yes, I'm very sure this is a planning failure on my part (and also not knowing the control algorithm for the EWP). There is no thermostat, and the sensor for the controller (and ECU) is near the stock location on the front of the engine. Relocating the sensor to the rotor housing near the spark plugs would be ideal, but I'm not doing that while the engine is assembled. I'll keep all my custom parts in the event I do switch back to the EWP, but the clock has officially begun. My tuner called me and I have dyno time scheduled for the 9th, so I just need to get it running, and the best way I know how is to use a traditional belt driven pump and thermostat. So keep your eyes peeled, I'm planning to fab everything this weekend and get it powder coated. Gives me a few days to get the coolant system bleed and address any leaks.

 

yes, that is not going to work.

But it can work better than factory when plumbed correctly.

Check out here: https://www.rx7club.com/3rd-generati...-flow-1110563/

 

It's been a whirl wind of a weekend, but I have updates! Some good, some not so good.

I got the new fabrication of the mechanical water pump all finished just in time to get it to the dyno over the weekend. The new set-up complete with what I'm calling the "elephant trunk". I will not be accepting other naming suggestions at this time....


Clearance is CLOSE!! I'm using a S4 N/A water pump and housing with the 20B water pump pulley. In order to get it to fit, I had to chop about 3/8" off the water pump shaft, and remove the second pulley from the 20B pulley. That was a chore and a half. There's about a 1/16" clearance to the screw heads so I don't think this is the final arrangement, but worked good enough to get me on the dyno.


The "tune" was good enough to actually drive the car a bit, although it still idled super high (more on that later). Here she (now named Eleanor) is, out of the garage prison for the first time ins about a yea along with the rest of the crew


She even drove herself onto the trailer, which was also super fun as the rear tires are brand new with all the mold release on them. Even with the crappy base tune this engine is very torquey and slid up the ramp the entire time.



Once she was on the trailer it was a 4.5 hour trip to Rouge Rotaries in Vermont. She drove herself onto the dyno and got all strapped down ready for tuning.


But it was late and I was tired so we opted to start the next day. This gave me a little time to check out Brian's shop.He's working on the cleanest Montego I've ever seen.


and his personal FD is amazing too.

 

Morning came and after taking in the beautiful Vermont view at the shop,


we got to work....and that's when things started going wrong. After confirming the timing was set correctly, we started by trying to get the idle down to a manageable level. It's been high since I first started the car. We tried everything under the sun in the LINK to bring it down to no avail. Next logical step is to check for vac leaks. I had done a smoke test already and not seen anything, but we decided to check again anyways. After not finding anything notable, we opted to check the plugs and coils. Everything looked good there. Well might as well do a compression test while the plugs are out....guys, the lowest reading on all 3 rotors was 104 with used housings and new seals. Highest was around 124. but equally important all the faces on each rotor were quite similar to each other. That's certainly great news, but still hunting for the idle issue. I happen to stick my hand in front on the TB while the car was running, and noticed that it was pulling a LOT of air for sitting at idle. We ended up lulling the TB off, and wouldn't you know it when I took it part to powder coat it, the plate wasn't quite centered when I tightened the screws down and it was not closing all the way. An easy fix, but a bit annoying that you can even do that. So that fixed, the car now idles right where is should.


One thing down, now to tune the car....Nope, not yet, the e-fans decided not to work using the factory wiring, so we ended up wiring in a large realy wired directly to the ECU...THAT fixed, now it's time to tune...Nope, not yet...The alternator isn't charging and when the Lithium ion battery gets too low it goes into a protection mode and cuts voltage off and kills everything. WE spend a LOT of time trying to fix this. We tried 2 different alternators, we jumped the connector pins to 12V and I still can not get voltage output from either alt. This is still an issue, and I'm not sure what to do with it yet, but we jumped the car while we did some tuning and at very least got a good base map for me to do the engine break in. Here's what you all have been waiting for.....the magic moment....turn the volume up....


