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I love running E85, I was thinking about switch to gas for the ease of finding fuel stations but the risks out weigh the benefits.
It has been a slight pain in my current residence as I have been driving about 25 minutes to the nearest station that isn't extremely high, however the new place I'm moving to has a cheap E85 station within .2 miles of the house. Winning.
I love running it too. I had a fuel pressure mishap the other day during a hard pull and hit 13.5 AFR at 15 PSI around 5500 rpms before I could let off and I registered no knock on the log. That to me is worth a small drive or buying a drum of fuel to keep at the house.
Spent a weekend working corners at MSR, the local track, and the weather was too perfect to pass up a good photoshoot!
After the weekend at MSR I took the car up to my friend Jose's house where it is going to remain until I get the keys to my new place. The car is well tuned at 15 PSI and as of recent I've been beating on the motor pretty hard. In an effort to avoid any potential disaster right in the middle of house-closing decided to just put it away until then.
On a side note, Jose has a FD with a BDC halfbridge that makes some disgusting power. I took a ride in it on "mid"boost at 17 PSI and about lost my bowels when it hooked...dear god...I know what route I'm heading in at least!
While I was up there I also went ahead and installed an efini wheel that I picked up from another rotor friend of mine. It was really a quick, easy and clean install and I'm super happy with the final product.
Lastly, I decided it was time to get rid of the bling-bling'in gold wrap that I had on my intercooler piping for a cleaner look.
Stay tuned for some real updates as soon as I get moved into my new place with the bigger garage. The low-boost ride in Jose's car has inspired me to make some changes!
Wow. It appears my last post was in February and ALOT has changed since then. Within just a few days of when I posted that was in a serious accident in my silverado daily driver.
I was cruising around 70-75 mph in the far left hand lane and following a bigass 3500 dually truck across a long sweeping right hand turn on one of the overpasses just past 610. I saw the dually abruptly swerve to the right and to my horror I caught a brief glance at a white sedan that was parked half in the emergency lane with its rear and hanging out into my lane. I hit the airbag before I could even process the site of the car to my foot to let off the gas, much less swerve. My dumbass wasn't wearing my seatbelt and was actually sitting on it with it buckled behind my back so the buzzer wouldn't be going off . The truck skidded to a halt a couple hundred yards past where I had hit the car. I managed to force my door open and as soon as I gained my footing I immediately took off sprinting back towards the car I hit fearing somebody may have been hurt. By the time I reached the car the Lady was out of the car and walking around. She stated that she was not alright, but when I asked what was wrong she simply informed me that her vehicle was a rental car (which was a huge relief to realize that everyone was ok and it was just cars that were damaged).
The guy who was driving the truck in front of me saw the entire thing and was nice enough to stop and check on everyone and then stick around to tell what he saw to the police. According to him, the parked car was for sure half hanging out in the road and he almost hit it himself. The officer did not fault me for the accident and we are still waiting for the police report to be released so that the liability can be assigned to one insurance company or the other.
I'm was just thankful to be alive after all of that and thankful the other person was alright too. I ended up daily driving the RX7 for nearly two months which went very well all things considered. I've got a built thread on another page that I'll be transferring onto this page.
So after having totaled my truck, being the most important moving-accessory I had, I closed on my house and started the move to Pearland.
Moving to the house was an awesome upgrade. Since I bought the car I've worked on it in driveways, outdoor carport things, parking garages, parking garage rooftops, and most recently the mini garage in the city house we just left so having a real 2 car garage opened up my ability to make big moves.
A month before this in January we had decided that we needed another dog and went *looking* at puppies, which is where we found Diesel Weasel the Dobie. If I remember correctly these pictures were taken when he was about 12 weeks old. I remember thinking he was HUGE then...
Since I was daily driving the car and not in a position to continue modifying it or push the motor too hard I decided to spend more time refining the tune. I had recently upgraded to the AEM IGN-1 coils running in wasted spark. I wanted to use the adaptronics fancy new variable dwell feature to get the maximum out of the coils while using the wasted spark harness. After a couple of weeks of research online I came to the values below. I can honestly say the coil upgrade was one of the best mods that I have done to my car in a long time. It was relatively inexpensive,extremely easy to install, and has helped make the car a more reliable consistent powerful machine overall.
