tldr; I've been DD'ing FDs for about a decade, but the interior always was a let-down compared to the driving dynamics. I had this wild idea to do a saddle leather brown interior like in a classic Ferrari, but I was scared of it turning out like crap and costing a lot. Then I found this! It's a 1997 with a sunroof. Someone had already done it all and it was also the cheapest FD available in Japan ($16,600 @ 50,000km). Only problem, it's an automatic.

These are pics from when I first got it. I immediately got rid of the 19" volk's because I had some new 17" SSR wheels with new PS4 tires on them waiting. Fitment is... an issue. The rear fenders were flared much larger than it seemed in the ad photos. Took 60mm spacers to fix them, but then I had to run 60mm spacers so yeah.

Front brakes are 4 pot GREX aftermarket rotors & calipers. Rears appear to be stock 16" ones.

 

Some basic stuff I've taken care of: peeled off the fake carbon fiber stickers from the entire panels. The center console cover & storage box is some different form of fake carbon, so I simply ordered replacement parts for that.

Good surprises so far: Spirit-r seats with cheap $300 covers.
Bad surprises so far:
1.) Engine feels underpowered vs a stock manual. Not sure if that's because automatics are just slow, or if it's something else.
2.) Car overheats in summer with the AC on. Solution: run the heater / no AC I've put some ducting on top between the FMIC and the radiator to prevent air for escaping out the top and that seems to have helped a lot. Installing the rx-8 fan mod soon to help with overheating in traffic. The root cause seems to be poor airflow though (the AC core is sandwiched in between the FMIC and the aftermarket radiator and there's no real path for air to the radiator except through both the intercooler and AC core, and there are tons of gaps around the radiator and such so the air is probably not going through very well).
3.) The zeal coilovers seemed to be in good shape, but were super hard. They always didn't do well even on smoother roads that undulated a bit (on my car with Ohlins, the car would hug the uneven surfaces without bouncing, whereas these would dip into the uneven surfaces and then bounce way up and felt floaty).

parking with anything wider than stock is... a challenge.

 

Although I wanted to prioritize a manual transmission swap above everything else, the suspension was killing me and I was worried it would rattle stuff loose. So I put on some cheap Flex Z's. They're not as good as the ohlins on my older car, but for street driving they're pretty good. For less than $700 they're hard to beat. The Zeals had poly bushings, and I think the rest of the suspension might as well? Although the car still doesn't feel as good as my 2nd FD on stock suspension did, it's much closer. So later on I think I'll need to refresh the bushings.


Removed Zeals

New Tein Flex Z's installed

 

The rear end is also... interesting. Those two silver circles housed LED back-up lights that had to be removed to pass inspection. I also removed the plastic cups with silver lips, so now there's just two big holes in the rear bumper. Also removed the diffuser so I could fit the car into parking spaces. Aside from the holes, I don't hate the rear, but the fitment is poor on the bumper. They also filled in the gaps on the rear quarterpanels where the stock lights would wrap-around, so undoing this would be a lot of effort. Not sure what I'll do with it, but I think for now I just want to fill in these two hole and maybe fix the bumper fitment (if possible, since it looks like it's slightly too small).

 

Dropped the car off at the shop yesterday to do the automatic -> manual transmission conversion. It appears they will be re-using the automatic ECU and modifying the wiring harness, so aftermarket ECU support won't be possible (with PowerFCs at least). Maybe if I built a custom harness for a haltech it could be possible? (It appears they only sell plug-n-play manual harnesses).

I only ever did minor tunes with a PowerFC and exhaust + intake + intercooler though, so I'm not too worried about that. Bonus point for starting with an automatic is that I get automatic climate control.

After the manual conversion, I think I want to put a 99+ spec front bumper on as well as reverting the front fenders to stock (about $500 for a set of fenders, plus painting costs). Rear fenders are the real problem though. It's probably going to be a very expensive cut + weld + paint job to get them somewhat back to normal.

 

I love a good de-ricing story. Great start, will be following your progress!

