hour with their eyes shut.

However, I hate to lose, so I steeled myself for one more try...



Oh, thank God! Just the one wrinkle, it was good enough. In my defense, the repair has lasted these five years and has only just started to peel off and need re-gluing. I'm happy with that... but I think I may buy a new wheel rather than try to stick it back down Prophetic...

I added a bit of relief to the coal-hole interior by transferring some bits from the old blue car, the "lucky" ikon, of course, the Sparco Paul Walker-stylee gearknob that gives you seventeen forward speeds just like in F&F, that kinda thing. I got some red leather gear and handbrake gaiters, since the Mazda ones were that flaky faux-leather vinyl stuff and they'd pretty much fallen to bits. Also got a nice DIN blanking plate with the efini logo laser-cut from that fella on eBay in Wales who does all these sorta things out of work hours.



Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the cassette deck, the blue car had come with a CD changer in the boot, so that was good enough for me, I swapped that over too. The sound system was terrible anyway, the speakers rattled and hummed worse than U2 so I didn't use it as often as not.

As I mentioned earlier, the stock temperature gauge is utter rubbish, not so much an early-warning as a gloat-after-the-event. Faithful ol' eBay scored a pair of gauges, water temp and oil pressure (equally important on a Rex where the oil does a lot of work), and an RX-7 specific A-pillar mount.



They were nice and simple mechanical GReddy gauges, which are still my favourite style, so clear and pleasant to look at. The pillar mount, however, was a total pain in the bum. A Rex cockpit is hardly spacious, and with two 60mm gauges mounted on the pillar, all it meant was that I continually banged my big hairy knuckles on them when trying to steer, which was hardly ideal



Dang. One more thing to sort out. Sometimes it's two steps forward, two back... the RE-Amemiya boost gauge had gone west too, so was replaced by a little HKS one that I'd assumed was 52mm but turned out to be like 40mm I didn't even know such a thing existed, and it was very nice and accurate and all that but at about the size of a wristwatch, hardly easy to read the 0.8 to 1 to 0.8 bar boost pattern of a sequential turbo FD. One step forward, two back then...

A bit like fitting some bonnet hydraulic dampers. That part went perfectly well, and let me lose the steel bonnet prop. It was great opening the bonnet now, like a posh Merc or something. But, while fitting them I noticed the vacc line to the brake servo was perishing, so I sacked it out into the bin and replaced it with a nice braided steel one with alloy finishers. Looks nice don't it?



Yeah, it looks nice. Didn't work so well, though. I'd forgotten there's a one-way valve in the original line, so the brakes were now not only no longer servo-assisted, I stood a good chance of putting manifold pressure of a bar through the servo and blowing it up like a fat frog on a footpump

"Sometimes my own stupidity amazes even me", I thought as I went through the bins for the old pipe. "But only sometimes, because some of the time I know what I'm going to do next" I continued as I retrieved the one-way valve from the pipe and glued it into the new braided line. Phew! Brakes again, hurrah!


Then, some good news

Finally, the wheels were back



I usually try to avoid text-speak as it's an atrocity on the English language, but on this occasion...OMG!

[Nik da Greek]

More to come in a bit... stay tuned, groovers

[Nik da Greek]

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 fking 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?

[Nik da Greek]

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

[Nik da Greek]

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

[Nik da Greek]

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.

[Nik da Greek]

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!

Edited by Nik da Greek on Monday 23 May 10:24

[Nik da Greek]

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?

[Nik da Greek]

OK then

[quote="Lucky"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM6i4_Tsoq8&feature=plcp

IT LIVES! Mwahahahahaha

This, it's fair to say, was one of the happiest days of my life. Well, the birth of my kids, my wedding, discovering two-girls-one-cup... all the usual major things we all go through... but this was a close fourth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B90hiCXfNA&fea...

You can hear the uneven idle of a ported rotary really clearly in those vids, the burp-burp-burp sound. A bridgeport is often referred to as a "brapper" because of the distinctive "brap-brap-brap" noise they make.

Sounds awesome enough to me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chk7BbtmFKI&fea...

