Check out the price paid for this 1984 GSL.
 

Check out the price paid for this 1984 GSL. All I can is is wow.

Mazda : RX-7 GSL | eBay

Nice car and it better have been garaged all the time in PA or it would be a rust bucket.

We'll see if this comes back up or not. 8K is a lot for a 1st gen.

Very nice example; good to see a decent car getting a respectable price.

Interesting how the winning buyer didn't pop up until the very end of the auction, & with a $2700 'raise' plus another $300 in the last seconds.

Strange.

the pictures were pretty lousy! why do we need 3 out of focus shots of the hood, but none of the left side of the car? why does it have a japanese license plate?

just to jump to a conclusion, i say last minute bid + lousy pictures = shill bidder...

I agree. I emailed the seller before the auction ended because they said the color was white. I'd never seen a white 84/85 with a brown interior. I wanted to verify the color and he said it was an off-white/cream. The cream with brown is my least favorite color. The condition of the car is not worth an $8,000 bid. Something isn't right with the bidding. For 8G, I could by a very nice grey/black/silver/red or blue RX with low miles.

hmm i have owned a white/brown car, i think maybe the red interior is more common?

I've seen a white with red interior GS, and another member's GSL-SE that's white outside with brown interior.

That guy really got more than his money's worth, I'll say that much.

Top dollar, but if mileage is accurate its not too far off the mark. In that condition, considering how rare such low-mileage cars are (as opposed to oodles of average-to-nice "normal-mileage" FBs) it really can sort of set its own price. Only takes two guys who Gotta Have It to get to these prices. Put another way, you could drop say $3K into a typical FB, redo the paint and interior as far as you could go with new paint and parts and you can easily approach this kind of coin. But, oh wait: YOUR FB still has 90K (etc.) miles on it. And lets face it, most of the new, or new-looking interior bits are mostly unobtainium. This all conspires to make these cars exceptional. And does little to advance the value of _our_ cars in the market. This cars will always be the exception. The new owner gets a barely -used 30 yr old car that will continue to depreciate with every mile he drives it.

Stu Aull
80 SA
Alaska

Wow!
I seen this bid earlier and it was going for atleast $5,000 if am not mistaken.

With non-faded factory panels and rear carpets with straps, and embroidered floor mats! That's a gem.

I wouldn't have paid a hair over $7,000 for it. But then I wouldn't have bought a 12a. Well, I didnt buy a 12a ;)

Maybe you have some expert car painters among your family or friends. For the rest of us a decent paint job can easily cost $8000 or more. Consider too that many older RX-7s have already been repainted, not always with top quality workmanship, which needs to be stripped off at added labor cost.

All the rubber trim and weather seals, and small interior bits can add up to where a restoration easily costs ~ 10,000 to $15,000. As noted many parts are unobtainable at any cost. For example does anyone have a stash of lower exhaust heat shields?

Lightning strikes twice:

Mazda : RX-7 GSL in Mazda | eBay Motors

:)

Stu Aull
80 GS
Alaska

I couldnt fathom paying anything over 3k for a 1st gen regardless...as i know what i will inevitably do to it :P

In '88 I paid $7500.00 for a silver GS with 32,000 miles.

Looks good. I just wish people selling cars such as this would post engine pics.

Second that; no need for two pictures of the factory brochure - immense need for underhood shots if he wants to score a price like that.

i like that one! i'm a sucker for silver/red...

nope, but i do have tons of now NOS parts.

although i do agree, to really restore an SA/FB properly its $10-15k, and that is starting with a decent car that runs. you could easily spend 6k on moldings and badges and weatherstripping and lenses and things.

I'm discovering this right now...

$50 to replace the rubber gromets that hold in the door panels?
$200 in interior paint?
$700 in weather seals?

*sigh* yeah i just did that.

I agree it is expensive to restore one of these.

I picked up my car for free and it was a great car to start with. I put over $4k to get it running and in suspention and interior. Over $3k in paint, $850 in seals and emblems. I still have about $2k to go to get it finished.

