Is it wise to remove the air pump on a 12a? I'm about to delete rats nest and find that the air pump doesn't have a belt on it and looks like it should go. There is a sign on it saying 'never remove air pump', which is confusing. Is it important?

 

If you have a cat in the exhaust, the air pump must stay. Otherwise the cat will burn out.

if your state requires an emissions test, the rats nest and air pump would need to stay in place.

What is your purpose form removing the rates nest?

 

Ok, will check into that, thanks for the info.
I don't have to worry about emissions, and just wanting to simplify the engine bay and get any extra power gains I can. I'll be swapping out the exhaust for RB unit pretty soon.

 

The RB exhaust will get you a hp gain but the rats nest does nothing for hp. Now, with that said, if you put a RB exhaust on, the rats nest is pretty useless. Your MPG will go down.

If the car isn't running top notch right now, get it running correctly first before removing anything. We have many many folks on here that get non-running or badly running RX-7 and they think that removing stuff will fix their issues. it's just the opposite. Removing stuff has caused more non-running or pore running RX-7.

 

Good points. It is running pretty roughly, missing and not idling on it's own, although got some improvement changing out plugs and leads.