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After much prodding and poking, I was finally convinced by my best friend to document my progress and start a build thread.
A little background first: I was fortunate to get my first RX-7 at the tender age of 16. It was a Red 1985 GS and I remember it fondly. I don't have any good pictures of the car, since I got it back in the days of MySpace... The only picture I have is from the run I made at the high school drags. Warning for potato picture.
I ran a best 1/4 mile at 16.8 seconds at 82 mph in the high school drags and I thought I was hot ****. This was bone stock, mind you and I genuinely thought that I could beat Corvettes and Evos on the street. I never encountered one wanting to race, so I never got my doors blown off.
Then one day during lunch hour in school, I found myself and a buddy in a ditch after a "sick drift" attempt. I came around a corner and nosed right in. No damage, but I could not get out. Another high school buddy came by with a truck to drag me out at the same time a cop rumbled by. So, I ended up getting the fear of god put into me by the officer while my buddies dragged my car out of the ditch. The cop could tell I was scared shitless and he let me go with a verbal. I can't believe I got away with that and vowed to never do any stupid **** like that again. I can safely say that I never did, because this cop knew my parents and my old man let me know that if I ever did that again, I wouldn't drive until I was 40.
Later on, I had done the rats-nest removal, installed a Racing Beat header (quality unit 10/10 would buy again), a used Racing Beat presilencer, and a Flowmaster Super 40 muffler. That last bit was high school ignorance, so NEVER EVER EVER do that. It sounded like a weed wacker in a hailstorm. Just awful. Fortunately for the ears of the neighborhood and bad for me, the car was rear ended by an SUV going 55 mph while I was stopped. This happened about 2 weeks after I graduated high school.
My poor little car was totaled and I needed a new ride, so I used the meager insurance money and found a 1985 Black GSL that suited me nicely. I loved that car, but not quite the same as my old GS. The ol' GS was my first love.
I drove the GSL all through college and it treated me well for the years I owned it. In 2009 I bought my 05 Dodge SRT4ACR and have to date put over 140k miles on it. The GSL ended up getting sold a few years ago and I lived without a rotary powered car up until 2014.
Enter my 1989 White GXL auto. I had been talking to my buddy about getting another RX7 for months and kept most of the chatter away from the wife. I would wax poetic about the glorious rotary sound and he would respond by sending me various Craigslist ads.
One day, on a nice April morning in 2014, I encountered an ad that said "RX7 Brown Engine $900"
My interest was piqued, so I emailed the guy and set up to meet him. Now, I did everything wrong with this purchase. I went after work with cash in my pocket and it was dark out. I got to the car and it had a black interior and looked straight. It also had been sitting for months and all four tires were bald and flat. Now the title of the ad said "brown engine" and I thought it was a typo. The "L" key and "R" keys are rather far away from each other, so I was confused. When I met the guy, I was confused no more and I assume he may have used voice to text to make the ad. Use that information as you see fit.
My buddy had come with me to see the car and he arranged a tow truck to come get it and money changed hands. Off we went back to my place to await the car. We pushed it into the garage that night and went to bed.
This is what greeted us the following morning:
First impressions were good, until we started to look deeper. There was rocker panel damage, fender damage, a previously undisclosed rear ender that had happened, but this all pales in comparison to the travesty of the interior.
The previous owner spray painted the blue interior black. And poorly too. The car was also very dirty and had lots of loose change. Most of it was not American currency. Strange.
That same day, we started ripping and tearing into it like a coupla lions on a kill. I will say that it was impetuous to start this way, but I just got too excited that I lost focus. This ended up being a big mistake in more ways than one.
As you can see, we made short work of the rear hatch carpet and seats and hood. This was all according to the "plan". I really wanted to check out the carpet and whatever hidden gems I may find.
Further on, we pulled the dash out.
This was about the point we stopped for the evening and we resumed back at it in the morning. The PO said that the engine was blown, but it would not start at all. We pushed it into the garage and started checking the obvious. The PO took the leading plugs out and I could not find them under the hood or inside the car, so I bought a pair and shoved them in. The engine cranked ok, but would not fire. I checked for spark and there was none to be found. I also checked for injector pulse and there was none. At this point I stopped because I had other plans for the day and wanted to bring some tools in from work.
