Box of Tj

alright, i've got about 1300 miles on my mazda reman engine i just had installed by gotham racing. when i first got it, the tech told me me that it would emit white smoke at start-up and it was nothing to worry about, because it's been tuned to be rich while its being broken in. it would also white smoke a little at idle, but it smelled like gas, so of course, i just thought it was tuned rich. well, i got it back this week after getting it tuned, and they tell me that it's been running lean ( when they told me it was tuned rich???) and has warped my apex seals, but they'll usually un-warp after 2-3k miles and compression should build back up (compression was also at 6-6.5, so says them) will the engine smoke like that if the apex seals are warped? cuz to me and all the information i've searched it sounds like my coolant seals are bad, which would also explain the low compression. what i'm starting to wonder now is that sense it's been doing it sense i got it back from getting the reman installed in the first place, maybe the seals were bad in the beginning?? correct me if i'm wrong, but it almost sounds like they're trying to take advantage of a 19 year old kid who doesn't know much about rx7's and get me to pay for them to rebuild another motor, when they put an engine with bad coolant seals in to begin with. someone help me out with this please.

P.S. i had them street port and put 3mm apex seals in, if it helps at all, and 1600cc secondaries. i dont' see where what mods i have come into play, but if anybody needs to know them i'll happily tell you.

Box of Tj

alright, now that i'm less upset and started thinkin about it, i just came to a realization, so now i appologize for jumpin to conclusions...
when it was at their shop, they gave me a call sayin they looked at my turbos (which were good, rebuilt ones) and when i blew my engine, debris was sucked into the turbine messin up the blades. other than that, the turbos were still good, but if i wanted to get the warranty i'd have to get rebuilt ones. i started lookin but then they called again sayin they found some at the shop that they got from a guy who just had them install a single turbo. "according to the guy" they didn't have very many miles on them after a rebuild, and they'd give em to me for cheap, so i accepted. would the turbos going bad also do something like this? i guess it would make sense now because it smokes during idle, too. i haven't checked to see if it smokes while i'm driving it normally or at WOT, but will it smoke if the turbos are bad? i'd like it to be this, turbos are a lot cheaper than a whole new engine, and i can do it at the shop i work at. what do you guys think?
thanks for the help.

OH! also, the smoke smells more dirty than sweet, but if oil's burning, isn't it more grey/black? this is pretty thick, white smoke at the start-up

Tim Benton

iTrader: (1)

who's doing the work on the engine, who did the work on the previous engine and who the hell told you the seals will warp and then unwarp after a couple thousand miles?
Maybe they meant the seals get seated?

Tim

djseven

iTrader: (56)

If it was a coolant seal I think you would already be adding coolant after 1300 miles. Turbos are definately a good place to check. Get under the car and see if there is oil on the housing for the secondary turbo. This will give you some insight if it is the turbos.

Box of Tj

thanks for the pointers, i'll get it up on a lift tomorrow and start checkin it out and come back with what i find.
i got it built at gotham racing and that's what the techs said. yeah, that's what they said, the seals would seat. i hear the 3mm seals take a while to seat anyway. there is a LOT of smoke, too, and i'm thinkin it's oil. it sure as hell doesn't smell like cotton candy, but def. burnt oil.

Tim Benton

iTrader: (1)

6 to 6.5 on the compression is low, right at the lower limit of a useable engine. I'm surprised Steve built an engine with that low compression or his shop I should say. He's pretty stand up guy, so I'm sure he'll take care of it.

What are they wanting to do and what do they say it will cost ya?

Tim

Zero R

iTrader: (1)

Exactly, I hope your misunderstanding something or whoever told you seals will warp and then unwarp needs to go find a new job.

B_Rock

There is a little bit more to this story. As to the turbos, when we sold them to you, we told you everything we knew about them. You were made fully aware that it was a used part, and that (to the best of our knowledge) they were in good condition. You were also made aware that there are no warranties on used parts. We usually suggest BNR stage III or Efini units as replacement upgrades, which we did offer to you initially. Due to your financial situation at the time, we offered the set of used turbochargers to you. This is not something we normally do for our customers, but we felt that it could help you out, considering your situation at the time. We always try and help our customers out as much as possible.

As to the engine, there is also more to the story. You admitted to having tampered with the Power FC commander in an attempt to alter the idle of the car. Upon inspection of the car, we found that the Power FC had been set to the 3bar map sensor setting. This would definitely cause a lean condition, resulting in detonation and loss of compression.

