RA super seals(black) any magic cure?
 

Hi!
From what i see from old posts, the RA super seals eats housings like a cookiemonster on speed.... But, now a few years has gone by, has anyone come up with a magic fix to this problem? More premix? OMP + premix? Special jungle prairs, rotary voodoo? :lol:

Any thoughts?

thanks in advance for answers :)

Switch to the Goopy Seals.

^^Sorry Elliot, you're gonna have to do better than that ;)

I think using premix and fresh housings would be the best way to avoid problems with housing wear. I couldn't comment about the super seals specifically, though.

Even with premix the RA seals have a tendency on leaving marks on the rotor housings.

I've used RA super seals for years. Many different apps, never a problem.

LOL :)

RA seals do work, I have engine that has been running them for somewhere around 9 years on a single turbo...

The last engine I took apart that I built with RA seals didn't have any housing issues. It was only 2000miles mainly at WOT( 19psi on pump gas/water injection 1 oz premix). I think I still even have those seals somewhere laying around.. Radiator hose blew off @ wot...

Back in 2001 or whenever those seals were released is when I saw the housing score issue( happened in 200 miles!)

nm

these are my housings after a set of RA super seals. these had around 750 miles, running OMP and a small amount of premix. car was tuned by Steve Kan to run at 12psi, on pump gas. afr's were in the 11.1 range at WOT. this was on both housings. one one of the rotors a seal broke, and the other two were curved bad. i have switched to ALS.

http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s...5/f47b72be.jpg

You broke a RA super seal?

Yup. Broke it right at the point where corner part goes in. The other two were curved.

I tried 50:1 premix (quart with fill up) and the OMP and the RA super seals still wore the rotor housings down quickly with lots of grooving.

I tried 3mm and 2mm RA Super Seals. Yes, I also broke and warped them.

I am using 3mm stock Mazda seals now with OMP and 100:1 premix when I remember. No perceptible housing wear so far.

seems hit or miss with the RA seals. that's still too high of odds for me to use them or recommend them.

perhaps they work better with some series housings which is why some people simply haven't seen issues with them. curious those who have had them gouge housings, what series housings were they?

with my minimal experience, I used super seals the thing knocked more then 4 time very loud on the dyno and they survived and still manage to put down power.

after 6 month of abuse one of the apex seal flatten the springs and got stuck in the groove. anyway when i disassembled the engine i was expecting housing grooves etc etc.... but to my surprise the looked like new!

so for me the super seals are just fine.

right now I'm using goopy and still in my break in period we will see how these hold up to 20psi

The above picture are FD housings. :nod:

Any input on the standard RA "Classic" seals?

I also experienced the classics, but they were 3mm early series with the stamped numbers to match the corner seal. They warped.

My housings were brand new FD housings on the 3mm classics (grooved) and used S5 housings on 3mm and 2mm super seals (grooved and also worn greatly).

i think that the early ones were ok..a kid i work with has had blacks in his t2 for many years with no problems but any recent ones that we've used had problems,from what i herd was that adam at rx7specialties made them for them when they came out and the switched to someone else and went down hill from there..we no longer use them and use adams seals with no problems at all,a friend of mine has a datsun running them @700hp with no issues...

I have RA Super Seals Black in my 20B. Kilo Racing rebuilt the engine about 7,000 miles ago. No issues at all and the car makes crazy vacuum at idle (normally around 18.5 but saw over 20 in the cold this weekend).

These are the only seals Kilo uses and he's warranted the engine against having housing wear. Said he'd fix the engine for free if there is a problem.

In my experience, the 3mm RA superseals eat housings in less than 10k miles. Seen it with 3 seperate engines back in the day all that started with great condition housings. By 8-10k miles each struggled to hot start. Upon tear down each had extreme grooves all the way around the rotor housings, much worse than was pictured abouve. Keep in mind, all 3 engines were in cars that were making 450-500rwhp, and the seals took the abuse back before the days of WI. This was back in the 2005ish era.

The 2mm Super Seals I have built several engines with before discovering the seals I now use. They are a great seal, seem to get around 12-15k miles out of a set before compression starts to suffer. By 20k miles the housings are usually beaten pretty bad.

My last FD about 2 years ago I ran the Super Seals because ALS seals were back ordered and I had limited time to work on my car. Put about 7k miles on that engine before tear down. The striations were starting to make them selves noticeable but werent extreme. More wear than I would ever like to see but not as bad as the picture above. Hot starts were ok but werent stellar by any means.

They have/had a place. They have helped a lot of engines stay together while making big power. For someone who plans to drive their car more than 5k miles a year I say forget about it, unless you just enjoy rebuilding engines.

I have a hole in my rotor and I am running used S4 housings on my NA rally car that has RA classics, it takes quite the abuse made 105psi with used parts, after 2 years im down to 97psi on both rotors.

