My friend bought an 87 base a few weeks ago with 110k on it. the motors was really strong and the whole car inside and out was really clean; the previous owner was pretty **** about cleanliness (not a bad thing right?). he planned to autocross it so he put in some eibach springs and tokico shocks in, as well as some 16" rims with yokohama A 520's on them. the car then developed an overheating problem so he replaced everything cooling related outside of the motor. it didn't help so he took it to a shop, wich found 141 ppm hydrocarbons in the cooling lines (wich liked to bubble into the overflow bottle). they said the engine needed replacing. i test drove it and figured it had been rebuilt recently based on how good the motor ran and whoever rebuilt it screwed up on the coolant seal or something. he bought it with the intention to rebuild the motor with my help.

here are some pics:

 

clean car.

stock bay looks weird with battery relocation :P

 

during the teardown, i started to notice that the whole rear of the engine was rusty. then when i attempted to remove the rear throttle body hose, it just came off, nipple and all. i was hopefull that the rest of the iron wasn't toast, cuz i was thinking we could justretap the whole and put a brass barb back in or something like that. no such luck. we tore apart the engine and we got bad news all around; here are the two endplates:

 

It really does look weird. Very nice car man.

 

a shot of the decent looking rotor housing and the intermediate plate, and some gross rust collection. my guess is that the coolant problem developed, and the owner at the time instead of fixing it let it sit for a while, with water in the chambers, based on the amount of rust, and the way the irons are corroded.

 

that blows....

 

broken seal lands, common problem and causes many deaths of engines n/a and turbo alike so it doesn't surprise me and was my first assumption after the first description.

be sure to build up the walls on the new irons with some epoxy or JB weld to help prevent future failures.

it is also why i tell my customers to be sure and service their cooling systems regularly to also help prevent failures such as this.

 

well, we are contemplating three options: 1) jb weld (both very skeptical) 2) MIG/TIG weld (cheapest, but may be a PITA to make it flat again) 3) getting new/used irons. we will probably go with 3 cuz were skeptical of any fix holding up, and the combustion surface looks to be in pretty bad shape as it is. if those passages werent screwed i would be considering lapping them.

 

#3


how do i know? because i tried the first 2 options and neither worked.

 

Number 3 is the only way to go. Let me know if you need some irons/housings.

I am not sure why you think the motor had been rebuilt recently unless I didn't read correctly. That old motor could have decent compression yet stil be old.

Use deionized water in the future (not that you used tap in the past, just for the rest of the readers)

 

i thought it had been rebuilt cuz it pulled really hard and idled perfectly, and it had 110k miles on it, two things i didn't think went together

 

Hey, since you have your engine torn out... haha...

Could you post some pics of the engine bay and where everything goes and how it looks outside of the bay? Yeah I have a haynes manual but I bet your pictures would help more... haha.... *I are t3h visual learner*

Oh yeah and those rims... they look like mustang rims without the center cap... what are they? EDIT: Not without teh center cap but w/out the stang symbol in the middle rather... doh!

iSP33D-for-J3SUS

 

um, not sure exactly what you want me to take pictures of...

and i have no idea what kind of rims those are, they're on my friends car, and he may have been given the reciept for them but im not sure. ill call him but hes at work right now

 

Pretty much if you were explaining the rotary engine to a child... those sorta pics


iSP33D-for-J3SUS

 

well, uh, i dont think ill do a real good job, or really wanna, so heres a website that i used to learn everything about how a rotary works, and is the reason why i chose the rx7 as my first car:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/rotary-engine.htm