Here is the link to my thread regarding these variable dwell values. By then end of it there are solid, set, and proven values for both wasted spark and direct fire applications. https://www.rx7club.com/adaptronic-e...tings-1094483/
I've dialed in my high/low map coolant enrichment tables to warm the car up at 12.0 up until 120F then 12.5 from 120F to 140F and then it tapers up to 13.0 where it will idle with the trim ceasing around 154F.
By this time I had fully embraced the use of megalogviewer software and had spent a good bit of time figuring out what combination of settings would best serve my tuning needs. The 12-15 PSI cells had been tuned to hold a tighter AFR across the range where it was seeing 11.8 at 12 PSI and then 11.7 at 15 and I spent a significant amount of time logging constant throttle pulls across the 2, 5, 7, and 10 PSI range to lean out these lower boost regions of the map. Previously even when my 12-15 PSI cells were tuned for the 11.7-11.8 target that section in the middle still ran a mid (and even low) 11.X AFR making it a bit sluggish at low boost. When daily driving the car I find that I get alot of use out of the 0-12 PSI range being lean and on point. Simply by standing on the throttle even at 15 PSI I am for certain doing something illegal and likely don't have traction.
Lastly I re-installed my ISC valve in an effort to lower idle and better control the cold morning starts however the valve has NO affect on my idle no matter what I do. I can set it to see 100% duty cycle or 0% and the idle remains the same. I assumed this was due either to faulty wiring or a faulty valve.
Sooooooo whats a man do do when you are daily driving your racer and everything is working perfectly without any cause for stress or thoughts of malfunction????
BUY A NEW TRUCK AND SOME SLICKS.
I ended going with that all original Mickey Thompson 26X10.5X16 tires and mounting them on a set of OEM FD wheels I picked up from a friend.
I started with these wheels that were given to me with white paint on them. Given that I was only going to be using them as drag strip rims I decided to just primer and paint them.
Primer
And finally painted and installed on the car!
The new truck is a 2011 Silverado LTZ 4X4 in the same color as my last. I didn't realize until I was at the dealership looking at it that it had the 6.2L hoss motor which ended up being a big selling point. Coming from the 4.8 in the true that got totaled, skipping the 5.3, and going straight to the 6.2 has been an awesome upgrade. This thing rolls out hard at anything over 3000 rpms. I don't have any plans to modify it past a simple leveling kit, however it is hard not to think about it.
And it was officially diesel weasel approved. He's a fan of the LTZ package...and the floor vent.
Now right about this same time I managed to do something really stupid. The shitty little PC680 battery had died and I was manually backing the car out of the garage so I could jump it off with the truck and with my left leg hanging out the door and pushing the car back the rear wheels dropped off the garage lip and I head a CRUNCH. My dumbass had just backed the door into the garage door frame and it had cramped. I wasn't even really mad, I mean while it was real retarded, **** happens. This is the only photo I still even have of the damage.
So after lots of searching I found a replacement door on the forums and had it shipped on a greyhound bus from San Diego California to downtown Houston.
The door had some minor scratches and dents as well as some burn marks from where its parent car had caught on fire or something. I took it, as well as the crunched door up to a local paint shop and had them rework the entire door and paint match it to the red on my original door. The paint came out perfect and I was impressed with the quality of work. That being said it wasn't cheap. The entire door replacement episode of my build ended up costing me just over $1000 bucks...and I still need some replacement door sills.
Putting the door all bad together wasn't really that bad. The only real pain in the *** part was getting the multitude of door seals to all line up and seal together correctly.
Now...
The very next weekend after I finished the door replacement I had a friend in town who took this quick launch video
I tried everything I could think of to attempt to convince myself that it wasn't really a lost water seal. It was idling extremely rough, blowing white smoke that smelled like coolant, and eating gallons of coolant by the minute. Before the white smoking started when it was only idling rough I had hoped for a minute I had cooked a coil with my aggressive dwell timing, however a test of the coils proved this to be wrong. I sat and stared at it, and my fancy new expensive door, for about a week before making the decision to pull it and move forward for better or worse it needed to happen.