I like to order their wet seal kit and RA classics (they come with apex seal springs) great quality great price IMHO.

being that the seals are used for aviation purposes foremost, i just don't get it. their seals seem to be the least reliable.

i've only built one engine with their seals and i have no idea where it went as it was sold by the customer when he decided to go with a 20B instead.

105 psi with a hole in the rotor?? :scratch:

i don't think he's quite all there. unless he somehow gets away with running the car doubling as a mosquito fogger. a hole in the rotor allows crank oil directly into the engine, i've seen engines run with a hole in the rotor and the smoke clouds were neverending and it would eat through all the crankcase oil in less than an hour.

I had the regular RA, and they gouge the S5 JSPEC housings in less than 10K miles.

CRAP, not what I wanted to hear :(

It is my opinion that the amount of housing wear caused by any seal is in direct relationship with the amount of lubrication the housings get. Many people feel that because they have a functioning (or not malfunctioning) OMP that they are safe. This just is not the case, I have had many cars come in where the oil injectors have failed, either completely clogged or blowing in both directions. Either issue drastically reduces the amount of lubrication the housings get.

I have torn apart engines with RA, ALS, Atkins, Mazda, etc and not one of them consistently wears housings more than the other.

For example, here is an engine that had a brand new set of housings when built with less than 4K with ALS seals, this customer was told by his previous builder to run 4 oz per tank (1/4 oz/ga) without any OMP:

http://www.banzai-racing.com/2011_cu.../housings1.JPG

I have pictures of Atkins 3mm seals wearing out the housings in the same way. The 2mm are so soft that they split in half under any type of real boosted power, destroying everything, so the wear does not matter.

I took my own engine apart in 5K miles intervals ( for 20K) and were no signs of wear. I started with the original RA seals and swapped to the super seals when they came out a few years ago. This testing was done on my single turbo 93 FD pushing 25+psi. I originally built it with new housings, when I pulled it this last time for the 20B and disassembled, the housings still looked new. My 20B also has super seals and brand new housings.

We have also opened up a 50K mile engine that we built for a customer several years ago, that decided he want porting this time, housings were completely usable, no abnormal wear at all.

We also have a customer that we built an engine in 2007 with Super Seals that daily drives his FD and he has put over 100K on since, it is still running perfectly.

Now I have torn apart engines with RA seals that did show wear, typically those people thought it was safe to run 1/4 or 1/2 oz/ga premix on cars that were making 400-500whp with WI. This is one of the reasons we always recommend no less than 1oz/ga.

I have not seen the wear from Goopy seals yet because they are too new, I am will to guess that I will see similar results.

The RA seals are the more reliable that I have found, they can withstand the abuse of engines making 600+whp without shattering and do not cause any more wear that any other seal.

Lubrication of the seals and housings is key for the longetivity of any engine regardless of the seals used.

Do you recommend 1oz per gallon?

He will fix the motor if it drops in compression? Get Steve to test it so you have a baseline

.

Most decent (TCW-3) premixes I've seen will recommend at least 1oz per gallon. The Quicksilver brand (a real nice Outboard/Maritime premix) recommends something like 13oz for 10 gallons if I remember correctly. Each brand will have different recommendations on the bottle.

Obviously if you go WAY overboard with the premix then you could have problems, due to displacing fuel, but anywhere between 1oz/gal and 1.3oz/gal should be fine... I'd err on the side of putting slightly too much in (by an ounce or two) as opposed to putting too little in.

I liked the Quicksilver premix as well because it didn't smoke when warmed up even at 50:1, the engine looked clean on the inside and it was cheap at Kmart in gallons.

I had high hopes it would mitigate the wear of these non compatible seals.

Which, in reading how few miles OTHERS have gotten out of the rotor housings on RA seals I guess it did.

But in the end they still looked like the housings posted above.

on the fence, to me it seems once the RA seals start to gouge then it goes downhill quickly. if you can keep the seals from digging in then you may be lucky and have them last for a good long while.

but many people have claimed to premix 1oz per gallon and still had poor results from the seals.

think about a tiny sliver of metal in an engine bearing, it goes around once and galls the passage rolling metal around, metal gets taken off and moved to the spot next to it, galling that spot and starting a chain reaction eventually wearing the shaft and bearing to the point of seizure. unfortunately in rotary engines their rotary motion could be compared to a bearing failure.

Quick question on the Premix: would having greater than 1.3oz/gal cause it to not stay alive and buck like crazy?

not likely but it will spit out your plugs quicker in fouling them.

I've always premixed 1ozper 1gal, without OMP. RA seals still gouged the S5 JSPEC rotor housings. To be fair, there is a slight posibility that one of the tuners refilled the gas tank, and did not noticed that I was premixing.

Its one of those things that I will never know.

For those running without OMP, do you suggest running 1oz/1gal at a min, or more?

