I'm interested. I have never had a rotary apart, so while I am basically farmiliar with how they work, their actual internal arcitecture is not that familiar to me.

I am looking at buying a FC that most likely has blown cooant seals to use as a drift beater.

In all of my searching, I always hear "rebuld" whenever someone mentions blown seals. Why is this? Where are these seals, what is entailed in replacing them, and why does this necessitate rebuilding the engine?

Please keep in mind when answering, this car does not need to pass inspection or be reliable, it just needs to make it arroud a drift course without dying too much and/or spewing fluids all over the place.

Thanks in advance.

 

coolant seals seal the combustion chamber from the cooling system, if those seals fail then you get coolant into the engine and combustion gases in the cooling system, much like a blown headgasket in a piston engine.

 

Here's a look inside the engine:

https://www.rx7club.com/forum/showthread.php?t=374810

 

once that you look in the link Aaron provided, you'll see that all of the seals are inside the engine. when the seal is 'blown' (whether apex, coolant, etc.) you have to disassemble the whole engine to get to it and that means rebuild. not like a blown head gasket on a piston engine when you just removed the heads to get to it.

 

Ok, turned out to be a moot point, I was worried about an engine that was in marginal shape, but as it is we couldn't get it to do more than sputter for about 5 seconds and spew out a TON of white smoke. That may have also had somethign to do with a poorly charged battery and really corroded terminals.

On the plus side, $400 for a straight body with a decent paint job makes it affordable for me to pull a junkyard engine, swap it in and rebuild the old engine at my leisure.

 

dude they went to the junkyard most likely because the motor is toast.

I wouldn't trust any old junkyard rotary motor. You'd be better off getting one off the classifieds here from someone with a high post count that can give you background on the motor.

 

I might just do that. The only way I would get a junkyard motor is if it came out of a reasonable low mileage car that was obviously totaled (t-boned, etc). That way I have a pretty good shot at knowing that the engine was running when it got hit.

I would really like to go with an engine from someone on here that can tell me about it, but this is an extremely "budget" project. If I can find something cehap enough though, I will go for it.

 

I am the other half of this team and we were thinking about doing a Turbo II swap, but it seems a lot more in involved in that than we were expecting.

There was a turnkey Turbo engine on here a little while ago, but so far thats all I've looked at.

I suppose we will have to stick with the NA engines

 

The TII swap is actually pretty easy. It's a complete bolt in and well documented. If you have the tools and space it can be done over a long weekend.