ebochenek

I'm new at all of this, just got my RX7 a few months ago. My car is a completely stock 79 that has less than 40,000 original miles on it (was really excited to find it). My problem is this:

While my car runs fine when running down the street or highway, as soon as I come to a stop, it dies. I tried to adjust the Idle, but I seem to have made matters worse, and have probably really messed up the settings. Prior to all of this the previous owner had the carb rebuilt at a Mazda dealer, and I had the car get a tunne up about 4000 miles ago (points, plugs, timing, new fuel filter and air filter element.) The car was running fine til about 1000 miles ago when it started dieing at stoplights. I am armed with Haynes, Clymers, and Mazda workshop manuals, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to keep it running at Idle. By the way, this problem only occurs when the car is fully warmed up. When the choke is on, there's no problem. If someone could give me a good starting point (i.e. x number of turns from fully closed) for the idle and mixture adjustments that would be a big help.

Also, I seem to be losing about a half pint of coolant every 1000 miles or so, but see no signs of leakage anywhere.

Lastly, I read about the ATF treatment and wondered if anyone could recommend how often this should be done as a matter of preventative maintainance

I appreciate any suggestions that you might have. This car is amazingly pristine, and I want to keep it completely stock so that it stays as "vintage" as possible.


Thanks

VintageRotary from St. Louis

inittab

Setting the idle adjustment screw is half the battle, have you adjusted the mixture as well. Perhaps it's running too lean.

mysteriously losing coolant is not a good sign. It's possible that an o-ring has given up in the engine and the coolant is being burned instead. There are also o-rings between the intake manifold and engine block that could be causing coolant to be burned or leak. Hope for the later of the two. Also check your overflow bottle for "bubbles". Bubbling in the overflow tank is caused by engine gases bypassing a faulty o-ring and getting into the coolant. If you have bubbles you have troubles.

As far as the ATF treatment goes, there is not set interval to do this. The proceedure is to clear carbon deposits out of the engine. It's often done on engines that don't run do to carbon-lock. If you run your engine sufficiently hard there should be no reason at all to perform an ATF treament. It's one ot those quirks with the rotary, drive it slow like grandma and you'll need to ATF it often.

Good luck with the car and post some pics if you can!