As for taking advantage of you, if that were the case, we would have charged you twelve hours to install and remove your fuel rail three times (due to injector fitment issues) instead of the five hours we charged. Also, we would not have performed a free compression test on your motor. We would have simply tuned your car and sent you on your way. This is obviously not the case.

pluto

Since I'm out of town this week, I won't have access to the internet all the time. Basically, I think that the problem was misleaded somehow between the phone conversation and what he thinks we meant.

The car came in a few months ago for an engine (SP w/ 3mm seals using a mazda reman), once everything was done and ready, we always do a compression test to make sure that the engine is in good heathy compression before we release the car back to the customers. The car described in this thread before it left the shop had high 7's in compression in all faces. It was also pulling approximately 42x mmHg on the PFC before it left.

The car came in early this week wanting the fuel system installed along with checking with hard start and idle issue with the car. The car set outside until we close the shop and pulls all of the cars in. I jumped into the car and tries to crank it but to my suprised (it barely cranks and idle). So I checked the commander and see if there was anything out of ordinary. To my suprise, the map sensor setting was set to "option 3". So I set it back to "normal" and the car cranks right up but it was hunting a little.

While performing the fuel system upgrade, we noticed that there were a few vacuum hoses tied in the wrong place, some hoses were lose as well along with the secondary injector connectors butt connected back together. That lead us believed that someone might have tempered with the UIM attempting to install the fuel system but unsucessfully.

After we installed the fuel system and tested it, fuel pours out of the secondary injector rail by the injectors, so we had to pull the fuel rail back out and replace the O-ring. apparently there was a cut inside the O-ring where we couldn't see it. (these are suppose to be new injectors and fuel rail that he brought to us for install so we could only assume everything was new and never been installed before).

So after we got everything tested and verified, we started the car up and let it warm up to the normal operating temperature while adjusting the PFC to accomondate for the new secondary injectors. Once the car reaches normal idle temp, I notice that the car was only idling at 300mm Hg. So instead of getting ready to tune the car, we immediately did a compression test and find that the compression was 2 points lower than when the car left after the engine job the first time.

So we called the customer up and told him what we have find while the car was here. First was that the PFC was temper with causing the settings changed to Option 3, we think that the car probably ran a few WOT runs in that setting and ran lean because of it.
Another thing was that we always asked the customer to bring the car back after the first 1k mile so that we can go over everything and also perform the free tuning service on aftermarket EMS. The car shows approximately 2000 miles since the engine was installed, it puzzles us why if the car was running weird, why took so long to bring back?

We then told the customer that most likely that the apex seals were concaved at the center of the seal where it exit to the exhaust port caused by high EGT when it was running lean at the wrong map selection setting. That also explains the low even compression on all faces.

So after explaining the problem to the customer, we told him that there are two options we could take,

One was for us to pull the engine out, if the problem was something other than concaved apex seals, we will repair it at no charge. but if it was apex seals caused by running lean, he'll have to pay for the cost of the repair since the car and EMS settings were tempered with during the break-in period.

the second alternative was for him to take it easy for a few thousand miles and hope that the apex seal will reseat itself and we'll do another compression test and go from there.

Also a note was that the car wasn't tuned (I couldn' tune the car with the condition it was in) so I'm not sure where he thinks the car was tuned already? I basically loaded a new safe map and added a few more % of fuel to insure that the car is well within the safety margin until we can fine tune it in the future.

Meiogirl

iTrader: (2)

my engine was put in by gotham 2 christmases ago, about 12k on it now. the car is in great shape and i have had no major problems.

RotaryResurrection

iTrader: (8)

Good job protecting yourself Steve.

Zero R

iTrader: (1)

Steve do yourself a favor and don't sell used turbo's it is almost never worth the headache. "Re-embedding" the seals sounds more like what I thought warp and unwarp made no-sense at all.

potatochobit

iTrader: (1)

your offer seems more than generous pluto.

he should not have touched the PFC at all.

mb7

I can vouch for Steve too. He has some of the best customer service I have ever seen, in any business...

Tenacious

I've only heard great things about Gotham Racing, so I seriously doubt they would try to take advantage of a *19* year old kid, hell if they offered you used turbos, they would be taking a pretty big liability case right there just by that.

