RX7Club.com - Mazda RX7 Forum - Eskay's Newest Financial Mistake: 1985 GSL

Greetings rotor gang, Mazda nerds, and probably the majority of New Zealand. This thread is my first post here and will mainly serve to help me keep track of what I've done and what I need to do to my recently acquired GSL project. Opinions and comments are always more than welcome, though! I'm a full time university student, so progress will surely be pretty slow on this thing for now, but I've wanted a 7 since I was a wee lad and this thing just sort of fell into my lap. So, we'll be tinkering with it here and there as time and funds allow. Little background on the car: it's lived its whole life in the Pacific Northwest, was clearly some really cool dude's ride in the 90's, and has been sitting for the last decade. Up until a month ago, it belonged to a friend that was letting another friend pick parts off of it for his FB. After helping remove the entire rear axle from the thing, the now axle-less parts car sitting on the shop floor was offered to me. In a sorry state, to say the least.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rx7...c31c117c0e.jpg

Current investment: $55 for the title fee and a single bolt to put the other FB's ring and pinion back together. I busted tail for a night on my own wrestling the "rebuilt" rear into the thing just so it didn't look so much like an absolute nightmare. Being the "broken" rear end of a retired track car (leading edge of a couple ring teeth have little chips), the gear contact pattern wasn't ideal, but I was still proud of setting up a diff on my own and it's good enough for a diff I fully anticipate replacing in the not-so-distant future. The car was a roller again.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rx7...6670c5f041.jpg

On the surface, save for some funky MOMO bits inside, it's just a pretty stock FB with lots of options. Underneath, it's got about 11 miles of speaker and alarm wiring and a totally different (FC?) steering setup. The less mysterious mods include what look like some decent Tokiko shocks, some funky purple coil springs, poly bushings on the rear swaybar, and a beefy strut brace up front. Also the totally rad bird in the rear tint. Big speedbump when I did some super basic diagnostics to see where to start: while the rear rotor showed 80+ psi on all three faces, the tester couldn't pick up any pulses on the front rotor. My best guess at this point is a stuck side seal but, since it's a higher mile car (169k on the body) that's been sitting a decade, the engine is getting yanked and torn down. The shop it's stranded in flooded pretty badly so most of the work I've done since then has just been stripping down the interior to get rid of the gross smells that come from wet carpet and mouse nests. The old Clifford alarm system and the formerly bumpin' sound system (1 Farad capacitor under the seat!) are also being removed to eliminate a mess of sloppy wiring behind the dash.

And that's the state of her today. I still have a good bit of cleaning and wiring to do on it, but most of where I'm at with it is just deciding what to do with the thing. There's a fella that's fairly local to me that hoards FBs, so I'm not too worried about finding 12A parts, if I need them. Most of what I have in mind at this point is suspension, a moderate street port, and life-support mods to basically make a road legal go-kart out of it (with a/c and cruise!), but I also have experience with autobody and paint and I like the look of Z flares on these things, so a cosmetic restoration to make it a shiny go-kart probably won't be too far down the line for it. All I know at this point is that I'm way too excited about working on a stinky parts car and seeing what I can make of it.