Hey Everyone,

I'm about to buy an 87 S4 13 N/A engine locally and the guy selling it states that the engine was "remanufactured" by Mazda in 2000. The plate attached to the engine is attached in the pic. Apparently the engine has less than 20k on it.

Does this make sense, anyone heard of this before?

 

looks different than the mazda reman tags i see, but mazda did use several different manufacturing facilities and probably several different tags over the years. does look like a mazda part# though.

mazda remans also never painted the front cover black to my knowledge either(in fact they're almost always stripped to raw cast iron/aluminum and never painted).

 

Yes, though I've heard Mazda outsourced to another company (or companies?).

 

I can't tell if the front cover is where this tag was taken from.

Here are some pics of the engine, help at all?

 

What usually takes place in a reman? Are any damaged rotors or housings replaced along with new gaskets, seals etc ?

 

well see that's the whole problem. You don't really know, not on these old remans. To a certain extent it's just luck. Mazda has a reman facility in Richmond VA now. I know they do Renesis engines but I'm not sure if they are doing Rx-7 engines. It is a high quality modern facility though and the technicians were trained by specialists from Japan.

 

Colonial Heights VA, where there training facility is actaully. As for where they were rebuilt before I couldn't tell you. I remember hearing one of my instructors at the Mazda training center in New Jersey saying that those guys took several REW engine parts, slapped them together and put it on a dyno and it ran perfect. But that was several years ago.

I know when an engine is remaned there now they tear it down, inspect all the internals, change what fails inspection and reseal it with all new gaskets and seals.

I have a few more training courses coming up in the next two weeks, i'll ask him where they were remanufactured before if I can remember.

 

There was a Mazda re-man facility down here in Jacksonville, Fl. years ago.

I met a few of the guys that use to work there. From what I was told, they did just like Jdrift said.

But they also said that they would spec good, reusable parts as bad and toss them. Then later they would dumpster dive and take them home.

 

the tag looks right. before they moved the reman facility to where it is now, they used to either clean, or just paint right over the grease.... silver paint though.

yeah they have tried a few things over the years. they used to do it themselves, but that didn't work very well, so then they outsourced, and that company threw all the couterweights and rotors into one box, so that didn't work either. and then now they have the "new" place in VA which only does Rx8 engines.

and now they have no jobs! in 2000, when the engine in question was built, it would have been done in jacksonville. the engines got all new gaskets and seals, they were supposed to get housings/rotors as needed, but we used to get lots of engines with out of spec stuff/painted over grease. it was bad enough that we'd have to look in the exhaust ports to see what was new/used. you'd get FD motors with chunks of apex seal groove missing/huge clearances...

 

Just picked up the motor, the front cover is actually not black it was just very dirty. Looks like it was painted silver as flakes are coming off.

I'm crossing my fingers on new rotors and housings.

 

if it's that dirty and greasy it really doesn't matter anymore.

 

What do you mean by this?

 

this should clear things up.
https://www.rx7club.com/canadian-forum-42/anyone-know-what-tag-means-scarborough-mazda-guys-954269/
it was in the CDN section a couple weeks ago.

 

The guys are right the Mazda engine s were built in Jacksonville years ago, the Last Mazda re-manufactured Rotary I got 3 years ago came from Mazda,but was built at a CATERPILLER reman Facillity ....Blew my mind...............but it was the best Engine I ever bought ,it must have been run on a test bench, it had perfect compression and started the first turn of the key.......I now have it in my 1975 Mazda REPU

 

I had an 88 NA that had the reman engine it. The owner still had the invoice/work order detailing which parts were replaced. On that engine they replaced both rotors and the middle iron, apex seals, all new springs and all new gaskets, oil pump and the oil pump chain. If I remember correctly they rebuilt it just like the Mazdatrix engines level E.
I bought the 7 from a Doctor for $800 with 2000 miles on the engine. All it needed was a clutch and a gas line.

 

My 7 had a Mazda reman engine when I bought it. I have all the paperwork detailing what all was replaced too. The engine in my case was replaced as a whole, even though the owner only had low compression on the rear rotor when he took it in. I have driven around 60K miles on it too, and that is after it sat for 8 years!

 

maybe they were new in september of 2000, but that was a decade ago