Since I know nothing about rotary's,(I have general knowledge), I ONLY take my car to Ray at PFSupercars(not only because he's an awesome mechanic, but his shop is nearby), also if you know you cant install something on your own, dont try it, it leaves more work and headache for the mechanic, because they have to figure out exactly what you did.

I have Ray/PFSupercars only do my work simply because good shops like PFS/Gotham usually warrant their work, given noone else has tampered with it, tampering w/ a tuning device without knowing what your doing can be deadly to your engine(thats true w/ any car) but even worse w/ a new engine!

Do what I do >< work your tail off for 80+hours a week, only top off your fluids/change oil, and take it to the Supah Rotary Mechanics!

In the end you will be saving money on what you(if you dont know much about rotary's). Because during that time you could be working and making $$, and plus the mechanic wont have to do extra labor to fix your mess ups!

Box of Tj

well i didn't mean for any of this to be a flame out or anything. i'm sorry i started this whole thing, i really regret it. i let my current mood get in the way. but, your right, i did accept the used turbos, i'm thankful for everything you guys are doin for me. like in my second statement, i took back what i said about the engine and put it on the turbos. i'm tryin to find some rebuilt ones, or to get mine rebuilt. that's where the leak was coming from that you guys informed me about. i should have gotten my core back and just had the turbine replaced, but i didn't have another $600 at the time. it might be a while till i get to take it back to you guys to get it re-tuned, cuz i don't have money for turbos or to get them rebuilt. i had my dad spot me for the injector install, as you saw, brock. man, i feel like a dick...

snagalittle

Gotham racing has the greatest service ever. I had my engine tuned and worked on there and Steve has backed it up completely. I am having injector duty cycle problems now and there was no way for me to get the car back down there to them. Steve sent me a pm saying that he was out of town working on some cars and that he should be able to run buy on his way back and take a look at mine. I have never had any company say they will come to your house and work on your car. I will never do any business with any other rotary company other than Gotham.

Landen

Box of Tj

oh, and i forgot to mention i now understand what you meant by changing it to the 3-bar map sensor. when you said i changed the settings i didn't know what you meant cuz i was absolutly positive i didn't change any settings, but i looked around because i let my curiosity get the better of me. when you said you saw it on option 3 it finally clicked, i didn't put it back to highlighting "normal", i just left it on option 3. i feel like a dumbass now, everything makes sense. the story i told you guys was i was in my driveway and it just started idling rough, and that's when i probably accidentally switched it over. after that i really didn't drive it a whole lot, and it makes sense why my boost gauge read one thing and the commander said another, yet the map sensor voltages checked out. i drove it to my work, drove it home and then drove it to gotham. I appologize for waiting so long to take it in, but i changed the oil to specs like you recomended and replaced the fuel filter as well. i also appologize for swappin the hoses on the uim, i had them tagged to try to prevent myself from messin that up, but i guess my own idiot-proofing still dumbfounded me. like i said in my 2nd post, i'm sorry i started jumping to conclusions, i let my mood get out of control. sorry everybody else for starting a battle on this, i tried to correct it before it got out of hand but i guess there was nothing i could do.

SlingShotRX7

Its all good.
It was a learning experience for you.

And at least you were man enough to admit what you did.

goodluck

B_Rock

Definitely, man. No hard feelings here at all. Once you get everything in order just get a hold of me and I'll get everything set up for you. Hope to see you soon!

turbodrx7

iTrader: (43)

Good that he admitted it. Steve is an awesome guy, did an awesome job tuning my car. Big hats off for him. Wouldnt even think twice again about taking him the car. Even tho hes in texas and i got PFS right here

Box of Tj

well, i've been doing a little bit of investigating lately, and with all the built up smudge on the underbelly of my car it's really hard to determine what fluid really is accumulating. i thought it was the turbos, but now they haven't been smoking nearly as bad as they were, but the only time i drive it is 5 miles to work and 5 miles home to shower, and then i go cruise around for about 10-20 depending on how much i feel like driving. yesterday tho, my clutch hydraulics went out, so now i'm thinkin some of it on the bottom of the bell housing and around there was brake fluid from the clutch. i'm gonna lay some newspaper out tonight to help pinpoint what is leaking... and maybe the white of the paper will help determine what fluid is there. my brake fluid is blue so that'll help, but now that i've replaced everything i doubt it'll flood. still haven't had a chance to put it on a lift lately, we've been swamped at the shop. i hate bein a state inspector...