eBay Motor?
01-19-13, 11:18 AM
#1
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eBay Motor?
How confident are you guys with buying a Turbo II off eBay or a JDM motor importer? Most of them say that the motors have between 30k-60k depending on the importer. I've been thinking about buying one and keeping my carberated 4-port 13b as a spare.
01-19-13, 02:57 PM
#2
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Can you lend me 2 thousand dollars?
I mean really,if you wanna toss your money in the wind you may as well make someone here happy!!
.Ebay motors are a Crap shoot,.
Try and find either a reputable rebuilder or a Company that will let you compression test and check the engine out thoroughly.
After all the Ebay vendor can send you anything..
I'd castrate myself with a Bread knife before buying an engine off of Ebay.
I mean really,if you wanna toss your money in the wind you may as well make someone here happy!!
.Ebay motors are a Crap shoot,.
Try and find either a reputable rebuilder or a Company that will let you compression test and check the engine out thoroughly.
After all the Ebay vendor can send you anything..
I'd castrate myself with a Bread knife before buying an engine off of Ebay.
01-19-13, 03:51 PM
#3
I think this link says it all about buying "JDM engines": https://www.rx7club.com/bad-fugly-bu...gines-1017301/
With no compression tests, warrantee, or reputation at all - how can you be sure they are not sending you a complete piece of scrap metal? You might get lucky. You might completely loose $1500-2000.
With no compression tests, warrantee, or reputation at all - how can you be sure they are not sending you a complete piece of scrap metal? You might get lucky. You might completely loose $1500-2000.
01-20-13, 01:09 AM
#6
JSPECS are hit or miss. More often than not I would not want to pay full price for one and run it as-is for the long term. Maybe to drop in, hope it fires up with no major defects, and putt around in for a few months until I could do a proper build.
I have rebuilt more than a few jspecs for guys who bought them, went to the trouble of installing, only to find out that they were blown when they came off the boat.
One local guy bought one and drove on it for about 8 months before it let go in my driveway. I had to help him rebuild it so that he could get home (about an hour away). It broke apex seals on the rear rotor right there in my driveway. To my eye, it looked like the parts had closer to 125k miles on them. When all was said and done it had a bad coolant seal with a broken jacket on the front iron, and a chewed up rear rotor and rotor housing. So he had a little more than half a motor to rebuild from.
I have had a handful of guys send them to me (primarily FD guys) and those things have been PRISTINE. But they are the exception rather than the rule. I've had far more jspecs that looked like crap inside, usually they are full of rust and have bad coolant seals, seals locked into the rotors from rust, maybe a cracked water jacket or two, or other times broken apex seals on one rotor that destroy the rotor and rotor housing.
In my experience about 75% of the time you get a much less than desirable engine, and 25% of the time you get one that could run for more than a year or 2.
I have rebuilt more than a few jspecs for guys who bought them, went to the trouble of installing, only to find out that they were blown when they came off the boat.
One local guy bought one and drove on it for about 8 months before it let go in my driveway. I had to help him rebuild it so that he could get home (about an hour away). It broke apex seals on the rear rotor right there in my driveway. To my eye, it looked like the parts had closer to 125k miles on them. When all was said and done it had a bad coolant seal with a broken jacket on the front iron, and a chewed up rear rotor and rotor housing. So he had a little more than half a motor to rebuild from.
I have had a handful of guys send them to me (primarily FD guys) and those things have been PRISTINE. But they are the exception rather than the rule. I've had far more jspecs that looked like crap inside, usually they are full of rust and have bad coolant seals, seals locked into the rotors from rust, maybe a cracked water jacket or two, or other times broken apex seals on one rotor that destroy the rotor and rotor housing.
In my experience about 75% of the time you get a much less than desirable engine, and 25% of the time you get one that could run for more than a year or 2.
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01-20-13, 08:21 AM
#9
We get 3-4 j-specs shipped to us each month from different customers or for core engine parts, rarely do we open one up that would have run well if it had been installed without rebuilding. There was one that stands out because absolutley everything internal was brand new, however that has happened only once in over 10 years.
01-20-13, 08:30 AM
#10
Original Gangster/Rotary!
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We have never installed a JDM engine as-is, we insist on tearing them down for inspection. Hell, there have been a few nasty surprises over the years when opening up new/reman Mazda engines for portwork 