It wasn't all totally smooth going, of course. When you change that many components, you have to expect things won't all work perfectly out of the box. Actually, that's not true at all. The ONLY problem we had was a boost leak. Which frankly, was unbelievable. To have one minor problem and only one, well it was more than either of us could have hoped for. The boost leak was easy enough to trace by the simple expedient of listening to the exhaust. The wastegate was stripped and we found;



wedged in the piston was a shrapnel piece of apex seal from the engine that had blown up and I'd bought the turbo kit from

This is the little critter. This is all it takes to wreck an entire rotary engine and turbo



And this huge teetering pile of stuff is what you have left over when you build up a single turbo RX-7 from a twin-turbo one



And just as well it was all being got rid of; check out the state of the manifold for the twin turbos!



No, all those cracks aren't meant to be there That's what a couple of decades of rotary furnace heat does to cast iron! The double-edges sword of rotary life is that the frequent power "strokes" mean you can get ridiculous power from a 1.3, run huge turbos and all that, but the downside is that the associated heat and gasflow problems cook everything in the engine bay to destruction and require excessive exhaust plumbing to cope with them.

And it's funny really; there's so much work in that pile of stuff - nigh on four years of mods and polishing and changing hoses and fabricating ducting and god knows what else. All just a complete waste of time. This is what I mean when I say I could have saved so much time and effort and money if I'd just gone straight A to B instead of Z and back again. But, je ne regrette rien as the song says! It was a wonderful trip and I learned a hell of a lot on the journey. And hey, dudes, it's about the trip, not the destination, yeah?

So, that's it, happy days then?



yeah, all I had to do was a thousand miles running in, and then map the ECU properly and it'd all be gravy. Finished. You can all stop reading and go home then.

.... nahhhhh, you know it's not gonna work out that way

[Nik da Greek]

So what was I waiting for? I got right on with the running-in. At first it was horrible, limited to 4,000 rpm and keeping off-boost altogether but as the engine loosened up and bedded in it got more pleasant to drive around. It was still frustrating as hell, but I kept myself motivated by the thought of how fantastic it'd feel to finally unleash the beast and feel that turbo hit for the first time. To keep the passion alive, I parked her up against a pretty background and took some "money shots" against the obligatory graffiti backdrop;









I was feeling pretty smug looking at those, and knowing the potential of what was lurking under the bonnet. At last I could sit back and go "Dang!" for the right reasons!

It seemed the best way to run it in was to go to as many shows as possible, so that's what I did, and the car never missed a beat. The culmination was the Seven's Day London run. This is the 7th July, long celebrated in Japan as being the RX-7s special day. It's got a special meaning to me as a train driver as well, since it's the anniversary of the bombing atrocities in London on the Tube and the one bus. In Japan they meet in the reststop under the concrete roads in the sky and look at each other's cars. Here in Blighty we decided to commemorate Sevens Day with a run through the Smoke. We persuaded a reporter from Japanese Performance mag to come along for the craic, and set to

pack of FDs plodding along the A40 overpass
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lin-mwdQ-A&fea...

and a walkabout parked up in Westferry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tci89ONl0c&fea...

Plus some photos from the night, hope you agree a whole phalanx of FDs makes quite a sight (and noise, lol)

starting at the Ace




along the Embankment


and finally Docklands




and home over Tower Bridge


The article in Japanese Performance came out pretty cool as well







and that was it, run in. Time for the moment of truth. I wanted to get it done NOW because Rotorstock was fast approaching and It'd have been nice to make the UK's only specific rotor show with the car finished. Unfortunately, J couldn't fit in the mapping because his dyno operator of choice was in the middle of moving premises. So I took it to a mate on the forums who does mapping and indeed does it extremely well. His own drag car is running the frisky side of 550 bhp so I knew I'd be in safe hands.

Strapped her down, run her up and let her rip





all was going well, here's a quick vid of one of the early runs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wShdpdXwwA0&fea...

and it even managed to climb a bit above that, this was the best graph I got out of the night;



and I was thinking "Jeez, it ought to be good for a bit more than that!" but then things seemed to be going really wrong. All sorts of rough running crept in, and as you can see the AFRs were all over the place. The dyno guy and mapper started fiddling around under the bonnet trying to cure it. The boost controller was a suspected culprit, so they tried to re-plumb it to the wastegate to gain more control. Before you knew what was going on, there was a boost spike of well over two bar, just for an instant, but long enough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXAArwNw0Yo&fea...

