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I could of sworn I had made a build thread 6 years ago when I first got my car, but I guess I never did. Well better late than never. Here's my 6 year (and counting) "build"
Bought the car in 2014 after my freshman year of college, as my "first" car. Planned on dailying it throughout the year, Michigan winters included, but luckily have never driven it in the snow. Bought the car with zero knowledge of rx7's or rotaries other than knowing they didn't have pistons, only thing I really wanted in a car was a manual cause that's what made you cool back then. Found this one in Ohio for like 3,500 I think, super clean 2 owner GXL in arctic silver, 125k miles, pretty much bone stock except a borla exhaust, lowering springs (never got to try out the adjustable suspension), and a radio upgrade. The day I bought it The day I bought it
Started off modding it with some basics on a dishwashers salary. S5 tail light swap, some fake ebay bbs wheels, and lightly used PBM coilovers were first on the list.
new used coilovers First day with the new wheels featuring some of my friends cars
Took it back to college after the summer like that, it stayed like this for a while due to funds and no place to actually work on it. Flash forward a year, friends and I move into a sweet new apartment with a 2 car garage! Met most of my best friends here and lived here for 3 years. FTP lens said it had enough and ejecto seated itself on the road. 944 project that ended up in a scrap yard
Met a lot of cool people at school and joined a car club. Took my car on multiple "Bulldog Rallies" to the upper peninsula, thousands of miles were added to this car just cruising to the UP and seeing cool places I would of never thought to take a little sports car.
Sweet apartment complex with all my friends. First rally to the UP, decided 2 tone was the way to go. Did some questionable off-roading in the UP. Some Pure Michigan. Final rally I went on as a student. I ended up running the club, so I was the "pace car". We don't condone drinking and driving, but the Rx-mini bar was hoppin.
Some time in college I did some appearance mods and got my calipers powder coated purple (wanted teal but guy said it didn't come out well), a friend from a local rotary club also happened to have an arctic silver FC and didn't want this sick shopping cart wing so I had to put it on.
It's a Sorana wing, if you were wondering
Not so teal calipers Decided to take the car to Florida for spring break one year, terrible yet awesome experience. Car made it the whole way without any issues at all! So much room for activities in the hatch.
This was about the half way point. March is still winter in Michigan so lots of salt at the beginning of the trip. Finally after 160,000 miles or so I decided it was time to refresh the engine and try my hand at building a rotary. There was a brief moment before this where I bought an LS engine to swap into it, but luckily I came to my senses. The build was on a pretty tight budget being as I was still an unemployed senior in college at the time. I had to piece together what I could from christmas presents, bottle returns, stealing my student loan money meant for food/bills, and even selling my PS4 to buy oil control rings that I broke in the disassembly process. I always wanted the brappy idle of a bridgeport but didn't want the car to be undrivable for daily use, so I went with a half bridge. Wish I would of just done a full bridge at this point but oh well, there's always next build... With the engine out and disassembled I obviously went through and cleaned everything and painted the engine teal/silver. Resprayed a couple parts of the engine bay where an old battery had corroded away the paint, and went through the body harness and took out unnecessary wires/ extended the fuse box to locate it infront of the radiator (was going for a tucked look). My goal was to have the engine out, painted, built, and running before my next spring break in March 2018 (started the build Oct 2017). Did everything myself from pulling the engine, porting it, assembly, and even tuning (this took like a year afterwards). I was going to school for automotive engineering so I had the background for tinkering with cars and wasn't going into this blind at all. Build went as planned and got the car started on the first day of spring break!
My internet isn't letting my upload photos anymore tonight, so I'll pick this back up tomorrow. Lots more photos to come, we're only at 2017 on the time line! If you're reading through this, hope you're enjoying it.
I painted the engine black and gold sometime during my junior year engine bay ready for cleaning Cleaned all the internal at my schools machine shop
ebay header and header wrap ftw baby bridges small exhaust porting never enough lube engine mock-up, this is where the excitement really ramped up! I assembled the engine in my bedroom.....in the bsaement. roommate and I had to carry this assembled engine up from the basement. engine sitting in it's new home fully assembled, almost ready for the first start
Gonna try adding some links to the first start and some idle clips post-build
So now at this point, the car was running pretty OK. Still on stock ecu, stock fuel system, ect. After I graduated from college, I moved back in with my parents and started looking for jobs in my career field (engineering). Didn't really have any luck for most of the summer that year, ended up taking a temp technician job at AAM. Finally I could start saving money for a house/garage and a stand alone for the car. Well so I though, instead I went ahead and bought an 09 Rx8 sport as my new daily since my truck gets terrible gas mileage (rx8 didn't get much better)
I loved my new rx8 so much that I decided the FC needed new wheels so that my fake bbs could go on the 8. That's when I got my set of Mazdaspeed MS01-s, 17x9.5/8.5 staggered. I have more pictures of them on the car, but they'd spoil what's to come.
