gibbon

swap it for something that doesn't go and a divorce

the WOF man actually wanted to stick around for a chat, guess he was a Mazda guy "so what have you got planned for it next?" "I dunno, I guess I'll wait for something else to break" Never had a legal car, this is new territory

one small sticker for a man, one giant leap for a man with a rotary

well I disregarded all advice and popped the side cover off, the wee wobble-cone (sorry, the "inertial actuator-cam") seems to push the ratchet tang up with very little encouraging so I'm not too sure what the problem is, maybe the WOF man didn't put the foot in hard enough

how does VTNZ test the inertia belt system on their rolling road?

thanks for the lead on that, seatbelt sales have given me a suspiciously good price ($185), but want my belt in exchange... did they ask the same of you?

WOF failed because seatbelt vehicle-sensitive retractor not engaging (which I didn't even know was a thing until now) so apparently it's a little intertia pendulum device, is it worth cracking the retractor open and having a dig around or is it the sort of thing where if they fail, it's because they're totally fucked? there's a second hand one on trademe so not totally desperate

I'm not sure all those solenoids are for turbo control (sounds like many might be emissions?) and I think that some of the solenoids would be using the same input signal ie secondary turbine feed valve would probably work at the same time as secondary compressor outlet valve. basically I thought the computer's output might be as simple as "i want one turbo" or "i want two turbos", and the rest would be handled in-house by the rat's nest But given that nobody supports it, probably not I wonder how the power FC manages it?

stuff it I'm just going to ask @ProZac why can't most aftermarket ecu's handle the FD sequential turbo arrangement?

I blew all my fancy ECU money on mags and shiny intakes because I'm sixteen

huh, somehow I completely missed that Zac had an FD... I thought he had an FC at one stage? Geez even tomble mentioned it a few posts back, whoops anyway looks like he's done all the hard work for me. going to have a read now. Zac and I are starion folk rather than regular folk, so it stands to reason that we both want to keep the twin turbos for the sake of absurdity. my ambitions are somewhat more humble however due to ability/tooling/sobriety shortcomings as for the rat's nest, the hoses have been replaced somewhat recently by the looks of it so someone's already done the hard work

bummer that the link pnp doesnt support the sequential turbos for some strange reason (maybe they just figured everyone would be ditching them?) edit: microtech's loom adapter doesn't support sequentials either.... what's the difficulty? I'm not really sure why this thing has a FC anyway, it's pretty mild

I was actually going to shoot you a PM one day to see how you felt about tuning one. I have no idea if it's tuned for the air pump installed or not etc are there any telltales that it's still on the base tune?

I popped my head under there this morning and couldn't quite make sense of it to be honest, I couldnt see or feel any sharp edges, or see any hardware holding the whole thing together. I think you might be right in that the remnants of the original guards might have been flared out into the lip of the larger guards but I can't see any cuts. Everything is covered in underseal, they've done a reasonable job of not making it look like it's just been slapped over the top. I'd say it's around a 50mm flare

definitely nailed the Jun bonnet, still can't find a Mazdaspeed kit that looks like it. there's a "15 year anniversary kit" that has some design similarities like a cutout around the fuel filler, like it might have been done by the same guys? Not ruling out it's a mishmash of different kits, but I still haven't seen that exact filler cutout or that exact "stepside" front fender on any of the gazillion bodykitted rx7s google could muster up gawd there's a lot of absolutely horrid kits for these cars out there. judge mine how you will, I'd say I got off lightly

my car is now modified beyond the scope of it's old metal cert plate, so It'll need to have the new mods certified, but there are also some old mods which are still installed. Will these just get grandfathered over onto the new electronic cert, or will they actually need to be inspected again?

How can a man own the most cherished sports car, without first owning the least cherished sports car? Be the Alpha and the Omega, tomble-san [TAOIST NOISES INTENSIFY]

I looked through the Japanese auction sites for a while, always amazing how every FD was just loaded with aftermarket doohickies. definitely loved by their owners, for better or worse Trying to work out what kit is on it, I haven't seen another like it. It was fitted in Japan so it's JDM spec yo, but there's hundreds of kits available so quite hard to pin down

both of you get out of my thread

The rusty shit is definitely concentrated around the coolant filler cap, someone's taken it off when the engine was hot for sure, but that could've been anytime really, it was a bitch to clean it off off Finally bought it home and after seeing it the wife has come around, big time. In her words "I just assumed you'd bought another absolute piece of shit"

I'm sort of trying to avoid messing with it too much, especially if it was going to need re-tuning etc. If the turbos give up I really can't say if I'd go hunting for another set of twins or go with an upgrade. Someone does appear to have replaced a lot of the hoses in the rat's nest, PO said he'd gotten in there to replace a solenoid so perhaps it was him It's got an Apexi power FC (with a hand controller - for when I want to press some buttons and make it explode?) Honestly they are just such a gorgeous car I just had to have one. Like everyone, I wish I'd bought it ten years ago for half the price, but that's life. And it is so refreshing to deal with a 90's car for a change (sorry fellow oldschoolers) not everything is broken, there's no rust, there's aftermarket support, the manuals are in english... coming from the starion to the FD is absolute night and day

