I recently picked up this 1986 GLX NA-T from a co-worker for $150. Quite the steal!

My experience with rotaries started in 2016 when I got an RX-8. This so far takes the cake for being my wife's favorite car that I've owned. It was incredibly fun, 6 speed manual, and felt like it was on rails. The rotary was cool and unique but honestly I wasn't a fan of the lack of low end torque. I always told myself that if I got another one I would do an engine swap in it (spoiler, this is NOT getting an engine swap anytime soon). If I do get around to an engine swap in the far future then I'm hoping to take advantage of the new CX-90 that came out with a 3.3L Turbo I6. I'll have to wait probably 15 years for those to drop in price enough to make it worth it though so keep your expectations low.

Enough with the background and onto the build. My goal with this thread is to documents my journey with this car, all the costs associated with it, record lessons learned, and ask questions for anything that I can't find in the FSM or on the forums since there has been a lot of "custom" work done to this car.

Initial photos of the cars before I took it home.











In really good condition! The drivers seat needs work (or to be replace), the driver door needs new molding, and the TII hood is a different color than the rest of the car. But these are all fairly minor things.

At its new home




I was told that the car runs and drives but has to idle high to stay alive. On the day of pickup the battery was dead so we weren't able to hear it run.

 

Like a lot of others out there I was inspired by the Pandem FC RX7 and dreamt of building one when I got a chance. This ended up being a lot sooner than I thought when I was offered the car at this price. The Pandem kit alone would kill my budget to fix up the rest of the car so I have opted to go with the Duraflex Phoenix Fire body kit which has all the same body lines minus the rally front lights. I personally like the rally front lights but that isn't enough for me to spend an extra $3000 on the body kit. I also realize that the Duraflex kit will most likely be much lower quality than the Pandem kit. This is something I will gladly take on and document on this build thread and I will be updating this thread I created when trying to see if anyone else had experience with the Duraflex Phoenix Fire kit.

As for cost, for the Front Bumper, Front Fenders, Side Skirts, Rear Fenders, and Rear Bumper Lips the final shipped cost to my home was $1,265.25 which took advantage of their summer sale (they seem to have this sale on all seasons) and their 5% off code DBS5OFF.
I am personally not a fan of the Pandem or Duraflex Rear Spoiler and opted to go for a JP Fiber Shop Ducktail Spoiler. The shipped cost for this after their own promo code was $122. I also have not heard fantastic things about JP Fiber Shop or Duraflex products but here we are. I will happily be surprised if I get body pieces that fit up and aren't warped. I'll be documenting everything as I get it.

I also need to purchase fasteners for the body kit and will most likely go with these Silver Fasteners. I'll wait to purchase these until after I get the body panels and know how many I need. It looks like I need 58 but again, will verify once everything is here.

 

When it comes to the interior of the car, I'm pretty simple. I like the look of all the original gear minus the steering wheel. So I went ahead an ordered a MOMO MOD. 78 wheel and MOMO to RX7 Adapter. The total cost for these items with tax was $344.06 once I get that installed I will include photos.

I'm personally more of a black interior person over the original maroon. But changing the interior color at this time is not worth my money when it could be going towards actually making the car run and drive well. The craziest thing I would plan to do in the future is put in some red Bride GIAS seats in. But that's a future project. Just wanting to document so you all can see direction I am going on the aesthetics.

The next thing I will be doing is getting an original stereo unit and putting it back in. I know this is counter-intuitive but I love the old look of it. I'll just put in a cigarette lighter bluetooth receiver to play music from my phone or purchase some cassettes to play on it. If anyone has one of these just laying around for the S4 let me know.

 

So what has been done to the car already? What is the status of this NA-T engine you've got in there?

Well it looks like the previous owners were big fans of Aaron Cake. The swap over to turbo seems to have all the necessary components already installed. TII Intercooler, Upper/Lower TII Intakes, Turbo Exhaust manifold, Turbo (probably from a TII), TII ECU, what look to be 89-91 13B Turbo Injectors, etc. That all being said, the wiring for it all is pretty atrocious. There are some wiring practices on here that I have never seen done in the past and I own a 1974 VW Bus that someone used to live in lol

Injector in the car-


What were they thinking on this?!?


Not the worst but not ideal either... There's a lot of wires left open like this without any shielding around it.


