c0rbin9

iTrader: (2)

Pleeeaase post a comparison of the JRZs versus the Ohlins when you install them. I'm sure a lot of us have cross-shopped the two when considering high-end coilovers, and it would be great to hear from someone with direct experience.

jorts17

Thanks! Agree that I need to address that. It’s on the to-do list once I get the brakes bedded in and the car comes back for some more work later in the winter. Part of me wants to paint the wells black at the same time but not sure if that’s the right call.

Will do! I’ve worked the car out at the dragon so I’ll have a decent frame of reference. I’ll be honest though, I’m not expecting the difference to be massive given what I use the car for and my capabilities as a driver. The Ohlins are just so good for the price, you’ve really got to want the JRZs for a street car, which I did. I’ll detail out my opinions though when I get some miles on the JRZs though.

ZumSpeedRX-7

iTrader: (12)

Mike and I used to text back and forth over random things over the years - our builds, photography, motorsports, M2's for some reason, random musings - and had a great run in down at NJMP. We had fallen out of touch (read: I fell off the face of the earth - kids will do that), and didn't realize he had sold this beauty

Glad to see it has gone to a good home, and even better seeing you improve upon something I would have deemed just about perfection

Best of luck - looking forward to it getting that much better

Cheers!

Narfle

iTrader: (16)

Meh, some do. It's not original. If the car is color swapped, it's probably a no brainer. I think it's an original detail, on your car. But, it's all up to taste. I been going at it with purple power degreaser. Works good.

jorts17

Thanks for the kind words. I tried to get his contact info from a couple of people just to shoot him a note and say how great the car is. I should just shoot him a PM. Putting these new parts on wouldn't be on the table if it wasn't for all of the great work done under his ownership.

Thanks for the tip! I'll probably keep it original since I may have the car redone in CYM at some point.

jorts17

When I received the car, it had a (pretty nice) custom 3" stainless exhaust that had 2 midpipes - one with a resonator and one without a resonator that was used via a boost-activated butterfly valve. The exhaust worked well, but it was not a giant fart can and was a touch quiet for my taste. I always try to keep the exterior of my cars clean and OEM+ but bless me, I just love fart can exhausts on cars like this. I also like something a little louder on a car I don't drive a lot. I may not share everyone else's taste here, but go easy on me. So to solution the situation I had to change the exhaust.

Amuse (R1 Titan) R1000
I love Amuse exhausts. Even under new-ish ownership (dba R1 Titan) their exhausts are still great and still are made better than a lot of the JDM Ti exhausts I have come across. Choosing which one was best, there was no doubt in my mind I wanted a 90mm exhaust to help lower the boost threshold and help squeeze a few more HPs out of the car. Since we will be fabricating a new downpipe, I went with the R1000 which connects directly to the DP. This also allowed me to option on an additional muffler to "hopefully" keep the volume from being truly OTT. This is the scotch body and the B tail finished with a gold ring. This is the best combination, all other opinions are wrong. Lol. I also had Amuse reduce the tip size to 110mm. They are normally 130mm which is a little too cannon even for me. The results, I think, speak for themselves. Now I just need to figure out how to keep this thing from killing my rear bumper with fire.

R-R-Rx7

iTrader: (24)

real nice build. i have seen this car in person at IRP, real nice car. i heard that it was sold. It seems that it has landed in good hands !

these monoblocs are real nice!! but then again everything else you have there is gorgeous. These monoblocs you dont see too often..

jorts17

Thanks, it's definitely in great shape which means I can focus earlier on adding fancy parts, haha. The Monos are so nice. I don't even think I've seen anodizing better than what Endless does, regardless if it's the hard ano on the Monos or the shinier stuff on the hats or twin blocks. It's next level and I could stare at it for days.

jorts17

I'm not sure how many people actually are reading this - but I'm currently debating converting the car to DBW over the winter as we do everything else. I really like the simplicity (idle stability, less space in the bay) and future tuning options (literally endless things here) that DBW affords. But I am really unsure on what effect if any removing the staged throttle will have. In theory it will hurt the car's drivability at lower throttle openings, but this is also not a stock port 13B with a smaller turbo that can be spooled up at 2000rpm.......