So the good news being the car is tuned and compression is excellent. Bad news is i've got some electrical gremlins to chase down before I can actually drive it....Oh, and the oil pan is slowly leaking already

but we're getting there!!

 

Sounds great! On the OEM e-fans, I had to reverse engineer the factory wiring and what my car's PO did with his relays to get them to work. I was lucky in that the OEM wiring was mostly unmolested, but all the OEM e-fan relays were gone. So I chucked all of his relays & associated fan wiring and went to town reverse engineering the OEM setup. I managed to successfully replicate how the OEM fans work (i.e., 3 speeds, both fans running in parallel, to include the speed bump-up when you run the A/C) using 2x outputs from the Link. Anyway, the attached schematic might help you do the same - it references back to the OEM '93FD Wiring diagram FSM, and sheet #6 is where you'll find the fan relay wiring, and sheet #5 has the tie-ins to the applicable Link ECU I/O. Hardware wise, you'll need 4x 40A SPST relays and either a relay box or sockets to wire the relays.

 

Unless trying to keep a car stock (which this one isn't). There is no point trying to reverse engineer the stock relay system. Get a brushless set up and have the ECU make it do whatever you want.

 

in my Rotary (or other old car) Entropy Theory, the engine must leak from somewhere, or it will explode.
its much better to have a small oil pan seep than a bad apex seal!

 

Man that exhaust sounds nice and quiet. Great tone without being super loud.....and you get to hear the turbo more which is a plus in my book. Glad to see this thing getting on the road

 

thanks everyone. It was really awesome to see it running finally.

I think I'll likely bite the bullet and buy a better radiator with fans and get rid of the stock wiring all together. But that may be a winter project so I can at least enjoy driving it a bit before the snow lock-down.

j9fd3s, funny you say that, one of my other rotary friends said nearly the same thing. I think this might also be a winter project, and just honda-bond the thing without the stock gasket.

boostin13b, yeah, it sounds really good without being overly loud. The dyno was louder than the car! Can't wait to see if it comes alive a bit more once it's got some boost on her.


In other news, I think I fixed the alternator issue. I powder coated pretty much everything, and I think in doing so, I eliminated the ground path from the alt to the engine block. I sanded down the mating faces, and I'm getting a good 14V now. Just need to get the inspection and registration done and i can actually drive the thing on the road and get some miles on it.

 

Which is almost exactly what my suggestion was, or Kaizen Relay as if I'm remembering correctly there are no more outputs available. Digital dash could potentially solve that as well, although I prefer the analog gauge look. SpeedHut for me

 

yeah, I'll openly admit I have a thing against changing the stock wiring for some odd reason. I mean I've pushed the firewall back, it's not like this car will ever be "stock" again. I'm slowly getting over it. We chopped up the fan wiring while on the dyno, and I haven't lost sleep over it yet. haha.

 

I get it, one could argue that it makes troubleshooting easier if everything remains stock. To which I counter, keep better records. You saw what I did to my FD wiring I agree what we did on the dyno was by no means pretty, albeit effective. With what new fans do I would suggest rewiring.... everything... but that's what I do

 

funny enough, I think I'm about over trying to keep the stock wiring. I started wiring up the wheel speed sensors and remembered this disaster was present in the car.




It's the old fuel pump relay, which isn't being used anymore, but still an accident waiting to happen to that all gut cut out over the weekend. In addition to that, I'm having troubles starting the car now due to the starter spinning very slow. So I started replacing all the wiring to the Alt and starter and this was under some electrical tape at the alternator.


So I'm almost to the point where I'm going to ditch all the factory wiring and start from scratch.

 

Damn

 

I ended up coming to a similar conclusion with mine. When you get into stuff like this, it really doesn't make a ton of sense to retain the factory wiring and controls as much of it becomes rather convoluted and a bit too redundant for the application if that makes sense. I will say that I almost fell into the trap of overcomplicating things just because I could (I wanted to run all of my controls off of CANBUS with my pdm), but for things like lights and window controls that literally have the control logic built into the switch or actuator, you might actually be better served doing it that way instead of having to do stuff like make your own CAN template to get the windows to go up and down when you can just reverse the polarity with the switch to do it without having to eat up a half-bridge output on your pdm or something silly like that (I'm seeing a lot of stuff of that nature that doesn't exactly make sense with people implementing pdms)

Side note: I've messed around with (read: dismantled and put back together) that MB car you saw. It's one of the nicest modified examples I have ever seen, and the only other one I had seen in that color that was as well-kept was a bone stock one owner example.

