Rx7 project ideas
 

Whats up guys Ive had my 87' non turbo 2+2 for a few months now and im thinking about doing big things to it so check out my ideas and tell me what you think.

-I took out my rear seats and am going to build a fiberglass woofer box (black) that is going to fit where the rear seats would be, theyll be facing upwards. The box would extend to each side of the car.

-Re-upholster the whole inside: Black carpet through the bottom, Black leather headliner, white leather on the door panels with more black leather trim.

-New paint job pearly white with some new 16 inch rims. (not sure which ones yet if you guys have any suggestions)

-Since my 7 did not come with a sunroof, I'm going to take it somewhere and have one installed.

-HID headlights and taillights. I was thinking of installing stationary headlights. (non flip-up), or should i keep my flip-ups?

-Also a new body kit


-----How does this sound to you guys? I plan on making this into a car that makes jaws drop. If you guys have any suggestions please share them I'd like to hear some more ideas.

sounds like you've got a pretty good grasp on what you want out of the car, opinions are always nice to get but every single person has different taste and in the end you just have to build the car for you.

with that being said, good plan with the rear seat delete, those things are beyond useless ha ha.. although having 2 subs right behind you in such a small hatchback might be a bit too intense. not that i'm against bass, my daily driver is a subaru wrx with 2x 12" JL 12v3v3-4's with 2400 watts powering them, and i still found that a single 12" with a 550w amp was too much in my rx7. if you were planning 8"s or 10"s it might be a little more acoustically matched with the car and placement, but then the box would be very unnecessarily big.

i'll be reupholstering my 7 as well, seems like it's gonna be a pretty big job. thankfully stuff like the carpet and front seat leathers can be bought for reasonable prices

a real nice pearl white (like escalade or bmw) looks minty on anything, so kudos. any reason why you're shooting for 16" rims? i think nice wide 17"s look right at home on our cars with an aggressive suspension setup and some lip. also tires are much easier to find with much more selection for 17's

make sure you do your homework before getting a sunroof put in and you get it done at a place that knows what they're doing. i've never had personal experience with aftermarket sunroofs as all my cars have always had oem ones, but i've heard tons of stories about endless leaking and whistling problems that never really get fixed after an aftermarket sunroof is installed.

for the hid's in the front, are you planning on doing any sort of projector retrofit? the benefits for you are much better (way more focused light output, crisp beam pattern etc) as well as other people (you won't be blinding everyone on the road like if you just put a cheapo kit into non-hid housings) are well worth it. theretrofitsource.com and lightwerkz.net have lots of different options available.

hid tail lights?? why? did you mean LED tail lights maybe? the tail lights have no reason to project light and that's all that HID's were designed for.. it would just make everything unnecessarily bright and complicated in my opinion. you can get very bright led cluster bulbs designed around various oem bulb sockets that will do the job very well, i don't know why you would want HID's in your tail lights

there's a few nice looking kits out there, i'll probably be kitting my 7 as well before paint. if you can afford it, an FRP body kit would be much tougher and last a lot longer than a straight fiberglass kit. i haven't done much reading on Duraflex yet (mostly fiberglass i think) but apparently it's a little more resilient than straight fiberglass as well

like i said, it sounds like you already have a good idea of what you want, and that's nice to see

keep reading and keep us all updated about how it's going!

-sean

I was shooting for 16 inch rims because for some reason I can barely fit a 16 inch in my wheel well. It might just be too wide of a tire but i ended up blowing my front passenger tire because I aired it up to 35 psi which caused the tire to expand and rub against my suspension.

And Im not too knowledgable on led and hid so ill just end up doing what you said. Thanks for the input man,

You sir have a GTUs. Please do not put a sunroof in it

I second this, also you should stick an RX-8 engine in it because 6 speed FC's are über cool :D

you were rubbing the suspension because the offset on the wheels is too high. a lower offset wheel or the addition of wheel spacers will make the wheel stick out further from the suspension and give you more clearance (lower offset = stick out from the car more, higher offset = tucked in to the car more)

the diameter of the rims (16", 17") has nothing to do with how close or far the wheels sit from the suspension, it's all about width and offset

the measurement of wheel offset is the physical distance from the flat mounting surface on the inside of the wheel to the centerline of the wheel width
http://www.nicoclub.com/tech/images/...set-image2.jpg

offset is measured in mm. a 0mm offset means that the wheel mounts to the hub exactly in the center of it's width, and that half of the wheel sticks in towards the car and half sticks out away from the car. most cars, ours included, run positive offset wheels, meaning that more of the wheel sticks in towards the car than out.

here's a good page about what all the different dimensions mean http://www.nicoclub.com/archives/wheel-tech.html

no problem bud, that's what this place is for

-sean

You have no plans for performance? Have you kept up on routine maintenance??

Why shouldnt I put a sunroof in it? And thanks for the diagram sean, very helpful. Also I dont have any immediate plans for performance. I have kept up on routine maintnence. Also Im only getting 11mpg right now and I really dont want to make it any worse lol.

Cant get much worse than 11 mpg lol. Performance!

Don't put a sunroof on it, I woudn't mind no sunroof, seems to be more rare.


Paint is a good idea. If you like to diy, i think you can build your own hid projector headlight setup, that is what I plan to do, same goes for led tail lights. (there is alot of custom potential in the tail lights, I have this idea to paint the housing chrome).

btw, you can't go wrong spending some time on this forum, i know i learned alot.

In my opinion, doing an aftermarket sunroof wouldn't be worth the time or money. As someone above said there's the risk of a poor install, and that's not something I would want to deal with. Also reupholstering the interior is a great idea, but in my opinion a white on black theme is a little too much of a contrast in color, and would look tacky. But it all comes down to personal style!

I concur he should not put a sunroof in it, but his car is not a GTUs. It's a 1987. GTUs models were only around in 1989-90. It is fairly rare these days to find an FC with no sunroof though.

Exactly. Non-sunroof cars are rare. It took me a year to find a good example without. It would be much easier to find a sunroof model and start from there. You'll also have a factory sunroof system, which I would expect to work much better than anything installed aftermarket.

I am actually suprised that this wasn't caught earlier.:scratch: Rare you say, I have sold two within the last six months. Both 1988 SE's, no rust, decent interiors with minor mechanical issues & both went for $500.