Real world comparisons seem to be sparse so at this point IDK if it's worth taking a leap of faith....and I don't really want to put a DBW actuator on the stock TB to bridge the difference. I'm open to thoughts and opinions though.

Pete_89T2

iTrader: (4)

^I had the exact same concerns about low throttle drive-ability, but in the end these concerns were non-issues. When I purchased my FD, I inherited from the previous owner a GM 90mm DBW throttle body (LS3), RX8 DBW gas pedal sensor/assembly that was adapted to to work with the FD, and a Link G4+ Fury ECU managing everything. Previous owner didn't get around to properly tuning the DBW & idle features, so when I test drove it, it had a stupid high idle on its stock 13B-REW ports and was running pig rich. The car also has a 13B-RE Cosmo LIM & UIM, which I understand is more of an open plenum design than the 13B-REW UIM, so perhaps it's better suited to a large single plate DBW throttle.

After getting my VE table, DBW & idle settings sorted out properly on the Link ECU, I'm finding that the DBW throttle is very responsive and linear from just above idle to redline. I'm not doing anything particularly fancy in the DBW mapping either; for the most part it's a direct 1:1 relationship between accelerator pedal and throttle plates. At idle (0% accel pedal), the throttle is cracked about 3.5% open when at operating temperature. Initially, I couldn't get the car to maintain a stable idle at less than 1000RPM when fully warmed up, but with subsequent tuning, I got it to idle happily at 900RPM, which seems to be as low as I can get it to go. That's the only disadvantage to DBW that I can see at this point - can't idle quite as low as OEM stock. Turbo spool up doesn't seem to be effected much either, at least in my setup. I'm still characterizing boost response on WG springs alone (closed/open loop boost controls disabled), but it will consistently spool & hit my 7psi spring pressure as low as 3000~3200RPMs on a 3rd gear pull, and creep up to 8~9psi if I stay on it and run the pull up to redline.

Bottom line is if your ECU supports it, DBW offers lots of perks. To wit, the Link ECU supports cruise control via DBW, so I now have working cruise using the OEM switches, even though the cruise unit was removed to make room for my IGN1A coils. I'm also using mine as a redline rev limiter (e.g., when RPMs hit your redline, any accel pedal movement = 0% throttle), which is much easier on the engine than a spark or fuel cut based rev limiter. You can also program DBW features like a switchable valet mode - max the throttle out at say <50%, no matter how hard the idiot driving it mashes the go pedal.

jorts17

Thanks for the feedback! This is why I wish forums were more active like they used to be. It definitely sounds promising based on what you're saying. My FD is on a Haltech 1500 so it's ready to be wired for DBW, and my idle is set at 1000rpm now anyway so none of what you are saying concerns me. Maybe I'll try to commit to this over the winter.

Pete_89T2

iTrader: (4)

You're welcome, that's why we're here!

One other thing I forgot to add - initial throttle tip-in and response during the cold start & warmup enrichment phase was a bit of a bear to tune, and I suspect that was at least partially due to the fact that the DBW setup lacks the staged OEM throttle. The symptom is a bit of lag/hesitation when you initially tip in the throttle to accelerate from a dead stop from idle speed. Initially I tried just throwing more fuel at the problem with the Link's warmup enrichment table, but that only got me so far. Fortunately the ECU offers lots of alternative ways to skin that cat, and I turned to using the 4D/5D fuel trims to conditionally richen up my AFR targets a bit at idle/off idle speeds during cold start/warmup conditions, The AFR target fuel trims go to zero (no trims) after the coolant temps reach operating temp. The other thing that helped was adding a few extra rows to my DBW map (accel pedal vs throttle vs RPMs) so I had more resolution in the 0% to 15% accelerator pedal range. That allows you to make the initial throttle tip-in non-linear (e.g., 1st 1% accel pedal travel = 2% throttle), which when working with properly tuned accelerator fuel enrichment settings works wonders for drive-ability.

