After about 10 months I finally made it up for tuning, Friday was a LONG day for me. I confirmed the appointment on Wednesday and grew more anxious afterwards, the car got an oil change on Thursday night and a quick look-over for the trip prep, I went to sleep at about 11:00 PM and was up by 4:30 AM ready to go. I ate breakfast and hit the road around 5:20 AM, stopping at the gas station before my 4 hour trek to NJ, after filling up and premixing I hit the highway. Traffic wasn't too bad leaving NoVA and it was smooth sailing after hitting MD, I stopped once to pee and made a wrong turn in the hellacious state that NJ is for unfamiliar drivers and rolled up to a gas station near IRP around 10:15. I asked the attendant to "top it off" which ended up being over 14 gallons and when I tried to pour the pre-mix in the filler neck overflowed all over the ground, that was a heck of a top off.... I gave up, wiped the rear 1/4 down and drove about 10 more minutes to IRP to check in.

Ihor told me I was the second car for the dyno and the first one was just getting strapped up so I took a cruise around Keansburg to burn some gas and see the town and homes near the bay. I returned and there were a few new FD's out front, moehler (Matt) was there with his '95 CW for tuning as well and his was to hit the dyno after my car was done. His FD is truly a sight to see! It rivals Gordon's for the nicest FD I've seen in person, Matt really pays attention to detail with the work and cleaning he does, it was positively a striking vehicle at every angle! Fast forward to about 12:40 after some good conversation and my car was up on the dyno (with the proper amount of pre-mix) with John Renna just getting started. I was blown away by how thorough John was with his tuning, his attention to detail was awesome and he took his time which resulted in a car that is a sincere pleasure to drive. A few hours in and after some WG pre-load adjustments the power tune was done and he was ready to hit the street for fine tuning. I drove the car and provided feedback while he made a few final adjustments, after we returned Ihor had to re-pin one wire on the ECU connector for the PFC to control boost correctly on the single turbo setting and we took the car out again. Ihor recommended that John should make another adjustment to the tune after his time behind the wheel and he did when he was finished with Matt's car. I hit the road after 7PM and stopped at a nearby taco bell for dinner and to say goodnight to my kids, it was smooth sailing and hauling *** after that until I hit Delaware where I stopped to pee and also said hello to Dave, another east coast rotary owner and took him for a quick spin. It was a great stop but it was after 10 and I needed to get home, I pulled up to my house around 1:30AM and took a shower because I stunk like "car" after being blown away in the dyno room for several hours.

It was great day, the car made great power, and it is a BLAST! I've got a couple videos I'll try to link up later but here are a few pics and the low/high boost dyno sheets for now.

 

nice, how much boost you running?

 

Averaged it's about 15psi. It peaks at 16 for a moment and then drops off to about 14, the pink line on the graph is boost.

 

Jehan is doing the EFR 8374 right now and we are all looking forward to test driving it. Looks like really good power and a simple 15 pounds with no meth tank to ever fill. Johns a good tuner. I’m sure you will be enjoying the car now that it’s tuned.

i read your experience with your Dyno day. Matt’s CW is nice. I bet he is happy to finally be enjoying the car again also. I have been driving my car around on a tune I bought from John and it was a nice safe rich tune for getting the car around and for some light boost. I drove on that map for months thanks to John. I did some tuning on it myself on the low end but felt more comfortable having it tuned up high rather than risking it myself. I run 50/50 water meth. (Boost Juice). Didn’t get any Dyno sheets and we didn’t record all the runs but the car ran amazing and am happy. I look forward to getting some Vbox Data. I’m just running an old Aspec GT35R Kit now. I’d like to see how this 17 year old turbo compares to the new EFR.
Do you by chance have access to a Vbox? I’d like to compare some data once the rain stops and I can get the car out and do some pulls on the highway. I may even try to get a 1/4 mile run in.
The EFR 8374 is probably the turbo I’d buy to replace this old thing. Maybe even the 9174 if it would spool faster than the GT35R.

Mike

 

I don't have access to a Vbox and I don't know anyone who owns one. My experience with the 8374 so far is all smiles, it spools so fast and the way the car builds momentum is incredible. I had an old 35R kit from an FD (which I think was an A-Spec, it was from Atila's car) on my old convertible and this turbo is much more responsive. If you're not power hungry and would be happy with around 400whp and no room for more BlueTII has been an advocate for the 7670 due to even faster spool and I'd have to agree after experiencing this. I can't imagine spool on the 9174 would be much farther behind the 8374, the bigger the turbo, the more street-ability you lose though. It's hard to stretch one out without breaking the law!

