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Hi, this is my first RX7. Im sure its a bit of a marmite car, but I love it.
Ive not owned it for long, and some may already know it. It was once driven by Tomoya Suzuki from the Sexy Knight drift team in a street legal drift comp back in 2006. Theres plenty of history wrote up about this car, by people far better on a keyboard than myself, so ill skip that bit for now and share some pics. We all like pics
Im going to keep the colours and decals, but im replacing the kit with a spare that came with the car, as I prefer the "cut outs" under the headlights and Ill keep the other one as a spare, using the East Bare lamps under the popup covers for now.
I bought it with no engine and gearbox. Id love to have all the brap's with a bridge ported 13b, but my mx5 turbo engine will fill the hole where a 1UZ used to be for now (once I get home to do it). I may just be temped to put a 13b in sooner rather than later. But MX5 engines are £200 and 260bhp is better than nothing.
The previous UK owner was cool guy Stavos. Who writes up cool and interesting things about performance engines on his page STAV-TECH - Home. He made a few changes since the car came to the UK in 2009. Mostly in the pursuit of saving weight. The coolest of which has to be the perspex rear window with fibreglass frame.
Also peeking through you might notice the rear mount rad..... and I might have put a special edition Status Error sun strip on the back
Other changes are in the interior. Where again, stuff has been ripped out in preference of weight reduction. A stack dash now sits in place of the old clocks and a switch/fuse panel has been mounted in the centre console. Also check out the custom titanium peddle box that utilises the original brake booster, mounted in front of the seat. This was to make space for the many mahoosive engines.
Still has the original steering wheel, full of drift luck!
The whole shell has been spot welded on the seems, which you can just about see to the left of Smokey's whiskers. (Yes the seats are out of date haha)
I forgot the brand of suspension, but who cares... look at those meaty upside down dampers! I think.. if I remember correctly, they're from the US.
You could barely get a rizzla between the Mustang rep wheels and XYZ callipers. Hopefully soon to squeeze the lovely bell mounted discs in anger.
i love this car and with out it being history i would never have probably got into rx7s im hoping to build one also but mine doesn't have history(3 of them).. please please please keep this updated and i hope i see you at a track one day
ill be going with the sexyknights style but slightly different
Welcome. A piece of history you have there. A real ex-Sexy Knights car. That's incredibly cool.
I have an old scan I got somewhere of a feature on Sexy Knights, I was hoping it would have your car in it. Perhaps Tomoya is in there, but this is before he had the car. Or maybe before he went all out on that livery. Thrash Racing is making seats again if you wanted to recreate the look a little bit! (He was sponsored by them when he had that car).
[QUOTE=dazed1;12319720]Welcome. A piece of history you have there. A real ex-Sexy Knights car. That's incredibly cool.
I have an old scan I got somewhere of a feature on Sexy Knights, I was hoping it would have your car in it. Perhaps Tomoya is in there, but this is before he had the car. Or maybe before he went all out on that livery. Thrash Racing is making seats again if you wanted to recreate the look a little bit! (He was sponsored by them when he had that car).
Cool man, thanks. It could possibly be one of those FC's. My shell was originally red by the looks of it.
I'll check the seats out, thanks. It used to have a bride recliner in the passenger side. But I've got no real urge to have it looking the same inside. I'm just keeping it as is for now. And may go with kirkey seat, if I need the head room.
Yeh man, I got it running! I just haven't had much time or money right now, so it's taken a bit of a back seat, hidden under a car cover. But here's a few pics and details of the progress since the last post:
The wiring was a bit of a ball ache, but one wire at a time and it came together. All be it a bit slowly.
Ended up removing 12kg of crap from the loom.
And got the dash somewhere near, for now.
Wired in a reasonably tidy fashion.
Still has a way to go though. Only got engine related stuff in at the moment.
Also chucked the spare kit on loosely and got the popups back in.
And ditched the rear mount rad. Which also weighed quite a bit when you weigh up the pipes, mounts and extra water. Can't remember how much though. But I could do with the extra space for track stuff as well, so win win.
what are you doing with the stitched up front bumper dude?
can not wait to see more
Hey man, I plan to repair it and keep it as a spare. It matches the the other from wings. The bumpers and wings must be made by different people as they're not interchangeable.
On a slightly boring update note, I'm going to be saving a bit of cash up so that I can get things moving further in the new year.
Since I've got the engine running, I'd like to get a wideband hooked up, so can I see what's going on and I also need to make anexhast from the turbo back. Ideally looking to get it into a unit and treat myself to some warm spannering.
Take it easy, and I'll catch you guys next year with something a bit more interesting to report.
Ok, so its been a while, but back in September I finally had the FC running on the road.
So I guess ill fill you guys in on some of the stuff that's been done... in no particular order.
One of the cooler things is probably the s13 dash. fits like a glove. Only had to trim 10mm off either side. Still had enough meat for mounting with some pretty basic aluminum brackets. A bit more aluminum to mount the stack dash, spitfire/Lancaster bomber boost gauge and innovate afr.
The stalks are from a mk2 MX5. Mounted with a 3d printed bracket made on an ender3.
Its only PLA but its been fine. Steering wheel boss engages with the auto cancel stuff for the indicators, so that's sweet. I was going to try and get everything working through toggle swatches ect, but decided that would be a ball-ache to install, use and I fancied a cleaner look.
Also pulled the custom peddle box out and replaced with standard peddles. filled the hole in the floor where the servo protruded.
Standard peddles give much more room for my feet as the peddle box raised the floor up about 2 inches. I'm no left foot brake king, but ill have a go and my foot was catching the column. Can put carpet down now too.
I also managed to pick up another set of DT's in 17x9.5 et19, which ill run with a meatier trackday setup
Which will fit something like this. Only these are 17x10 et20, so I should have the 5mm clearance I need up front.
Had my first go at spraying with a gun. Cheapest one I could find, linked with a 10 year old compressor that could barely do 3 passes of the bonnet before I had to wait for it to fill again.
A decent body shop spent a week or 2 trying to match a colour in their spare time and came up with this. Viper Mica. A factory Ford Falcon F6 colour, that works pretty well on black primer. There's a bit of a colour difference but its better than a bare fiberglass bumper.
Was going to go oldschool with the tuning and run stuff like this HKS unit, along with some cool Apexi stuff to control the ignition and boost.... but I've decided to go for more reliability and future proofing with a MegaSquirt ms3x ecu, which is in the post.
That's pretty much it for now. Im probably forgetting a lot, but ill be back once I've got a solid map. I'll have a go myself and then get it up the road to my local dyno. He's never worked on rotary's either so should be fun. He's a ford cosworth man. Loves a turbo 4 banger. Soon to be converted to the braps
love old pieces of JDM history like that!
