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Thought it was finally time to post up my 1987 Rx-7 Fc Drift build.
I've been building this car for over a year with nothing but YouTube, Forums, and General Car knowledge. This was actually my first car and so we will start July 29th 2013. At the time I was 16, my grandfather was a hot rod mechanic and taught me the ropes pretty well about how to rebuild a v8. Carburetors and Pistons were thought of to be what "real car guys used." Well boy was he in for a shock when he found out I was into these little Japanese 'toy' cars that went brap and made a lot of racket. So having never driven much more than my dads 1990 Toyota Tacoma, the thrill of driving this rotary powered beast changed my perspective on what a real car is suppose to feel like.
So living in Bend OR I had a hard time finding any RX that wasn't already stripped or frankly just plain ugly from mistreatment. I had driven a few, one was a N/A, black spray painted, straightpiped FC. Still had AAS that still worked! Ill admit being the kid I was I was freaking out after I drove it, was so happy to have driven a 'real' racecar..... It was a piece of crap. Nonetheless I found an Rx7 that was worth looking at.
After at least 2 years of constant searching on Craigslist there was one over in Portland that was a steal. Only $1200! Now at that price It had to be junk right? Well not as much as you would think.
That's right it was a 1987 Turbo 2! For $1200 it had to have a million miles... Nope wrong again about 110,xxx. That's all it only had that many miles. Well something had to be wrong with it then and of course it had a few things needing attention. New fuel pump, New shifter because the stock one would just come out of the transmission. Other than that nothing major. So being the person who wanted to mess with everything the first thing I did when we brought it back was tear the whole car apart.
What did I find? Well I found lots of things beneath that lovely RED carpet. Between what looked like heroin needles, things that I couldn't describe and glass from a previous rear hatch shatter, well it was messy. So lots and lots of cleaning blah blah blah. I made it a decent teenagers car.
After lots of annoyingness dealing with the DMV to get my car registered I decided to completely ruin my car and paint everything in a hideous purple...
Purple (Already hideous) Wheels, Purple headlight buckets, Purple headlight tint, Blue lug nuts and red interior... Don't ask me what I was doing because trust me I have no clue and I honestly don't even want to know.
Eventually I made it better I guess, painted the wheels metallic black along with the headlight buckets and it was back to looking like a very cool Rx-7
Unfortunately this also begins my luck of people backing up into me and general disrespect of my car.
After I drove the car for a few months I felt the need to hear the rotary as its true self. So instead of buying a $1000 exhaust and maybe not even being happy with that I decided to look into building my own. So got a decent 3 inch downpipe off of ebay and started welding up a dual 3 inch straight pipe. I had some high school experience so I thought why not.
Also did a emissions delete during that time and i accidentally swapped the plugs for the primary injectors with the secondary injectors which is why flames are literally everywhere, yay rotary.
Needless to say my neighbors absolutely hated me, every morning getting ready for school letting my car warm up for 15 minutes completely unmuffled rotary brap noise, yeah that was great. Eventually did some more little stuff like BOV, intake, FCD, cut springs, new struts, steering wheels, gauges, and a whole lot of radio/speaker changes. At one point I had two 12" and two 10" subs in this little Fc, still can't hear right haha.
After getting hit yet again I decided to try to make a type of widebody stock front fender, so I rolled the fender so much that it almost went flat out. Then banged the metal as flat as possible and played with some bondo and for my first time trying to do anything body inclined it wasn't that bad. My next task was matching the other fender to the drivers side and well to this day I still havent done that haha idk if that will ever happen.
Something that I forgot to post up was the fact that I Plasti-dipped the entire car in a weird grey.... also not happy about that and advise everyone away from it... It sucked
Did like a whole day of pressure washing to get that crap off and still to this day i still find some every once in a while.
Then I bought a 1990 Legacy wagon just to get me through winters because Rwd and turbo isnt exactly a practical winter vehicle. So after saying I wasn't going to do anything with the leggy I kinda did...
So yeah anyway that's the daily, and because I got that I had time to strip the FC of literally everything.
Ill let the pictures do most of the talking for the part where I stripped my whole interior. Keep in mind during this time I was still in school and didn't have much $ to spare. So until I got a full time job working at Nissan I was pretty much just doing what I could with what I had.
Literally spent months wire brushing all of the sound deadening off, Cut off brackets that were not necessary and did a full redo of the interior.
Now begins the reason why this car is a money pit, the engine. After searching endlessly, learning plenty of knowledge, and finding a ton of good deals, I found one that stood out to me more than all of them. On the club someone was selling basically everything I would need to make this a high HP 'reliable' race car.
Basically everything I needed.