The next weekend I brought my Snap-On Modis in and hooked up the labscope to the CAS to check for a clean signal. I had an excellent and clean waveform from the CAS, so I ruled that out as the cause for no spark. I moved on to check for fuel. There was no fuel pressure and no power to the coils, so I checked the main EFI Relay. The relay had failed and wouldn't power the coils, injectors, or the fuel pump but it would power the ECU. I simply jumpered the terminals of the relay connector with some wire bridges I made and the car started after a little bit of cranking. It smoked like a chimney, but ran surprisingly smooth. This was good news, as I was hoping that the engine was not actually blown.
So, now that the car ran. I had to go for a test drive, right? We put the seats back in and took off down the road to the gas station. The transmission refused to shift until you hit near redline, so I was convinced the trans was shot. It slipped and banged into gear, but it was auto and I didn't care much because I planned on swapping to a manual anyway.
Turns out that the lights don't work without the cluster bezel attached. Who knew?
This should have been a sign from above that we should just head home and stop, but NOOOOOO.
This photo is about 20 minutes prior to getting pulled over and ticketed for numerous things including, but not limited to:
Speeding (impossible because auto 13b and the cop didn't radar me, just heard loud rotary)
No hood (I was unaware that was a law, but it's fine if a jeep has no doors and no mudflaps, and a '69 Chevelle doesn't need a hood)
No insurance ( The insurance card was in the pile of dash parts at home, my mistake.)
Rolling a stop (The car stalled at a stop sign, so I threw it into park and restarted the car. Cop was also unable to see the stop sign that he claimed I rolled because he was parked up the block in a bank lot.)
Needless to say, that turned a fun evening into a downer. I ended up going to the courthouse and got it deferred, so that happened.
OK, back to the fun.
The project was called SketchyRacecar by my wife. She has been supportive and a bit of a driving force when I start to lose interest or get discouraged. So, my buddy Matt, who has been in the project since the beginning, acquired these stickers from a vinyl maker he knows.
The #MOMSMONEY is just a joke. To the haters, as it were. I had a Twitter and a IG account that I really never use, so it's all tongue in cheek at this point.
One of the first jobs I did was restore the main carpet. It had rust spots, stains, questionable bodily fluids, and a terrible paint job.
Step One was to assess the damage and clean it up. I spent a few hours scrubbing it with a stiff nylon brush to loosen it up and lift as much dirt out as possible. I then vacuumed it and went at it with carpet shampoo and a garden hose. I don't have a carpet cleaner, so out came the nylon brush again. I also have a EuroSteamer, so I used that on the really bad sopts and lifted most of the stains out.
After all of this work, I then got to work spraying the carpet with black Rit dye from the local RIte Aid. I used a weed sprayer and the same nylon brush to work the liquid dye into the base of the carpet fibers. The trick was to work with almost boiling water and a splash of vinegar.
This is half of it done. It's not quite black, but more of a deep purple at this point.
I rinsed out the carpet and reapplied dye several times over and never got that true black color I wanted.
What to do now. I wanted a true black carpet. I went to the local AutoZone and purchased some Duplicolor Vinyl and Carpet paint. I was skeptical at first, but I went forward. The trick was to start with a totally dry carpet. Since this was around summertime, I let it sit for a week on my back patio and dried it out. I then sprayed in sections and used the nylon brush to work the paint in as I went. The biggest issue I had found through research was that people would have the bottom of the fibers start to show when you ran your hand over the carpet.
So I sprayed and worked the fibers and got a very nice even coverage and the fibers were a true black. Since I worked the fibers in nice and deep, the carpet stayed soft after drying. One of the concerns was that the bristles would get stiff from the paint, but by working the paint in and down, it remained soft.
I also got the rest of the carpet started, but lost interest fairly quickly since the Rit dye did nothing to the rear carpets. I'g guessing it's because the fibers are shorter and are a different type of fiber.