I would stick with what your premix manufacturer suggests, there should be a chart on the bottle, as each brand will be slightly different. However I would def not run any less than 1oz/gal if you're running without an OMP.

for the most part i've always suggested 1oz/gallon and never had anyone with dropping compression numbers.

I could not tell you what happened with your specific engine as I did not build it. I can say that I have been building 50+ engines/year for 8-9 years with the RA seals and have not had any issues. Some of the customers with 8-9 year old engines still own the cars and we are still modifying them.

The amount of premix varies depending on power and level of boost, but I would never run less than 1 oz/ga, if you are consistently pushing 20psi with water/meth then more should added.

If you have excess bearing wear or running super high rpms, there is a chance that your rotors are making contact with the housings. This would cause scoring that is not the fault of any apex seals. I have also seen turbos that have eaten the compressor wheel, this results in similar housing wear as what was posted on page 1 from the fine pieces of aluminum being sent through the engine. These are just a few situations I have seen in engines not using RA seals that yield the same eaten rotor housing results.

Blaming the seal is easy, finding the true root cause of the problem is time consuming and most DIY builders just want to get their cars running again. This is the reason some have gone through 5-10 engines.

However I am not going to spend endless hours playing "Guess the condition of my parts" or "Guess my mods". I always need to see the complete engine and often the car to determine what happened in any particular case.

We have built ITS race engines running Super Seals that have survived muliple seasons. As any racer will tell you this is a very demanding environment spending nearly all of it's time near 9k rpm. We recently opened one of them up just to see how things were going and there was virtually no housings wear.

Yep :) I'll add that to Steve's growing list. Had what turned out to be a PPF issue (twisted did not break). He's putting in the hi flow cat and then it's off to the dyno.

Years do not mean anything when talking about engine life. We have to know how many km or miles an engine has done. A drag racer can race 5 seasons with xyz seal without any problems but in reality he has done less then 100 miles whereas a car that makes 5k to 10k miles per year will cover 25-50k after 5 years. A drag racer will do 3-5 runs per event (10 seconds each time) and let's say the season has 10 events, it'll average 30-40 runs probably with higher octane, oil flush more often etc. A street driven car will do no less than 100 runs in a year incl. burnouts, highway rolls, traffic lights, high speed runs etc. And each of these actions will last way more than 10 seconds.

I am not trying to underestimate drag racing or say it is not hard on the engine but if you are using a similar spec'd car in the street you are actually putting it through a harder test.

I wonder if premixing is there to offset harsh aftermarket seals. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite because I am planning to use premix in my new engine however only for extra insurance not because I think it is a must.

I have read in this forum in the past that oem seals may be softer on the edges, not sure if it's true though.

high revving high loads are definitely an infinite amount harsher on the seals and housings than cruising on the freeway giving the engine a moderate push now and then. this is mainly because of the expanding forces at the higher RPMs, the faster the engine is revving the more that tiny bit of weight of the seal is pushing on the housing, creating friction, trying to gall the surface and embed itself, is doing.

this is one more reason why ceramics are so easy on the engine, because they are so light. many high revving engine builds(9k RPMs+) aim for the lightest seal that they can get away with, ceramic or carbon.

that said, i imagine some if not most of the failures from seals eating housings are from improperly setup builds, running engines with harsher seals bouncing the engine off the limiter for extended periods of time. one of my n/a customers showed me pictures of the engine he tore down that had severely gouged housings, this was an engine built with atkins seals and was the only one i built that i have seen an issue with. coincidentally he was running the engine on the track mainly and running the engine to 9k regularly, overheating it didn't help either but he knew the engine was on it's last legs so he cooked it just to finish the day off. i'd have to guess it had around 30k miles, a dozen or more track events, a number of dyno sessions and about 5 years of use.

my FC is running better than ever with RA super seals and used housings. 11.42@122mpg with a s5 hybrid turbo. fired up as soon as the gas hit the spark plugs after the rebuild
theres 5000 miles on it now. I definitely plan on using the RA super seals when I rebuild the engine in my FD this winter.
with all my searching i could only find people saying tey heard they eat housings.
I hate how people bad mouth a product from a single incident. that guy with the gouged housing didn't know if the tuner added premix,it could have been a flaw in the housing or assembled wrong.
if gouging was a problem you would think i would have had a problem with my used housings the past 2 summers of drag racing and autox

the point is which seals start to gouge easiest, to which there seems to be no easy to find answer without a lot of wasted money/time on R+D testing of various seals.

once the seals begin to dig into the housing it can only get worse from there.

about the only seals i have never seen really gouge the housings are OEM, and likely why mazda chose them after their countless hours actually testing the various seals. they can lightly score the chrome but not anything like some of the pictures i have seen of other seals. they would likely fail before going to such extremes.

Read post 26:

Chris my comment wasn't directed at you. Those are just my thoughts in general.

Since we are on topic, let's take post 26 and replace every "RA seals" in it with "Mazda OEM seals". Get my drift?