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Just took delivery of a 1994 montego blue roller. Interior is in really good condition and body is mostly fine, though paint is trashed - roof and the entirety of the driver's side is a mess. Will be slowly restoring it to running condition and already have a lot of parts on order to do that. I'm sure I'll be hitting up the classifieds section shortly
Welcome to the forum and congratulations on your new RX-7!! Do you know any of the car's history? Are you planning on a stock restoration with minor mods?
I don't know too much about its history except what I can gather from the carfax and the guy I bought it from. It was an east coast car (but minimal rust from what I can see), has about 77.6k miles, and doesn't look like it has run since about 2005. The guy I bought it from got it in 2019, and shipped it off to IRP to have it restored, but it sat there until he lost interest / got tired of waiting and sold it to me. The person he bought it from was apparently going to hellcat swap it, and just ripped everything out of the engine bay (literally in some cases). They cut the engine subframe, but in a silly way -- they just removed the tabs to mount the power steering rack, then reattached the rack with hose clamps. I'm currently working through seeing what's missing and going through the parts fiche to order replacements. However, with the engine bay already nearly empty, I'm considering some color options for a respray.
Since I live in California, I have to work around the smog system we have. I've been hunting for a usdm 13b-rew, but haven't been able to track one down yet. I've seen plenty of jdm engines, but those won't pass smog as far as I'm aware without egr, air pump, cats, etc. They're also really expensive around here (7-8k) and have no compression numbers to guarantee anything. So I've also been looking into some swaps I could do legally, which is either e-rod lt1 (it seems the e-rod LS3 is no longer being made), or buying a donor vehicle of some sort and cramming everything in. I'm not looking for /huge/ power. Maybe something like a 2.3l ecoboost - keeps it somewhat in the Mazda family, even if only tangentially at this point.
That's disappointing to hear how badly they hacked some things up. Hopefully you'll be able to sort those things out. The marketplace here might be able to help with sourcing an uncut subrframe. I think i saw one on one of the facebook groups for $300 in the midwest, but shipping might be a bear.
Also, I encourage you to explore alternative routes to registering that car anywhere else but Commifornia. The regulations there are so absurd it makes it near impossible to be a car enthusiast.