Now it sounded sicker than ever. The guys persisted trying to sort it, but it got worse and worse. Eventually around midnight we had to call it a day. Ignition breakup was diagnosed as the problem, and they handed the car back to me with the warning it'd probably run really rough because the plugs were now fouled. I got in to drive back home as their van disappeared into the night... and straight away knew there was something badly wrong.

Yep, it had dropped an apex seal. The engine was ruined.


This, it's fair to say, was one of the low points in the story

[Nik da Greek]

Sorry, been trying to post again for ages but some kind of bloody adblocker thing kept screwing the site up




Well, needless to say, I missed Rotorstock

My previous post sounds bad, but it's not meant to. I don't blame the guys who blew it up on the dyno. You can't, can you? No dyno operator runs a car without you signing to say its at your own risk, so even if I wanted to shout and scream about it, it wouldn't have helped. Don't get me wrong, I was pissed off, more angry than I've been about almost anything else, but it was no help. It was done.

It's a terrible situation to be in though, caught between Scylla and Charybdis, to quote ancient Greek proverb lol. The engine builder says "well what do you expect if you boost it two bar above where it should be?". The dyno operator says "why did you bring us a car with flaws like that in it?". The mapper says "the ignition was breaking up long before it overboosted".

Who's right? They're all right. To this day it's never been conclusively proved what killed the engine first, or why the faults developed... although later events would shine some further light and show the way forwards...



So there's li'l old me stuck in the middle sucking on it. I drove the car home that night so angry I've almost no recollection of the journey. For those amongst you who've never had to drive a rotary when it drops a tip, my advice would be; "don't". It'll barely idle, it's got random compression, its throwing neat petrol out through the exhaust... it's terrible. The only way to keep it running is to keep it spinning fast when centrifugal force almost overcomes the worst of the damage by flinging what's left of the apex seals outwards towards the housing. I got it well over the legal speed limit on the way home, and I was so angry I never once thought of calling recovery, or even of the added damage it was doing to the motor.

And that's the catch-22 of a rotary. So fragile in some respects, then quite able to add 20mph onto the national speed limit... with only 50% of its engine working Fickle bloody things.

Once I'd calmed down I drove it up to Super 7. J was more gutted than I was if anything, after all he was the one who'd put in the hours with the die grinder porting the engine and sticking it all together. But there was no sense in crying over exploded apex seals, we had to strip it apart and find out what was left

back to square one



it was literally like tearing your heart out. The strip-down revealed the expected carnage. This is the tip that went, the pesky li'l critter. One of the ends is supposed to be missing; the tips are two-piece with a triangular section at one end for sealing purposes. The other end isn't supposed to be missing



There was no sign of the missing bit, but you could easily trace its progress around the engine by the scrapes in the rotor housing...



...the nicks where the rotor had bounced over it...



...the chunks taken out of two of the rotor faces...





...the horrendous gouge in the housing where it had got trapped under the rotor edge before exiting through the exhaust port...



...and of course the nicks taken out of the turbine wheel blades as it made its final bid for freedom through the hot wheel...



Dang!

I really can't pay enough respect to J over his attitude. He was gutted, clearly, but as a businessman, he didn't need to take responsibility for the disaster. There was no proof anything he'd done had led to the destruction, indeed it seemed as likely if not more that the boost spike is what done the deed...and that was probably down to the dyno guys meddling with the boost controller. I was certainly not going to try getting into legalese about it because that would have been a nightmare for everyone involved and probably would prove nothing. He stepped up to the plate and offered to rebuild the engine for the cost of the parts alone, and I don't think anyone can say fairer than that.

So hey, ho, it's running in (again) we go

[Nik da Greek]

J was as good as his word and re-built the engine for the price of the parts. It was back in and running within a couple of weeks. A few things got changed along the way, since some weak spots had been identified during the previous running-in period. In particular, I got a set of uprated MazdaSpeed spark plug leads as there was a question mark about the ignition side of things contributing to the blow-up. The coils were tested and appeared to be absolutely fine, but I had Magnecor plug leads that were a nightmare for seating properly. The boot formed a vacuum when you pushed them on the plug and even when they seemed properly seated the electrode sometimes wasn't in proper contact. The Magnecor were red, which matched the colourscheme and the MazdaSpeed ones were a fetching shade of turquoise, which didn't, but you can't have everything!