 

I think it's general knowledge at this point that it spools faster and flows more. I was hoping for some comparable data. I will do some runs in mine soon with the Vbox. If you are interested in doing some pulls I would be willing to ship you a Vbox to borrow for a week or two. All you will need to do is turn it on. Stick the suction cup to the inside of your windshield and within a min or two it picks up the GPS satellites and records. It's already programmed to know when you are just driving and when you are racing towards preprogrammed metrics. It will file each attempt individually with as many times as you decide you want to try them.
I've actually run a previous car at the track and recorded with the Vbox and it was within a tenth each time of the 1/4 mile. You can also compare Vbox data from around the world with thousands of other cars. It's pretty cool. I will see if I can get the car out later and get some data to show you how it works.

Mike

 

Ian, it was great meeting you last week, and seeing your beast on the dyno. Thanks for the kind words about my car!

 

There have been no updates for a while because I had taken a bit of a hiatus from working on the car due to running out of "car fund". I took it out to a couple local events with the biggest one being a track cross on the Shenandoah Circuit at Summit Point where we ran the whole circuit except for the back straight . We had the option to pay $20 for "parade laps" on Summit Main at lunch time, I thought it was going to be lame but decide to go for it since I'd never driven the circuit and it was freshly paved. That $20 led to more fun than the $100 I paid for the track cross because the guy leading the cars was hauling ***! I dropped back a little bit and was able to push the car as hard as I was comfortable with, I had to slow down a couple times when catching the guy ahead of me but I was able to push the car hard all the way around the track to the point where I was scaring myself when braking at the end of the straight, it was wet and I was getting a lot of shudder under hard braking at speed. The next month I got together for a local Spring Cruise organized by Rocky and we had a few FD's out there which was awesome. Two of the owners had LS swapped cars and I swapped seat time with one of them, he really enjoyed the feel of the big single and I enjoyed the torque of the LS in every gear. When getting on it I yearned for the feel of my car though, his LS felt a little slower and it just didn't have the get down and go the turbo has when dropping gears into it's efficiency range and sending it.

In early March and local guy had a tree fall on his car, after talking to him for about a week I worked out purchasing the car which was a non-repairable total loss. I wanted a spare drive-train from the trans back and better window seals for my car and it was the ticket to get them at no cost and build my car fund back up by parting it out which I had done with several FC's in the past. The part out has been going a little slower than I'd like but well and I've purchased some new things for the car, most notably brake parts and a new cat back. I also put an order in with Ray for a few OEM parts and told him about the parts car, he actually needed something his body-shop lost so he dropped by to pick it up. I hadn't seen him since Malloy dropped Mazda so that was cool, he looks to be doing well and is still having endless issue with the ECU in his 20B car.

Here are some pics:

One of my "0"'s flew off during the laps on Summit Main!


Here's the parts car when I went to look at it-


Before the cruise I traded the base model seats from the parts car for a VIS Techno R hood. I wasn't sold on it initially and got it to help keep the v-mount from heat soaking but it has grown on me. Can't argue with the $0 price either.

Here's a couple from the cruise, The red car is Mauricio's '95. He's a local friend who wen to IRP for a rebuild and EFR 8374 turbo kit as well.


I also went a little crazy with seats last month and bought both of these sets. I REALLY like the red but want to ditch leather at the same time, I'm torn between the two sets because good R1 seats and red seats are HARD to find.

 

I made my next impulse buy and my car got hit by a lacrosse ball when I was leaving work, it totally sucked. I was driving down the access road to my work which runs parallel to a practice field for the adjacent high school. Some kids were practicing lacrosse perpendicular to the road so that their ***** would be able to use the fence as a backstop. I saw a white object in my peripheral and the next thing I experienced was a loud whack, one of the kids lost control of his throw and sent his ball flying over the fence into the road. I stopped and put my four way hazards on and then collected the young man's information. I stopped at a body shop on the way home and the estimate came out as $650 to fix the single ball dent and repaint the panel, having a new dent just sucks more because nothing has gotten worse for the car under my ownership until now. When I arrived home I called the kid's father, he gave me the run around about how we is a lacrosse coach, this happens all the time, his son said the ball rolled under the fence and bounced up into my car, and that he wanted to go through insurance. This damage is much harder to recuperate repair costs for and I was feeling boned until I spoke with my adjuster and she said it was possible to get a payment through the damaging party's homeowners policy. Knowing that information and that their homeowner's insurance carrier is the same agency as my car insurer I'm patiently waiting with renewed faith. I've sent all my info, pictures, and made a recorded statement.

