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I figured I should start a build thread to document my build and to share as I know I always love looking through these. I'll try to split up the posts by progress/topic and date the first few as a lot has already been done.
I've always loved the FD and always hoped to eventually get one. I almost bought one about 12 years ago, a 1993 VR, but ended up getting an e36 M3 instead (which I still have). Anyways, around September of 2017 conditions were right and I started looking for an FD. At first I was just trying to find the cheapest manual car I could find, but eventually started to look for more middle of the road cars which were a better foundation. After looking at some VR cars, a black shell, and talking to several people selling in neighboring states, I was lucky to find a Montego RX7 in my city (Portland, OR). It was reasonably priced and after some negotiating got it for a what I think very reasonable amount. 1993 RX7, Montego Blue, Tan interior. 89,500 miles, Manual 5 speed. Engine rebuilt by the owner before current with OEM seals/specs with 3k miles since rebuild. ( No paperwork, but painted blue if anyone in particular does that?) Stock sequential setup, boost at 10psi. It had some good reliability mods, larger aluminum radiator, aluminum AST, larger intercooler, etc, but otherwise stock. It even came with a PowerFC and commander but unused. It had some blown bay special "MaxSpeed" coilers, and lots of clunks over bumps from the rear suspension. Paint was decent but peeling in some places, and had some bad touch up jobs done on some bigger chips etc, no big dents but your normal collection of dings here and there from the last 25 years. Oh and absolutely terrible chrome wheels and racing beat spoiler. But overall ran fantastic hot or cold, and got it on a lift and did pretty much a full PPI except compression testing since we didn't have the tool. Thus, a few dollars later and it was mine on November 17, 2017.
Specs
1993 RX7 Touring
80,500 miles
Montego on Tan interior
Stock turbos in sequential
Rebuilt motor with 3k miles, details on possible changes at rebuild unknown
Catless straight pipe (Kind of worried with this and stock fuel, but boost has been staying below 11.5psi and AFR under 11.3 at leanest under boost, usually around 10.5)
Intake
Aluminum Intercooler
Aluminum Radiator
Speaker pod with AFR and Boost
Ebay blown Coilovers
Racing Beat spoiler
So I'm big on detailing, and the car needed it bad, so the first thing I did the first week I got the car was full detail, interior/exterior.
Scrubbed the interior, the tan door panels had an ungodly amount of dirt and grime buildup in the texture molded into them. Got a pretty good workout going crazy with some brushes and rags and every cleaner I tried to get the gunk off. I actually found "Spray and Wash" from on top of my washing machine to be most effective, and hasn't seem to have any negative effects.
Before scrubbing, picture doesn't do justice to how dirty it was.
A good scrubbing, and 2000 calories later.
Next I did a full exterior detail. Wash, clay bar, medium cut, swirl remover, wax. Paint actually started to look really good after the detail. The hood was still just decent because it had really been hammered with rock chips and what looked like 100 grit sandpaper in a lot of areas, but overall, the car was pretty clean from 10ft away.
So now that it was starting to look a bit better something had to be done about the ugly wheels and wing. For the wing I went for the usual '99 spec. I had to paint it to match the car, so I got some paint from Scratch Wizard, who are actually just down the road from me so I didn't have to pay for shipping. So got the primer, base coat, and clear coat rattle cans and did my best. It turned out okay for a rattle job, a few streaks, the shade was probably as 8/10 match to me. Everyone I asked said it looks the same, but they don't suffer from my degree of OCD.
After the spoiler was done I had to figure out what wheels to get. I knew I wanted some kind of 18" 10 spoke wheel, and was between Volk ZE40, WedsSport TC105N, and Advan RZ, or some cheap knock of one of them. Ended up getting the TC105N's over the others, partially due to price, because I still lovvvve the ZE40 but they are pricey. And went with a conservative 8.5" square setup because I'm keeping the power mainly stock and went with 245 Kumho PS91 tires, which I feel like is plenty of tire for the car, maybe I'm wrong?
Finally got around to putting the wheels and spoiler on the car after Christmas time. Added some red Efini emblems and even dropped the car a bit as well on the coilovers.