 

few small updates. I'm still not driving her daily yet, but she's been out a few times. I finally got around to some of the things I should have done before getting on the dyno. Like replacing the stock fuel filter and installing the flex fuel sensor.


with a little muck shield...


After doing this the car wouldn't stay running....the highs and lows of project cars. But I got it sorted out for now. The flex fuel sensor has always been set up in the ECU, but was never getting readings since it wasn't installed. After doing that it changed my target AFR to something super wacky so the injectors were just turning off after about 3 seconds. Logging in the link is a little awkward, but you can log everything. This allowed me to see that the inj duty cycle was going to 0 and lead me to the problem. So I zero'd out the ethanol compensation and she's back to running again. I also reset the static fuel pressure to 43.5 as it shifted a bit as well (also shown in the log).

Shortly after that my T2 starter started to die and wasn't cranking fast enough for the ECU to read speed. Not knowing if it was a wiring issue to the starter or the starter itself I decided to upgrade both. I ditched the factory wiring and installed a new distribution block with new 4ga high strand wires to the alt, starter, and fuse block.


Also addressed the non-bent lug that had been bugging me before. It looks significantly more clean now I think.


I also ordered one of the 2kW RX8 starters and made a hybrid starter out of the T2 one. With both the new wiring and the upgraded starter she cranks around 250RPM now.

 

Nice. Good thing you didn't start tuning for power before you replaced the fuel filter. I recently upgraded the fuel filter from a factory Z32 to a Deatschwerks -AN one on the wife's car and had to pull out a ton of fuel under boost because of the added fuel flow. It'll save some money in the long run

 

Agreed. That's why I figured before I really start driving it I should button up all these little things. I got the wheel speed sensors working as well, and am 90% done with my new dash install. More to come on that soon! In the mean time, Brian has suggested I switch to all 9's for plugs, so I did that today. While I had the plugs out I figured I might as well document compression...Here's the cold numbers
Front rotor:


Mid:


Rear:


Total run time on the engine is 180 minuets, so I'd assume those numbers should come up a bit as it breaks in.

 

More details on the dash. It's in and working. I had an old gauge hood that I decided to try and modify for the new digital dash. I started by 3D scanning the hood (available for download here) before any modifications were made. I used that model to create template and for cutting out the hood and for mounting the new dash.


that piece was then plastic welded into the hood. While I was at it, I had a few broken threads that I needed to fix (that's why it was replaced originally)


So I came up with these thread fixers for everyone. As always, they are a free download here


replaced all of them while I was at it. They worked surprisingly well!


A little bit of filler to hide all the little imperfections. This is not bondo, but a flexible filler typically used on bumpers an such


I didn't take a bunch of photos, but I also added some inserts to mount some USB panel mounts for the ECU and digital dash. Turned out fairly well I think.


Lights on!


In case anyone is wondering, the gas gauge is a VDO (part number A2C38331100), which uses a 90 to 5 ohm input signal, just about perfect for the stock sending unit.

 

What an awesome build!! So happy I saw this!

 

That dash looks incredible !

 

thank you. I'd say it was hard to do, but computers did all the heavy lifting. haha

In other news, I can never leave well enough alone, but I suppose that's how project cars always are. I've driven the car a grand total of maybe 50 miles, and I absolutely can not get the clutch to slip easily. To the frank, this is a me problem not a clutch issue. The clutch is very on/off, but if you get it in just the right spot, you can slip it to get a smooth engagement. I'm struggling to get used to it, and I think this is a common "problem" with the Excedy twin disk. Taking notes from this thread, I went on the hunt for a larger bore slave cylinder. The current datsun slave is .75", so 1" is the target. After searching for a while I found what I was looking for rear port, 1" bore from a 1974 MG midget. The holes are slightly to far apart, but nothing that cant be fixed.