The carpet looks nice and black when wet with the dye, but after it dries it ends up looking poor. The top vent area ended up getting painted here, but I quit for the day and never got back to it.
I live in a small town and this officer of the law went total power trip on me, but to be fair I did take off from my house without a hood.
The carpets were a serious labor of love. I still have dozens of pictures of other things I have done, so I will post them in due time. The worst job I have done so far is the underside of the car, but I'll get to posting those when I find the pictures.
Pressing forward in my saga with this car, I spent a considerable amount of time restoring the dash and the driver door panel.
All of the interior panels need extensive work from the shoddy paint job, so my first step was to inspect the dash to see if it was even salvageable. I don't have many pictures on this process, but my first step was to clean the dash with a microfiber rag and some mild soap. I worked through the vents and all around the edges. The black paint that was sprayed on came off rather easily with some elbow grease. After some scrubbing, I had the dash back down to almost a blue color. The paint had already adhered too tightly in places, so I moved to the next step.
I took some 0000 steel wool and buffed the surface of the dash back and roughed it up a bit. Took a clean, damp rag and wiped it down. After letting it air dry, I sprayed the dash with an adhesion promoter.
It sprays on clear, but left a milky residue where it was especially thick. It also took quite some time to dry (I can be very impatient).
Once it was dry and had left a matte sheen to the dash, I went to work with Duplicolor Vinyl Paint.
Light coats and made many many many passes. The finish was very trial and error. I'm leaving out the errors here, because the proper method is how I have described below.
I was very impressed with the color coverage and the overall quality when it was all said and done. It took several attempts with different chemicals to get it right, but once I did it the way I have listed it came out wonderfully.
Before:
After: Taken with a potato of a camera.
I know the pictures are garbage and I'm scouring my computer for the photos I saved, but I must have lost them. The difference in person really makes it worth it.
The door panels was the same process. I disassembled them into their base pieces and I got my hands on some marine vinyl, which looks like leather(kinda) and some black suede from JoAnn Fabrics. I scuffed the vinyl of the door panel and painted it like above and I put the marine layer over the cloth insert in the door. The bottom carpet piece I wrapped with the suede and reassembled the door panel.
Picture of the vinyl pad of the door.
This is the finished product after a few hours of work.
While I had the panel off the door, I decided to do the popular FC power window relay mod. The switches should not run that amount of amperage in the first place and the mod was very very easy and allows the window to roll up and down faster. Win-win situation.
This is the thread where I found the schematic to follow. I have access to all of the wiring diagrams at work, but member ITSWILL made up an excellent diagram on post 11 thatjackhild59 posted from another thread, so I have to give credit for saving me the time of figuring it out on my own.
Again, no good pictures on my part, but I used crimp spade terminals and did the mod without cutting into the harness too much.
I only had two colors or wire, but I bought four generic 5 pin relays from NAPA (2 driver 2 passenger). I do not recommend doing that. The relays were $18 each and I didn't realize until the cashier told me the total for all of the stuff I had waited in line for 20 minutes for. So $97 poorer, I headed home with the bounty. If you want relays and the proper 5 pin connectors, go on Amazon for the love of god and save some money.
I had some extra metal socket rails from harbor freight lying around, so I bent one into a "U" shape and mounted the relays on the inside of the door with self tapping screws with the "U" holding them firm. Not the prettiest thing, but I messed up and didn't realize how cheap Amazon relays can be had for until it was too late.
Seriously. Just buy two of these and be done with it. Free life tip for you guys.
Before I put the freshly restored door panel on, I covered the door openings with some Damplifier from Second Skin Audio. I'm cheap, so I bough some of their B-Spec stock for a lower price. It's the same sound deadener, but it just did not meet their quality control for thickness or shape or whatever. I did not find any issues with it at all when I was applying it. The stuff is crazy sticky.
And finally, the mostly assembled panel. I will need to pull it back off when I paint the car, but that will all come in good time.
I'm not posting the progress exactly in order, but I'll go ahead with one more update to the project before I head to bed.