One of the things I bought from Ray was a new disp stick, the rubber seal had hardened on mine and for $15 it was not worth passing up. I had a new rotor top for it laying around that my mom had bought me years ago as a gift. I never wanted to install it because I wasn't married to any of the cars I had, it feels good to have finally settled on this one and put it to use.

Here is the dent; the car had been repaired in that location previously and painted over so when the ball struck it cracked the paint and filler. I feel like that helps my case in proving the impact was a downward angle and not an upward bounce.


My impulse buy was an N1 Dual catback. It is my favorite look but everyone is telling me it's LOUD, one even going as far to describe it as sounding like "Hammered **** on a 2 rotor" which was funny. I cleaned it up and painted the pipes with high heat paint before putting it in my attic to store until install. The paint needs to cure at 400*, I'm silently hoping the attic causes some curing before I can put it on the car for the final bake.

After unboxing-

After cleaning-


Hung and prepped for paint-


Paint I bought at the local auto body supply-


Finished product:


In the coming weeks I plan to repair my door panels (I bought some good stuff at the auto body supply to use), install the exhaust, and then refresh my brakes. I'll try to document it all, especially the door panel repair. I brought my DS panel into the auto body supply and the counter rep sold me some stuff he said would fix the cracks in the backing foam and any of the broken plastic. The working time is 20 seconds so prep will be essential.

 

Car's looking awfully nice. What did you decide on the seats? Both pairs look really perfect. Hard to find the leather so nice. Can't really tell how the R1's are except they look nice. The red leather looks really nice with the silver, but so do the black and I suspect they are more comfortable. What did you decide?

 

Thanks, Gordon. Bodywork and a repaint in SSM would really set it off but that's not in the cards right now. Both sets of seats are a 7.5/10 and I'm really being drawn to the red, I'll probably stick them in and try them out when I get back to work on the interior. I did install a new set of OEM defrost vents already and they made a huge difference on first impressions and my sanity, every time I sit in the car now I no longer think about replacing them!

 

I put the N1 Dual on and took the silencers out. DJSeven was right when he said it "sounds like hammered **** on a rotary". It sounds GREAT and idle, unloaded cruise, and WOT- when loading it up and spooling to drive up a hill or from a traffic light it is super tinny and canny sounding, it is too loud for me right now. I'm going to run it for a bit to see if it grows on me but will probably end up taking it off and selling it so PM me if you're interested. There is a zero chance I'll run it with silencers, I'll juts pick up a better exhaust and sell both of my cat backs.

I must just be getting too old to not enjoy a screaming car, I was actually feeling kind of embarrassed passing people with their windows open this morning.

 

There's a loud car, then there's the N1 Duals. That exhaust is just atrocious. It also doesn't fit for crap on most cars, it touches the black plastic under the bumper and melts it.

Love the project!

Dale

 

 

The N1 dual was short lived. I had a buyer arranged on the 29th who picked it up on the 30th. The car now has no catback installed and will sit like that for a couple weeks. I posted my old RB dual tip for sale and bought a new Tanabe Medalion Touring on the recommendation of a couple other members. I'll post pics and a sound clip when it's on.

 

I got the new exhaust on- here's a quote from another thread where I posted about it:

I ordered my Tanabe on Sunday, 7/1/18, and it arrived before 11:00 AM on Tuesday, 7/3/18! I immediately unboxed it and mounted on the car in a whole of about 30 minutes, the only weird thing was the size of the hardware that came with it which was useless to me but I assume was specified to fit the factory catalytic converter. The catback fit very well with no rubbing and seemed to be of good quality. Without a scale and working by "feel" it is lighter than my old RB dual tip, the construction looked to be of quality but it is definitely less robust than the RB. The flange is not as thick and the piping is thinner, the muffler and exhaust tip did have gussets as you can see in my pics below. One of the things I like the most about this exhaust is the construction of the tip, it is "thick" in size and looks very nice. The word "medalion" is etched onto each side of the tip in a similar fashion as the RB exhausts.

I have not driven with it yet but I love the way it sounds so far. The idle is low and deep and while it wakes up when free revving it maintains the low tone and has no harsh raspy sound. I can converse behind the car without shouting and the sounds of the exhaust under the hood are actually louder than the muffler when standing at the rear corner of the car.


Here are some pics:

 

Sounds great, Ian.