But did it work? I have no idea yet....Because I also decided to change up the coolant system yet again. The water pump is just too close to the intercooler for my comfort, the water pump inlet is on the top of the radiator, and the stock fans and wiring, just seem out of place. So I did what anyone would do, and tore into the car yet again after buying a few parts that may or may not work. I have to give @RogueRotaries credit for the idea, but I'm attempting to fit an RX8 water pump and housing to the 20B as the water pump is quite a bit thinner than the FC one. The first problem with that is that the water pump housing is part of the front cover on the RX8....or at least it was



The second issue is that the pulley isn't even close to lining up with the crank pulley.


Not a problem really. I machined .44" off the backside of the pump to get it to line up.


so much better


Lots of work yet to go, but this is the start of it


and just for fun, here's the relative thicknesses of the water pump housings. Left to right is: modded RX8, FD, FC.

 

interesting, i've noticed that the FD water pump setup is lighter, but it puts everything further forward than the FC setup
for me, this means that the strut bar doesn't fit, cause the FD alternator is too far forward

on the slave cylinder topic, Mazda basically used the same master and um release sizes the whole time, the early BRZ though has a larger slave.
i'm not recalling the sizes off the top. the BRZ cylinder bolts on to the T2 trans, but the pushrod needs to be customized. my ACT clutch needs more travel, so it didn't work for me, but its possible

 

Yeah, I really wanted to run an FD set-up, but had the same issue. It's just to thick. Wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have the vmount, but here we are....

The new slave is in and blead, but won't know if it works until I get this darn coolant system back together. I bought a new radiator and spal fan set-up from a guy on marketplace, but it seems to have been damaged in shipping, so I'm trying to work around that at the moment. In the mean time, the RX8 set-up is fitted and the alternator mounted as well. I still need to modify the inlet and outlet tubes to point more towards the radiator ports.



On another topic, I need help. The car has been smoking a lot on startup. It clears up eventually, but something is certainly not right. I was worried it was a coolant seal issue with the 2 overheating events that happened with the e-pump. While I had the coolant pump off I pressure tested the system, and it help 18psi perfectly for over 40 min so i'm not thinking it's a failed coolant seal. It doesn't look blue to me, so I didn't think it was oil, but after removing the UIM to replace the slave, I noticed the secondary port runners have quite a bit of oil in them....but just the secondary runners....




here's the car running. Sorry I don't know how to embed videos, and try to ignore the squeaking belt.
https://i.imgur.com/FZfJebV.mp4

Currently I just have the lower filler neck vent capped and the upper one just vents to atmosphere. Oil pressure is not low. It does smell heavily of fuel, but the wideband isn't reading overly rich (.98 ish at idle). My next plan is to pull the plugs and crank it over to see if there is any accumulated fluids in the chambers, but I'm about at a loss for what else it could be.

 

well winter is upon us and that means the car is off the road for the season. quite disappointing that I didn't get to drive it much, but I'm thankful that I got to drive it at least a little. It also means that I don't have to feel guilty about tearing into it farther, so that's what I've been doing. I've finished up the RX8 water pump conversion....kind of....
For fun, here's the evolution of the cooling system starting with the epump adapter, going to the S4 set-up, and now the finished RX8 set-up


I ended up ditching the stock RX8 thermostat cover and fabing my own. I'm getting fairly good at these at this point. I didn't get many pictures of the fab work, but here's the final step after welding, machining the mating flange flat.


New radiator installed. It's a Afco that's probably a little too large in reality, but it's in and has some nice Spal fans in a great cover. Don't mind the bungee cords, they were helpful hands in getting the radiator placed.


There's tons of room between the intercooler and water pump now, but the main crank is close-ish to the radiator. Nothing I'm worried about, but it's always something. haha. Here you can see I had to modify the AN adapter fittings as the coolant pipes that used to be there were a bit too close together.