jorts17

Suspension Refresh Part 2

By my judgement, all of the suspension bushings on the car are original. There are no obvious offenders, but with a little over 80,000 miles on the car and nearly 30 years to put wear on the pieces I know there are improvements to be made with a refresh. Best of all, with the mileage I'll put on the car a refresh now means being in perfect shape for a LONG time to come. As with most parts, I looked to Japan for the answer.

Super Now rear toe links, rear sway bar endlinks, sway bar bracket and front tie rod ends
Super Now private labels a lot of parts for other JDM shops, so I decided to go straight to the source. Plus, they allow you to anodize the aluminum pieces in almost any color that you want. So of course I chose black. How original. Something else to note, on many of their pieces they offer either a "2 piece" or "3 piece" bearing. The 2 piece is standard and is not stated who makes the bearing. The 3 piece (shown on all my toe links) are made by NMB and are beefier and made with nicer materials. Make sure you option the good bearings with your fancy billet parts.



Super Now rear lower arms and spherical bearings for OEM arms
The next step was replacing all of the bushings in the main suspension arms. For this I went with new OEM front arms to lock in some minty ball joints while these parts are still made. Then I had Super Now press out all of the OEM bushings and replace with their NMB sphericals. Of note, the front lower bushings were replaced with eccentric bearings which should give me a lot more camber adjustment when aligning the car. In the rear, the rear upper arms are not new but were cleaned and had spherical bearings pressed in all locations. For the rear arms I went with Super Now's dedicated rear lower arms, also anodized in black. They claim that the rear arms are more vulnerable to cracking if you press their sphericals into them, and the price of these arms is very competitive with obtaining a used set of rear lowers and adding sphericals to those.
















I'm super excited to get these on as not only will it mean the suspension on the car will be completely fresh, but they should add an even greater level of precision on top of new OEM rubber or poly bushings. This thing is going to drive awesome. At least in theory. It also means my comparison of the JRZs to the Ohlins will be worthless since I'll be adding all of this. Lol.

jorts17

Not a lot has happened over the past month or so except a couple of parts arriving that I took some pictures of. The car is currently on a lift waiting for some time to free up so my friend can finish the things that I coerced him into reaching 75% completion on before getting busy enough to stop lending a hand. Like all projects, what was supposed to be a suspension and brake job has now bled into some of the turbo system work I wanted to do. So the car will remain down until all of that is complete.

The good news is even with all of the supply chain challenges, the material for my new downpipe and dump tubes are on the way and should arrive in a week or 2, which means fabrication can start shortly after. I’m really excited for this as Origin Fabrication’s work will clean up the bits of the turbo setup that bothered me a little, and then things will be *chef’s kiss* until I get motivated enough to replace the clutch and 5th gear.

In the meantime, enjoy some pictures of other small parts that have arrived somewhat recently:

TiAl MVS gates, Full-Race BOV cover
These will replace the current single Turbosmart gate and the TiAl Q BOV. I’ve always really liked the EFR’s CRV and using it should help keep the setup a little more responsive and save some space.



ASM Alcantara Seat belt guides
I have to admit I got way more excited about these than I have any right to. The FD needs these guides too unlike my S2000 due to where the belt is placed. Without them it just falls off the seat and you have to fish for it every time you drive the car. I dreamed of a cover that matched my RS-G Alcantaras and I guess ASM was listening…lol. A few months ago they did a run of 50 belt holders in the exact Alcantara finish of the RS-Gs. I tripped over myself trying to make sure I got a pair before they sold out, and man do they look great!





