I don't remember what the coils themselves cost. It wasn't much, but Claudio talked me into them when I bought the Haltech e8. The coil bracket was free. One of the perks of being an engineer in a manufacturing plant with their own machine shop.

yeah i hear that...sucks i have to fab everything up from scratch and buy all my own shit...eh it's all good though...keep us posted on pics...im hungry for more pics

NICE work... Keep us up to date..

L8R

Nights and weekends I work at a local fabrication shop. Mostly, we do industrial stuff like semi-beds and pipeline stands. On rare occasion, we'll do rollcages and other hot rod related stuff. It gives me access to some pretty neat equipment and lets me get quite a bit of fabrication practice.

:bowdown:
If you take the car to shows you will have to film reactions, I imagine you will get some good ones.

You can tell anyone you go up against that you have less than a smallblock.

VERY NICE , u shouldn't have any rear end problems lol ..........:rlaugh:



luv ur project keep up the great work, I will keep my eye on this one. r u goin auto ?




LMAO !!!!!! damm i'm a dumbass 4 not reading ur "setup" if I was goin that route I would put a 3 speed auto
just my 1 cent dat bitch would RUN !!!!!!!!!! good luck

Did a little more work on the car. I am planning on having the Big Bore modification done to the RE throttle body. Did a little reaserch on this forum and decided it was rediculous to run 3" intercooler piping, neck down to 2.5" to mate to the intake elbow, and then neck back up to a huge throttle body. It looked at what other folks were doing and welded some 3" aluminum pipe to the intake elbow and then bead rolled the end.

I welded all of the unused vacuum ports on the LIM, UIM, and throttle body (there are 4,195,546 of them!) The lines going to the wastgate & solenid and the BOV are all -AN. I'm trying to keep as few rubber lines as possible to minimize the chance of one blowing off at high boost. The only lines that need to be rubber in my application are the MAP and Boost Gauge. I wanted to use the fittings at the back of the UIM so they could pass through the firewall with as little showing as possible, but the nipples are just straight tube and are much too small for the MAP. At first, I pulled out the stock tubes and tried to drill and tap the locations for 1/8 NPT. Blowout! I figured I'd just weld up the holes and tap a little higher, but that is right where the division of the Upper/lower ports is. So..........I built up the edge with weld and contoured it to look like this......Pain in the @$$!

Keeping in-line with trying to have as few non-AN fittings as possible, I read a post that said an Accufab GM IAC Motor to FOX mustang adapter might work on the RE throttlebody. Money! So I punted the Haltech IAC adapter stuff I made earlier and am going with this setup.

In fact as far as muscle cars go, you can say you have a micro block!

the nova is like a tank bro...are you going to cut anyweight out of the car or leave it the way it is...By the way the car is looking great is it back from paint yet?

Absolutely! As stated in the original post, we have tried to make the car as light as possible. Here is the list of weight reductions. I'm sure I left some of them out. Most of them are estimates, but it should be fairly close.

Weight Reduction (lbs)
Fiberglass Front Bumper 90
Fiberglass Rear Bumper 90
Fiberglass Hatch 50
Fiberglass Hood 20
Lexan Hatch Window 5
Removed Trunk Paneling 50
Removed Trunk Paneling Mounts 2
Removed Hatch Springs 2
Removed Hatch Spring Mounts 2
Chris Alston's Front Clip 40
Disk Brakes and Aluminum Calipers 10
Engine/Transmission 150
Aluminum Radiator 5
Removed Heater 5
Aluminum Door Pannels 2
Removed Door Cross Bracing and lightened doors 20
Gun Drilled Axles 2
Drilled Rear Window Arms 2
Sound Deadening 10
Carpet Padding 2
Hollowed Radiator Support 1
Aluminum Driveshaft 5
Lightweight Battery 20
Windshield Washer Fluid 3
Aluminum Exhaust & Burns Muffler 20

Weight Addition
Subframe Connectors 22
Undercoated Trunk 10

Vehicle Base Weight 3364
Total Weight Reduction 608
Total Weight Addition 32
Final Vehicle Weight 2788

Not back from the painter yet. It won't be back until August........damnit.

AUGUST! Damn that stinks.

I've been doing quite a bit of reaserch on exhaust manifold design on this forum and have realized that my design could be greatly improved upon. So, I'm remaking the manifold using the following criteria.

• Equal length primary tubes
• 2" Sched 10 304 SS Primary tubes
• At least 3" of straight pipe after the exhaust ports
• Dual wastegates for total runner division
• 13-18" primary tube length
• Bracing at the turbo flange
• Turbo location to allow for 3" to 3.5" downpipe expansion
• Turbo location to allow for at least 4" of straight pipe on the downpipe before making the first bend

Going to get started tonight.

Good shit! That will upset the big cube boys!!!

August? Why so long?

The shop that is doing it does regular bodywork during the day and restoration work at night. It's a very labor intensive process to do a full strip and then do a show quality paint job on the underside/inside/and outside, especially when ghosting in graphics.

Don't worry about the weight. Hes doing fine. I gathered some weights and hes ok. This was searching through the internet. Some weights might be off, but basing on what he said about the FD these figures should be close enough.

Curb Weights...