The little Blitz dump valve had proved to be feebly inadequate to flowing the amount of shunt the new turbo was pushing out, and a GReddy Type R was pressed into service instead;



The pulley setup had been chafing slightly on the oil cooler lines, so a bag-load of cable ties sorted that little problem before it led to disaster!





The fuel pressure regulator was a secondhand one of unknown provenance, I think it was a Nissan one of some sort. Since there was a question over the fueling too, it seemed prudent to change the poor little thing



Rotaries simply cannot take being run lean, because of course that makes the chambers hot. Then carbon deposits form localised hotspots and then they get hotter and hotter. The mixture pre-ignites before ignition. Yep, that's good old-fashioned pinking right there. A piston engine will tolerate a certain amount of detonation like this, but a rotary will just blow itself to bits; it breaks apex seals and in extreme cases even puts dents into the rotor faces. So, the moral is, don't let it lean out. Ever. With this in mind, I sourced a nifty SARD fuel pressure regulator which should be more than manly enough



and the injector system was double-checked and refreshed. Here's the end of the billet rail with ballast resistor load-protected injector gubbins



That was pretty much that, normal service was resumed. Even from the word go this engine seemed a lot more tractable than the last, even with the limits of 4k rpm and no boost imposed again. Not sure why really, it was just smoother and more pleasant to drive on. And so I did, racking up the miles. I was pretty broke by now, as you can imagine, so there wasn't much budget for any new toys, though I did manage to score a MazdaSpeed alloy rear strut brace to replace the standard steel one and to match the front



That's my cuddly lucky Cthulhu there as well, he's been in the car since the Montego Blue one. I'm not actually convinced he's really all that lucky, to be honest, but you never know, perhaps things would have been worse if he hadn't been there . Not much else to report, except I stickerbombed the battery box in a moment of extreme boredom



I also managed a swap for some wider spacers because the ones I'd bought proved to be slightly too bi-curious to really fill the arches as I'd hoped. Fortunately, a fellow FDUKer had some wider ones that were too manly, so we exchanged. Much better;



Except now the rear wheels rubbed heinously on the arches I thought about getting all ghetto on they ass with a scaffold pole but the way my legendary luck was running in 2010 I thought that might well end in disaster. So I rented a proper arch roller and got a brave mate round for moral support...



I know he looks a bit like a monkey with a jar of peanuts, but this is my bezzy mate Ada without whom none of this would have been possible lol. Whenever the lurrve for the car flagged and I felt like chucking it in he'd show up and just attack whatever the problem was full-on. Sometimes everyone needs a mad mate to kick them up the backside. Metaphorically.



What a clever doobrie these are, too. Even our hamfisted efforts worked wonders, one rolling the arch and the other keeping a heat gun aimed to soften the paint and prevent it from cracking. All these years later, it still hasn't cracked. Winner! Encouraged by our stance-stylee success we threw a bucket of elbow grease over the engine bay, along with a few litres of autosol







As summer drew to a close, I had well over a thousand miles on the car and things were looking up. All summer I'd also been working through the death of my old man and trying to settle his estate, but this was now drawing to a close and the money we inherited took some of the strain off the finances. It incidentally meant that my long-suffering wife sent in the builders to start work on her long-awaited loft conversion and kitchen extension. Then...

...riding home on the bike, all of ooooh, ten miles an hour ...if that... across a roundabout in town, some wizened arthritic old pensioner decided she was far too important to give way to the right on a roundabout .... BAM! she just drove right over me. The bike was wedged under her front bumper, right under the number plate. Oh goody, haven't done any upside-down riding in ages.

She was very peeved to be so rudely inconvenienced by my inconsiderately interfacing with her car just because I clung to tedious out-dated notions like right of way and my liberty to go about my lawful business without being assaulted by fking idiots. She was in a hurry. Her passenger would miss his train at this rate. As you can imagine, I was very sympathetic to their plight and showed my understanding by not beating them both to death with my bare hands.

