Nik da Greek

Thanks, dude. I try to be a bit lighthearted, it's all about enjoying the damn things after all! Believe me, there've been times when I 've properly thrown my rattle out of the pram and wanted to burn the whole lot to the ground but no-one wants to read that, do they lol



This huge mountain of **** is what you end up with when you strip out twins and go single! So much work and effort in here, all just torn out and thrown away. *sob*


But progress demands sacrifices lol, so on with the relentless progress. Underneath, titanium meets ceramic. Just went with a screamer pipe, wanna feel the noize


Suspension in place, complete with braided brake lines all round


A Dragon Peformance diff brace for peace of mind


..and all the oil cooler lines replaced with braided stainless and Aeroquip fastenings




There are loads of other mods in here I haven't got pics of or are too boring, things like braided steel clutch line, MazdaSpeed spark plug leads, new fuel filter while we were under there, Nissan GTR 33 fuel pump, Nissan GTR fuel pressure regulator, the clutch is an uprated one of unknown origin that was on the Mon Blue car way back when (possibly HKS)... the list goes on and on. There is always something you forget that needs uprating, no matter how cleverly you do your homework before you start!

Up top it was coming together, too. Even fitted an airfilter lol. The little fashon item Blitz BOV was no longer up to the job so a man-sized GReddy Type R was pressed into service. Once read a description of this as "sounding like Darth Vader coughing under the bonnet!" (hood! I'll get the hang of it one day)




And the spoiler was now red rather than metalflake purple


and the bonnet (screw it, you get the idea!) was red, too. Lovely.

.

Nik da Greek

So, that was that then. The addition of a Super 7 billet fuel rail with 1600 injectors (the car was already running 850s all round) was the last piece of the puzzle. A running-in map was stuck on, and I was off to enjoy 1000 miles of pottering running her in.

It was great, in a way. A bit horrible to drive for a while, but eventually it all started to bed in and I even got to try a bit of boost here and there. Stopped to take the obligatory car-in-front-of-graffiti pics, of course!






So, this is the happy ending, then? After a few blind alleys and re-doing the same stuff twice here and there cos I hadn't thought things far enough ahead, all I needed was a few dyno runs, some mapping, and I had the car of my dreams, what she could have been all along?

You know it ain't gonna be that easy, don't you?

Well, it got round to the mapping anyway. There were a few hiccups en route (like the low coolant sensor wire snapping en route to a show, the end result being me and my mate had to listen the buzzer for about two hours before we came to the genius idea of just earthing the wire out! Doh! Instant peace! He didn't talk to me for a while after that lol).

It was a week before Rotorstock (when things always seem to go wrong for me, year before the ABS blew itself up, year before that it'd been the turbo pack that ate its own head). The running in was finished long since, but the builder was too busy to get the car mapped. I didn't want to drive it all the way to Santa Pod and back unmapped, so after chatting to the builder about it, I went to a couple of mates from the forum who had a sideline in mapping going on.







Awesomes! Nearly there!



Errr, no. The evening ended right back at square one. Next day, it looked like this;

.

limepro

iTrader: (2)

You threw all that stuff away? I would pay for shipping if you want to send it all to me!! lol.

Nik da Greek

Yep, she'd **** herself on th edyno, the incontinent old sow. I had to drive her back home fifty miles on one rotor and a gusset full of apex seals. Fortunately it was about midnight, and I was pissed off enough just to keep my foot in it all th eway home. It's the catch 22 of rotor motors, so fragile, yet so tough. She managed to get up to a good 90mph on one rotor, bless her.

The engine, when split, was a bit ugly.

This little ****** was the culprit for the damage;


The housing wasn't too bad in places, just scrapes...


....nicks...


...and unfotuntely one whoring great gouge torn out by the zorst port


the rotor was just another paperweight




and the turbine wheel of the turbo had a neat matching chunk taken out of all the blades where the bit of tip had been spat out


Y'know, that's not what I had in mind....

but what are you gonna do? Well, I'll tell you what I did, I had a massive ******* tantrum about it for a couple of days. If I've learned one bit of advice I can pass on in my whole sorry life, it'd be don't let one person build an engine and another person map it, because if it blows its guts out you will be basically buggered with the blunt end of a pineapple. No-one's gonna take any responsibility. Down to me then.