Stage 2: Acceptance
So I borrowed a lift from a v8 rx7 friend and with the help of Jose ripped out the coolant bleeding heart of the beast. This was my first time pulling a motor out of anything and I'm 99% sure the first time this motor had ever been removed from the car since it was installed in the factory.
Up Up Up Up Up and Outta There!
Aaaaaaannnnnndddd she's out. It was actually much easier than I expected.
At this time when I pulled it this image was inspiring and I was looking at all the room I had to clean up and all of the things I wanted to fix. Now (6 months later) I'm still looking at it and it doesn't have quite the same positive allure.
With the motor out and secured on a tire it was clear the coolant seal had failed. Turning the motor over by hand had coolant pumping out both the exhaust ports and spark plug holes. This was the point of acceptance and this was where I left it for the day.
Pulling a motor is a right of passage for an Rx7 owner. Congratulations!
Now that I know how easy it is and have a garage, I may pull it to accomplish even small tasks that before were just done under the car with little to no space!
Originally Posted by socks
So close!
If I could only get this lazy german to pull a motor I'd be set.
Originally Posted by jacobcartmill
keep up the good work. hang in there.
WE'VE ALL BEEN THERE
Thanks! That was all pretty easy. The hard part was what came next...
I had originally planned to just drag the motor up to Dallas and have it rebuilt with a half bridge, but then my friend Mr. Socks and I worked out a deal. He's doing something different with his car and I'm buying his semi peripheral port built race motor along with a EFR 9180 setup. The motor only has a handful of passes on it, but I don't think he ever got any actual numbers on it before leaving for a 1.5 year stint in Germany.
SO I'll be picking up where he left off with that motor and turbo, just out here in Texas but essentially the plan is the same. Run as much boost as the 9180 will spool. Take names, kick ***.
The catch with all that is that I had to wait 7-8 months until Christmas in order to get my hands on the goods. While it has felt like an eternity it was the only way A) I could afford a motor/turbo of this caliber and B) would be able to have my car ready for that kinda power.
I'll update with pictures of the fuel system build progress, new socks and shoes, modified build goals, electrical and ECU plans, and other excessive awesomeness very soon. I've still got a ways to go to be ready for the motor, but as I'm now within a month I'm on it.
I am glad to inform you that a great time is upon us. It is now time to prepare for the impending glory to come. We aren't out of the woods just yet though, but there is a bright light powered by completely obscene insane rotary nastiness that can be seen seen at the end of the tunnel. Lock up your daughter and hide yo wife, batten down the hatches, prep the hyperdrive, and brace yourself for the hater onslaught because IT IS GO TIME.
ENTER THE SUPER SEMI-PERIPHERAL PORT BUILT/BALANCED/CLEARANCE/PINNED ROTOR HEART.
When I lost my motor the plan was to take it up to Dallas for a BDC half bridge rebuild after which I'd simply drop it back in, bolt up my 6266 and be back on the road in a month or so....
BUT THEN...
I was chatting with my friend (socks on here) about having lost my motor and we worked out a deal. He was on the first month of a 1.5 year stint in Germany for work and had just barely completed his semi-peripheral EFR9180 build before leaving and having his car put in storage. Sooooooo what would and serious rotorhead do when halfway across the planet from his 7 with nothing to do but plan...prep to go 3 rotor.
So I spent the last 9 months waiting on his return from Germany in the meanwhile saving and prepping my motorless car for the insane power difference it would see when I finally got my hands on it. FINALLY after waiting all this time we met up over the holidays and made the exchange.
This dude literally flew back from Germany, compression tested the motor, ripped it all out, and met me a few days later to make the deal, bought a house and bunch of 3 rotor ****, and flew back to Germany. Its just wild that some people fear pulling out a motor and skirt the issue, but for this cat its like a 2 hour ordeal.
So what started 3 years ago as a twin turbo car with a dead secondary has now spiraled out of control into...
