Yep. Had that on my old car and it was beautiful. On the new car I just hadn't had a chance to get it on before the CAS screwed me.

 

^This

^This x10^6. Using a 30 year old factory harness on an even a mildly modified turbo car with a stock or RTEK chipped ECU is like playing Russian roulette. Best to replace the harness with a new OEM one (if you can get one) or properly rebuild it to like new standards.

 

On your next engine look into some tougher apex seals like rxparts, or irotary.

OEM seals work great in stock or near stock conditions, but they can easily break if something goes wrong ie leanout detonation, ignition problems, hardware failures....

 

if the spark is happening at the wrong time, stronger apex seals won't help you....

if you read Smokey Yunich's book, he spends about half of it describing how big of a problem Inductive Crossfire is. the Ford and Chevy V8's are really bad because they have cylinders that are next to each other in the firing order, and also physically (7 and 8 for the Chevy).

if you fire the spark plug 90 degrees early it does not matter how strong your piston rings are, or you pistons, or your rods, or your crank, or the block, the engine will break. the rotary is no different.

 

Thanks for all the input everyone. I'm out of the country for a year so nothing will be touched until then. Looks like I have plenty of things to work on when I get back. New wiring harness, new sensors and some upgraded ignition components for sure. Hopefully I can diagnose the cause when I tear down the block.

 

Back in the country and will be tearing down the car shortly. I've been home for 6 weeks, but in the 1st 2 weeks my truck decided it didn't need spider gears anymore and my non turbo FC decided it was fine without a sizable chunk of coolant jacket. So I rebuilt the motor for the non turbo rx7 and swapped a new differential into my truck. Luckily this quarantine has given me plenty of time to work on projects.

Finally about to start working on the turbo rx7. I picked up a FFE hall trigger kit, and pieced together an AEM smart coil setup using sakebomb's universal flying lead harness, planning to swap to direct fire.
MSD 6A will obviously be removed.

I already had gone through the entire engine harness originally installed the adaptronic to remove no longer used wires and replace any damaged connectors, but I will give it one more go through to make sure that everything is satisfactory as well as integrate the new electronics.

Will report back once the keg is opened.

 

Finally apart! 2 broken apex seals on the front rotor. the seal with a chunk taken from the middle of it is otherwise undamaged. Pretty strange failure I would assume.

I lucked out and everything else looks great still.

bought goopy apex seals for this time around, otherwise all new OEM mazda seals/springs.

 

Keg is back together, ended up going with RX parts apex seals as the goopy seals were out of stock.

Harness is now rewrapped with the new electronics and was tested pin by pin.

hopefully back on the roads in the next couple of weeks.

 

Glad you're making progress. I'd be concerned about that apex seal piece going through the turbo. Have you inspected it for damage?

 

Conpletely forgot to look the turbine over for damage, that would be unfortunate, the turbo only had as many miles as the motor, would be a good excuse to upgrade to the s362 I've been thinking about though! I'll check it out tomorrow

 

Glad to see progress. I don't remember but did you have any logs from when it happened?

 

No damage to the turbine!

Dguy-logs supposedly exist but I have yet to be able to get them from my tuner. I contacted them about them again today, I would really like to see/share them before running the new motor.

 

Still no logs, no response at all from my previous tuner so ive gone with a different tuner for this round.

Car is up and running!

Looks like this is a thread with no definite answers, thanks to everyone for the help. I'll get a build thread up and going to document further progress.

 

I've seen a bad trailing coil blow an engine. Worth checking out before you get it tuned again.

 

I don't see how a 'bad' trailing coil would be able to blow an engine with increased CCP which is where you'll see apex seal failure like that. Especially when it was supposedly 'out of boost'.

Not to beat a dead horse but I don't think your engine blew 'out of boost' if it was in your tuners hands. I think he tried to get too hard too soon and it popped. Then he told you it was out of boost. The fact that you haven't gotten logs and he's AWOL is proof enough, for me.

 

I've seen bad trailing coils cause preignition events, like ones you can hear. This is an old thread i was sub'd to, I didnt read it through. If he wasnt in boost then probably not the issue, but why not check if he hasn't? Seems like he's checked everything else.

 

Dguy- until the day comes that I get those logs and they show otherwise, I'll be thinking the same thing.

Fuhrertuner - I've moved to smart/ign1a coils so that won't be an issue going forward, bit maybe still worth testing put of curiosity

 

What do you mean too hard too soon? I am guessing is either boosting the engine while not in proper temp range, or hitting X amount of boost on crappy map.

 

It could be either, though Id be money it was too much boost too soon on a crappy map. Or just boost too soon with weird compensations in play (crappy map). EIther way it sucks for OP, hoping he gets it sorted.