But like I say, what are you gonna do? Can't cry forever. Jason at Super 7 was a good enough mate to offer to help out on the rebuild, and the car was worth ten percent of rock-all as it was, so we had no choice but to rebuild it again. Tried to take it as a chance to tie up any niggling loose ends, but I gotta say, it stung a bit!

1QWIK7

iTrader: (33)

For real nik. You have hundred of dollars of parts just sitting there. Are you really throwing it all out?

Nik da Greek

God, no, guys. Figure of speech. The good stuff all got sold on (this was a year ago now), thing like the Apexi filters, Blitz BOV, polished hardpipes etc. A lot of it didn't sell, no-one wants stock radiators or things like that, and in the end I donated a whole load of boxes of crap to Super 7 of all the bits I'd accumulated over years that would only ever be useful on a twin turbo car. Couldn't bring myself to weigh it all in for scrap in the end.

ZE Power MX6

iTrader: (157)

Ahh what happened? Blew a seal?

Oops, guess I read too slow, keep getting distract by the Man Utd / Chicago game and Coppa America game.

Nik da Greek

Yayy! Hundred posts down lol

So, another engine. Took a couple of weeks to get it sorted, and J was true to his word, did me it for parts and waived the labour. It was hard to see what had caused the engine to blow, this was the worry. At one point the boost had spiked real high, up near 2 bar, which may well have caused it to lean out like fury and det. Why it had spiked was another mystery. The boost controler was a GReddy Profec Type II B (like, snappy name, guys!) that had been steady and trouble-free for over a year, both twins and running in the single.

The only good thing to come out of it was at least it proved the worth of an HKS ignition amp. Once the dyno guys realised something had gone badly wrong (like cos it had dropped from 408 to 300 horsepower!) they tried troublshooting everything they could think of. Unplugging the Twin Spark dropped it by another 50+bhp. Up till then I thought it was just an empty gold box with a little LED on it lol.

It was suggested the leading coil was failing, but tbh that's never been proved and there's been nothing wrong with it before or since. Hmm, don't like mysteries. Especially when they cost an engine.

Still, gave me the chance to take pics of stuff I missed first time round! Super 7 billet fuel rail with ballast resistors for the 1600 injectors


oil lines actually in-focus this time


Nissan FPR setup. If you really squint there's an oil filter pedestal mount for the gauge senders in there somewhere.


Cleaned and polished with the third engine in. Starting to get a bit fed up of neatening everything back up after major surgery now lol


Does look nice and shiny though, don't she?


Finally managed to source a MazdaSpeed rear strut brace to go with the fornt one I'd had for ages. These are great because you can keep the parcel shelf mounts


Also played about with different width spacers to get the wheels to sit just right like they always should have


although the rears needed a gentle arch roll to stop them scrubbing. The coilovers were by now on the lowest setting. This is my mate Adam doing the damage lol


easy with the right tool, none of the ghetto-style block of wood/scaffold pole stuff here.



Part of the running in involved the Seven's Day meet up in London (England). We in FDUK do it most years in honour of the Seven's Day meet at the underpass in Tokyo (can't remember the damn name Daikosuko or something? Probably just wrote ***k your mother in Japanese, sorry in advance if I have). So , on 7/7/10 we all rocked up to the smoke with a magazine reporter in tow. This is how it appeared in Japanese Performance magazine;

Nik da Greek

Time for another interlude? Few more of the Seven's day meet, if you're interested. Meeting point at the Ace Cafe (if you've ever heard of it? Famous meeting spot back in the days of the rocker boys on their Triumphs. Since become a petrolheads nirvana just off the North Circular)


The North Circular


Rexes prowling Park Lane (the second most expensive square on a Monopoly board lol)


Parked up on the Embankment under the Lever Building by Blackfriars


St Pauls Cathedral behind the new Blackfriars station works


Bank of England. Not too interesting, there's not much money in there now. We'd rather give it to Greece, Portugal, Italy.....


Westferry Circus, underground Canary Wharf in the Docklands (Isle of Dogs) final meeting point. It's LOUD!