After putting a few hundred miles on the car. I got a check engine light, which i found to be the AIT. Sourced a new "fast reacting" sensor online, and went to install it. I really really realllly didn't want to take the manifold off to get to the sensor even though most things i read said you have to. A) because I just didn't want to have to take a bunch of stuff apart if it wasn't mandatory, and B) I didn't want to mess up any of the complexities under the manifold just by looking at them wrong. I probably spent 1.5 hours screwing around with getting it off, using a series of crows feet, modified sockets etc to get the old sensor off, and new one in without taking off the manifold. So much work for something so easy still. Ended up having to break off the plug end of the old sensor because it was too long to fit in my regular length socket to get it off, but a long socket was too long to fit in the tiny little space. Luckily the new sensor had a different end design and I could get a normal socket on it. Even with the normal socket the space is so small and you are bareeeely able to the get the socket on the sensor to screw it in. So did that. Changed the oil while I was at it.
Are you a detailer? What exhaust is that? Car came back to life
No, many years ago I worked for a tiny private car dealer in the summers detailing really rough old 914's, 911 SC's, and Mercedes Diesels after he got them for cheap. Thats where I picked most things up. Just did a good polish with an orbital and random orbital. But yea, it was a big improvement! Thanks! Not sure on the muffler I want to say I've looked before and couldn't find a name. Car isn't with me now, so I cant look.
So after putting 600 or so miles on the car, I noticed consistent clunks from the rear which I assumed were the pilowballs, but also several other negative suspension characteristics. When driving hard under braking the front end felt very wobbly/unsteady/floaty, and the rear on turn in felt like it would go from normal to feeling like it had a ton of toe in. Did some suspension inspections and found some interesting things, in the rear the toe arms had tons of play in them, which I assume is causing the toe changes. I know the upper control arm OEM bushings also have some slide and dynamic toe changes to them in the rear, but this was definitely excessive. So it seemed like new bushings were in order. Looking to front the bushings in the front strut mount were totally slid out of the strut. Completely. Cant believe I didn't see this before if it was there, and that I put over 600 miles and most of it on curvy backroads like this. Same on both sides. See the picture...
So those needed to be replaced. Ironically, the next day I was putting new coilovers and front arms and my 350z drift car, so wasn't too happy on knowing I "had" to get new coilovers for another car so soon.
Alright, so the car is really looking good for what it is at this point. Has some good shoes, decent paint, runs great, suspension is toast as you saw above. Its at this point that I really have to decide where I want to car to be when I'm "done" with it. So I compiled a list of things to do
- 99+ front bumper
- Good Coilovers
- Bushings
- Black door panels
- And some other minor things
So I guess this is where things get more in depth. When upgrading the front end, obviously new bumper has to be painted. Now the Montego looks great, maybe as good as it can. But Montego always has just looked a little dead to me. Yea, its cool how its blue then green, and if the sun hits it just right it looks sexy, but 80% of the time it just kind of blah and lacks some depth/pop. I do love the color and its so intrinsically 90's, but I wanted something better. I am lucky in that I have a connection to a body shop through family that allows some pretty amazing deals concerning paint and body work, thus I made the decision that painting the new bumper was a good time to also paint the car. I was between either going to black, or going with blue, I love CYM but didn't want something that bright. Bounced back and forth between blue/black for a bit, but eventually settled on doing the blue. So I get the bumper, and things start to get real. Of course when I first planned on painting the car and talked with the shop things were going to be cheap because I just wanted a simple respray in a different color and didn't really want to spend too much money. But then as they evaluated the car and my OCD became a problem we started to up the time required and cost to get it to where I wanted. And we probably changed the plan 3 times increasing in complexity, going from a simple respray plan, to essentially completely chemically stripping the panels we could and sanding down close to at the metal on the rear fenders/pillars/roof to get everything even, fix every ding and dent, and get things essentially near perfect. Thus the car was now going to be completely disassembled, except for the engine bay which I'll paint down the road if/when a new motor is in store. So since the shop is essentially doing this for cost I start the teardown procedure myself to reduce the labor needed, and strip everything I can before I hand it off to start what would otherwise be a $10k paint job
Figured it was a good time to roll the fenders since I'm adding spacers to flush things a bit, and didn't want to hurt and crack the new paint
Most things stripped out of interior/exterior. Took all the door seals etc out, managed to only break one plastic clip
What spacers you going with? You're not wasting any time.
I got some H&R's. When I was sizing the wheels I used a thread that has a chart of the sizing for the FD and the max wheel widths with offset etc you could run without rubbing ( https://www.rx7club.com/suspension-w...sizing-475828/ ). I used that and some other threads for my offset choice. I think my wheels are maybe even 2-3mm further out than the chart says is the max possible without rolling fenders, but even with that sizing I definitely still have like 10mm front and back to get to semi-flush, so was kind of disappointed with that and that I have to run spacers because I would rather not, but eh. And this is just semi-flush, not crazy stancenation stuff lol. I should have done some more investigating with pictures and calculating backspacing from the different widths and offsets, but oh well.. spacers it is.
