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Hi guys, just fell into the deep dark lonely pit of rotary addiction! Began by buying my sister an 81 12a manual a month ago that had some carb issues but after fixing it and driving it I fell in love. After tinkering with her 81 I really wanted to mess with one that was fuel injected and I've always been in love with the FDs. There has been an FD sitting in a driveway on blocks on some backroads for several years I'd known about so I walked up to the guys door and asked what it would take to get the car. Long story short I towed the car home because he had no battery and he'd let it sit for years so to avoid doing any damage I didn't start the car before buying it because I expected the worst. The car is a 1994 5 speed touring with an Apexi PFC and a cat-less downpipe. After getting it home and performing the proper procedures to start an FD after being stored improperly the car STARTED RIGHT UP! Along with starting right up came CLOUDS of white smoke out of the exhaust. I checked under the radiator cap and sure enough it was bubbling up a storm so I figure I have a pretty good sized coolant seal leak. I let the car get up to temp. and it stayed right in the middle. I tried using alumiseal and had no change in the amount of smoke the car produced. On top of this when I rev the car the turbo makes a very unhealthy high pitch sound but I haven't had the time to look into that yet. I live in the Seattle area and if anyone knows of any good rotary shops or sources around here other than Atkins Rotarty it would be a tremendous help!
Last edited by 81&94PNW; 03-06-17 at 07:11 PM.
Reason: Spelling
Investigate the Northwest regional thread on this site. Look up Team RX7 Seattle on Facebook (and join). I think they have weekly informal mini-meets.
Check under your oil filler cap. Is there white goop? That may show water condensation in the oil. Also you could have water in the gas from condensation in the gas tank. If it continues to blow white smoke that may be water vapour. Bad case would be coolant is getting into the combustion chamber from a failed coolant seal. Does the smoke smell sweet?
Is there indication of oil in the coolant (see coolant seal leak above)?
Last edited by Redbul; 03-06-17 at 10:25 AM.
Reason: Spelling
Thanks for the recommendations! And Redbul, the smoke does smell pretty sweet. The underside of the oil fill cap looked clean and the coolant looked really good when I drained it.
As for water in the gas I just about fully drained the tank and put a half tank in with the appropriate premix.I wanted to be sure it wasn't water in the tank so I replaced and plugged the fuel line coming from the cars tank and ran it into a gas can and the car still smoked out my neighborhood.
When I was replacing the coolant and the car was running the coolant began to bubble over so that leads me to believe it is coolant seals. I've built engines (mainly V8's) before and I'm confident I can do most of the work myself I'm just wondering how much of a project I'm getting myself into. Thanks again for the resources!
hey, welcome to the forum. cool story and nice find on that fd. since it's in need of a rebuild, what's the plan? stock or ported? upgrades? now let's see the fb. any plans for that one?
You may be aware of Atkins. I think they are near Olympia. They stock a wide range of NOS rotary parts.
Keep tabs on our Westcoast Rotary group in Vancouver. We have about 60 active members.
Perhaps pop up to Abbotsford and talk to Marco or Taylor at Force Fed. A large number of our group have run their cars through there in the last year. They have strong ideas on which way one should go with the cars (i.e. minimum of "reliability mods"). But for recent active rotary engine experience, they are probably second to none.
While the engine is out of the FD I would like to do a street port and swap out the stock twins for a single turbo. Havevt decided on a turbo or turbo kit yet, still have a lot of research to do in that area. I'm aiming for around low to mid 300's for whp but even more important to me is throttle response so probably staying away from bigger sized turbos.
As for the FB it's my 17 year old sisters who drives it to school so it needs to stay reliable which is why I don't have much of a plan for it. When I got it the cat was clogged so I replaced it with the Bonez "race pipe" and now its set for a while. The carb still isn't perfect, the car would die when the car went under load leading me to believe the secondaries weren't opening correctly. I took apart the Nikki carb and CLEANED EVERYTHING thinking it was some debris causing the issues. After putting the carb back on the car won't die under load but still has a slight hesitation at 2k rpm's, but nothing that makes it un-drivable. For now I have no plans for the FB but depending on how the carb behaves in the future I may be looking at a holley swap.
Welcome from Oregon! If you were closer, I would offer to take a look at it. You can try Jerry's Little Car shop, but he really likes to only work on stock 3rd gens.
Awesome, another Seattle member. Definitely join "Team RX-7 of Seattle" on facebook. We are planning on doing a meet and drive once the weather gets nicer.
When building my fd I had pretty much the same goals as you. I ended up going with the efr 7670 turbo. It was good for 344 wph at about 13psi. That is with a high flow cat and 92 octane. It's a lot more power than stock and is plenty fast for me, but still has awesome response and is conservative enough that it should last a long time.
My whole build project was actually triggered by a coolant seal failure as well, but mine was on the combustion side of the engine so I was getting exhaust into my coolant instead of coolant into my combustion chamber.
Hopefully we'll see each other around. It would be great see your fd running properly again.
03-05-17, 10:57 PM
Just got into RX7's
Team RX7 Seattle
