eric e

hi guys

thought i'd intro myself and car

i'm eric and the car is eRX7

i'm in japan and after building up as much info as possible, from this list and the web over about a week,i have bought a 1993 FDS vin 102355, 60kmiles

i wanted as standard a car as possible and in the photos it looked straighter than it actually was, but after driving for 3 hours to see it i bought it anyway as the price condition ratio looked pretty good

mods. big APEX? exhaust
new wastegate?
HKS foam air cleaners
TEIN 8 position adjustable suspension
17inch mazdaspeed wheels, 235/40 + 255/40
tiny momo steering wheel that blocks all the gauges and means my hands trigger the wipers on left turns
cheap boost gauge

the seller had only owned it since sept. and didn't seem to know much about it's history, no records etc.

oil level was just BELOW minimum, he said that that was OK and any higher robbed performance...

oopps gotta go

wills send now and add rest later

eric e and eRX7

eric e

eric e again

wanted to ask you guys what the story on oil levels was?

after handing over the cash and driving home i stopped at a store to buy some mineral oil to at least get the dipstick to the mid level and found the oil fill cap really hard to take off

after spending around 2 hours looking over the car, having him drive it and then me drive it, had forgotten the most simple engine check of looking at the inside of the oil filler cap..........it had a little of the white oil/water mayonaise on it...so i cleaned it all out and hoped it was just from short city drives....thinking that in the next 3 hours of driving all water should be boiled out...unfortunately there was a little white ring the next morning when i thought to check again

the car never seemed to smoke during the thrashing the owner gave it to impress me but this looks like an o-ring problem raher than a worn seal thing

i had hoped to buy a rubber tipped compression tester on the way there, rip out the check valve and do my first ever compression test, but tools like compression testers in japan are just so far removed from the average driver's needs that they are impossible to find quickly

also i had forgotten to convert all the psi and inches of mercury measurements, mentioned in the pre-buy checks for the boost gauge, into metric so couldn't really be exact about what i was seeing, but everything looked ok...

as mentioned by another newbie the amount of RX-7 stuff on the web is fantastic and takes a bit of time for newbies to organise in their heads

so i'll finish for now with a couple of questions and then head back to the search function

1/ what is the optimal oil level in the engine?

2/ is brake bleeding easy with the abs?

3/ how important is the power steering fluid change?

5/ i assume it still has precat and cat, the ECU is standard but it has freer air filters and exhaust, will a plug check show if it's running lean?

4/ the mazdaspeed 17inch wheels look like they will need a monster spanner to remove the alloy 8 sided nut, will i find the lug nuts under that? cause even though the

5/ the woofing noise from the waste gate/blow off valve is quite audible even during light driving, is this normal?

eric e

couple more things on the car

front tower arm
front and rear spoliers
but no cruise control

the S model in japan was the base model but most, like mine, seem to have been moded to beyond R level over the last 10 years

will get on the far east forum to try and find out what was standard on the japanese S models before add-ons

eric e

oh, and thanks for reading this far, pics to follow this weekend, assuming it stops snowing/raining

lists like this make it possible for mugs like me to own cars like this and live in such difficult countries as japan where even reading a road sign can take 10 minutes let alone a japanese tech manual

(my japanese wife was trying to translate some bike engine stuff for me but we kept getting hung up on the changes to the "burning room"???,

combustion chamber in chinese characters,
in french i think twin-cam is double tree!

93BlackFD

mineral oil in the engine? that scares me, someone help me with this one...

keep the oil between the low and high marks and you should be good....

eric e

ok that should have been non-synthetic dino oil

thanks for confirming the mid-level is what to aim for

eric e