-Brand new S5 13B
-Ceramic Apex Seals
-Full Bridgeport
-New front iron
-New front housing
-Solid corner seals
-Oil pressure mods
- S5 trans with 30,000 miles on it
- Stage 4 SPEC clutch and pressure plate\
- New slave cylinder
- Custom intake and exhaust manifolds
- 2 tial 38mm wastegates
- 75mm throttle body
- Front mount
- Griffin radiator
- Dehral oil cooler
- RB oil filter pedestal
- hks ssqv blow off
- Stewart electric water pump
- all -an fittings for oil lines
- a full MS3Pro with all the wires that I needed already wired up (kinda)
Any way for all of that the price was too good to argue with so I did it.
Got it shipped to me all on one big pallet, not going to lie it wasn't the best and some stuff was pretty banged up. But I got it so I was happy. First thing to go was the awful color combo of extreme blue and white. Paint stripper and patience was next.
Then heat rated primer..
Finally a nice coat of BLACKKKKK
Since my car is a S4 chassis and I have a S5 engine and trans I had to swap to a S5 rear trans crossmember and move a few things around to make it fit nice and snug. With the help of some solid engine and transmission mounts it all sat nice, low, and solid.
So finally got my engine in and I decided to just go for it. Pipes started getting placed, manifolds were test fitted along with a ton of prep work with the wiring that wasn't even close to going in at this point.
Obviously the stock turbo wouldn't do with a bridgeport while chasing power so research was done and a S366 Borgwarner with a .91A/R was purchased.
Compared to the stock turbo was laughable...
Compared to the engine its like I added another rotor, soooo thank you BW
During this I wasn't just thinking of engine power and braps, at some point you have to see what you're doing so off of another enthusiast I snagged this custom gauge cluster that bolted right up to my stock dash, threw the correct gauges in and was set.
You gotta stay in the race car when you're doing 250MPH sideways so grabbed some generic Bride lowmax V3's and after using them for a few months i've realized that I am the only one who can fit in them, all my friends hate me for having them haha suckers. Also painted my terribly red dash with a great ol' color of blaaaackkkk.
Oh my god I still can't explain the amount of terribleness that happened while grinding all this crap out... I hate it -_-
With my whole package I bought came the electric water pump and a mini 'race' alternator which I later had alot of problems with... We fabbed up a custom mount so both could hang off the side of the engine.
Far too long later the interior was to bare metal and painted with a greyish construction primer.
More and more was coming to shape and the car was actually starting to look like a car for the first time in months, got the intercooler on which I stole from my friends WRX and the radiator was beginning to stay in the place I wanted it to be.
I put a door on! Actually was a big deal for me.. we painted the inners a weird mix of blue and black. Bought a harness bar and some harnesses, the picture showed blue and they showed up green... didn't quite know how I felt about that
Don't get me wrong I like the stock body of an FC, they are super cool cars but lets be real here this is a drift car and everything has to be way overly exaggerated and stupid. That being said BODYKIT!
Since I murdered the red in my car all this was useless to me.. Anybody want it? I still have it..
Put the dash in along with the seats and it was all looking how I wanted it to.
The time had come to add wires to the car, cluster went in, MS3Pro got mocked up.
Had a problem with my exhaust housing on my turbo hitting my lower intake manifold, sent my housing off to the original engine builder for a cool little re-direct of the 4 inch downpipe.
Also got some SWEET xxr's... I now regret getting those as I think real wheels are worth the money, actually liked how these looked at one point.
Ecu mounted
Got the steering wheel I have wanted since before I started this thing
Started making a custom gauge panel for Fuel, Fuel pressure, and Volts.
By this time last year it was winter and building a car outside in the winter isn't exactly ideal, so we brought the FC over to my grandpa's shop.
I Hate Wiring... lets just begin with that. It was time to start messing with the 60 pounds of wiring that was pulled from my FC. I wanted this car to be street legal, after all there aren't many tracks near me and street driving is just fun to begin with. So things I needed:
- Headlights
- Headlight motors
- Brake lights
- Tail lights
- Blinkers
- Wipers
That was stock harness, with my extra stuff was:
- Gauges: RPM, AF/R, Water temp, Boost, Fuel pressure/level, Volts, Oil pressure
- Switches
- Ecu
- Water pump
- Ignition
- Fan
Then was the ecu wiring:
- Water temp sensor
- Crank angle sensor
- Map sensor
- Intake air temp sensor
- Throttle position sensor
- Injectors
At this stage there were still a lot of wires left, that's because I didn't know what I needed yet.
The nice thing was that most of my engine harness was already terminated with weatherpac connectors that plugged in oh so nice.
Relays for ecu and waterpump
Did I mention I hate wiring?
At some point we got bored of wiring and decided to figure out the intercooler piping
After weeks of diagrams I got the harness down to a manageable size.
Got a lot of the cooling system finished up and the harness figured out.