When I bought this car I was actually more interested in getting an FD chassis, as most people would be. Many of the cars I came across were either beaten shells with no title for $3000 or a decent example for over $17k. There was one that I almost went for, but the seller sold it before I could see it. This FC kinda fell in my lap and I "settled" as it were. I like all three bodies, especially the FB, but I figured I can go up the generations progressively.
Quick side story. Before I bought my DD Dodge SRT4, I was in the market for almost any performance car. I had my black FB, but it got lousy gas mileage and was small. I really was limited with what I could do and where I could go at times.
I was looking at EVOs, STIs, Cobalt SSs, Mazdaspeed3s, and the SRT4. Back in 2009, any EVO was wither $10k or $20k. The $10k cars were beaten to hell with tons of miles and the $20k cars were bone stock. The entry fee at the time to the STI club was MINIMUM $25k in my area. No matter what condition. I think I'll pass. I passed on the Cobalt because it's a dirty Chevy with a Rent-a-Car interior. And at the time, I personally did not like the Speed3 because it was a hatch. I like everything else, but that so I looked at my SRT4 ACR edition. It was stock, low miles, and well cared for.
At the same time I found my SRT4, I also found an ad for a 1994 RX7 Black on Black R1 edition. The price was right and it was also stock. At the time I was still in college and I talked to my dad about my options. He honestly left the choice up to me and I passed on the FD, because an 18 year old with no money has no business being in an FD. I also had my FB and the point of getting a new car was to have room for more than 1 person and a grocery bag.
Shortly after I bought the SRT4, I got a substantial raise at work, but not FD money. The choice kinda haunts me to this day, but I have squeezed over 120k miles out of my Dodge since 2009 and I'm still going. I doubt the FD would have lasted under my driving. At my peak, I was commuting over 100 miles a day.
Ok, back to the FC. When I was planning out what I was going to do to the car, I had a variety of choices to consider.
I could go with a stock T2 swap and run around like that for awhile.
I could keep it NA and swap to a manual
I looked at the 13B-RE swap extensively due to Banzai Racing and their vert FC
I also game planned a 13B-REW swap and going single turbo.
I almost got my hands on a REW locally. A guy up north was doing an LS swap in his FD. He posted the engine, trans, harness, ecu, intercooler, etc all for $600 on Craigslist. I called him daily, sent him texts, emailed him and got two replies. One was "yeah I still got it" and two was: "It just sold"
At that point I felt jobbed by some CL guy, again, so I said screw it. I have a 13B here, I'll just turbo this turd and see what happens. I have read and researched for hours on every facet of swap in the FC. I have been around rotaries for years and a lurker on the club for over a decade, so I at least had the reading down. It also helps that I work in the auto repair field too, so I am fairly confident behind a wrench.
Step one was to yank the old engine and transmission out. My garage is a mess, but I made it much worse.
And after I scrapped the transmission for ice cream money, this is how the car sat for months. Some rather big events happened in my life midway through this build an I could not devote the time, nor energy to work on it every day. While it was apart I did spend time sourcing parts. I found a S5 T2 diff for $50 from a guy locally, a S4 T2 trans for a couple hundred bucks, and I also worked on just cleaning all of the grease out of
the car and under it. There was a nasty oil leak that the PO had let go for a long time.
The whole underbody was coated in this thick, nasty, tarry grease. I got some purple power and a plastic onsie from Home Depot and crawled around on a creeper scraping the undercoating off by hand. This process took me months to complete. Mostly because I didn't want to, but the wife would occasionally tell me to get back to work on it, or else. I didn't want to find out what "or else" meant, so I trudged out there again and started cleaning and scraping. While I was down there, I found out that the PO loved to hit curbs and jack up the vehicle incorrectly. The entire pinch welds on both sides were folded flat. A few hours with a hammer and dolly straightened them out, as did pounding down the floor from inside the car because he high centered the car somehow. I tried every trick I could to get the tar off easily. I used super clean, purple power, simple green, kerosene, engine degreaser, a eurosteamer and a putty knife, a wire brush, a wire brush on a drill, a wire wheel in a grinder, yelling at it, etc.
