I measured my side seals and they average arround .005-.007, im eventually going to turbo is this too lose

 

I'm not a professional engine builder, but everything I've gathered for clearances says you should be targeting closer to .003-.005.

 

Yea I guess I'll get new ones, its sad I was so close to putting it together

 

It's better to catch it now, than regret it once it's all together. I think you'll be happier if you get it right the first time. Good luck.

 

Are we talking inches or mm as units of measurement here? Also, I'm assuming you're referring to side seal to corner seal clearance as that's the only one you can adjust for, but here's what the FSM says about all things side seal related:



So if you were measuring in inches, 0.005~0.007 is a bit loose. You want to be on the tight side of that spec for best compression, and some builders will claim they can go a little bit tighter than Mazda's spec with no downside. Better to catch it now rather than later.

 

The side seal slots are all different lengths. Each slot is stamped with a character denoting their length catagory.

You will see katakana characters at each slot.

Anyways.... once you inspect them you can just rotate the longer side seals down to the shorter slots and re grind them to length and buy 1 or 2 side seals for the now empty longest slots.

 

Do you know if this fact is called out in the service manual somewhere?

 

it is in the Rx8 manual, since the Rx8 seals were sold by length. the Rx7 seals have always been sold as cut to length, so its not in the manual. stamp is there on the rotor though

 

It really depends on what you're doing and expecting from the engine. I wouldn't sell someone an engine with those tolerances but I've torn down engines for refreshes that were making perfect power on the dyno with up to .011 on a couple slots. What the dyno doesn't show you is transients and low RPM compression numbers.