Wow, its nice to see another blue 7. Yours is one of the first ones I've seen other than mine, and I think it looks beautiful on FC's. Your paint appears to be in better shape than mine, though.
Also, the reason to replace the rack witha manual one is that the manual rack has a slower ratio. This means that there is less effort, but the steering isn't as quick. If you are planning on autocrossing your car, I would stay with the power rack, and just disconnect it. You have to put a little more effort into it (mainly when you arent moving) but it steer quicker. My car has a manual rack and it was a little slow for autocorssing. It can be done, you just have to adjust for it and spin the wheel quicker. Theres actually a pretty good thread discussing the differences somewhere on the first few pages. I just posted on it last night.

 

The shaft was on the concrete only for the pic lol it's now resting on my carpet :P

Ah i'll keep my rack and just loop the lines for now..Can't slow it down that much with the bearing in there..

Today I spent time cleaning the housings to get them ready to be painted.. look decently new now, before I couldn't read the Mazda 13B since it was covered in so much oil! now it's better..

i'm going to be calculating how much and what I need to proceed.