Eventually I got fed up. I went to AutoZone and bought a case of brake parts cleaner and a respirator. The grease practically fell off! What was once taking day, was accomplished over the course of a couple hours here and there. The wire wheel finished off the wheel wells and the vicious stuff that the brake cleaner could not touch. I should have known, but all of the chemicals I was using prior I already had from work surplus, so I didn't have to spend any money, but they didn't work.
After I got the car chassis cleaned, I celebrated. Had a Red Hook ESB, and let the car sit for a couple weeks because I was over it all. I was tired of getting grimy and crawling around under it, so I let it sit on stands to think about what it had done.
Until my next update, presume that it's still on the stands thinking about it's life (it is, just in a different phase of completion)
So I lack the technical lingo for most all rotary-specific details in this build, but I can mash things into place with the best of them.
So we lifted the engine, and stripped the engine bay down for paint. The car is going to remain some shade of white, but we wanted the engine bay to be a bit obnoxious. So we sanded down the bay, wiped it down, then sprayed on some primer.
After some layers of that I rattle canned the firewall and behind the towers in neon green.
Delicious.
Keep on trucking. Painted the rest of the bay.
This was right after spraying, so it appears a tad blotchy. We let that dry completely and then did some color sanding. After color sanding I gave it a light tack coat of clear, then a heavy clear. Let that set up and cure and then hit it with some 3000 grit and polish.
Only then did we decide to paint the core support green as well. So we masked off the bay and did the core support. As that was setting up we started hanging items back into the engine bay. Not pictured here was the stripping, prep, and paint on the subframe, or any of the brackets that are also in there. Everything that could be re-finished was.
Man... lifting photos from facebook really screws with the quality.
Tonight, I'll update the floor and the rest of the firewall items, but that bay was a labor of love. A true obnoxious color that hurts the eyes and I love it.
Next update. It looks like I'm doing almost daily updates with the content I already have, so the underbody. Oh this devil in the details. Like I said before, it was a labor of love. I spent far too long trying to get the underside perfect. What this entailed was removing the subframes, fuel and brake lines, the fuel tank, all of the hole plugs and grommets, and the fenders and bumpers. I wanted the car to be one color underneath for cleanliness. The PO had the car painted at some point, and it was bad. There was overspray of two varieties, caked on mud, tar, and undercoating.
Now onto some pictures. I was terrible about taking pictures of this stuff, but I got some of it at least.
Step one was to clean the engine bay and remove the subframes. From the first picture, to the last picture in this thread is one full year of difference. I work at a snails pace on my own cars.
Sprayed it all down with Super Clean and scrubbed off as much of the gunk as possible. The paint below the brake master and booster was done for, but nothing a wire wheel cant fix.
Out came the front subframe and more and more cleaning.
Now this **** right here. The previous owner loved to stump jump things. This really was what irritated me. I know that the inner frame rails are soft, as are the pinch rails, but my god were they buggered. These were photos I took to send a body repair friend of mine. His reply was "Aww man, that sucks. Yeah just hammer and dolly it straight, but the rockers are gonna be fun to fix."
The observant among you may notice the heater core and AC evaporators were removed. Here is why.
I wanted to refoam the heater case. All of the blend doors were falling apart and shedding. I was sure that by just turning the fan on would make them fall apart.
I went to the local TruValue hardware and bought some generic weather stripping and cut lengths to cover the edges. I can't find pictures of the actual process, but I do have a final picture.
Since the car was originally auto, I needed a pedal box. So I got one.
A nice gentleman off craigslist traded me the pedals for some folding money.
The horrible underbody. This job sucked. I know I have said it over and over, but it sucked.
So I got it all clean and started with the wire wheel in the wheel wells.
Cleaned and primed the LF wheel well, then let the car sit some more.
This shows the straightened pinch rails. A few hours getting this perfect was all it took. Plenty of breaks were had in between.
