Happy Holidays!!

Pam and I went to Englewood, Florida with her family over Thanksgiving, and it was a great vacation. That is me getting hit with a wave on the left. :D

It's almost Christmas now, so here's a picture of the 2005 decorated tree.


Hope you all have a Happy Holidays!!!


God Bless,
Chris and Pam

Bronze Medal Winner

What a new post? How can this be?

This morning Steph and I ran in the Fall Frenzy 5K run that she helped setup. This was the first year of this run. I think they did a great job setting up this race, and it was sooooo cheap to enter. $7 entry fee and you get a t-shirt, now that's a bargain. We are actually trying to run in a few 5K's before Thanksgiving, to help prepare us for the Turkey Trot this year. Pam, Mom, and Katie walked in todays race taking turns pushing Peyton in the stroller. Katie and Peyton also participated in the kids Acorn Dash event. They were so cute, I wish we had our camera with us.

The last race we ran was about 3 weeks ago. I ran a 6:50 minute first mile(10 seconds behind Steph), then it was all downhill in that race with a final time of 28 minutes. Today we paced ourselves and ran the first two miles in 7:30 each. Then I slowed down some on the last mile, and I ended up with a 23:49. I was still hurting on the last mile, but I did alot better than the last race. I didn't have to walk any this time.

At the awards ceremony, Steph came away with a 2nd place in her age group, and I pulled out a 3rd place in my age group. Yaaaayyyy! That made it well worth the little bit of training Max and I, and Steph and I put in before this race. I'm going to keep running Max at least once a week from now on, he loves pulling me along. Maybe Steph and I can try to keep running together once a week too.

Tune in next month to see what I post about then. haha. I'm really going to try and post more. I'm replacing a camshaft position sensor and wiper blades on Pam's car tomorrow. I'll see if I can get pictures of that and make another post. :)

Our New Dog

We rescued Max from a shelter in St. Louis this past weekend. He is a Jack Russel mix, and isn't as hyper as everyone told us he would be. He is great. He plays for about 20 minutes after we go for walks, then he will lay down on the couch with us. Even when in the car, he doesn't get too excited, as seen in the below picture. :)

Survey Time

I wanted to work on cars this weekend, but it was waaaaayy tooo hot. I rumaged through the garage and found some parts that I want to install in the RX-7 soon. I did a little playing around and found out I had some options.
Option 1: Silver Indiglo Gauges and Original Black surround


Option 2: Siver Indiglo Gauges and Silver Aluminum surround

I'll just have to figure out how to get this in there without scuffing the glass on top again. :)

Remember that after one of these gets installed, I'm going to mount my silver Auto-timer back in the middle of the gauges like this.


Please leave feedback in the comments section with your name, or send me an email. Thanks!!!!

Round 3: ATF Trick

How does engine flooding happen most of the time, and how can you fix it on a rotary? When you don’t let your RX get up to normal operating temperature before you take it for a quick spin, it might flood on you when you shut it off. There are usually 2 things you can try on a flooded RX, you can take the fuse for the fuel pump out and crank the car several times to get the gas out of the engine with the spark plugs in or with the spark plugs out. Then put the fuse back in, and start the car up. And if it is seriously flooded, you can try the ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) trick. After putting on the first round of mods, my car flooded on me a few times because I didn’t let it warm up before driving short distances. Most of the time, I could let it sit a few hours or overnight, and it would start in the morning.

Flooding the rotary engine this often isn’t good on the engine seals. It cleans off the oil around the Apex seals, which allow the engine to work. The walls and tips of the rotor, as seen in this moving demonstration, all have a thin layer of oil on them that allow the engine to keep a seal. When the rotary engine gets seriously flooded, you get little to no compression out of your engine. This finally happened to me, so I had to do some research and found an odd fix to try. The ATF Trick.

I’m sure everyone is wondering what the ATF Trick is by now. J The ATF trick is something I searched for and found at the rx7 club forum. The trick is to take out your spark plugs, pour ATF in the engine, and rotate the rotors to lube up everything. Then put the spark plugs back in and rotate the engine some more. You are supposed to let the car sit for a few hours, rotate the engine again, then let it sit again for a few more hours or overnight. After you let it sit some more, you can go out and see if the car will start. If it does start, get ready for a smoke show!!



It should run pretty smoky for 5-15 minutes like that, so make sure your neighbors aren’t out when you try this. :) After the smoke starts dying down, you should take your car out and run it hard for 10 minutes to get it’s natural oil coat built back up. When you are done with your test drive, you can let the car cool down, and replace the spark plugs with brand new ones. After that, your car should be running as good or better than it was. I followed the complex unflooding directions at this website.