Rx-8 ----------------------3045
Rx-7 1993 TT Base----------2789
Rx-7 1993 TT R1------------2800
Rx-7 1993 TT Touring-------2862
Rx-7 Convertible ----------3045
Rx-7 Turbo ----------------2888
Rx-7 88 Base---------------3003
Rx-7 84-85-----------------2640
Rx-7 79-83-----------------2440
Rx-5 ----------------------2464
Rx-4 Sedan-----------------2620
Rx-3 Sedan-----------------1945
Rx-2 ----------------------2315
R-100 ---------------------1782
Rotary Pickup -------------2865
Miata 1990 ----------------2293
GLC -----------------------1790
Mazda 626 -----------------2530

No dis to 2cute, but I'd love to see a rotary in EVERYTHING! Good job on the swap and major props. On another note, 2cute with over 51,000 posts how do you find time for anything else??? Wow!

I think I would go with a set of 4.11 gears instead of the 4.88 since you are going turbo. Nice project. Keep it coming

I figure I've got enough tire so why not. In all of my past cars I'd always wished I'd had more gear. We'll see how it works out. :fingersx:

Finished the turbo brace tonight.....Now, on to the new manifold.

Very nice.

like i said i can respect the work he did however im a purist and dont like to see this kind of thing. as i dont want to see sr20 in rx s i dont want to see the rotary in other vehicles. thats just my own thing sorry.

as for posts lol dont ask

Hey Nick why didn't you change out the exhaust sleeves?

is it safe to say too much time in your hands counts

I fully plan on it. I've got a set of TII sleeves to swap in. I'm going to let Gotham do it when they rebuild/port the engine.

Sick! You are going to catch so much shit at musclecar shows. The fab work looks fantastic.

haha, +1

But I think the amount of shit he'll catch, and the amount of "so tell me, WTF is this again? awesome!!" will be 50/50

Very cool! I love mutts...

lol part of it is a joke. part of it is my actual posts. thats why i said dont ask

Why are they better than the FD's? I took mine out yesterday and was going to get the FD's.

He's got an RE, not REW.

The RE has tiny sleeves.

I know he has an RE, so do I, but I was asking why is he using tII exhaust sleeves and not 13brew exhaust sleeves, what's the difference?

This is a very cool project. I cant wait to see final pics of it!

Not sure. I happened to have a TII engine that I have been stealing parts from to use on the RE. I needed the front pump setup to be able to run the Gilmer drive. The TII sleeves look like a big improvement over the ones on the RE.

I have an extra set of REW sleeves if you need them.

Did some work on the exhaust manifold this week. It's turning out pretty good so far. The tubes are 2" sched 10 304 stainless steel. Both flanges are stainless as well. Runner lengths are 15 3/4" and 16" (98% equal length). There is 2" of straight pipe on each port before the bends. I'm going to run dual 38 mm Tial wastegates, which should be in any day now. That way the runners will be totally divided.

I love it...

Damn, looks realy great! I particularly like what you`ve done with the motor flange. Could I ask how did you get the "semi" holes in it? I suppose you will penetrate deep wen welding those stainless bends. :)

I'd like to take credit for the flange, but I bought it from Mazdatrix (part #16187). It comes with a shoulder to insert 1 1/2" Sched 10 pipe into which is very cool. Only problem is that 1 1/2" covers up a good portion of the exhaust port. I had to surface the lip off of the front and open the hole to the I/D of 2" sched 10.

The welds will penetrate almost all of the way through. We'll test on some scrap pipe until our heat settings are right. Then we'll backpurge the pipes with Argon to keep those sugary deposits from forming on the backside.

cool car...

Today, the throttle body came back from being bored out by RC Engineering. I had them do the secondaries and primary. They charged me the same price to do everything as they do just to bore the secondaries. It was still expensive as hell, but I thought that was pretty cool of them. The work looks fantastic!

makes my big block 5spd nova seem plain...

My brother and I almost have the manifold done. Just need to remake the support. I couldn't keep it lined up while welding the pipes up. Even if they only pulled 1/32" it was amplified by the time you got to the connection point on the engine. I could have oversized the mounting holes, but that just seemed ghetto. No problem. It should only take a couple of hours to remake. I learned an important lesson when cutting the wastegate holes on the primary tubes. Don't EVER cut pipe with a plasma cutter without backing to catch the slag. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the slag out. The last thing I wanted was for some of it to let go and wipe out the turbo and/or engine. I ended up having to cut out the pieces of the primary tubes and refit and weld in new ones. Then I opened up the holes with a step drill and rasp instead. I left a little bit of inside lip on the wastegate runners for anti-reversion. Not sure if there is really any benefit, but hey.......it shouds good right! I used to think the $1000+ shops wanted to make a custom manifold was outrageous, but after doing it myself...it's a steal. There is a great deal of satisfaction making your own though.

Oh yeah, I sold the GT4088R and stepped up to a GT4294R with 1.15 hotside. I'm also going to see if Gotham will do a full bridge instead of a half-bridge. Exhaust is being upsized to a full 4"

More pics....

very nice welds. project is looking great.

Thanks. I've only been TIG welding for about a year now. I hope my technique keeps getting better, and more importantly.......more consistent. I have the unique capability of going from pimp-to-gimp in a heartbeat.

I have been TIG welding for about 8 years now, on and off. I have found that even the mood you are in will have an effect on the welds...
But I have to say, nothing wrong with those welds! :icon_tup:

where did you get your gilmer drive from?