Heading home over Tower Bridge. Top night out!

hades

iTrader: (4)

Thanks for the great read!

Nik da Greek

Cool, so where was I? Oh, yeah, running in. Did that, couldn't face another 1000 miles so went for about 650 as a compromise. This time Jason mapped it himself. No dramas, all good. Peaked at 407 bhp (Euro, don't forget) but had a nice curve to the graph that's probably more relevant than outright power. Only got a graph from a later run when it had lost a bit due to heat and stuff.



So there we are. Happy ending at last, yeah? I got on with just driving it and enjoying it. Didn't do any work, no tidying up, nothing. Just drove her. In all weathers, this is leaving for work one morning around four a.m. in winter. I know it's not much compared to the temps some of you guys get out there, but then how many of you drive 400 brake singles to work lol. Yeah, got too much sense, I know hahaha


Even the wife relaxed enough to let me take the nipper out in it once in a while now she was pacified the car wasn't going to explode in a fireball without a moment's notice. This is Conrad. He loves it cos "it goes really fast and makes whooshing noises". He's only four, that stuff matters at four. At forty, too...


Stickerbombed my battery box when I was bored one day, and that was the only mod all winter...


...mostly cos the weather was horrid (for England, yeah!). This was work one night, spent a few hours stuck here lol


Not much fun driving on rails in that, let alone on the roads


Anyway, winter finally thawed out a bit, so round about mid-January we arranged a FDUK meet up in Milton Keynes (a horrible place basically with no plus side other than being a convenient mid-way point between a whole lot of us).

On the way up, in no tearing hurry, running along an open road having just overtaken a slower car, mate behind in his FD, got to 6500 in second, changed up (it was just around freezing), not even on WOT, 6500-7000 in third, going to change up...BOOM! Huge sheet of flame from the exhaust lights up the night sky. Car looses way immediately. Sounds like a tractor. Won't idle. Won't pull. Lumpy as hell. Pull over, forlornly, desperately check to see if it's blown the MAP sensor vacc line off, all the while knowing the awful truth like a knife in the guts.

Yep, she's **** herself again .


Home by low loader. Again.


Three HOURS limited to 55mph. Got home at one in the morning to see the wife's head looking down from the window to see what the noise was.


...boy, was she gonna be pleased...

phrost

iTrader: (14)

crazyness! I guess the 4th engine build is next.

Nik da Greek

lol. The latest engine blow wasn't the only problem I'd had over the winter. My lovely titanium exhaust had manged to break itself. Not sure how, but the weld on the middle silencer box had cracked, and since titamium welding is a bit of a specialist skill, I had to search long and hard to find someone to fix it. Eventually sent it off to Craig at Dyno Torque in Brimingham. This guy is a superstar, his current LS-engined twin turbo FD is at around 840 bhp at 13psi, so he knows a bit about making cool stuff work.

Unfortunately, since the ARC exhaust was designed as a full system, the midpipe was the wrong length to just fit another one, had to swap the entire thing. Think this is now my seventh exhaust variant.... Dragon silenced stainless mid pipe and a Kakimoto Red Label back box. To be fair, it sounds a lot nicer than the ARC one. But it's just not titanium


Added some stickers to keep my "sponsors" happy. Without this stuff (and Red Bull, and RockStar, and Relentless, and...) none of this would be possible.


Then, in October last year, I got rammed off my bike by a wizened, arthritic old pensioner who basically did the equivalent of running a stop sign and took me out. This is the other lady in my life, by the way;


Going really slow but I took all the weight of the bike on my standing leg and it tore the ligaments out in my right knee and wrenched the shoulder joint apart. That's why I'm off work now, just had keyhole surgery for a Subacromial Decompression to basically shave all the bone and wrecked tissue out of my shoulder. Nice. So all in all, it wasn't a great winter!

Anyway, this engine had gone big stylee. This time it looked like someone had thrown a grenade into the front rotor housing. It had taken out all three apex seals, the housing, the mid plate, and the front plate.


Completely FUBAR


Just to complete the misery, we discovered on strip down that the turbine housing had cracked where the downpipe flange was welded in.