However, she had managed to rip out my cruciate ligaments, tear the cartiledge off in the knee joint, pull my shoulder joint apart, all sorts of fun things like that. Amazing. Chuffed.

So I finished the summer stuck living in a building site, no roof on the house, every room torn to bits, building dust everywhere, on crutches, unable to walk let alone finish the car. (It took something like two years to get the claim settled by the way... despite her admitting 100% liability and the police thinking about charging her with dangerous driving. The law's an ass. My recovery took half as long, mostly because I had to have an operation to put my shoulder back together. Don't do it, kids, stay rubber-side down lol).


You gotta say one thing for my luck, it's consistent


My incapacity wouldn't necessarily have been a problem in as much as there was no time limit on running-in... except... I'd put the Rex forward as a decent car to feature in Japanese Performance magazine. The editor had written an editorial appealing for more street-driven cars than the track fare they'd been focusing on and buoyed on the success of the tunnel run feature I'd sent in some details. Out of the blue, an email... can we feature your car? Errrr... that'll be the one that blew up and that I can't drive cause two of my favourite limbs no longer function, then. Dang!

I had no choice but to ring Super 7 and plead with them to map the car up at short notice, it would have been rubbish to try and sell a piece on a car that wouldn't rev above 4,000 rpm and couldn't boost. Jason stepped up once again and took it away to map. By now it had well over a thousand miles on it, so it'd all be fine. Nothing could go wrong, could it?


Could it?

[Nik da Greek]

Round about...


...now!



Of course it was all fine Gahh, what you'd think there'd be any problems after all that? I was due some good luck, surely



three hundred and ninety-six very real and emotional horses. How d'ya like them apples! Felt like all the hard work had been vindicated, just a gnat's short of 400bhp from a 1.3 litre twenty year-old car. What a result. J delivered it back to me the night before the day the photoshoot was scheduled. It was filthy, and the morning dawned freezing cold. I couldn't wash it; the hose had frozen. I could hardly stand anyway. I drove it up to the local Polish car wash. Their pressure washer had frozen. Went to the automatic car wash. Yeah, that's right Out of order due to freezing temperatures. Does no-one lag their goddamned pipes nowadays!?

Went home in a massive strop and phoned Ada for help. He came straight round off a night turn without having any sleep and we managed to fake the car into being shiny. We literally were just finishing when the reporter and smudger turned up.

The photoshoot was a strange affair, I didn't really know what to expect. We tried to find somewhere nice for the pics, the photographer had an idea of getting onto the beach since we were by the sea, but in Darkest Worthing it's not that easy as it's all high promenades. Eventually we tried the council. Yeah, they were happy to let us get onto the beach. A fee of £300 ought to cover it...

We bade them a fond farewell and eventually wound up on the waters' edge on Littlehampton's west beach. Scary. It ain't called L.A. for nothing, you know. Still, I thought the location came out OK in the pics (these are stolen from Ada as I was too busy being a helpless cripple and telling the reporter my life history to take any photos)





my sad story being taken down by the inestimable "Carolgees"



Adam's T-Rex watching the proceedings



Snapper doing shapes and colours lol



Still talking rubbish.... note how I spent the time sat down, even driving was a bit painful. I was crippled by the end of the day!





Right, that's enough of that. Safe to say it all felt like another vindication. I took Carolgees out for a blast up the bypass in the car and it blew both of us away, to be fair. It was soooooooo fast now, as you'd expect in a 400bhp car weighing just over a ton. He left muttering about having to get one of these, so I felt that was job done. Even if we did nearly get rear-ended by some dappy old geezer in a Punto who hadn't noticed the traffic had stopped in front of him Fortunately the squeal of brakes ended with him stuffing it into the central reservation rather than right up our arse.