 

 

Thanks, Guys. I wanted to drive the car today to hear it but did not. I have a confession- my door panels have been off for about a month and after using the car as a DD for a week I'm entirely sick of driving it with them off! So sick that I have no desire to hop in and go anywhere. The good news is that I disassembled both panels last night for cleaning and repair. I have to get some 6/32 hardware to stud the broken screw lands and some flat washers to reinforce some broken tabs,as mentioned before I already have some super high strength 2 part 3M glue from the auto body supply store to use. Pics and a writeup to come next, then it will be on to brakes.

I may face another delay, I'm getting the urge to move my parts car to a spare garage I have available. The kicker is one side has about a ton and a half of old brick I need to move out.....

 

I finally got around to fixing my door panels. The job didn't go as well as I'd hoped but everything is solid, the work time on the repair adhesive I got was only 20 seconds and anytime the applicator stopped flowing the adhesive would harden almost immediately. I used 6 mix tips just to complete the few repairs pictured below. The job would have been much better with 2 people or an adhesive with a longer work time. Issues aside, this stuff was amazing. It bonded to the door panel foam, plastics, and metals with no trouble at all and was rock hard in 30 minutes. Gluing the metal "bridges" on the drivers side made a huge impact on panel rigidity.

The hardware I used was all 6-32 and #6 fender washers with lock washers and standard nuts with one additional tee-nut that I flattened out and cut one side off of to use on the PS door. I cut the screw heads off and then threaded them into the old posts and the tee-nut. They aren't that pretty but are solid; I had originally tried to use tubing and was going to fill the adhesive around the land but the flow dried faster than my work speed.

There are a few pics that show in the post but are not showing up, I've tried uploading twice.














I'm going to PM my power windows tracks and regulators and then reinstall the panels.

 

Cool, thanks for sharing how you fixed the door panels. Wished Mazda made it sturdier.

 

I have the same Tanabe and love it too!
Ive ran it with and without a mufflered(rx7store piece) mid pipe and its sounds great both ways.
Great review on the Tanabe!

 

Quick update from the last few months:
My interior is nearly back together, all that's out is a rear speaker grille because I keep forgetting to replace the rear speakers, its been like that for a few months as I got into other things with the car. (Hopefully these next pics show up)

One of my local friends with an FD, Mauricio, bought some Ohlins DFV for his car and took out his old lowering suspension which was Koni Sport shocks with PFS or similar springs. It was in pretty good shape and I had accumulated too many sets of seats over the prior few months so I traded him a set of decent R1 seats for the setup. Mauricio came down one night with some beers and we got to work on the cars we did a few things to his and mine. We replaced a crappy old air horn with a set of Hella horns and installed a wideband O2 on Mauricio's before moving onto mine. We installed the suspension on mine next but ran out of time for anythign else that night and both went home.

My car was rubbing on the front left and there was still more to do so we made plans to work on my car again and he drove his jeep down to pick up the seats. The other set of seats I got were red and I've always loved the SSM on red look, while I got busy on the fixing the rubbing issue Mauricio swapped over the seat hardware and started putting them in. The end result looks great (better in the pics than it actually looks in person) and I was very happy to have the ripped black leather driver's seat out. it took me a while to bang my dent out and get the wheel to stop rubbing the front corner of the liner bu when I was done we were both impressed. I'm hoping to bang most of the other dents out and maybe dip the car this summer to hold it over until I can paint, that's super low priority for me though.

New Seats In:



Lowered on Mauricio's old suspension:


Mauricio's '95


Putting things back together after smoothing the dent:


Moving on, I continued to have a low boost issue. I thought the solenoid on the EFR may have been overheating so Ihor sent a new one (IRP is great!) and I remote mounted it by the ABS and also installed an R2 strut bar (non-adjustable). Unfortunately there was no change the the low boost condition.



A few weeks later I drove my car on a short overnight trip and watched the hood shake on the highway the whole time, it was unsettling. Upon inspection of the latch when I returned Home I found cracks that did not exist before the trip. This hood came with knockoff aero-catch latches and I'm not using them because I don't want to drill the radiator support to install the posts and move the wiring harness (PO put them in a dumb spot). After looking at some other building threads I bought some button style quick latch pins and installed them over the bolt holes for the washer fluid and coolant overflow reservoirs. My original plan was to use the jam nut that came with the pin studs to hold down the reservoirs but the pin studs on the set I ordered were too short. I had to get creative so i headed off to the hardware store and bought a few more M10 nuts, M10 washers, M10 bolts, and M10 unions that matched the thread pitch. I ended up putting a bolt up through the bottom of the welded nut so I had a stud on the top then i set the reservoir neck mount down, installed a washer, tightened the union down, and then threaded the pin stud into the top of the union with a jam nut on it so I had some adjust-ability. It worked exactly as I had planned but took way longer than expected. Pro-tip to whoever buys these, buy the longer 4" pin studs and this is a quick job.