The fabricator looked at it, thought it could maybe be welded, but was just as likely to shatter into a million pieces. The turbine wheel was scrap anyway, it had three apex seals go through it this time and it was shrapnel. Oh, and the manifold had blown a hole where the runners met, too.

It was beginning to look as thought the only sensible option was to scrap it all. Break the car for what was left saleable, and throw all the scrap in the bin. It wasn't economical to try and rebuild it again, was it?


Still, on the positive side, Japanese Performance maganzine put me in the Reader's Rides section using some pics I'd sent months back. Seemed like they were taking the ****, really

Nik da Greek

Well, I don't like to lose. Maybe I'm just pig-headed, but it seemed a shame to throw away all that work. The main thing was to isolate what it was that was causing the damn engine to drop its tips all the time. We isolated a few possible causes, bearing in mind that an awful lot of stuff had been changed and/or upgraded anyway.

The most likely culprit looked like the alarm wiring. The aftermarket alarm was wired into the ignition circuit, and was running wire you wouldn't use for your front doorbell, let alone the sort of current an FD ignition needs. It was agreed that the wiring would be taken completely out of the ignition, just using the starter motor instead.

Another problem was the horseshoe engine loom. I'd already replaced this once, when it was still on twins. By then it was like fifteen years old and cooked. The insulation was falling apart and the wire itself cracking and fraying. It looked like the replacement was now doing the same thing. Rather than get another secondhand one that probably wasn't in much better nick, we decided to make a complete one-off bespoke loom out of proper overkill wiring.

Finally, we decided to upgrade the ECU to a Link G4. The Apexi is good enough, but not as clever as it could be, and the Link supports a lot of clever features, so that should the worst happen and the engine try to suicide again at least we'd have a datalog of what had happened. In addition, aviation Kryptonite unbreakable seals were decided upon so if it did det again, at least it may survive this time.

Other than that, everything would be checked, refreshed and renewed. It seemed almost certain the problem was some electrical spike that happened after the car had been running a long time ( both times it blew it had been running two or three hours), a high resitance problem that was baffling the ECU and making it advance the ignition right the way round. If we eliminated everything that may cause this, then it'll all be good.

Of course, the turbo setup was scrap, so it was time to start collecting parts again! I didn't fancy another secondhand tubby cos it hadn't worked out so well last time, and I couldn't afford a "name" brand because the car had pretty much bankrupted me already with two enigin ebuilds already in a year. My mate Ed sorted me out with a good compromise.


It's a Master Power (yep, them from Brazil) MPT64 with .70 on the front and .96 on the back. On a P-trim. Somewhere equivalent to a T04R, I gather, though I freely admit I'm far from any authority on turbos.


Quite a bit bigger than the old T04S, anyway, it needed the biggest streetport we could squeeze out of the plates to run her up. Didn't want a bridge because it's a road car at the end of the day, can't be doing with all the aggro.

Good used Trust tubular stainless mani to replace the cracked HKS cast one


Brand new 60mm Tial wastegate


the old HKS one had been suspect, if you remember it had allowed a big boost spike when the engine blew on the dyno, and it had an apex seal wedged in it from the last car it was on, so I was just as happy to see it go. Anyway, just look at this baby, it's beautiful


Last possible weak link was of course, fuelling, so a SARD FPR found its way into the mix


BOOM! Fourth engine that's been in this car in a year. Hopefully the last. Ever


Made 423 bhp @ 6500 @1.1 bar....then the fuel pump ran out of gumption. *****' sake. Always something. Now have a Bosch 044 which should be man enough for anything. Also starting to press the limits of that little FEED intercooler, so I've got a Trust one to go on. And the battery's sruggling to start her, so I've got a much bigger box and a dry cell Mercedes battery from an SLK 500 to go in there. Should be strong enough current to set fire to a bucket of ****.

That's where we're at now. So fast, just insane. I love this car. Even after all the ballache and bankruptcy, I love this car. Th eother day I had a horrible moment when I thought something terrible had happened. She'd just blown a boost hose off. Fantastic! The Link is so much better than the Apexi it's not even funny, car runs better than it ever has. No regrets. Some detail pics for ya...










.

