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I love build threads, but never thought my car deserved one. In the past year a ton had changed with it and I would like the share the experience with this awesome forum.
History: The Rx-7 has always been my dream car, but I am pretty young and they always seemed like these ultra-rare, high maintenance basket cases to me. By circumstance I ended up stumbling across the minty-est Rx-8 R3. It had 8,000 miles on it when I bought it in the spring of 2017 and I only paid $11k for it. I fell in love with that car and loved almost every minute of it, but there where three drawbacks. First, I did not fit well in the Recaro’s. I am 5’11” 185lb with a 32” waist. My lats were always resting on the bolsters, not on the seat back. Second, this car was TOO CLEAN. I was using it as a daily and was terrified anytime it got dinged or I curbed one of its 19” wheels. It was not lost on me that the R3 is one of Mazda’s rarest most special cars. Third, it was not an FD!The minute I started getting paid FD money I hopped on the forum flirting with the idea of “upgrading,” my rotary rocket for a faster machine. A well respected forum member reached out to me offering to sell his FD. It had almost every features I wanted; 95 PEP in MB, no Bose, no rear wiper, with a sunroof. It turns out he had bought it from another well respected forum member, hence the name, “village bicycle.” Both members are great guys and I have nothing, but good things to say about them. I am not including their names for the sake of their privacy, but I encourage them to make mention of themselves if they wish.
I spent five hours driving it to NC from TN. One of the most euphoric drives of my life. It was a sunny fall day and I was cruising with the windows down and the RC antenna up down the winding roads making my way home. When I got home I realized how dirty the paint was. Clear coat had some bad sun fading around the fenders. I was able to bring the paint back to its former glory after a 3 stage paint correction. Definitely one of the harder ones I have done, but I think it was worth it. Unfortunately I only have pictures after the correction.
Had to geek out and takes some pics with the 8 before it went to its new owner. My initial impressions with the Rx-7 were disappointing to to be honest. It handled far worse than the 8 and had a lot of little issues that I will address in later post.
At this point I had not modified the car much. I was dailying the car at the time (only had a 4 mile commute). The first thing I did was upgrade the headlights and radio. I threw on some topshelf bulbs and re-aimed the headlights. They will do for now. Next I installed an old double din touchscreen head unit I had laying around from a previous car and installed some kicker speakers. I am still not satisfied with the sound, but they are a huge upgrade form the 24 old set up in the car.
After 2 months of daily driving the car with a few multi hour trips, the FD started to show its age, but my blissful ignorance did not see the signs. The low coolant buzzer would come on every two weeks after which I would fill via the radiator neck. I also noticed the coolant was filthy, so I attributed it to neglected maintenance and did a coolant flush.
Next I addressed the suspension. The shocks were blown on the car and it wallowed all over the place. I wanted to lower it and with the prices of coil-over kits these days, it was the logical choice.
Finally, it was time for the car to go into hibernation. I had gotten short orders and left the car with a family member. Above, is its last photo before being stored. Below are some FDs I saw on base.
Alright enough with the boring daily I want my FD back! Went home to get my FD it over heated twice on me on the way back to work. Notice the I had the wrong radiator caps car. It turns out my waterpump was seized and I had a small leak in my coolant seals, but I had not figured it out at this point. I immediately assumed it was a bad thermostat and went ahead and bought new radiator caps too. The car got me around for the next couple months albeit I did not have a commute and put less than 1500 mile on it.
Ordered a set of Fortune Auto 500 coil-overs back in December and finally got around to putting them on the car. COVID19 had shut down everything, so I resorted to doing them in my buddy's driveway.
First shot I had gotten them way too low. Had to pull them off and do it again.
Two tired Mazdas tackling some mountain roads.
The coil-overs did far less for the suspension, than I thought they would. They definitely made the ride more comfortable with superior dampening, but cornering and grip was still dangerously bad. I also was in need of a set of tires. Noticed the transmission was popping out of 2nd and grinding into 3rd under hard driving. All issues that were addressed another day.
I moved again and it looks like the car is not cut out for the Florida heat. At this point I am clueless as to why it is only pushing coolant out and not pulling it back in. I order some new hoses and an overflow tank from Ray thinking I have a pinhole leak somewhere.
Short answer: I was being dumb. Long answer: It had been raining earlier that day and the roads were still wet. My tires in bad shape and the suspension was wallowing all over the place from worn components. Coming around this interchange too fast, the car was upset by the simple change from concrete to asphalt. It spun twice before hitting a wall. No one was hurt and the airbags did not go off. I seriously thought the car was totaled.
The car was not totaled, but what a long and arduous process.
The insurance: This part was easy. I had regular old USAA on the car. They did not total the car, because I had less than 70k miles on the car. Basically they calculate value based on the five closest cars listed on Auto Trader with similar mileage. The market being ridiculous post Covid helped me out. Also because of covid the insurance estimate was made by the body shop not an official insurance adjuster.
The Parts: Okay this part was painful. It took them five months to get the parts and put it back together. Lots of parts they could not find through their normal distributor and we ended up having to call Ray Crowe for. The hood and AC condenser are NLA and I had to buy off forum members. The hood was the most difficult component to secure, due to its size. They are not too terribly expensive for what they are, but they are very expensive and difficult to ship. I ended up paying $600 from a forum member.