here's a pic in progress, I did not take any completed pics because I ran out of light:


The next item on the list was finishing the strip down of my parts car and disposing of it. I "drove" it from my garage to the garage at the vacant home I'm helping my parent's renovate (Moving closer for the grand kids!) which is right around the corner from mine. I stripped it the rest of the way with some help from Mauricio and Matt from Icon Garage before selling the stripped rolling chassis to a guy named Steve who has a bunch of FD race cars in NC. Steve needed the front cut to repair a wrecked car he bought so it was perfect for both of us.


Remember the boost control issue? I finally got fed up one day and checked the one thing I kept telling myself it wouldn't be, the pin at the ECU. To have the PFC control boost for a single turbo properly the boost control pin need to be moved at the ECU connect, when we did this before tuning we messed up the pin and it was never seated correctly and I boogered up the connector body when trying to "fix" it. After a temp repair with another terminal removed from an old engine harness I've had boost control with no problems! I have a new connector body and terminal with matching wire to install. My engine harness is an R-Spec from LMS-EFI and Chris was awesome and sent me a new body and wire lead with the proper terminal free of charge when I inquired about buying replacement parts! As of this month the PFC and my engine harness don't really matter anymore.....


Things coming in 2019-

I started working on the brakes, I've had parts to refresh them for months sitting in my attic and have not had the time. When the garage opens up at the vacant house again I'll be taking my car over and removing the parts. I'm painting the front and rear calipers silver and installing new coated blank rotors with HP + pads, braided stainless lines, and the highest temp fluid I can run. A BBK wasn't in the budget at this point and is not necessary for my current use.

The biggest change to come is a a Haltech Elite 1500 a, a new engine loom, Water/Meth injection, and a few other things. It's all ordered and I hope to have it in and tuned before summer, I now have 3 kids and the youngest isn't even a month old so I'm hoping to still be able to make good progress.

If any of you are looking for a nice PFC and simplified sequential harness PM me because mine will be available when it's removed. The combo is a PFC, TurboJeff PFC Mount, Black Datalogit, and standard commander with a custom cigarrete lighter mount + Serial/USB cables. The harness is an R-spec engine loom from LMS-EFI built for running single turbo or Simplified sequential setups, it is full PnP and all that needs to be done to switch between the two is re-pinning the terminal for boost control. The harness package comes with a separate LMS-EFI loom for waste spark IGN-1A coils that is long enough to reach a bin mounted battery.

Thanks for looking!

 

Well, as expected, progress has been slow. I've shipped out some stuff and ordered a few more things for the EMS upgrade but am still waiting on the EMS, harness, components, and the AI kit.



I did get to work on the brakes but the project was an initial failure. I had cleaned the control arms and wheels wells up, painted the dust/cooling shields, and painted my front calipers and a spare set of rears I had that i thought was good. Once all that was done I brought them back to put them on the car and I had the speed bleeders to put in. Both bleeders broke off in the front calipers but the rears were good so I mounted those and took the fronts to a local machine shop to see if they could remove the bleeders. $45 later the old bleeders were out and I had installed the speed bleeders. I mounted all the calipers and began to bleed the system, the bleeding went well but I had trouble getting both front bleeders to seat without wrenching on them hard. I finally thought I had everything seated and went out to bed the brakes and the used rear left caliper began to smoke so I drove home. The sum bitch was super hot and just total trash, I checked the front bleeders and both were a little wet so I threw in the towel and made the decision to have bleeder repair kits put in the front calipers and get re-manufactured rears. I could not locate a set of re-man rears so I began to call around, I narrowed it down to three options posted HERE and decided to move forward with a company called Phoenix Caliper Co. in Chicago. The gentleman I spoke with on the phone was very helpful and their prices were very reasonable so I decided to send them a whole set of calipers (I had spare fronts and rears). A little over $500 later (including shipping) I now have 4 rebuilt and powder coated calipers with new speed bleeders to install. My middle son's second birthday party is this weekend so I'm targeting next week to install, I'm planning on turning the rear rotor since it was new and blocking the brake pad with some emory cloth. Hopefully I can salvage them.

I don't have time to proof read so I apologize if this post is scattered.

 

Calipers upon receipt from Phoenix Brake Co.