Grocery list
 

Assuming my rotors and housings are good (motor should be pulled tonight and taken apart tomorrow) what do I need to rebuild a daily driven motor that ill have street ported. Ie. Which gasket set which apex seals. Looking to get a grocery list with a few opinions. Needs to be reliable and CHEAP but not afraid of high rpm's. Using nikki carb off brand headers, s4 waterpump and housing, stripped emmisions in a 85 gs 12a.

Btw its a r5 motor. Just eanting to know what this is going to cost to get me running again and a parts list to work off of. Atkinsrotary has confused the crap out of me.

Ide say factory everything for a SP engine. The only change specifically, would be to use O.E. FD corner seal springs, as opposed to the old style wire spring (cause its dumb not to), and consider using Goopy Performance apex seals, as the have better break-in sealing, cheaper than O.E., said to be stronger and more durable than O.E., come in stock size and oversized (for worn seal slots), and the have a slightly redesigned 2 piece seal which is nicer to the chrome.


other things to consider for when the engine is apart would be to mod the rear oil pressure regulator and ugrade the oil pump

So can I just buy a soft kit seals and springs if the bearings and rest look ok? I need 25000 miles from this rebuild.

Unless the bearings are badly scored, leave them alone. Newly-installed bearings have a higher failure rate than good used ones. It seems to me that barring an extreme overrev or loss of lubrication incident, bearings are basically immortal, with the main cause of failure being "infant mortality" from poor installation.

Let me ask you this. Why are you rebuilding it? That will determine what you will need.

How many miles are on it?

New oil O-rings are a must IMO, the Atkins ones work well and I use them in all of my builds. I'm also very pleased with the Atkins apex seals. Side seals are a crapshoot, if the engine was well taken care of maintenance-wise, they are often well in spec lengthwise and can be reused, other times they're tapered in thickness and should be scrapped. It seems to me that the corner seals wear as much or more as the ends of the side seal do (they get a telltale notch from the side seal digging in), and I've gotten away with just buying new corner seals. Or putting them on the other side of the rotor... ;)

If you use the FD corner seal springs (not required, but nice to have) with OEM 3mm apex seals, it's a very good idea to file them out just a tiny bit. I've had them "catch" in the gap between the two halves of the apex seals. I'm anal retentive about stuff like that. Again IMO if you are using iron apex seals, the FD corner seal springs don't really get you much anyway since you are rev limited below the point where the wire type springs aren't a good idea anymore.

With a 12A there are two very critical things to pay attention to: Housing chrome and the apex slots in the rotors. I've only pulled one 12A apart with no chromeflaking, and pulled another good running 12A apart that had 1/8-1/4" of flaking out most of the way around on both sides, which unfortunately qualifies as "good/use it" in 2012. The rest have big huge swaths missing at about the top righthand corner (ports left/plugs right) because that is where apex seal chattering from high revs is worst. If you see that kind of wear, check the apex slots, if they're more than 3mm + .003" (mixing measurements, yeah!) then they are junk, although I understand Goopy makes oversize seals to help old rotors along. The worst I've seen could fit an apex seal spring in next to the apex seal! That was on the rotor that I drove it home on. I think the PO abused that engine a bit.

Again IMO, if you pull the engine apart and find that it needs rotors and housings, start scoping for a S4/S5 13B N/A block and go from there.

Right now I cant get the front nut off. Back came off but im stuck on the front nut. Looking at the rear housing I have a little flaking bit nothing thats bothering me. But after it took 2hours one day to start the car and it sounded like it was running on 1 rotor I did everything I could to the point I did a compression test that the front rotor failed badly on. Up to that point I was geting 14mpg on a stock motor and it was losing power every week.

Best way to deal with that bolt is to loosen the flywheel nut, then while the stop is on the flywheel, loosen the pulley bolt. Seems to help the flywheel come loose from its tapered fit.

If you had a sudden loss-of-compression event... well, that's never good news, usually everything related to that rotor is junk.