Y'know, that sorta thing happens around me all the time They never published the article in Japanese Performance either, after all that. The editor changed and the new one thought the location wasn't dramatic enough in the photos to use. That's about right for my luck, then

Anyway, once my leg and shoulder had healed up enough for me to drive again I got on with enjoying the fruits of my labour. Figured I'd earned it. Of course, it was the depths of winter by now, so it wasn't as much fun as it could have been (or more, depending on how much fun you consider total lack of traction to be). Still, the li'l 'un enjoyed it



"I love Daddy's car cos it goes really fast and makes whooshing noises " Bless him, he was only 3 1/2 at the time

It was beginning to dawn on me that this wasn't the most ideal form of winter transport, however. Since the Mister Two was dearly departed (I actually offered it to We Buy Any Car and they came back with an offer of £50... rather less than weighing it in at the time . Eventually I gave it to Jason as a sorta "if you can get it running, you can have it" deal. He did, and the little Toyota gave sterling service for years as a courtesy car. I had loads of people from FDUK say to me "I had your old MR2 while my FD was in Super 7 and it was great... dunno why you hated it so much!". Must be me, then ) and the bike clearly not an option because it was still being fixed, I had no choice. It's no fun starting the car at three in the morning and seeing water and air intake temps on a running engine of;



but what choice did I have? I'd made my bed, ploughed everything I had into the car, and now I was stuck with it for better or worse. I only had enough money to buy a cheapy set of spare Volk splitrims on winter tyres and bung them on to save the GT-Ps from rotting in the road slurry.

You want pepper with that salt?



Gahhhh, just think what this caustic cack is doing to our lovely paintwork



Fortunately, the problem of paintwork wear and tear was solved for me on the way up to Milton Keynes for a FDUK meet-up and dinner.



The car blew up again














Yep, you read that right. It blew up. AGAIN


Open road from Dunstable, out of a roundabout, second gear... short shift at 6.5k (it's one degree above freezing, after all)...third gear... go for gearlever at 6k.. BOOM!

Night sky lights up with sheet of flame from exhaust...Car loses way immediately... Starts rattling... running rough as a three-legged dog... won't rev... oh, no, not again, come ON you evil, vicious bh... please don't be dead again.. drop to second.. give it a big bootful... BANG!.. more flames... engine stutters...

...and dies.

coast to halt at roadside. Get out in forlorn hope it's blown the vacuum line off the MAP sensor, they run rough like a dropped tip if that happens. My mate Andy who'd been following pulls up "What happened? I saw the flames! How's it blown up, you weren't even caning it..."

Map sensor's still plugged in. I've killed it. Again. Get her started after ten attempts. Idles like a tractor, shaking to bits. Limp the last few miles to the pub. Car dies again and won't run at all.

Call RAC



the driver's a great guy, a Caribbean fella who's been all over in the Army and has a hundred great stories to tell. It's just as well, he's my company for the next four hours as we totter along at 55mph all the way back to the South coast



I'm happy to listen, he's a great storyteller and to be honest, I don't really feel much like talking anyway. Get home at two in the morning.

Drop the car on the drive, crawl into bed. The wife's watching from the window as we unload it. She doesn't need to say anything. It's all been said before.

Edited by Nik da Greek on Tuesday 24th May 18:04

[Nik da Greek]

WaferThinHam said:

Dunstable's a hellish place, maybe it blew up in disgust? :P

lol. The only thing you can say about Dunny is it's a hell of a sight nicer than Luton

[Nik da Greek]

To be fair, not all rotaries are like mine. And I was asking it to almost double the factory power output after all. However, we did eventually get to the bottom of the issue that was causing the engines to blow, and it was neither easy nor something you'd really have expected. All will be revealed...


Meanwhile...


It sorta goes without saying that this was another one of those low points. It was the piece de resistance when the guy who came to trailer the car up to Super 7 managed to crack the bumper winching it into his wagon with a badly-placed tow strap. It also goes without saying that the conversation was rather fraught when I finally got there. The way I saw it, there was clearly some underlying problem which was causing the car to keep breaking and it ought to have been sorted the first time, not allowed to continue blowing motors at random. The way J saw it was that he couldn't just keep throwing engines at me in the hope one held together. We settled our differences and came out the other side better for it, I think.

This time, the engine didn't even cost me the price of parts However, I'm getting slightly ahead, lets have a look in the old one before we move onto the errrr.... fourth shall we?



Errrm, yep. It was FUBAR.