We are almost up to date. So the bodyshop has the car, but since this is more of favor/connection thing my car definitely isn't the priority, and things are just going slowly with them getting started a little bit at a time until they get a good time with their already busy schedule to do all the disassembly, body work and paint work. But in the meantime I have a LOT of stuff to get.
Firstly I got some OEM Stanley 99+ turn signals from ebay, that one light had BOTH mounting tabs totally broken. Kind of annoying since there was zero mention in the ebay listing about it, and obviously you can tell if they are in your hand. But technically you could see it in the pictures and the guy was nice enough to give me a little refund back, think he's a member here too. Anyways so had to be creative and create some new tabs by adding some epoxy to the back of the light and then drilling and adding new screws. They came out decent enough.
added epoxy resin and put a washer at the top of it to seat flush against the bumper, the epoxy goes deeper into the plastic grooves on the other side so the screw can grab onto that and deeper.
Drilled a hole into the epoxy at the center of the washer, making sure to stay at the right axis in line with the mounting position, then screwed in a bolt and cut the head off at the right length after it was in place. This is really solid, and fits well into the bumper after checking.
So I ordered some things. LOTS of things! All delivered to my office since they need signatures etc and I don't want them left at my door just in case, so my co-workers think I have a serious online shopping addiction at this point because I get something new every week and it always comes in a huge box so its a bit of a production.
I'll start the showcase here. I was like a little kid checking the tracking numbers for all of this every day until each one showed up!
Firstly I got some black door panels on here a while back, perfect condition except the top mounting clips were all broken which will make for fun mounting. I needed pillowballs and figured I would do bushings while I was at it. I know most of the bushings are probably fine, but figured I would just do a full overhaul. For the bushings I decided to go with the Superpro. I ended up going with the "bare kit" because I got upgraded separate TCS trailing arms from Banzai, and Battle Version toe arms to replace my sloppy ones. I did this instead of just swapping to poly bushings in these arms because there is a lot of talk about how these arms are multi-axis (which they are) and switching to poly can cause some binding and unwanted handling characteristics, and figured I would listen to the RX7 gurus. I got OEM Mazda bushings for the rear lower control arm inner attachment. For the pillowballs I went with J-AUTO. I also got some spacers as I mentioned before, and got an "RX-7" half plate so I could be OG.
My shifter was also a bit sloppy and I have the infamous 2nd gear grind/notch, so got some new shifter bushings and the NEO fluid I've read good things about for fixing the grind from Mazdatrix. Also snagged a new Fuel Filter from Rotary Performance and some Idemitsu Pre-mix I'm gonna try out. Black door panels
Big box of Superpro bushings, pillowballs, and Mazda OEM rear lower control arm bushing all from J-AUTO
H&R Trak+ Spacers, Battle Version toe links, TC Sportline trailing arms, and RX7 front half plate.
New shifter bushings, springs, etc. NEO tranny fluid
Rotary Performance fuel filter, and Idemitsu Premix
So the car is at the body shop so I have to just stare at my shiny parts until I can get the car back and them them on the car. Here are some pics of the car from last week when I stopped by. Like I said all the body parts are being disassembled during paint so they can be painted separately for the best quality. Thus car is totally torn down - doors, hood, hatch, glass, sunroof, mirrors, vents, bumpers, etc. Strange to see the car so naked. Anyways stopped by last week and they had the car prepped for some primer before blocking etc. Took some pics in the weeks prior of the car getting stripped down and with dings etc marked. As you can see there are quite a few to get things smooth. Pretty excited because the ball is really rolling now and it should progress more quickly from here.
Stopped by today.... Things are taking color! So obviously the car is going to be Innocent Blue by the thread title. But I was really bouncing between Doing Mazda Innocent Blue, or Doing BMW Estoril Blue (which has always been one of my favorites) or Porsche Sapphire Blue. But I decided to keep it somewhat "original" to the car and stay with a manufacturer offered color, even if it was offered in the US. But even with that said, the three colors are pretty close really.
Here is a test fender from the scrap pile they did for me last week to make sure I like the color. Which I do. Its crazy how Innocent Blue can take on such a different color in different lighting. In direct sunlight its a light blue, in shade or low light and normal blue, or in some artificial lighting a deep grape color. I like it. And then some pictures of the car in the booth! My car took up both paint booths with all the individual parts haha. I missed the base being sprayed, but they took a pic for me. I guess after this its off to the oven for curing, and then reassembly and wetsanding.