As for how the engine is running, I charged up the battery and it would crank and crank to no avail. The previous owner was confused because it would start right up for him. I tried multiple de-flooding efforts starting with removing the fuse, then working towards removing the spark plugs (and putting ATF in the bottom spark plug holes before putting the spark plugs back on) but none of this seemed to work. I had previously exposed to fuel injectors because I was told there's something not right about them and they were spewing fuel at one point (just to add to my potential fire hazard of a car) so I double checked that I had every plug connected that wasn't already unplugged. It didn't even seem like the engine wanted to start, felt like there wasn't any fuel. So I grabbed a fuel pressure gauge, took an injector off again to inspect in case I missed anything, but this time the injector was completely dry. I was definitely not getting fuel. I just left the injector unplugged and turned the key on, no fuel priming. Pumped the pedal, still no fuel all over the engine bay, cranked the engine over, and still nothing. I understand this is not the safest way to test if there's fuel but I was pretty confident I wouldn't start a fire. I tried chasing down the wires making sure everything was plugged in for the hundredth time. I finally gave it a rest, sat in the driver seat and looked for more interior items to fix. My head was touching the ceiling so I decided to adjust the seat position. When I reached down for the handle I found a massive switch loosely laying there with a sticker that said 25AMP. I thought to myself, "No way... Is this a kill switch?" flipped it in the opposite position, tried to start the car, and it fired right up

So it runs! Won't stay alive at idle but I have a feeling there are multiple vacuum leaks so my next task will be to finish removing all the emissions items (looks like they started doing it), remove all the vacuum spaghetti, and leave only the basics. This should help resolve or significantly narrow down any vacuum leaks I have.

Other notes about the drivetrain are that it still has the NA diff and most likely the GLX 5 speed (still need to verify) which will both needed to be upgraded since they won't be able to handle the turbo 13B's power for long.

 

welcome to the board.

car looks pretty good from the outside, to me, at least. glad you got it started. i think that puts you way ahead given what you paid for it - congrats, by the way.

yeah, you're probably going to have a time sorting through all those wiring "gifts" you inherited. however, it's worth it to do a thorough job in finding and correcting them. i can't wait to see what you end up doing with this thing.

 

congrats !! that's a very rare deal you have good friends at work !! Great project and will be worth some good $$ when done. Hope you can solder (don't use wire nuts in a car the wires can corrode over time) use solder and heat shrink and it will be a permanent fix... Good luck on the build !!!! (following...)

 

Also following, and a bit jealous of the incredible deal you got.

Also, I've had pretty good luck and save you the step of soldering each wire (although I still do because I'm paranoid).

 

Thanks for all the advice! I have also had good luck with heat shrink clamped connectors so I will be using those to solve the electrical issues.
As a side note, if there's an admin reading this who has powers to change the title of this build thread to 1986 GLX NA-T instead of the lowercase version that would be great. When I made the thread I had everything capitalized but it published lowercase which personally irks me and whenever I try to change it the capitalization stays the same...

Today I worked on removing the rat's nest. The main reason and advantage to me is to simplify the vacuum controls on this engine. I know the havoc a vacuum leak can create and I would like to keep that to a minimum and hopefully solve some idling issues at the same time.




While I was at it I removed the cruise control. I'll set that aside in case I someday want to add it back. I don't usually use cruise control on any of my vehicles and since it was an easy delete I figured I would pull it.
I also removed the carbon canister. I haven't finished pulling the lines from it yet and I need to do more research on where they all go and what they are used for. At this moment I am going to do routing my vacuum lines in a similar fashion to the image below since it seems neat and simple. I'm looking at this thread and this thread to help me determine what absolutely needs to stay on the car to function properly.




The image above shows the wastegate going into a Turbo Solenoid Valve (Boost Control) which now just goes into the intercooler piping. I'm not certain if this is the best place to route the line so I'm trying to look up what others have done. The previous owner already did most of the emissions deleting by removing all the solenoids (I don't believe the boost control ever existed on this car since it is an NA-T), blocking off the EGR, removing the air pump, adding a double pulley to the alternator, blocking off the Split Air, and Sub-Zero removal. I'm not sure why they went through the trouble to remove all the emissions items yet keep the rats nest. Either way, that's gone now. I am keeping the BAC since I am keeping my power steering and I plan on adding A/C back into the car (this is going to be interesting). I don't plan on turning this car into a track monster, it's going to more-so be a go fast show car. Because of this, I'm not going to be shaving every ounce like the P/S, A/C, stripped interior, etc. I would like to have some luxuries (like A/C) so I can enjoy my drive in the car.

While I was in the middle of removing the rats nest, my MOMO steering wheel came in. I couldn't help myself and had to stop and install it.





