coolant seals
 

Hey, guys! How difficult would it be to replace coolant seal in a 13B rotary? Can it be done with the engine in the car? If so, any helpful link on how to?

They are fairly easy to replace, but the engine has to be removed. The reason in that the engine is bolted together through its back side. You will need a large socket (54 mm or 2 1/8") to remove the flywheel and a long wrench or impact wrench to remove this nut (it is torqued to around 300 ft-lbs). Most of the other tools for just replacing coolant seal are typical hand tools (socket wrench, end wrench, etc.)

Your best bet is to buy a Haynes repair manual for your car. You can also download the Factory Service Manual (FSM) online depending on what year the car is. Hope this helps.

Kent

engine will have to be:
1) taken out of the car,
2) stipped down to short block
3) at the short block, a 19mm socket for the front small bolt (eccentric lock bolt) with an impact wrench will have to be used to get it off, and also the 2 1/8" nut and an impact wrench (as described in the above post) for the flexplate/flywheel nut.
4) tear engine apart, replace the coolant seals...
5) put it all back together, put the engine in the car, and put all the other parts back on.

Since you're going through all this trouble to replace some $9 seals, why not just rebuild the engine? I had bad coolant seals in my 13B, and decided to wait and save money to buy a whole rebuild kit. I could not be more satisfied with my decision.

It's not "hard" to rebuild the engine. It's time consuming.

How do you know if you have bad coolant seals? I'm concerned that I may have this or some other coolant problem.......

If you have thick white smoke coming out of the exhaust that smells sweet, then the engine is burning coolant. Also, since the barrier between the rotors and the coolant system is breached, the rotors compression will be allow to pressurize the coolant system. You will be able to notice lots of bubbles in the coolant over flow bottle (after engine is up to operating temprature and the thermostat has opened). You may also notice the add coolant light may start to come on, or that the overflow bottle fills up until it over flows. Normally, the bottle collects the excess fluid being pushed out by the thermal expansion of the system. But when the engine is running and the coolant is at a lower pressure (low pressure cause by lower temp) the fluid is drawn back in to the system because there is a vacuum space where the fluid used to be. So it is a constant cycle and the fluid reservoir never over flows. Having the rotors pressurize the coolant system can break this cycle and the fluid will always be pushed out of the system into the bottle til the bottle is full.

Sorry to give you the bad news, but to replace those seals, you basically need to rebuild the entire engine.

Another trick to find out if the coolant seals are bad is to rev the motor with the coolant filler cap off and sniff it for exhaust gas smells.


-Ted

Would bad coolant seals lead to spray over the engine block and under the hood?

Yes, the coolant gets so hot that the caps for your coolant system would release it. See, once it gets too hot, the caps release the pressure, which means your coolant is shot out.

You need to stop driving your car around, and realize that you have a serious problem. If you want to trash your car then go ahead, but if you want to fix it and prevent any other damage, then stop driving it and get the problem fixed.

I fixed the coolant leak heh
sometimes i get freaked out that the engine doesn't rev to 3,000km hehehe

only cause I am so used to it on a cold morning, it was a faulty rad cap, easy fix :D