The rest: I was not extremely satisfied with the work and the way the project was managed from my shop. If I could have done it again, would have taken the car to a paint shop that does more custom work and restorations. I was limited by insurance. Typical mass volume shops are not equipped to hunt down rare parts from twenty year old cars.
Damn that sucks, must be scary spinning off the road! I did that once in my old car on a lake front road, I was going 45 through a tight S curve on a heavy dew morning. The car managed to stop inches from the wall, but I was facing on coming traffic, luckily it was like 3AM so barely any car on the road they they were able to slow down for me to turn around.
Your car seems to make out ok, can’t wait to see the repaired picture.
Alright no more playing around with worn suspension components, everything must go! Every bushing on the car (still gotta do the diff) was replaced with SuperPro's purple bushings. I do not have a lot of pictures from installing the bushings, but let me say it was a lot of dirty, exhausting work. My smart watch said I burned over 4,000 calories that day sawing, hammering, and pressing the old bushings out.
The bushings definitely made a noticeable difference in the car's handling. The steering rack bushing took the most the slop out. NHV was of no notable difference. The weather stripping is worn and lets in a lot of noise anyways.
As Dale mentioned I relocated to Corpus Christi, Texas. Still getting to know the place, but already started to work on the car a little today. If you are a rotorhead in Corpus hit me up!
Now back to our timeline:
November 2020 - January 2021
Here is the car back from paint. Too bad it does not run as good as it looks. Even up close, in person it was not looking great. I had to take it back and forth to the bodyshop to handle various little problems. They damaged a fan motor, they forgot to install the badges and rubber seal between the hood and bumper, the list goes on... I also had them re-sand the paint as it came out with a lot of orange peal and still has some to this day. I see why people discourage resprays, but the car looks 10x better than it did before. I even had them install an R1 wing, which went together flawlessly, despite being cracked.
Next I tackled the airpump. Mine (right) whined, clicked and squealed non stop. I got a replacement (left) from a buddy, but it had a different pulley size and really did not fit well. Have not seen another small pulley pump. Somebody chime in if you know about them. I ultimately deleted it.
My alternator failed and I find this when replacing it. It is the bolt that runs through the lower part of the alternator bracket, through the water pump housing, to the front iron. At this point I was still having weird intermittent overheating problems and could not find a culprit. Judging by this bolt I assumed the gasket around the water pump and the pump housing to iron was bad.
I ordered new gaskets and thought this should be a piece of cake. Well it was not… Around the same time I met Dale Clark on the forum and had offered to let him drive my car since he was looking for new coilovers and wanted to get a feel for the Fortune Autos. The weekend we agreed to meet up I started working on this project. What I thought would have taken a few hours to complete ended up taking two days. Dale came over to help. I can say if it were not for Dale I probably would have given up and sold my car. I had no idea what I was doing. Dale, Jimmy, Kurt, and Jon all really helped educate me and keep me interested in working on the car. Dale has a really good thread here https://www.rx7club.com/3rd-gen-gene...iends-1151938/ . The best mod you can do is a local group of rotor heads.
My alternator failed and I find this when replacing it. It is the bolt that runs through the lower part of the alternator bracket, through the water pump housing, to the front iron. At this point I was still having weird intermittent overheating problems and could not find a culprit. Judging by this bolt I assumed the gasket around the water pump and the pump housing to iron was bad.
I ordered new gaskets and thought this should be a piece of cake. Well it was not… Around the same time I met Dale Clark on the forum and had offered to let him drive my car since he was looking for new coilovers and wanted to get a feel for the Fortune Autos. The weekend we agreed to meet up I started working on this project. What I thought would have taken a few hours to complete ended up taking two days. Dale came over to help. I can say if it were not for Dale I probably would have given up and sold my car. I had no idea what I was doing. Dale, Jimmy, Kurt, and Jon all really helped educate me and keep me interested in working on the car. Dale has a really good thread here https://www.rx7club.com/3rd-gen-gene...iends-1151938/ . The best mod you can do is a local group of rotor heads.
Turns out my water pump was bad too. Dale noticed it when I pulled it off the car. Again, something in my ignorance would have never noticed. He ended up selling me a space RE-Medy pump from MazMart he had sitting around and I got the car running that weekend.
My car, like I assume many old FDs leaks a ton of oil. Turns out some of that oil was power steering fluid. Dale pointed it out to me. The small hose between the pump and reservoir is a common failure point. I tried getting some hose from a local supplier but ended up ordering a new one from Ray Crowe, $12 and hassle free. Somewhat of an embarrassing oversight on my end but made a huge difference on steering. I am just glad my rack and pump was not damaged.
Me and Dale finally met up with running cars. I was blown away by his car. Aside from being wicked fast you can feel the attention to detail that has gone into his car. Very responsive engine all throughout the powerband with a very tactile drivetrain. Definitely made me reevaluate the plans I had for my car.
Cleaned up the car and took it out for a photo shoot on Pensacola beach with my buddy’s E30
07-01-21, 10:47 PM
Had to pull them off and do it again. 
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