They even sent me this nice little beer cozy. I'm not usually one to put my beer in a cozy but it seemed fitting today and I think it looked cool. I'll probably keep it around. I went with the MOMO MOD. 78 350mm Leather wheel. I believe the original wheel is 380mm and when comparing them side by side the original wheel dwarfed the MOMO. 350mm was the largest diameter I could get and I'm glad I went with it over the 320mm. Without looking at them side by side though, the wheel looks very fitting in the car and I am happy with how much it changes the interior. It only took me 4-5 tries to put the wheel on since I forgot to line up the wheels the first time, then I forgot to put the little boot on, and then I get the horn wiring all messed up. But it's on there now!

 

The Duraflex Body Kit came in! I won't go into full detail about the Duraflex kit here so I'm not double posting everything. If you would like to see in depth about it you can go to this other post I have for it. To summarize, everything came out in much better condition than I had assumed it would. The kit is not without imperfection and there are definitely pieces that I will need to address such as the front bumper and side skirts. I've only done initial fit-up checks by holding the pieces against the car. It's really hard to tell how well it'll work out without taping them in place and see what the whole kit looks like and where everything will land.

In all, I am impressed and I don't think it will take much to make it look how I want it to!

 

Over the weekend I received a factory radio that I ordered. I love how 80's it is with all the equalizers on it. It just looks so good in the car while a double din touchscreen seems very out of place in my opinion.



The volume **** came a little busted which is unfortunate... If anyone knows where I could find a replacement **** that would be fantastic (or if anyone has one laying around or a parts radio). Currently I just have the broken parts in a ziplock bag and I'll super glue it back together for now.

I was a little afraid to put the stereo back in because there was a huge wiring mess in it's place that belonged to the aftermarket stereo that was put in. I figured it would be a lot of work to re-cut and splice everything back together.




This is all that wasn't original and came out. Turns out that one 1 wire was spliced for all of this. Maybe they just needed a power wire? Not sure how the rest of it was working (I can't imagine very well) and there was a couple ground wires. So I untwisted the wire nut that was used on the single cut wire, removed the ground wires and the harness came out really easily. I then attached a female spade connector to the wire, plugged everything into its place, and viola! The stereo worked perfectly. The antenna went up and down when I turned the stereo on and off. It searched for stations and played music for me. And best of all, the interior is looking more complete. I'm very happy with how it turned out.





Now I just need to figure out all the wiring that's under the driver side dash. There's a couple wires that are coming from the engine bay for the boost gauge, another set of wires for an oil temp gauge, various aux wires, and a couple random ones that I have no clue what they are doing. Once I can get the steering column plastic on that will be another really big step to interior completion.

 

Also during the weekend I picked up an A/C system for the car. Found a Sanden compressor for $20 and picked up the condenser and associated tubing for $50. The person who had the condenser and tubing also had a center bezel which can be seen in the previous post. Mine was in pieces so he sold me that one for $10 which was a great deal for me considering the are currently $80+ from anyone else. I just need to order a belt for the AC compressor and I'll probably follow this page to add 152a to the system. Seems to be a solid alternative to R-12 and I could definitely get it done myself. We'll see how soon I actually get the car reliable though. This may be a project for after it's really ready to be on the road. But, I do get distracted pretty easily with these seemingly un-important projects so a post may come soon with it done.

Last night I finished capping the various vacuum locations, re-routing fuel lines, and put the engine back together. It got pretty late so despite my excitement to start the engine and see if it ran any better I decided to just go inside, wash up, and go to bed. Hopefully I'll get some time to go out there today and start the car. If it is idling nicely then I will take it for a drive. My co-worker told me he rebuilt the rear brakes but not to fully trust his work so I'll be going slow to make sure I can actually stop the car before taking it on real roads. Not the most re-assuring comment for a safety part...

 

Well I was able to get out there and start the car. Took a little longer to start for some reason jumped to life at a high RPM and then died immediately. I tried starting again and it started immediately and jumped up to 3k RPM. This is fine, I know it can have a cold start sequence that gets it to that point and it started to trickle down to 2100 RPM or so. I then tried blipping the throttle to see if that would help lower the idle. This then increased the idle to 3k again and it stayed there. I blipped the throttle and then it went to 4k RPM and stayed there. A couple more blips kept it around the 4k number so I'm not sure what happened... I'll check to see if the throttle cable got stuck or if there is something else going on. I did go to the BAC and tried to reduce idle 1 full turn (Not sure if that's a little or a lot. Probably should've started with a 1/4 turn) incase that was the issue. The car then wouldn't start... I returned the BAC back to the original position and then ran into an issue I've been fighting where the key sometime engages the starter and sometimes it doesn't... As with most issues, this has been covered on this forum. I found this post and will be looking at hooking up a secondary relay to resolve this issue because it is incredibly annoying.