The front rotor had blown again, which is slightly unusual. Generally the rear fails first, presumably due to the increased heat management problems back there. So at least it was consistent... Considering this time I'd driven it about five miles after it blew as opposed to the fifty the previous time, it was in a much worse state, it had let go big style



The rotor was scrap. It had dropped at least part of all three tips this time. To be fair, I've got quite a collection of these now, including one on the hearth in the front room. My wife's marvelous, she's very understanding



Pretty, innit!



Don't think I'm excessively weird, I'm just a true rotard lol. I deserve pity, not contempt ahaha. *ahem* Right, back to the autopsy. The three disappearing tips had obviously totally destroyed the rotor housing as well, it was ruined comprehensively. More depressingly, the turbine wheel of the turbo was now scrap as well (yep, that one I'd only had a year, barely boosted, and had paid about a grand on refurbishing, that one). A new wheel wouldn't have been a disaster, but in addition to that...



It had broken the turbine casing as well. This is a bit of a dodgy one, I can't prove anything one way or the other, so I won't go throwing blame around, but it appears the weld where the flange (ooooh, flange! ) had been fixed was no good. It's hard to see in these pics - ignore the black stuff, that's where petrol sloshed through the broken seals and washed the carbon out through the fracture. Makes it easier to see the break, I guess



but of course, the casing's cast iron, which is hard to weld at the best of times. As I understand it, it needs to be heated before welding to allow full penetration. Now the fault was clear, it was easy to see on close examination where the welded flange was simply stuck onto the surface without any real penetration. The local tame fabricator, a man of immense skills with a TiG torch, sucked his teeth and shook his head. He said it was more likely to shatter into a million pieces than stick back together if you tried a repair.

I've heard suggestions that the ceramic coating might have contributed to the demise of the metalwork by keeping too much of the heat in, forcing the metal to expand and contract too quickly. I don't know, I'm in no way qualified to hold an informed opinion on that. However, given the rate of failure, the dodgy colour of the coating, and the brief timescale since refurbishment, would I go back to the firm who did the work? Nope. Would I recommend anyone else did?

Nope

Oh, and the HKS manifold had cracked as well, in the web where the runners joined the turbo up-pipe.

So, to recap and precis... 50% of the engine was scrap; the turbo was scrap; the manifold was scrap. Oh, and I'd managed somehow to do the impossible...



Yep, I'd managed to break a titanium exhaust God alone knows how, but one of the strengthening webs was missing and this crack in the weld for the mid-box was where the brace had been. I can only assume it took a clout from a speedhump or something, and the brace took the brunt of it, but cracked the weld in the process. Because the exhaust was designed as a system, a normal FD mid-pipe wouldn't fit with just the titanium back box because the lengths of each section were wrong. So I needed both sections while I searched for someone who can repair titanium

So.. engine, turbo, manifold, exhaust.

Anything else?

Well, yeah, actually. As I alluded to, J said he'd do the engine for free this time because he felt so bad for my situation, but we had to be able to guarantee this was never going to happen again. That meant further investigation into the cause of the blow-ups, and changing everything that was suspect. So I had to promise to commit to this, whatever it took. Fair enough, but I honestly wasn't sure if I could... or if I wanted too

So I sat back and sulked for a while. I listened to a lot of Rammstein, Killing Joke and Spacemen 3, which helped a bit. I made lists of all the bits on the car, and what I could expect to sell them for if I broke it for parts. I looked into selling it as a project. And a few things became apparent;

1) it was worth naff-all either as parts or shell in the current economic climate (this was early 2011), especially considering how much I'd spent on it.

2) I hate to lose.

3) I had such a fantastic group of mates in FDUK who couldn't have been more supportive, offering everything from a shoulder to cry on to parts from their own stashes and even off their own cars to help with a rebuild.

4) I really hate to lose

5) There was no other car that I could think of that offered the same thrill, amazing ride, fantastic performance, gorgeous looks, etc etc and there was no way I was going to while my life away growing old and grey in a soulless econo-box with the other doomed souls trudging around the congested tracks of our septic isle.

6) I really fking hate losing, and the car deserved better.

That was the decision pretty much made then.

Go large, or go home. Again