I finally decided on which stand alone to get, ended up getting a plug and play Adaptronic. Mostly because I hate wiring and this was simple and had a nice user interface. I had some issues when I first installed the ecu and couldn't get the car running right on a modified stock T2 map, so I kept the stock ecu in for a while longer till I could figure out the new one. Also fought a leaking front cover o-ring for a while, ended up ditching the fc paper gaskets and went with a metal rx8 one. Only up side of taking the motor in and out of the car so many times, is I've gotten pretty efficient at it and I've been able to keep the pretty engine clean for a long time.
As much as I loved the rx8, I regrettably traded it in on an impulse for a new 2019 Veloster N. To this day, it is still one of my biggest regrets. The N has been a fantastic car, on track and as a daily, but still doesn't feel as right at the rx8 did. I'll get another one eventually, but here's my veloster ( also this is probably getting sold in the next few weeks due to my recent purchase of a 929). I also have a problem with buying wheels, this one has nt03's.
I was getting bored of the stock body look, so I went ahead and bought a front bumper (not the one I wanted, wanted a B-wave kit) and some shine side skirts. Fitment on the bumper is kinda crappy, but I made it work sorta. Shine skirts fit like a glove, guess you get what you pay for.
So now we're just about caught up to today, but with the unfortunate Covid pandemic I had lots of time on my hands to start a large project. If you've been reading this thread and wondered why it's called the banana, here's why. I always loved Haraguchi's drift FC from Japan, and love CYM FD's and spark yellow SA's (own one now). I never understood why Mazda didn't make an FC in yellow because they look sooooo good. So during my work from home time, I decided to try wrapping my car. You guessed it, yellow. This was a fun and very frustrating activity to do by yourself. Yes I know, there are lots of oil stains. It is an rx7 after all.
Took me a while to get the front bumper done, worked resumed and I lost a lot of free time. Oh yeah, I put under glow on it. Still need to figure out new turn signals, the cut outs were too small for the factory lenses.
I still need to finish wrapping the rear bumper, still finalizing my new exhaust and need to cut some of the bumper. Also just need new hardware for the spoiler, I lost the studs and nuts, whoops.
This pretty much brings us up to speed to today. The Adaptronic is now on the car permanently and I have been working on the tune for a while, the cruising map is pretty good and smooth, haven't messed with timing all that much. I've been fighting bad ECT sensors, and can't get the ecu to read the factory one so I'm probably just going to get an aftermarket sensor and put in inline on the upper radiator hose. Added some extra sensors to aid tuning like fuel pressure, oil pressure, oil temp, and a working wideband. Engine now has probably 6k miles on it and is running good, the compression numbers could have been better but it is my first rotary engine build after all. The next steps for this "build" is going to be fixing oil leaks first, but then continuing on with my "I wish Mazda would have made a yellow FC" is I also love tan interior! So next is dying the whole interior tan. I've done a couple trial pieces and think I found the color I want, the plan is to start dying pieces this winter and hopefully buy some tan Recaro LX's.
So stayed tuned for what most people would call ruining a perfectly good blue interior.
I also recently purchased a couple new cars (I have a problem). A 1979 SA Rx7 in spark yellow! at this point I'm committed to buying all the yellow Rx cars I can. And more recently I just bought what is supposed to be the Veloster's replacement, a 1992 Mazda 929. Both cars were pretty much 1 owner, rx7 was only owned by the 2nd owner for maybe 2 months and the 929 was an auction car so it's technically a 1 owner. I won't go into much detail about eh 79 here because I have a seperate build thread in the 1st gen section for that, go check it out https://www.rx7club.com/build-thread...spark-1147597/
As for the 929, most every forum for uncommon Mazdas are dead so here are some photos of it. Plan is to just maintain and drive it as a daily (maybe not so much in the winter since I have a truck) and then eventually I plan to bag it and pull the minivan engine out and put an LS into it.
So on top of turning my interior tan this winter, I've also picked up a new project that will hopefully be completed by spring time.
Picked up an s5 BNR stage 3 turbo, manifold, and downpipe for a pretty good price. Now I'm in the market for some new injectors, intake manifolds, and intercooler stuff.
Injectors I was thinking about doing stock T2 550cc for primary and ID1050's for secondary's, it's probably over kill but at least I'll have room for growth (secondary's atleast)
Looking to port match a T2 lower intake and adapt an FD upper manifold since I hate the way T2 uppers look without the intercooler on. So if anyone has one or both of these for sale, hit me up.
Intercooler will be a V mount, most likely just going to fab this up myself with a universal intercooler. Does anyone have recommendations for an intercooler that works well for FC v mounts?
Plan is to keep the NA drivetrain for now and hope it holds up until I can buy a T2 diff and trans, was toying with the idea of just using a CD009 instead since they seem to be more abundant.
09-27-20, 09:44 PM
