Not very good, I haven't been able to work on it much lately.
You remember that FD I bought a while ago? The one that already drove and ran, but just needed a bit of attention here and there?

Well....






The car wouldn't drive right, and I couldn't figure out the problem, it would just die above anything past 1/4 throttle. Wierd thing is all sensors checked out fine, so in the end I pulled the engine wiring loom and stripped it. Found a lot of melted wires in there, it seems like the ground connection has been hooked up to the battery + at some point. Since that's like an 11 gauge wire there was a BIG shortcut heating and melting a lot of important engine wires. I'm surprised the car even ran at all!

So, the stock ecu and engine loom won't be going back into the car, it's getting replaced with a standalone ecu, new engine loom, with all new sensors, including wideband lambda and dual EGT sensors. The rats nest has been removed, the turbo's are now non-sequential with a ported wastegate. Emission stuff is still there though, although simplified. Also rewired the fuel pump all the way from the pump itself, and some other reliability mods here and there.









I think it will be a pretty nice FD when done, apart from the wiring everything seems to be in great shape. It just sucks that this takes time away from working on the 4-rotor, it probably would've been running by now if it wasn't for this mess

 

Yeah as much as I love my rx7, I'd never go back to the days where it was my daily driver...never again.

 

Amazing build, just crazy

 

What kind fo ECU is that? Can it controll OMP, or you are going to pre mix?

 

Haha... man, I bet you can't go 5 minutes without tinkering with something! Now you've got two Rx-7s to build! I envy you, I think...lol. That is a beautiful FD!

 

Other FD owners are probably going to hate me now, but it's an SMD produced version of the MS2 V3.0, it has some improvements though like a dedicated VR conditioner and an onboard lambda controller and such. I'm pretty confident it will work just fine, but the amount of I/O is a little low for an FD, I can't really use everything I would like. If I had to choose again I probably would've gone with an MS3 Pro. Oh and no OMP support, so premix it is.


No need for envy, working on the FD kindoff sucks! It's not a fun car to work on at all. But the new wiring loom is in, and I should be putting things back onto the car tomorrow so hopefully the car is back to being awesome again in no-time!

 

I'm very interested in hearing how the MS2 v3 goes, it's an ECU I'd like to look at some day.

 

Awesome build you got there. Eager to see it running on the track

But how did you put those rims on your car? On the pictures you can see that the rims are bolted next to the original mounting positions. Did you just drill new holes with 5x114.3?

The BBS RZ 394 (BMW; 16x8.5 ET13??) should have 5x120?

Keep going on like that. Always happy to see new posts

Greez from Bavaria

Chris

 

Damn mate unlucky and damn, I hate a boost sensor in the ecu :| then you need to get a vacuum hose tru the firewall into the ecu.

 

Yep, the BBS's are 5x120, as it's a BMW wheel. I drilled 5 additional lug holes with the correct pattern (On the mill using the digital readout and a 60 degree countersink tool).


Well, it's not that bad really, with an FD it's really easy to get an vaccuum hose from the engine to the inside of the car, and it works quite well. The longer hose acts like a buffer, which gives a smoother MAP-readout. Oh and you don't have to use the internal sensor, an external one like the oem FD sensor can be used aswell.

The ecu and wiring loom is in the car at the moment by the way. Just wiring in the last few sensors, I should be able to do an ecu input/output test tomorrow, so fingers crossed!

 

John I am thinking of using the same wheels on my vert! Im guessing that the only way to fit without widening the fenders is to modify the hub like you have? The adapter's I've found add another inch and I'm sure that won't work....

 

I JUST READ NEARLY THIS WHOLE THREAD........my brain hurts!

 

No need for adapters, just to make things stunningly easy:



I had to pull the front fenders out though, because of the low ET value.

 

Haha I never even thought of that!!! Good call!

 

Won't that wheel break easily? It seems like it will because now it has less metal between the original lug nut holes...

