would an fd be a bad choice for me to puchase as a daily driver??? it doesnt seem like to many of you here use them on a daily basis...it would be the first car that i purchased on my own, and i would have to take a loan out from the bank.

Would i be better off buying a project fd, like theft recovery or flood damaged, and fixing it up myself. Or looking for a well running FD that doesnt require too much work.

How much money would you say that you spend one your fd for maintenance?

Are replacement parts extremely hard to find? because if i bought one out of an insurance auction or something, there would most likely be body damage.

Whats a reasonable price for a stock fd in good condition?

Does anyone have links to any webpages where i can find insurance settlement cars?

 

First, how old are you and how much disposable income do you have?

An FD can be used as a daily driver, assuming you have a backup car if something breaks. Repairs aren't horribly expensive compared to most other vehicles of this class but if an engine goes, you'd better have about $4,500 in reserve to cover it - unless you do the swap or repair yourself.

I have driven RX-7s as daily drivers for the past 21 years and currently drive a 1994 FD. Change your oil and filter often - about every 1,200 miles should do. Read the stickies at the top of this thread and do the required 4 reliability mods. A downpipe, in my opinion is critical. If you do more than two performance mods (intake, downpipe) you risk running into trouble as a daily. The second you throw in a super hiflow muffler on top of those, you really need to start making some fuel and ecu mods and then everything starts getting very complicated and horribly expensive as a daily driver unless you do all the work yourself and understand what you are doing. There are few on these boards who can claim this ability.

I think rotaries get a bad rap as dailies because so many people try to race them daily at full boost at stop lights or freeway ramps. Yes, you can have fun once in a while (and its a good idea to keep the engine speed varied), but a good rule of thumb is to to keep the RPMs under 4500 RPM and shift to save fuel, since you should only be running 93 octane $$$. Stress on apex seals and engine gaskets can be a matter of accumulated hours of extreme operation, although poorly advised tuning will blow up an engine in seconds. Most of my rotary engines have lasted about 100,000 miles with occasional high performance use.

I can't recommend a newb buy a project car off the bat. It's simply cheaper to buy some else's pristine car. Starting for a good 3G is about $15,000 and they can run up to $23,000 if they are low miles, great paint and good engine compression. Which reminds me, if you do buy someone's car, a Mazda dealer compression test will tell you a lot about your engine. Do a search.

 

thanks for the reply