Nik da Greek

The only thing I've done since getting her back together is fit a Shine street diffuser. What a pig that was. I've heard a lot of people praise Shine stuff, and I don't know any better, but the one I got certianly didn;t fit too well. Fortunately, the spats on my car hide a fair bit of bodgery, cos this is how it fitted...




Dunno, maybe it'd warped but nothing I could do would persuade it to make the right shape. Ended up cutting it up quite severely, which was annoying as it'd taken a day or two to prep;
rubbing back


primer


and paint


Ford Graphite Grey to match the wheels, and make it stand out a bit more. Diffusers often get a bit lost under the car when they're just plain black


Got it on in the end, but took a lot of swearing and the left hand side still needs a bit of bodyshop work. Plus I had to re-make all the bracketry for the fog light..


But worth it, I reckon


So that's where we are now, today. Like I said, I'd recommend no-one follows my particular path to modding. Fun though it's been, I could have bought three sorted single turbo cars for the money I've wasted errrr.. blown...errr frittered oh, whatever on the one and a half cars over the years. And, one last word of wisdom; if your engine blows up, make bloody sure you know why it did it before you try and rebuild it . Otherwise you end up with a garage full of these...


Thanks to everyone who's still reading this rubbish for taking the time, and I'd just like to thank all my mates in FDUK who've kept me sane and helped out the last few years. Love ya all, guys!

The car goes in for the new IC and final mapping this week, so hopefully I'll be able to post some good news up soon. If it doesn't make 440 I wanna know the reason why lol

Cheers!

Supernaut

iTrader: (83)

Impressive build thread and a very unique car. My hats off to ya.

ecoli

GREAT READ....now on to a question or 2.......

1. kinda asking all who read this....is this a typical RX7...ie. always having issues?

2.what is the bridge you mentioned?

mkiv98

iTrader: (5)

I read this in Jeremy Clarkson's voice the entire time.

I feel really bad that all those beautiful cars have to suffer through that weather and salt on the roads!!!

pomanferrari

iTrader: (1)

I'm on my fourth motor also but along the way I've figured how to cool the engine (Evans NPG+); eliminate detonation (water injection) and get enough spark (HKS twin power).

I went to a Moto GP race today and the car feels like a bike when on boost. A guy on a Ducati 848 knew better than to play with me.

Nik da Greek

Cheers for the kind words, guys.

Lol @ Jeremy Clarkson. I'm a fair bit shorter and never went to public school but my hair's just as bad!

@Ecoli "bridge" refers to bridge porting the engine to flow more mixtrure through, thus more gas out thus quicker spool (very broadly speaking). Comes with all sorts of issues like terrible emissions, lumpy idle (brap brap brap) and so on.

This isn't typical at all (no-one else I know has blown two engines in four months) but don't forget this is now getting on for twice the power output that Mazda intended the car to have. There aren't many engines that displace 1.3 nominal litres that you could get over 400 horsepower from and expect to last long without issues. Run a stock car and refresh the vaccuum lines in the rats nest and the engine loom and there's no reason it should be unreliable at all.

@ pomanferrari yep, it's definitely as close to riding a bike as I think you can get on four wheels. I'd have thought an 848 would stand more of a chance, the guy on the 1198 would be too scared to open the throttle or use the brakes in anger in case it had him off haha. I think I'm there now on the reliability (except the WI which is one more thing to break/forget about in my world lol).


If I knew then what I know now, I'd have bought a cheap car with a single turbo conversion already done and worked from there, but hey, at least this car is now 100% mine. I've had more say in how it's built than Mazda ever did. But sometimes I think it'd have been nice to skip the middle part of the developement process (and save myself about 20 grand in the process)

Monkman33

iTrader: (28)

Damn, that's one long trek. I sincerely hope you don't have to worry about another engine pull for at least a decade.

1QWIK7

iTrader: (33)

Damn talk about dedication..I always loved the buildings and roads and how narrow they are. Those little stores that remind you of little villages from centuries ago. Damn I wanna visit england so bad..

ZE Power MX6

iTrader: (157)

Good read, hope this one last!

*RX007*

iTrader: (4)

Poli Malakia! haha hope it works out this time

CrispyRX7

iTrader: (139)

A great read....and thanks for sticking with the rotary and not throwing in the towel and doing the LS thing.

Regards,
Crispy