 

No

 

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Today was a fun day. It started with this:




Which led to this:




Finally, after a few weeks of working on it, dyno time! I've never tuned one of these cars before, so I took my time, and tried to make a safe tune. Proof that it runs:



It runs ok now, I started with the ignition map that comes with the PFC, I pulled some timing in the high rpm vaccuum area because I heard some detonation from the knock sensor but apart from that it seems fine. I started with the fuel map from aaron cakes website, because it was the only rotary basemap I could find, but it wasn't even close, so I ended up re-tuning every part of the fuel map. It's about 1:14-1:15 AFR during cruise and 1:10.5 at maximum boost at the moment, I still need to spend some time tuning other stuff like acceleration enrichment and temperature corrections but at least it drives now :-). I'm thinking about taking the car to the track in a few days, to see what it can do.

 

FD's are nice and all...

But dat FC...

 

Yeah, your right. The next update will be about the FC, promise!

The FD is getting close to being ready, the car passed tech inspection and is now imported here in the netherlands. I was pretty curious about the inspection because the car needs to pass an emissions test, it didn't pass before, but it passed just fine with the megasquirt ecu .

After the tech inspection and paperwork was done I still had most of my free day left, and I had a nicely running FD, so I put some sticky tires on it and took it to the racetrack.






The car ran ok, but there were some problems. I had some 18x8,5J et35 wheels, and found some 250/640/18 dunlop slicks, so I got the tires mounted on the wheels and everything looked like it would work, but when I got on the track I found that they rubbed a lot during cornering. So I took it easy, and refitted my smaller street wheels after the first session. The second session went better in terms of cornering, but after going all out for a few laps I noticed the temperature started to rise. Not willing to risk frying the engine I backed off for the rest of the session. The datalog showed 116C max, and 90C intake temps. I was kindoff amazed because I'm running a thick koyo radiator, dual oil coolers, and only about 7psi boost. Ambient temp was about 30C. Wierd that a car with less than the stock power output needs that much cooling mods to work on the track , Anyway I'm not going to mess with it too much. Better start finishing the FC so I can use that car for trackdays!

 

Maybe the air can't escape from the radiator because of the stock intake/battery/IC.
Switching to a TurboJeff battery tray and M2 intake opened a lot of airspace in my FD. It definitely runs cooler, even with the stock radiator.

Mostly, it's difficult to track a stock-turbo FD. Even track-purpose, twin-turbo cars have struggles with cooling.

 

Remove the fogs for the track and push the mouth of the bumper open more?
Do you have the FC temp switch or is the ECU running the fans on more than low speed? With your ECU, not sure what you're doing for fan speed control exactly since it's not the standard PFC with fan speed options.

 

welcome to the FD! when my FD friends used to go to the track, they didn't compare laptimes, but how much they overheated, getting rid of the twins fixes the temperature problems, but adds others, and cost.

a track FD is one of the few cars that would make a 4 rotor FC look like a smart practical alternative!

 

that's awesome

 

Nah, it's a 96' JDM model, they don't use a thermoswitch. 3 out of 4 cooling fan relays are directly controlled by the ecu, the 4th relay is activated by switching on the AC. The megasquirt controls the 3 relays just like the stock ecu does, They now start working when the engine is 90 deg C.




So, Good news! The FD is now registered and ready to use, so I've picked up working on the FC again The last time I worked on it I was getting the transmission and mounts together so they can be joined with the engine. Today I picked up where I left off and looked over the transmission. I have an S4 TII and an S5 TII transmission, but I picked the S4 one because of the shorter 5th gear ratio. The transmission looked very messy as it had a few leaks. I fixed the leaks, and cleaned everything up a bit. Also got some new shifter bushings because the old ones were gone.

The transmission mount also needed some attention, because it looked like this:



The middle rubber bushing was pretty worn , I remember hearing about people having problems with the stock transmission mounts causing the shifter to move under power and such, and looking at the stock bushings it makes sense so I started looking about the shop for something to keep the transmission in place a bit better while still allowing for some movement, and found a few of those rod eyes used for air cylinders. A bit of measuring, machining and welding later and I had this:



Basically the rod eye was machined so it looks like a spherical bearing, and this is inserted in place of the stock rubber. This keeps the shifter in a fixed position while still allowing everything to rock around a bit.