well, I purchased a 1991 convertible rx-7 with 154xxx miles, but the motor supposedly has 10xxx miles and the receipts to prove it. so, it being an automatic I decided to swap the trans out. I spent about 3 weeks tracking down parts at a reasonable price and got to work. completed the swap only to find the reverse gear's gate is not there ( I just cant get it in reverse) that's problem number one. problem number two- when I purchased the car the motor ran FLAWLESSLY. after the trans swap I cant get it to idle right. it starts up, revs to 3k as per usual. drops to about 2k after a little while. However, in its final warm up stage where it drops to around 700ish it then begins dropping to 200ish then spiking up to 1000 then drops again and eventually dies after 5 minutes or so if not given gas. on a piston engine I would suspect a vacuum leak somewhere. This is my first rotary so I'm clueless. Also, I replaced the fuel filter with an oem one from autozone. i do believe there is a slight exhaust leak as well. does that affect idling? thanks for any advice! i want to keep the rotary but if i cant get this figured out im going to put in a piston engine that i am more familiar with. again, Thanks!!

 

Nothing you described is unique to rotary engines. Did you check for a vacuum leak? An exhaust leak would not affect idle.

 

Did you swap the computer over to a manual trans one? Also about reverse, i remember reading on here people have trouble getting into gear because of the reverse switch IIRC, so some searching cause i believe it was mainly s5 trans

 

An S5 has a computer for the auto transmission which is specific to the transmission but the ECU for an auto and standard transmission are one in the same. And the reverse switch responds to movement by the transmission housing and not the other way around thus the transmission itself is oblivious to whether the switch is connected to it.

 

well, the engine is running flawlessly. however, trans reverse gear is still a no go. could it be the megan short shifter? when I purchased the trans it didn't come with a shifter and that's all I could get my hands on. would someone be willing to let me use there stock shifter to test this? probably n0t the place to post this...sorry I tried posting in classifieds but wasn't allowed. I'm in need of a manual transmission or stock shifter. Thanks! located in southern Maryland

 

try a big screw driver

 

He's not joking either, take the shifter out and put the screwdriver in there and see if you can shift it than

 

Touche, but i seem to recall some perople having issues going into reverse because the reverse switch wasn't aligned properly in the trans or something along those lines. Unless i'm getting the gears mixed up