So I believe I mentioned that I got my hands on a T2 transmission. I dropped a dummy block in the car and put the trans in to see how it looked. This is about the point when I learned that the auto and manual cars have a different body. Oh the horror. There are several thread on the subject and RotaryResurrection has a how to on his site about it. My plan was to just use the xcessive manufacturing conversion mount. I still need to order one, but I at least have a plan.
I scraped and brushed the entire underside back to bare metal. One the metal was clean, I sprayed it with brake cleaner, then wiped it down with acetone. Protip: leave the garage door open.
Once that was all done I coated the entire underside with self-etching primer. The etch primer is designed to cut into bare metal for a better grip. Or, at least that is what the can said.
Moving on, I bought some expensive 3M seam sealant and coated all of the seams that I had exposed. Once that was done, I sprayed the areas with rubberized undercoating to give it a lasting seal. Once THAT was done, I painted the entire underside of the car from front to back with a durable chassis and frame paint. This left a nice tough coating and should last for years.
All this HARD work on the Underside..and NOBODY will notice it unless you Run over them..Hahaha!
(thunk!...hey!...clean Underbody!.,..Owww!... Diff in the head..Spit out back..lol!)
great attention to detail! just seeing these these full resto builds make me want to do mine as well but unfortunately i dont have the required space and for sure they wont they like it if i do it at my shop either lol keep up the work
I just have a basic 2 car garage, so not that much space. I do understand that many others have much less than what I have to work with. I need to get back out in the garage, but house work has had a calling.
Instead of going out to a cold garage to work, I'll make another update.
The underbody is clean and the wheel wells are done at this point, so I need to work on the floor inside the car. I am fairly budget limited with what I can afford at any given point. I spend money in small spurts on the car, but I want to do the job right. if I can not afford to do it right, I wait until I can. No use in robbing Peter to pay Paul down the road.
I did quite a bit of forum crawling and this forum has almost all of the answers if you know where to look. I rarely feel the need to post any kind of new thread asking a question, because it normally has already been asked about a hundred times already.
I wanted to stiffen the chassis of the car and help improve transient response in corners. I know that the frame rails are made of butter on our cars and the pinch welds will fold over just by showing them a picture of Clint Eastwood. I found a helpful thread on installing the V8 Roadsters Miata frame rail stiffening braces. Flyin Miata also makes a set, but theirs are riddled with triangular holes to help with weight. I did not want to use those, because I wanted to cut notches for the factory exhaust hangers. I ordered the V8 Roadsters rails and measured them up. The rear of the floor slopes up a slight bit, so they don't sit quite flat. Nothing a big hammer can't fix. During this time, I also was a dum-dum and chipped up all of the factory sound deadener in the driver and passenger seat areas. I used dry ice, a hammer, a chisel, and patience to get it all up.
Then I went and laid down some Second Skin Audio Damplifier matting. The Damplifier I ordered was their "B-spec" grade stuff. Lower cost, same-ish product. They claim it doesn't meet their QC specs, but it looked great to me. I cleaned the floor of the car with rubbing alcohol and stuck it down in sheets. This stuff is impressively sticky.
In the last two photos, you can see the bolt heads for the frame rails. The hardware that came included was top notch and the install was easy enough with two people.
The passenger side did not bolt up perfectly flat, but the floor is not perfectly flat so I am not concerned. Even though the car is on stands, the car does "feel" stiffer while I'm crawling around it with the new rails installed.
During the install we sprayed the bolt holes with rubberized undercoat and sprayed the hardware underneath with it as well. The sound deadener also did something interesting. As we tightened down the bolts, it kinda oozed around the washer heads and sealed up. I will presume that water will never get in from the bolts due to the rubberized undercoat and the Damplifier caulking the washer heads.
One of the concerns about the rails was that they would "laminate" the existing rails and not allow water to drain and harbor rust. This should not be the case as the rails are about an inch wider than the existing rails and about a 1/4" taller so there is room around the existing ones to breathe.
Before I did the repair, I showed the underside of the car this photo:
The rails got really shaky and required some therapy
06-25-16, 08:44 PM
