Hey guy's, I'm new to the forum and I'm about to purchase an '88 GTU for about $200 bucks. The engine has about 130,000 miles on it and it smokes and makes wierd metal sounds I'm told. I plan on doing a rebuild on it and replaceing whatever is broken, but what I'm wondering is this. It's my understanding that it is a good Idea to put the housings on a laping machine and smooth them over a bit. But this will probably remove the nitride finish Mazda put on them to improve the wear of the engine. I read on one of those rx-7 tuner sites that w/out this finish the engine will only last like 30,000 miles. Have any of you run across this problem? I want to be able to drive the car a long time w/out problems. (I put about 30,000 miles on a car a year.) Any info would be nice. Have any of you purchased new housing's? How much are they, ect?

 

new housings are a few hundred bucks...i lapped mine when i rebuilt it and have no nitride finish...wouldnt have done it if i had known..but i drive extremely hard and i have got over 7K miles on it now with absolutely no problems....hope that it continues that way.

ps as far as i know the nitride is about .004 thick so u could just polish them a little with no worries..i took of .005.

Pat