So that's over $10k for a car that I picked up for free. As the car looked when I picked it up it was worth close to $2k.

I'm really happy with the car and I would do it all over again.

I'm there too. Beats dropping $35K into a new sports car Chris. Esp one that 10 thousand others will be driving around for next few years...

Trick is to have the coin UP FRONT to drop into a minty $7-8K RX so you don't have to make yer $2K RX7 into $10K worth of replacement parts. Advice I wish I would follow....
;)

Stu Aull
80GS

I'm in the same boat as you. I bought my '81 1st Gen back in 1986 from the original owner that had just gone out and bought a new 2nd Gen. He kept it in the garage and never drove it in the winter. It had 40,000km on it at the time and I bought it for $8k. At the time, the GX model with leather and air was a rare find, so I jumped at it. When my daughter was born in '89, it just wasn't financially possible to keep it along with a second family truckster, so I sold it to a friend of mine. He drove it for a couple of years and for whatever reason, parked it in his driveway and forgot about it for the next 4 years. In 1996, I bought it back! It was showing signs of neglect. It had a gummed up carb, was in bad need of a tune-up and it had a good deal of dents and dings to be repaired. Towed it in to the local Mazda dealer and they had it running like it was supposed to be in no time. I picked up a parts car for $200, changed the bumpers and the front panel, had some dings repaired, re-painted, and had it back on the road by the summer of '96. I don't remember exactly, but I think it cost me about $2000, all in all to get it back on the road that time.

The next summer :(, partially for financial reasons, and having to drop off two kids at daycare before heading off to work, and not having much opportunity to drive it, I decided to sell it.....again. This time, it wasn't to a friend, but to a garage owner just around the corner from my parents house. He had taken a look at it for me before I bought it back the year earlier to give me some pre-inspection pointers and had expressed an interest in the car. Sadly, we parted ways again.

I don't really know why he bought this car from me. Apparently he never drove it. It sat in his garage for a bunch of years. From what I've heard, when he remarried, his new wife wanted the garage for her car, so he moved it to the lot behind his garage. Then disaster struck. There were a bunch of vehicles vandalized on his lot, including the RX. The side windows and the windshield had been smashed. By the time he realised, the car already had snow in it. I guess at this point, he had given up on it. Some people I know had tried to buy it off of him but he refused to sell it. We were talking one day about the car and they had suggested that I go and see if he would sell it back to me. I guess it was more of a challenge type of thing, but the more I started thinking about it, I thought "Hell ya" it would be great to have it back again.

I headed over to see him to have our little talk. I told him that I'd heard about it's misfortune and if he was looking to sell it. He told me that if it wasn't going back in my hands, where it belonged, then he was going to send it to the crusher:eek:

I just couldn't see it ending that way. There's no way I was going to let that happen.
So, for the third time, I bought it back. Hence the, Third time's a charm!!!

For the last bunch of years, I have been scouring the internet for various pieces. I lucked out and found a 1981 GX in Ottawa a couple of years ago. It had only 128000km on it, no winters, one owner, original paint, albeit almost non-existent paint at this point, and garaged almost all of its life. Same red leather as mine. It probably would have been better to rebuild this one, but I couldn't let my original FB down. This was going to be the sacrificial one, without hesitation.

I have already spent way too much time and money on this project, but hey, we have a history together. How many people can say that they have bought the same car three times. Even after seeing these ads for FB's on EBay, I would still go the same route.

I have an iCloud Photostream site:
https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A1JtdOXmvkcPq

where I have posted some pictures of the condition it was in when I bought it back the last time along with some progress pictures of where I'm at now. It would be a lot faster to have someone do all of this work for me, but it just wouldn't be detailed the same way.

This probably would have been better posted in the FB project cars thread. I didn't expect to carry on the way I did. Sorry for the hijack.

I might have to sell my stock 83 GSL with leather interior.

It's in better shape

Cool story and amazing job on that resto, she's looking amazing. With the factory IMSA air dam too! Nicely done man :nod:

~Geoff