13b-REW originally built by Carlos Lopez
large street port on FD irons
iron intake ports ported out to match the larger cosmo ports
1" semi peripheral port housings
2 additional solid dowels
race balanced
rotors lightened and clearanced
Turblown Cast EFR9180 IWG turbo kit
xcessive LIM custom modified by Chip Ursu for peripheral ports
FFE Rails With 2XID1300 primaries and 4XID2000 secondaries
Haltech PS1000
Haltech TCA 2 channel egt
I'm forgetting a bunch of other stuff too, but the motor/turbo/ecu was the bulk of what I was waiting on. This is a no limits build now, I don't know what this thing will do at 30+ PSI on E85 but we all will soon.
This is it, you've reached the pinnacle of Rotary Engineering. You've pieced together a badass setup and I can't wait to see it all come together. The best 2-rotor FD, hands down.
So I didn't quite meet my goal of firing in February but I've made an assload of progress.
I bought the cheapest stand that summit had for sale and after some simple modification of the mounting plate it worked just fine with the 13b without any special adapter
I contemplated using my old OEM oil pan, but after eyeing the Winchester Metalworks oil pan that Bacon had been selling I couldn't bring myself to put that old nasty plastic thing on this motor so I just ate the cost and this happened.
And holy crap, words nor pictures can describe this thing. It really is even more badass in person that it looked online, and for $480 it is worth every cent. Not only does it add 2 quarts of oil to the system, but it is extremely well baffled and the 3/8" thick metal flange adds strength to the motor by providing additional support to keep the motor from twisting under heavy load. Between this pan and the 2 additional solid dowels in my motor, it should be rock solid.
And then after all this time, it was motor drop day!
For starters, it is MUCH MUCH easier to stack the twin disc clutch with the motor on a stand than in the car.
Up up and away! Help was provided by the Jose the rotor-soldier who's always here.
Even when you now it is supported really well, its still a sketchy feeling when you have so much dough in something and its dangling in the air.
After the car sat in the garage for 9+ months without a motor, it was refreshing to see it back in the daylight. After that amount of time with it broken and dead, its easy to forget how badass and how nice of a car it really is.
AAAAANNNNNNNDDDDDD She's In! Dropping the motor itself in was actually only like a 15 minute ordeal.
I flat out couldn't help it and had to see it, so a turbo mockup was required. Got-damn! It looks awesome. I absolutely can't wait to hear this sucker scream.
First and foremost, I would suggest nobody ever buy anything from Atkins rotary. This is their knockoff gasket they shipped me after I ordered it off their site with an OEM part number next to it. Long story short its crap, as is their customer service, and organization in general in my opinion. To each their own, but there won't be a single Atkins product on my car, ever. Below is the gasket from atkins compared to the *REAL* OEM one I got from Mazdatrix.
To fuel this thing, I've put together the fuel system equivalent of a fire hydrant. 2XID1300's as primaries, and 4XID2000's in a 4 port rail as the secondaries.
The xcessive LIM was modified by Chip Ursu for the 1" peripheral ports and o-ringed at the top to eliminate the gasket and associated leak at high boost.
Dual 044's. I never realized how serious these guys were until actually holding the set.
First and foremost, I would suggest nobody ever buy anything from Atkins rotary. This is their knockoff gasket they shipped me after I ordered it off their site with an OEM part number next to it. Long story short its crap, as is their customer service, and organization in general in my opinion. To each their own, but there won't be a single Atkins product on my car, ever. Below is the gasket from atkins compared to the *REAL* OEM one I got from Mazdatrix.
Atkins has their place in the rotary world and will be here for a long time.
On the other hand, Atkins clearly shows 2 different intake manifold gaskets on their website...
Anyways ! I was wondering about the two solid dowel you installed.
Did you do anything extra for the top one?
Or you simply installed it normally ?
I've heard of people leaking oil near the turbo-feed when doing this mod.
Ohh and cool build thread ! Looking forward for more
I actually do not 100% know. I bought the engine from a friend who had it built, so I'm not sure how it went in there, I just know that it did.
In other news, this will catch me up to where I am now with the rebuild. I got a super deal on a used kaaz 1.5 way diff off the forums on here. I don't know how much the semi is going to make at 30 PSI on the 9180, but that's what I'm going to run so I figured this was good diff insurance.