Relocated my coilpacs behind my dash. Got all my Glowshift Gauges installed. Ms3Pro usb connection placed where the cig lighter used to be. LED switchback blinkers/DTRL installed. Ground block used and extra fuse panel powered even though I changed my mind about using it. Water pump controller mounted with Map sensor to a plate behind the dash on the passenger side. Still hood shift ****.
Never got to post about my fuel situation. So I used the stock rails with adapters to go -an lines and then since I didn't want to spend the extra few hundred dollars to use the lines I went with standard 3/8 fuel line using barb adapters. I am running 55+ PSI off of a standard Walbro 255LPH pump and that is regulated by a aeromotive FPR. The lines are run in parallel to equally fuel both rails, that was done with a fuel y-block straight from the pump. Then for injectors I used brand new Injector Dynamics 850cc Primary 1000cc Secondary. Think these would be big enough to run e85? idk maybe one day
Finally had power running through the system and nothing had caught on fire. So that was cool, but I still had to test my ecu and see if my engine electrical was working as well.
You can see the mess of wires that I had confused everyone haha
Engine was mostly wired up, besides headlights and what not
Got power to my Drl/blinkers
This was so put together compared to a few months ago
Everything was ready, even had the timing light on just to make sure this was all a go.
Everything was ready, checked double checked and from what I thought ready to fire up and brap away...
But guess what, its a rotary and they never start up the first time, so weeks of trouble shooting went by and we even went to the extent of towing my car behind another car and making the engine run but every time we wanted it to idle it was a no go.
It would crank super hard and sound like it was going to start but then it would die and almost explode out the exhaust, so things weren't going well.
But on the bright side this was the first time I had let the Rx-7 out of the garage in forever so seeing it out was awesome and made me really want to get this thing running.
But then I found the problem.... anddddd I don't want to say what it was haha just remember if something is wrong, its always the easy things alwayyyyyyssss. Cut your gaskets correctly.
That's the first smokey startup with open downpipe haha, If anyone has a better way to upload videos let me know.
But as all things go well, some things go wrong, one of which was my turbo literally poring oil out of the front housing.
This was a problem and left me with a comparable amount of smoke to a house fire.
Found the problem after more troubleshooting, From my old emissions delete I had plugged the upper port on the oil filler neck. This led to my oil pan to become pressurized and not allow my return feed on my turbo to do its job of returning the oil to the pan. Therefore it was dumping all the oil out wherever it could, in this case out through the turbo seals right through the front exhaust housing.
After the massive oil spillage everything got soaked and would constantly smoke and just was plane gross, so took it all back apart again and got it all cleaned up.
Quick little pic on spark plugs, they suck and constantly foul when you are breaking in an engine, mine did to the point of running on one rotor and was terrible to get started again, change and clean your plugs!
Once main things with my tune were somewhat in place my car idled decently, here's a video of it idling with open 4 inch downpipe.
So it was time to get an exhaust on the thing because I obviously couldn't drive this thing on the streets which I still wanted to do.
Got myself some sweet 4 inch tips along with two magnaflow resonators. I had already welded up my own 3 inch straight pipe so i just took all my parts to the exhaust shop while driving my car haha was so surprised I didn't get pulled over, even passed cops. This is what I got back.
Video of when I got the exhaust done Version 3 haha
Got my car to work finally was able to get it up on the allignment rack and see how limited adjustments were on the fc chassis, therefore I decided to order adjustable stuff just to get things reasonably setup.
Parts make the car, you can spend hours upon hours working on a car but the parts you choose truly make or break the car, and its all opinion based so you can't judge someone for liking something that someone else does not, doesn't mean flippy deletes aren't ugly haha.
Headlight "conversion"
Got carbon hood latches to match the hood
Parts Parts Parts!
Initially I didn't want to do overfenders, but I realized that you really cant go crazy fitment/wide without some sort of larger fender in the rear since you are limited from going in with the wheel to a certain extent, so I got some cheap +30mm rear over fenders along with some +20mm front fenders, also never liked the larger front fender options but this will get me by I guess idk things always change. Got all my PBM parts in as well so it was time to drop the whole rear everything and get it all ready, and bust out the torch as well haha.
Just thought I would give you some helpful advice regarding the PBM lateral toe-links. Replace the hardware tapered nonsense. Mine broke from normal driving not even drifting. I did a steel sleeve around a coated highstrength bolt. This has worked well, especially since these arms only prevent dynamic toe-in. Let me know if you need pics.
Just thought I would give you some helpful advice regarding the PBM lateral toe-links. Replace the hardware tapered nonsense. Mine broke from normal driving not even drifting. I did a steel sleeve around a coated highstrength bolt. This has worked well, especially since these arms only prevent dynamic toe-in. Let me know if you need pics.
Keep up the great work.
Yeah if you wanted to explain a little bit more about what broke on your links that would be helpful, I haven't heard of these links breaking so let me know!
10-12-16, 12:10 PM