 

Here's how it looked in the ad. I found the shop who did the original build (Autocrafts https://www.auto-craft.net/) and even a photo of my car on their google reviews. It used to have some gauges and stuff in the glove box (they were gone when the car arrived and it's a normal glovebox now). The steering wheel appears to be some cheap chinese wheel with a momo bolt pattern, so I'm replacing that whenever the new nardi arrives. Still not sure what the red light and **** are for on the center console, but it appears to be tied to the second foglight switch. Probably was for the rear lights or something.

Researching the Autocrafts shop, apparently they have/had a thing for modding RX7's to look like RX8's (my car) and RX8's to look like RX7s. Kind of gross.

Bonus pics: Mr. Fujita and his team installing all the spacers in the shop on the rear wheels.







Spacer test fitting

 

Some updates:

• Manual transmission swap is complete. Car now has a PowerFC (base tune). The transmission is new (rebuilt) and feels amazing. Also did the sakebomb aluminum gas pedal at the same time, and I highly recommend it. Relatively cheap and is much better than stock.

I forgot to buy a new shift boot & ebrake boot in time, so those will get put on later (black alcantara with red stitching)

• To address the cooling problems, I installed an air dam above the radiator. Also installed RX-8 fans (1999+ spec on the FD iirc) into the original fan housing and put some water wetter into the coolant. Cooling seems fine now, but will test it some more later (there was also some speculation that the stock ECU was burning too rich and causing additional, unnecessary heat).
• Cleaned up the interior a bit: new steering wheel, new center console, shifter, etc. Also working on replacing the stereo with something better quality. This $20 one produces weird sound distortions sometimes.
• Keyless entry added! Works fine, never knew it was an OEM option.

Next I have to put the OEM headlights back in, which will require welding, and then maybe I can tackle the front-end.



Manual swap complete (forgot to buy e-brake boot in time)

 

The rear fenders look like Chargespeed and someone did some nice work on those AutoExe side steps to modify them to fit! I have a similar setup and am
envious of your side steps. They look very nice!

 

Hah! I actually just got rid of those side steps. They're probably on YAJ by now.

Yeah, definitely look like Chargespeed fenders now that you mention it. Are they removable? I thought they were OEM fenders that had been flared & stretched, so fixing that would've been a pain. But if I can just unbolt them, remove some bondo, and repaint them, it's a lot more feasible to undo.
https://www.rhdjapan.com/charge-spee...ders-fd3s.html

 

Here it is with the fenders coming off. (finally replaced these mirrors too, but probably will have to go to ganador or something as a long-term solution)

Also removed the rear spacers so it'll fit in my parking garage.

 

Dang, I would have loved to try to get them to the states for my car!

Usually they are adhered with panel bond or a similar product. They will be tough to remove and will probably be destroyed in the process.

 

Yeah, I don't necessarily care what happens to the FRP fenders, but who knows what it'll look like underneath. I don't totally dislike the look, but they block visibility when parking and are kind of annoying to live with (I also can't put wider tires on or I can't fit in a lot of standard parking spots here). Probably better to just sell the car and get a stock one or just learn to live with them.

The rebuilt starter I bought died on me and left me stranded (had to push start the car), but that's fixed now. At least I got a good picture while I was waiting for help. Otherwise no issues since the transmission swap. Just drove it a lot to break things in, changed the oil & belts, and it's doing well. The rx-8 fan swap helped tremendously with radiator temps as well.

 

More trials and tribulations:

Clutch bolt broke and stranded me, but at least the repair cost was cheap ($0). Finally saved up enough to redo the front-end, lots of good improvements with that as well:
1.) Wideband O2 sensor and PowerFC Master from Xavier + tuning software (forgot to give them the connector to plug the O2 sensor into FC Master though so I still need to address that and then I'll retune it)
2.) Fixed the mess of wires in the interior for dashcams, radar detector, powerFC master, etc.
3.) New 99 spec front bumper, OEM fenders, and all the associated plastickry (undertray, oil duct air guides, tire wheel well ducts, etc.), headlight quality is much better than the slick lights that were half-dead.

Next up I think I'll get the kabuki ganador knock-off side mirrors and fix the holes in the rear bumper (current side mirrors work, but are hard to see with).

 

How has been working with FEED? That's certainly a unique opportunity not everyone gets to experience, very cool!