Rays Center Caps
In the age-old debate of center caps vs. no center caps, I am 100% on team center cap. Snagged the last set of these in stock from Japan and threw them on immediately. Idk why you no center cap people think the way you do. The wheels look far better with them on for a street car.

TwinCharged RX7

iTrader: (14)

I find that no center cap people are generally no center cap people because their wheels didn't come with center caps haha.

jorts17

That’s the truth. I just don’t understand how most people can stare at an often kinda corroded or mangled axle nut all day and be ok with it. Just one of those little things that drives me crazy, unless it’s actually a track car and you don’t want to eject the caps all the time lol

Narfle

iTrader: (16)

Team Center Caps, checking in.

jorts17

Things are moving along and some progress may actually be made instead of just piling up parts at my house and friend’s shop….maybe.

All of the material arrived for my downpipe and dump tubes. When you look at it laid out it doesn’t look that impressive, but I’m excited for Origin to work their magic on these bends. Should be considerably nicer than what is on the car now. I still need to decide if I want to have the parts Swain/Zircotec coated or sent to ATP for some wrapping when they’re done. But I’ve still got time.



Also in my pursuit to modernize the car where it makes sense, I decided to convert it to DBW. After looking around I chose a kit out of Aus. The adapter and pedal bracket are both machined and have a great fit and finish. The pedal bracket in particular is quite nice. This also pairs with an 82mm Bosch TB instead of the LS TBs that a lot of the US kits use. I think this is a more reasonable size for the HP levels I am targeting. The kit uses a GM pedal like most do. You can bet a Garage Alpha pedal cover will be on the way soon too.

jorts17

Is this a progress update or is it just more pictures of parts? Just more parts, obviously. When you have a newborn and your friend has to run his business first and work on your car second timelines can be a little stretched

Anyway, when I took the FD to the Tail of the Dragon for a weekend last fall I found that I really did not care a lot for the clutch. I think there is currently an ACT Xtreme pressure plate + organic disc in it right now. I am not sure if there is a lighter flywheel or if it's OEM. This makes for a reasonable pedal pressure and easy slipping which helps pulling away from a stop but when hustling the car through the gears the clutch does not feel as "sharp" as I would like. Since I am also hoping to replace the tall USDM 5th with the .806 JDM ratio, we may as well put a somewhat sportier clutch in there as well. So I continued some of the obsessive clutch research I did when I had my S2000 and set out looking for a clutch with the following criteria:

• Retain pull-style to keep all OEM release parts
• Minimize total assembly weight as much as possible
• Retain a reasonable amount of streetability as this is first and foremost a street car
• More aggressive engagement feel than the current organic disc ACT

After diving back into clutch research the following showed up:

ATS Double Action Pull Carbon Twin






On paper, the ATS clutch should meet all of my needs. My primary qualification ruled out a lot of the OS Giken clutches. They're really nice, even their motion conversion kits are nice but I far prefer the simplicity of keeping the OEM pull-style cover and all of the OEM parts that support it. Trying to minimize total assembly weight tends to push you in the direction of the carbon clutches. You've really only got ORC and ATS on the Japan side of things (or Exedy if they even still make the carbon twins) but the ATS clutches have a distinct difference from the others. ORC and Exedy use a similar type of carbon disc. They are super light like all carbon discs, absorb impacts well which means you can use an unsprung hub and they slip well until they are super hot. The downside is they also will slip with the clutch fully engage until the discs are warmed up. ATS uses a totally different construction that claims to have considerably better low-temp friction while still being streetable and of course super light. What you give up is that slipping ATS clutches aggressively (big rpm, long duration) will warp the metal components in the clutch as the carbon gets super hot.

I decided the upside outweighed the downsides since I am not planning to drag launch this car, which is a big killer of the carbon ATS clutches. The total weight is quite light even though it is a twin disc and the shift feel should be a 10/10 since the carbon plates are incredibly light. We'll see how it goes. Maybe the next post will also contain some actual progress. Maybe. I'm also content to just stare at these parts for a while.