Well, i've been driving my 10AE TII now for a couple months, and while it was warmer...it was just fine to drive around..but its a little different story now. Aside from it flooding out EVERY time i try to start it (went around that with the fuel relay cut thing) today when I was driving it the blue smoke that came out for a solid 7-8 minutes was unbelieveable. I couldn't even see behind me, i'm just lucky that i didn't come across a cop because i'd been reported to the EPA for how much pollution i was jettin out. It was unreal. I'm just real scared to be doing a rebuild because I've never gotten into a rotary, and neither has anyone around my town that I know of. Another bad thing is that I'm not exactly rolling in the dough...i've been saving up, but i'd still fall short of the $1500 or so that i'd need to send the motor away to be rebuilt. I think i'm just gonna have to kinda live with it for right now, and hope that the motor just doesn't go all together. Any ideas on what i could do to kinda legnthen my motor's life while i'm still saving? I'm actually surprised that it runs as well as it does with 165,xxx miles and to my knowledge, no prior rebuilds.

 

with that kind of mileage, the engine may not make a great core. be sure to inspect it very well if you do it yourself.

only thing you can really do to help prolong the life if it is to stay out of boost, run a little premix in the gas (about 1/2 ounce per gallon gas for insurance) and keep oil clean. the "atf trick" might help a little, but I wouldnt hold my breath on it

get a compression test done on it. or you can buy a cheap tester and do it yourself, won't be very accurate, but it will give you a good idea of its condition

the best thing to do is quit driving it until you know the condition of engine. that might not be possible for you though. if a compression seal goes, it can do a lot of damage on the way out

 

Okay, thank you for those tips. The motor will i hope make a decent core....it idles down to about 1000 rpm and stays steady there with relative ease..and really, the thing runs real well once its been going for a while. I hope i'll be able to rebuild it once i get the money up..

 

FWIW, $1500 would get you the rebuild with a streetport with me...and half the shipping more than likely.

Like was mentioned above, if an apex lets loose, your cost will rise (unless buying a high dollar rebuild of some kind) due to the damage it will cause.

You can try running water through the engine while running via a vacuum hose that would feed both chambers(on an s4 t2, this is the ? shaped hose above the BAC which goes into the intake manifold), this sometimes helps clean out carbon and such, increases compression sometimes, and i have once or twice even seen it help smoking oil seals. Do a search for water injection, water trick, water treatment, etc. for more details, but I do this almost daily to one car or another. A rotary cannot be hydrolocked. Remember if you do this you need to hold your throttle way open like 4-5k rpms to avoid it flooding and dying. This is just a steam clean method.

 

You should be able to buy a rebuilt core for $1500.
If you want you can buy all the seals/gaskets necessary to do the rebuild yourself for about $450-$550.