Hello,

I am not very good at these build threads or very big into social media but I enjoy seeing others hard work and being a fabricator for a living well it really is fun to play around with ideas (doesn't hurt when your dad is an engineer lol) But anyways I will get to the car. My car actually was my first car I bought when I was roughly 17 for the price of $1500. Your right a pretty weird cool car for a teenager but this one has some problems mostly in need of a big tune up and once over. Of course being 17 and it being a rotary I didn't know much but my dad was pretty good with cars although this was one of the few rotary cars he worked on.

The first few things we began fixing were the vacum leaks around the engine making it run very poor and the factory 4 barrel carb actually was stuck with only 2 barrels working so we found that out and got it running on the vacum 4 barrel, boy did that make a big difference in performance. So then senior year comes and at our school we needed to do a "senior project" where you needed to pick something you enjoy or whatever and do work towards a goal, have a sponsor that kept track of some things and signed off you were doing your project. Long story short I choose to restore/modify my RX-7. I took it off the road to do body work and other things and by the end of the senior year it wasn't really close to where I wanted it really.

Then sadly like a lot of projects it started to get pushed to the side and of course being 18 didn't help with money being tight etc. So it sat and sat. I would do some work every now and then but I really just couldn't see a path or have an end goal so it just was waiting on the side line for the right time to come that a spark hits me and money is right and that moment finally has come. Sure is long over due and been sitting but as I see it better late than never to finish something. Right?

So here we are in 2019 and I am hitting it hard with the help of my dad. He retired this year and he was always looking to restore some cars when he retired (he mostly has MG's and Fiats) so he thought it would be a good project to start back up and I guess with him working with me some times it helps push me or at least makes a path where you see something coming along. Currently we are focusing on the body work but this isn't going to be a stock restoration as the car wasn't in the best shape to begin with when I first bought it.

The way the car sits now the suspension is stock with KYB struts and shocks, new poly bushings, hawk hp+ pads, new rotors. We cut the springs down a bit as we removed a lot of weight and it raised the car a lot so we figured we would try cutting them and at the worst we are out factory old springs. All the suspension arms etc have been repainted and new hardware.





For now the engine will be staying mostly stock until I get the body finished and try to get the car back on the road but in the future I am thinking about porting it and adding other go fast parts on it such as a better carb etc. But I did take off all the polution pumps etc basically anything that the motor didnt "really" need it is taken off and all the holes on the intake manifold are plug welded to basically make a "Racing Beat" style intake manifold. My dad is really trying to simplify things and make it very easy to work on plus get rid of weight while we are at it.




As for the body well thats where things get interesting. Way back when I was still in high school the said "senior project" my dad and I thought the car would look awesome like an old IMSA RX-7. So we took the front and rear plastic bumpers off, bumper bars and the 5 mph bumper shocks and decided to make our own. So at the time he worked at a manufactoring company and he got a few full sheet "scrap" of metal and brought them home and we clamped a couple pieces of angle iron where we wanted to put a bend at the corner of the bumper and hung it over the front steps and I stood on it slowly until it was the degree we wanted the bend. Back then I was still not a trained welder and we didn't have the luxary of a mig welder so we oxy acetylene welded the new piece to the front fasica between the hood and bumper and the corners to the fenders, and to this day he still says its the best piece he has ever made for a car lol.




So along with the race car theme I started to think how to make the car better in general. I talked with my dad some and we thought why not stiffen things up by adding frame connectors from the factory front frame and the rear frame, much like the Mustang/Camaro guys do. So to do that and make it look nice and factorish we came up with a way to fab up a press brake on the existing workbench and have it dettach for when we are not using it. This all happened after I looked at press brakes at say Eastwood or Summit etc and found them to say of can bend up to 22 gauge steel and I thought that is kind of worthless. I have lots of 14 gauge and wanted to build the frame rails out of that so we set to work and there are a few limitations as per the minium distance between bends and the length of the part has to be under 52 inches but it bends 14 gauge with one person fairly easy, mission achoplished!







I will be adding more to the frame such as cross supports where the seats will mount etc but this is the first step. The main reason why we figured to do this is Mazda stopped the frame from connecting and having the floor needing some serious patches well it was a good chance to make the car stiffer. Later on after all the rebuilding is finished I am building in a roll cage also so that will tie in a lot of other areas together.

Coming around to the back of the car having done away with the factory bumper it is a blank canvas. Having blocked off the original tail light slots I was trying to come up with a different look that still fit the car. My dad being a bit more old school than me thought of the 4 round lights Corvette is famous for and thought why not give that a try. So having some trailer lights around we cut the holes *look out for a 4.5 inch hole saw on a hand drill, gets interesting* and placed them. Not 100% sure if they will stay with those style of lights or maybe 4 red lights etc but I do dig the round lights.