 

Generally great, but pricier than a normal mechanic (his shop always does good work, but he's money-hungry from what I hear). I wish my Japanese was better so I could talk to him in detail about more stuff, but I've been going there for years and never really had an issue that wasn't my fault (eg. buying a set of used pedals that broke). His other customers come to the shop and hang out and talk about cars for hours while they wait for repairs, so that's cool too, and all of the mechanics basically drive FDs so it's interesting talking about different parts and setups. I think after a year or two, once he realized I was a regular customer who always paid in full on-time, it seemed like my work was getting prioritized, which is nice. My engine rebuild, for example, took about 5-6 days, then I did the break-in and he retuned it the next day. That was sort of a special request (engine died a week before a race), but he just did all this work in a couple weeks, and was basically held up by the paint/body shop down the street.

He thought the size of Xavier's FC Master was hilarious, but started getting serious about it when I was explaining all the different features. He's pretty old-fashioned and conservative though (not a fan of auto-tuning, for example) and cautious about new things. I was showing him the new billet aluminum rotors from an aussie company recently and he's like "yeah, you have to be careful with aluminum rotors because we don't get E85 here in Japan and gasoline damages it over time".

Also, one of the mechanics who's been there for ~10 years now has become a semi-pro racer, so I can have good discussions with him about car setup and such.

That said, the local mazda shop, which is much closer, has an older mechanic who does good work as well and their prices are about 20% cheaper, so for simpler stuff like suspension swaps and whatnot I've been taking the car there some.

 

that is one of the little reliability "secrets". for example in endurance racing its really common to have this years car and last years car, and last years car tends to win, the bugs have been worked out.

on my car i let the auto-tune do everything, just to see how it did, and its great.

 

Nice build man.

Curious if you have a before and after photo of the metal welding to go back to the OEM pop up lights? I'm in the same boat and was trying to find a photo of them removed for reference and man is it tough...

Thanks.

 

Here's some photos. They ended up not needing to re-weld it due to the way it was cut (could just bolt it back in to the existing bolt-holes).

 

Rad. Thanks!

 

Found one more photo if this helps. I think there's different ways people cut though, and I guess I got lucky and they didn't cut out so much that it would be difficult to revert to the pop-ups (I guess if they cut out the entire bracket you're forced to weld something back on).

 

So I've gotten a second alignment now and the numbers all look pretty good. More of a street setup than a track setup, but oh well.

Anyway, car seems a little better but still handles weird. Rear end feels almost like the subframe is sliding separately from the rest of the car, and the front end of course is tram-lining still (maybe changing the toe could fix that). I've tried going around corners in neutral or with the clutch in to see if I it's just the diff, but it appears to be something wrong with the car and not the diff (the diff clunking / movement is a separate weirdness on top of this). I'm sort of out of ideas so since the car is old and of unknown maintenance history I'm pondering replacing all the bushings. But due to labor costs, I'm debating just replacing the suspension arms altogether with Super Now arms + 3 piece heim joints & pillowball bushings. On the rear suspension apparently replacing the OEM bushings with pillowballs is a huge improvement, same with the rear lower control arms? I forget, but anyway the rest seem to be ok to replace with OEM style poly bushings if I decide not to replace every single suspension arm with a new one.

Here's the current alignment setup and some pics of the bushings on the swaybar endlinks. They seem ok, but upgrading to the autoexe swaybars was a huge improvement. Way less body roll, doesn't feel any more uncomfortable to ride in, and due to the lessened body roll the weirdness in the suspension isn't happening as often.

 

I really love the interior of the car, very unique but not overly flashy or tacky.

Also the climate ***** look so much better than my 93.

How did you mount your PFC master? Still loving it?

 

I think only the automatics came with these auto-climate control ***** which is a bummer. I used the R-magic mount with double-sided tape. So far no issues. My car is parked outside on the driveway and this summer it got to 95F so the 3d printed case sort of... melted. So I just flipped it over and melted it back into shape, lol. The auto-on for power-on also stopped working but that's just a BIOS toggle that went back to default I guess. And one time the shop I left it at turned the car on and off quickly I guess and didn't shut the PFC Master off manually so it stayed on and started draining the battery, but I think the latest update catches that issue.

 

Version 1 Type X also came in manual, but only for that year.