Last thing today I took it for a drive around the airport which was interrupted by a BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ which was pretty fucking obviously trying to tell me something was up. the "add coolant" buzzer and light was on and the temp was definitely higher than it should be. I had drained and flushed the coolant a week or so ago and thought I was pretty diligent in bleeding the air out, so I topped it up (and it wanted quite a bit), gave it another run, and... coolant all over the floor, under the overflow bottle. I had admittedly seen a little bit of coolant on the floor after driving it in but to be honest I filed it under "I don't want to see that". So again, another "ohhh that's why it was cheap" moment. bad water seals? is the engine pressurizing the coolant and blowing the water out of the separation chamber? nope, just a bad pressure cap on the chamber. topping up the filler, it was running straight out of here and into the expansion tank. with a bit of heat in it it would've been fair pumping out. a $37 fix, and everything's back to normal Suppose I should talk about how it actually drives? so yes it starts hot and cold (and very hot!) so I think the engine is, actually, pretty good. It's got 78k on the clock which is probably still young enough, certainly for what I paid. If it craps out at 100k that'd probably take me decades to run that figure up. with standard porting and turbos it probably doesn't set the rx7 world on fire, power wise - frankly that suits me. my other cars are a pajero and a triumph, and this is the fastest thing I've driven in quite some time. And it's harsh as well, it's loud and smells like two stroke and the suspension is hard as hell. a million years ago I had two series 1 rx7's, one was bog stock and the other one was more extreme than this. 9 times out of 10 if I was going somewhere I'd jump in the standard one. So I'm super glad that this has a comfortable interior, I guess I just wish it were a little more tame. maybe I'm getting old? Only real plans to come are to hunt down the last bits of interior and get it wof'd ........."shouldnt take much" says the previous owner.........

now the bodykit, I can kinda live without. Initially I went looking for a very stock machine but fate would have it (and not for the first time) I ended up with something very much the opposite. It does look like it'll unpick easily enough if the day comes, although that would mean buying stock guards and a stock bumper and most parts aren't cheap. So I'll stick with the kit for now, the downside of this is that I'm limited to exactly bugger all wheels that will fit. As mentioned it came on Enkei 3 piece wheels which sounds nice, but they don't fill the guards, and sit way too far in (even with the 20mm spacers there's extreme wheel rub if you even think about steering. I thought about changing the lips, I thought about changing the barrels, I thought about how that would mean spending 5k just to end up with some beaten to shit centres just to keep the wheel snobs happy. So I cheaped out and got some 9" -20 Rota RKR's because they're pretty much the only thing that would actually fit, straight off the shelf. Realized what I needed on Friday, found some for sale on Saturday in Cambridge, @RXFORD was coming through on Sunday, they were in Auckland Sunday night, and one of my customers was driving a truck straight past on the way to Whangarei the next day, the system works! (compared to the time I tried to bring a starion engine up from CHCH, which wore out it's welcome with about three different OS members, and THREE YEARS LATER, having never actually arrived here, was sold sight unseen) Despite being only an inch smaller they seem absolutely tiny, it's taken some getting used to. But I can turn corners now. Oh but the previous owner had wandered off with the lock nut key. He sent it up to me but it was too late, I'd already created this piece of art what is it? it's a small piece of pipe with five castellations cut into it, hammered into a slightly larger piece of pipe, and welded up with great enthusiasm and little ability. but it did the job! oh and with a socket welded crookedly on the end because I still had half a rod left and by god I was going to use it

I need to get some more pics but stock photos would probably cover most of this off. Other shit I found, well going back to day one when I jumped in it to fire it up and drive it off the truck, it fired up real nice, except the oil pressure gauge which was cheerily sitting at zero. so I'm sitting there while the towie mucks around getting his ramps lined up, wondering if I'm rooting what's left of the engine, but I figured if it actually had zero oil pressure, the towies would have already blown it to bits when they absolutely would have taken it for a hoon at some point on it's way up here. Turns out the senders are notorious for crapping out, I pulled mine and its resistance range was way out. SO I JUST BOUGHT A NEW ONE AND IT TOOK ME 30 SECONDS TO FIND IT ONLINE AND IT WAS THAT EASY BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT HAVING A CAR THAT ISNT AN OBSCURE 40 YEAR OLD MITSUBISHI IS ALL ABOUT Ventured underneath for a look and found the powerplant frame cracked through apparently this is another very common fault on these cars, this one has an aftermarket Mazdaspeed brace (or a Mazdaspeed badge on a red painted factory brace?) but apparently they're barely any better. Will zap it up where it sits

Then I hit the first major red flag - I'd been expecting an "ohh, THAT'S why it was cheap!" moment, and perhaps here it was: Excuse me what the fuck is going on down here? I do not appreciate busted wires and shit. At first I thought a rat might've gotten into the engine bay and chewed through the loom, but I found the rest of the wiring wrapped around the crank pulley shit, I hope it isn't anything importa-aaaand it's the oil metering pump so just to tell you guys how to suck eggs, that's the pump that feeds a wee bit of oil into the chambers to lubricate the seals. Now I did a bit of reading and discovered that the pump on the FD is a stepper motor controlled one, so presumably that means when the wiring got torn out of it, it just failed at whatever flow rate it was allowing at the time, as opposed to stopping working altogether. Hopefully that position was full tit max flow. SO, how long had the pump been fucked? Normally this would throw a fault code, but this thing has an aftermarket ECU so no dice I very politely contacted the previous owner and he said that he'd never seen the busted wires, and frankly knew nothing about it. One interesting tidbit was that he said he had had some boosting problems with the (notoriously finicky) sequential controls on the turbo, had replaced a solenoid, but the problem had come back shortly afterwards, and that that was when he decided to sell the car. Why is this topical? Because when the metering pump loom was torn to bits, it pulled a hose off the vacuum chamber for one of the solenoids! So there's every chance that this occurred pretty much the last time this car was driven. Needless to say it's on premix now.