Then once I can reliably attempt to start the car, I'll work on trying to resolve the high idle issue. Could be a vacuum leak, could be one of the many things I plugged, could be a stuck throttle cable.

 

Looks like a really nice car overall! You've made progress with the interior and the MOMO steering wheel looks great on the car!

Edit: I tried to edit your thread title but it seems to not be updating in capitals. I'll check on it and see if it changed. Not sure why it wouldn't instantly change. I might have to do change it on my laptop instead.

 

Today I started the engine and the same thing happened. Started, went to 3k and died immediately. Then I started it again and it went to 3k and slowly crept down to 2100. I blipped the accel pedal and it went up again so I tried pulling on the pedal and then the throttle went back down to 2100. Maybe there's a return spring that isn't functioning properly? Or maybe pulling the pedal is just a red herring for what is actually going on. I tried turning the screw on the BAC and it seemed to not have any affect. Maybe this is because the idle was too high? I'll have to go back through some threads that talk about the emissions delete. I know one of them said that idle would go up to 2k with one of the deleted portions and to reduce idle which I assumed was with the BAC but maybe there was a different procedure I missed.

I let the engine run for a little bit so that it could warm up and I could attempt a compression test. I was fairly certain it would have low compression based on the fact the previous owner said it wouldn't start when hot. This was a similar issue I had on my RX-8 although I was able to band-aid fix it with an upgraded starter (since 2004 starters were complete garbage). I don't have a rotary specific compression tester but I just wanted a feeler of what was going on. I will note that everything I did was not to the favor of the test... I did pull the schrader valve out of the compression tester, but it took me a while to actually get to testing the engine so it certainly cooled down a little bit (although still warm enough to feel like it was burning my skin when I would touch portions while putting on the tester). My battery is also starting to die considering I've attempted to start the car multiple times now and have only let it run for probably a total of 10-15 min. With all that said, the front rotor was reading 60 psi and the rear rotor 65 psi. Even with the conditions noted, that's plenty low enough to almost determine that it has low compression. Before doing a rebuild I'll put seafoam through the car to see what happens and if it loosens up some seal springs. I've read great things about running seafoam through the engine so it's at least worth a shot before pulling the engine and replacing seals. Once I put seafoam through it I'll find someone with a real rotary compression tester to get some results.

After doing the compression tests I tried starting the engine since it was warm and it would not start, again eluding to low compression issues.

On another completely unrelated note, the sunroof motors sound like they are working but the sunroof doesn't budge at all. I tried pressing on it to see if I could help get it to catch. I'm unsure if it is completely disconnected from the tracks or what so that's another item to figure out. I pulled the little circular cover to the allen key that manually cranks the sunroof. When I pressed the button it looks like it would budge but wouldn't actually rotate the assembly. That being said, the engine wasn't running when I tried so maybe it would be better if the car was running on alternator power? I'll try manually cranking the sunroof to see if it moves.

 

As the old adage goes, "If something isn't working right, look at the last thing you touched." When I was removing the vacuum spider and removing the cruise control I disconnected the throttle cable. When I put it back on I made sure it was nice and tight on the upper intake so it wouldn't fall off. Well, when I tightened it down I didn't realize that I was also increasing the tension of the cable thus my mystery high idle was due to the tension I made. I loosened it up and made sure there was a small amount of slack in the cable so the idle can be determined by the linkage and not cable tension. I had to keep the throttle pressed a little to keep the engine alive but once it was warm I let got and it started idling! First time it's actually idled on it's own while I've had the car (without idle being 2k+). Idle was very low, in the 500-600 RPM range and definitely struggling to stay alive. I thought I read to adjust the BAC for idle but I misread the FSM and will need to adjust the TPS. This makes a lot more sense. Any adjustment I made to the BAC screw did nothing to the idle and confused me. I should be able to get back out there tomorrow and adjust the TPS so I can be idling closer to the FSM's 750 +/- 25 range.

I did still experience a hot start issue (as expected). I found this thread that is intriguing and claims to fix hot start issues due to poor fuel mapping by Mazda for the start sequence. Once I get the idle figured out I'll put seafoam in the fuel tank (since the engine certainly could use a good cleaning) and try this method out to see how it works. If everything goes in my favor then I just have sticking seals and the seafoam will help un-stick them, and the hot start can be fixed by either the un-stuck seals and/or by modifying the fuel map.