Next, I ditched the OEM door panels for some of these LRB speed racing door panels. I either wanted to go this route OR convert everything over to black interior. Given the ridiculous amount of money I got for my driver's side door panel and the even more ridiculous amount I have going into the performance of this build, I opted to give these cheap panels a shot! While it does feel weird taking a complete interior out of a 50k mile car, I'm also honest with myself about what it is, and I don't care. Overall I'm impressed with the entire kit. I may have them hydro-dipped or duplicolor metalcast them up ricer style...
And I do have to say, the more I look at this LIM setup the more I like it. It is the xcessive 4 port that was oring'd and modded for semi-peripheral ports by Chip Ursu. Its just badass. Hands down kickass piece of hardware. While it probably isn't the most aesthetically pleasing piece out here compared to other semi port options, I think it is likely the most functional. The fact that it allows me to retain the stock UIM is awesome, other than a "small" turbo that is hidden low on the shorty manifold and the v-mount this looks like a regular ol'e single turbo rx7, nobody will know its a full blown race motor at least until I start it.
I also like how the peripheral ports are opened to both the primary and secondary runners. Most of the others I've seen have them off of the secondary runners only. I'm sure some would want to debate the theory of it, but given the nature of pressure I feel like having it open to both will allow me maximum flow into the engine. Its just awesome, I've head the CX racing piece is ok, but you have to put a bunch of work into it after buying it to make it work right as the actual part you buy is a POS. I know elite rotary is working on one too that is modified from their large runner cast intake, but I can only imagine I'd have to sell my car to pay for it...so there's that.
Its like my motor...all the fancy important **** is on the inside
And here is where we stand now.
Lastly, an obligatory lightly filtered Instagram photo!
So as I stand now, I'm aiming to fire it up some time next week. I've still got to swap out the thing gauge flashing sheet metal I used to mock-up mount my pump with the actual mounting plate I had cut for it, finish running fuel lines in side the engine bay and run the return line, install the ECU/wiring harness and plug everything in, wire in ignition harness and install coils, then double-triple check all the nuts, bolts, lines, connections to ensure everything is tight and nothing overlooked. Then Fire.
Once I get it up and idling the pace will probably slow a bit. I've been in a hurry to get it running, but I've got a lot of detail work I want to put into the entire car before its fully road/track ready.
Anyways thanks for reading! Next up will be completed fuel system pics and hopefully some first fire/idle videos. Then a diff swap, and likely a Haltech PS1000 semi-peripheral tuning progression thread.
I've been meaning to update this, but I primarily track my build a local forum...which as of next week is going to be shut down. Its sad, I hope the thread gets archived at least as it was awesome.
The last I posted in March the motor was in the car and I was finishing up a bunch of small details, which ended up taking longer than I planned. I got the car fired up and running mid April, but spent a few months chasing electrical demons.
The BIGGEST pain was that I couldn't get the car to idle much below 2200 rpms and it was sketchy at best even then. I initially attributed it to the motor itself being so wickedly nasty beyond anything I had previously tuned but the more I fought it the more frustrating it became.
I gave up on idle being lower and started cruise and low boost tuning, only to find I was getting what felt like massive aggressive ignition breakup and weird vibrations across the whole car when I went into boost. In chasing that issue I came to find that 2 of my 4 spark plug wires were toast and reading NO resistance when tested...which also explained my idle issue.
I had been running on L1 and T2 only. At the time I had been running no split at idle as split caused things to get unstable quickly, and the split map had it splitting the spark right when I was going into boost...hence my break up. After making new wires...presto...she idles happily brapping at ~1750 rpms and the breakup was gone.
Somewhere in there I sold the PS1000 and upgraded to a Haltech Elite 2500, which is awesome.
I'll update with progress pics when I can, but to cut to it below are links to some hood dump 2200 rpm semi port brapping!
Since then I've put a full exhaust back on the car with a resonated midpipe so as to quiet it down. I'm probably going to just reserve the hood for the track or events where extra-obnoxiousness is required. The car has been street tuned to 20 PSI, where it will be staying until I can find a dyno to push it further.
Upcoming work includes installing the kaaz differential, completing the tan-to-black interior swap, lots more haltech CAN gadgets and hopefully some 30 PSI dyno numbers.
01-12-16, 06:42 PM
