My friend Marc's awesome FB Restoration
 

Hey Guys,

So almost 2 years ago now my friend Marc embarked on a project to do a complete restoration of his 1985 Mazda Rx7. There's an insanely long story involved which I will get into later including a paint/body shop that tried to screw him and lots of other fun stuff, but for now I just thought I'd share the pics of where it sits now.

The car was put on a rotisserie and a combination of chemical stripping and media blasting was used to remove all the old paint. All the rust was removed, new metal welded in, and the whole car painted inside, outside and upside down. The underside was given a protective coating and the suspension reassembled with brand new RB Springs, Tokico shocks and new Poly bushings all around.

Marc and I recently spent a week tweaking on it. It's at the 2nd paint shop now (ClassicAuto - freaking awesome shop) having all the glass and dash installed, and the rest of the interior/exterior stuff done before it goes back to RPM to have the rest of the engine bay reassembled and the finishing touches done.

Enjoy the pics :)

More pics!

Many more to come (I'll edit in some text later)

yet more!

Another set...

Over halfway there lol

Second last pic post!

Last one!

looks liek some real progress is being made there!!! not sure that i would have chosen to paint the engine rather than clean it up to oem specs but hey, its Marc's car and its looking really nice.. you in any of the pics Jon?

I'm the guy with the shaved head in the last pic, in fact. Not the best pic of me, I was just starting to grow the goatee back and hadn't bothered to shave my head or face the entire week, lol.

Yeah an engine rebuild is in the plans for next year but for now, with the project having already stretched WAY past its original completion date and original budget we just wanted to get it back in there and looking half decent!

Jon

Do I spy an REspeed rack and pinion? nice work

Good Eye :)

Yes, among the car's upgrades:
- RB Springs
- Tokico Shocks
- Poly Bushings
- ReSpeed Rack Kit and 15:1 Flaming River Rack
- Sterling Carb
- Ported Intake Manifold
- Racing Beat Exhaust (Single pipe version)
- Smoked Glass Sunroof
- Carpet from stockinteriors.com (GOOD quality compared to others like BlackDragon)
- And of course all the soundproofing : Second Skin's "Damplifier Pro"

And a few other little things. When it comes time for the engine rebuild there will be other upgrades made as well which are as yet to-be-decided.

It's going to be one *sweet* ride!

Jon

I like the custom painted distributor cap. :)

Looks like a big project, and should be a blast to drive when finished...

Amazingly enough that wasn't on purpose. We ordered an OEM replacement distributor cap and rotor from PartSource and much to our surprise it was made of grey plastic when we opened the box!

For the life of me I can't remember which brand it was though.

It has been an enormous project, and we've still got a ways to go, but things are slowly getting there.

Jon

Looks good minus the painted engine and trans. But it's his car. Damn fine work involved there. Can't wait to see the "final" product.

lol, actually I thought it got sprayed along with the motor. I didn't realize it was actually made of an unusual color of plastic. :) At least it is color coordinated now.

Judging by their location, I'm gonna guess that the painted engine and trans was for protection against the elements

Yeah up here you can't get away with having the engine (or anything really) be just be bare metal. The iron becomes rust coloured and the aluminum turns white in fairly short order.

Ideally we would have preferred not to paint it on the hoist like that, but rather do a full teardown and rebuild, masking and painting it properly as we rebuilt it. The engine rebuild is scheduled for another year though. We just needed to clean off the gunk and grime and make the engine not look so crappy in the newly painted engine bay.

Personally, I love the look. As much of the engine bay as possible is going to be done in that silver colour. My car has a silver/black theme, but his will just be silver on that blue colour background, it'll be sweet.

Jon

That is a sweet car, what color is that? Thanks.

any updates.... hows the car coming together

V3 - Tender Blue Metallic. In all those pictures there's still lots of dust on it and it hasn't gotten its final buffings yet. I'll get some good quality pics when the paint is 100% done, it'll look amazing.

It's a stock colour, my favorite in fact. I honestly considered doing a colour change on mine to make it that colour, but decided to stick with the silver instead.

Jon

Wow, you posted that while I was writing my reply to the other post!

No reports from the paintshop yet. We had some delays getting some parts in that we needed... trim pieces, glass run channels, etc... It should all be there this week, meaning the paint shop should be able to wrap up their side of it fairly soon.

Once ClassicAuto is done with the paint, dash and interior/exterior bits, then we have to make an appointment with RPM Motorsports to get the rest done. I'll get ahold of Marc this week and see if I can get more details.

Jon

RPM Motorsports is a great company. They did a very good job on my 13B Build that mixed my budget with a good engine. Very easy to talk to. Unfortunate that they are so far away, I would had loved to have them clean up my engine bay and get everything back into stock locations... I shipped them my engine, and they shipped it back. Tell your friend he made a great choice in RPM.

Yeah we've been doing business with RPM for a while now. They installed my ReSpeed steering rack and did the disassembly of this car when the project started. They're great guys.

Jon