 

Great progress so far ! Following.

When setting base idle, you need to put a jumper wire on the 'initial set coupler'. Otherwise when you make adjustments to the BAC, you wont really see any changes.
Before you set base idle though you should...
-verify timing
-verify the TPS is set correctly. (Engine must be at operating temperature, fast idle cam must be separate from roller when setting TPS. See FSM 4B-62. TPS shouldn't be used to set idle, but it can affect idle speed.
-all accessories off, jump initial set coupler, engine at operating temp, set idle via BAC. See FSM 4B-80

My 86 NA is in the same boat right now with hot starts; hoping it's just stuck seals and I am trying similar cleaning methods. Good luck !

 

Any updates to the car?

 

This is inspiring

 

No new updates at the moment. Now that the holidays are over I am hoping to get back to it. Been doing a lot of traveling and hanging out with my kid.

A minor update, I put the seafoam into the gas tank and then I got the engine running but couldn't get it to stay running which was a bummer. I still have the body kit sitting in the garage (which my wife would really like to be out of the garage) but I'll probably work on getting the engine going first and then work on putting the body kit on.

This is a pretty slow week so I'm thinking I'll be able to make it out there later today to work on it some and maybe a little this weekend or Monday since I have it off. As mentioned above, I didn't put the jumper in when setting idle so I'm sure that is part of my engine issues and I'll be working with that as well.

I'm honestly so glad that I've made this thread. It's really helpful in picking up where I've left off.

 

Update for today, I charged the battery last night, just went out to the car and it started right up! A Christmas Miracle some might say. But it still wouldn't idle (shocking, I know.) So it dies immediately, I got it started again and held the throttle to keep the RPM's up so that it would stay running. It sounded decently smooth all the way down to 1k RPM which made me happy. Once warm I revved it up to redline a couple times to see if that would help anything and then it actually was able to idle on its own! I was kind of shocked so I quickly ran into my garage to grab a timing light. Plugged it to the battery, made sure the clip on the spark plug wire was facing the right direction (it said plug and had an arrow so I pointed the arrow towards the spark plug), and then shot the light at various pulleys to try to find a timing mark. I couldn't find one to save my life. So I'll need to figure out what's going on there. I also noticed that my distributor is plugged so even if I found the timing mark I wouldn't have known how to changing the timing because I don't have a dizzy anymore. More to research...

I decided to move on, the idle was dropping so I was trying to be quick since it started to sound like it would die at any moment. I went back to the BAC. I messed with it a bunch previously turning the screw in all directions without any change (I didn't have the plug jumped so as others have said, nothing would happen). I went to jumper the plug and I was struggling to actually find the plug the FSM was referencing. So I could use some help with that.

Here's the FSM


Here's what I'm looking at -



Is the plug that's attached the the BAC the one I'm supposed to jumper?


I couldn't find any other plug to jump so I unplugged that one, engine RPM didn't change, then I jumpered it, engine died. I wasn't able to spin the BAC screw before the engine died.

Since the engine was warm and I've been having hot start issues I wasn't able to start the engine again using the normal methods. Going back to the thread I mentioned before about a potential hot start solution, the issue HAILERS states is that the RX7 has a fuel mapping issue when hot. It tries to give the engine more fuel than it should see which prevents the engine from starting. Since I have a fuel cut switch I switched it off and the engine actually tried to start again. After a little bit I was able to get the engine going, flipped the fuel cutoff back on and was able to keep the engine alive with the throttle. I wasn't able to get it to idle on it's own again though. When I tried the engine died and then I was once again stuck with my previous issue that my ignition seems to only work half the time. My key will turn all the way but whether or not the engine turns over is a roll of the dice. After many attempts and the engine deciding it didn't want to turn over I gave up.

On the bright side, I got a bluetooth receiver for the cigarette lighter and that worked great with my stereo!

 

Any updates @cvannoy ?

 

No updates since the last post but glad that I have this forum so I can know what the last thing I did was and can back track a little bit. As it turns out, having kids makes your priorities change quite a bit. But, I have gained some motivation to get back to this (and even get it into the garage) so I'm hoping there should be some updates in the next couple weeks.

 

Nice, I'm glad you still have the car. I know how kids can throw a wrench in getting things done, but the best thing to do is put it on hold until you're ready again. Looking forward to the updates.