So then comes the next custom touch. Having known that RX-7s run hot and our original plan with the IMSA front end we were going to duct in the front duct to the radiator. Then being the engineer my dad is his mind is always thinking of how to improve things, he said one day what would you think about cutting the hood to vent the air coming out of the radiator that way the air gets out of inside the hood reducing drag. I said oh kind of like the Ford GT40's I am game. So out came some cardboard and after many templates and measuring we cut out some duct work out of some left over from work 20 gauge SS. I am planning on putting an Koyo radiator in the car also but as it sits the ducting fits the factory radiator and when you open the hood it misses everything even with the ducting sticking on the hood. There is some tweaks and cleaning up to do to dress things up but the main idea is on there and looks great!









So I think this is a good ending point for now, as this is been a few months work in picture form. There is a bunch of little things that I don't have on picture or forgotten to mention but basically the motto of this car is going to be a fun track car you can drive on the street ocasionally. The build is really just what comes to our mind to improve the car overall. Hence the stripping weight, stiffening up things etc. Dad has always looked up to Colin Chapman (Lotus) and loves Formula 1 so the engineering behind all that kind of gets tossed into this. Sure its not going to be a crazy rockship formula car but re-designing things to help the car perform better is a fun project and I am sure there is plenty more things to come.

Hope everyone enjoys seeing this project as much as I enjoy seeing other peoples handy work. In my eyes its easy to go buy crate motors, a chassis, and go fast bits then install it but to fabricate and put thought into it is where the blood sweat and tears is put into a project and makes it very personal and special.

Btw, feel free to ask any questions about future plans, or anything you think of... I will gladly share my story

 

This looks great, I'm going to enjoy your thread. Thanks for putting it up.

 

I'm currently doing a bunch of measuring and fitting to get the new fabbed frame rails put to gather working towards getting the floor fit between the new inner rocker panel pieces I have tacked on. Lots of things to be thinking of and trying to locate the seats so I can add some support under them and make my own seat rails also. I don't have nothing fit up good enough for a picture but I felt I would check in at lease with some sort of report.

Oh and here is a picture of our home made press break that is currently getting a work out LOL!

 

Managed to get some more work done and some pictures this time. Currently I am working on the frame rails so I can get the floor pans back in the car so I can carry on with things such as the roll bar etc. I got some of the cross frame rails installed and welded. I need to work together a plan on the transmission tunnel on a way to end the frame rail right now I have a piece of flat steel welded on the end of the frame rail so I can bend it down to follow the tunnel so I can weld it up in the tunnel. Here is a picture so far, I will get more pictures under the car etc when I have some more time.



Up next I have some more detailed shots of the duct work that is now welded to the hood and that hinges up with the hood. Notice the little dip bent into the middle of the hood to clear the pulley. That was not originally designed but it barely hit the pulley so I took a piece of wood and c clamped on either side bending for clearance and the hood closes great.



Lastly I started to mock together the radiator in the new mounting brackets and in the duct work. I had to do lots of trial and fitting to cut off just what was needed to fit around the brackets and radiator without hitting. There is still some obsticals that I need to over come mainly the stock top radiator hose will not reach to the engine due to the duct so I will need to come up with a custom way to get that routed and also pretty up some loose ends and makes sure everything has clearance.

 

You want to make sure some air still passes through the engine bay. The exhaust header needs fresh air passing over it. Usually builders will clamshell a radiator and intercooler (or oil cooler for a N/A build) with only 50% of the air that hits the front of the car passing out the hood and the rest going through the engine bay to replace the hot air generated by the header.

 

Thank you for the advice. I am pretty sure there will be some air coming in but I will make sure there is enough. I was thinking that also that of course you dont want no air coming in around the engine bay but now I will double check. Again thanks for some advice of something I might have over looked!

 

You also may want to read through this Mazda competition manual, page 12 specifically.

http://wright-here.net/files/manuals/rx7_comp_man.pdf

 

Thanks a bunch for that super cool reading material. I never seen that before!

Btw fun thing that happened the other day. I jacked the car up close to the new frame work to move some jack stands around to get access to the read and it seems the car is more ridged now. If I jack say on the front corner behind the front wheel it will lift off 3 places. My Civic Si only does the side you are jacking from and I know my dads 350Z will lift 3 tires off as you jack from the front side. My question is did the original Mazda design allow the car to be that stiff or did it flex too much? It's been so long since I jacked up a stock RX-7 to remember lol.

Anyways, I plan on working on welding in the floors this weekend so stay tuned

 

Sorry for such a long time between posts as I have been very busy with work and trying to work on the RX7 before the weather gets too cold (no heated garage) but I have been making a lot of good progress and getting some of the bigger jobs finished. I have finally got the floor pans fully installed and welded along with the new door jams pieces the floor sits on. One of the most time consuming tasks has been building the roll cage. Having borrowed a bender from a friend that was made to bend mostly conduit it took some time to learn the machine on how much "lead" to put for the shoe and how much the tubing springs back etc. It has taken a few weeks to get it all finished but I think I am mostly done with it.

Here are a few pictures.