Round 2: More Replacement Parts

The shifter was a little sloppy when I first got the car and it would sometimes grind while shifting into 2nd gear. Sometimes it was my fault, but most of the time it was the car’s fault. :) To stiffen up the shifting I replaced the shifter bushings, as shown how to do here. And to help it not grind in any gears, I replaced the transmission oil with NEO Synthetic 75-90 (similar to Redline).

Anyway, here’s the story that convinced me to fix how the car was shifting.

One day I was driving with my sister in the car, and we came up to a stop light right next to an old Caprice Classic (or similar boat) that was turning the same way as us. Both turn lanes were going onto an Interstate On Ramp, and the lanes merged into 1 lane before they actually merged onto the Interstate. Anyone from the area would know the North Cunningham and I-74 intersection I’m talking about. Well, these guys were cranking their music, staring at us, and looking like they wanted to race. They even had the inside lane. Since I was in my Turbo car, I thought I could easily take this big boat. The light turned green, and I had the jump in 1st gear, but then I tried to shift into 2nd. Grrind! Grrind! Shift. They were already enough ahead of me, that I let off the gas and took my first "loss". If the car was shifting OK, I knew it would have been a different story.

When I ordered the new shifter bushings and oil, I also threw in a new Thermostat and Fuel Filter. RX-7’s are known to run a little hot (especially the Turbos) and I didn’t know when the last time that these parts had been changed. Better safe than sorry.

The other part that I had to replace was the starter. Luckily I found that out while the car was in a wide-open parking lot where it was easy to push start and get home. Gabe was able to help me get this installed one Saturday afternoon. We were real shadtree mechanics that day. We pulled the car up on the sidewalk, so we could put jack stands under it. I had a gravel driveway at the time, and the sidewalk was the best stable surface we had to jack the car up on. We might have actually worked in some shade that afternoon from a nearby tree. Look closely at the ATF picture in the next post, and you might be able to see the tree and sidewalk through the smoke. This was a pretty easy replacement, just a little awkward using my incomplete set of tools, and working on a sidewalk. :)

Stay tuned for Engine Flooding and the ATF Trick next.

Round 1: Intake, Plugs, and Wires

Here is the before shot of the engine bay before I got my hands on it. Notice the white wipers still on the car. :)


The first(not including the wipers) and easiest mod that I ended up doing to the TII was some new, red Magnacor 10mm spark plug wires.


The next easy mod was a red, used Bonez Intake that I purchased off of the RX7forum. Notice the shiny little breather filter for the air pump right above the main filter.


I really liked the red on the intercooler, and it made me want to add as much red into the engine bay as possible. Here's the picture of the engine bay after the first round of shadetree mechanic mods. The red is slowly spreading.

Independence Day

Happy 4th of July to everyone.



Has everyone seen a good fireworks show this weekend? We haven't yet, but plan on seeing one tonight. Has everyone already been to a family cook out? We had our family cookout on the 3rd, so we could rest and relax all day today. It's been a great weekend so far. Pam and I finished making our Flag Cake this morning for our holiday festivities. It is delicious. I bet she is going to have pictures of it up soon on her site.

I'm going to go look for my fireworks now. I hope everyone has had and is still having a great holiday weekend.

The Beginning of the RX-7 Turbo II

About 4 years ago I paid off my first car, a maroon ’87 RX-7 SE. There was nothing wrong with the car except that the paint was starting to fade on the sunroof. I was reading on the RX-7 forum all the time looking for projects to start with this car. Since it had an NA (naturally aspirated) engine, there wasn’t much I could do to it compared to the Turbo model. So I started reading more and more about Turbo II RX-7s. Mostly about what I could mod on it with my small budget and still get some horsepower gains. Meanwhile, my friends Nate and Gabe started looking for Turbo II cars for sale on the Internet. They found some nice ones, but they were either too pricy or too far away, and I was still reading up on the TIIs. Each day looking at the ones for sale and learning about them made me want to trade/sell my current RX-7 and get the turbo model even more.

Finally, Nate found a white ’88 RX-7 Turbo II for sale in Joplin, MO. The owner wanted to sell it within a week so he could buy a newer faster car ASAP. Nate said that he would go with me to pick the car up, if I did end up buying it. After seeing the picture of the car,

emailing the owner back and forth for a day finding out info, and giving him a call to talk about it, I was like, I want to buy this car. I asked about all the things I’ve read on the forum that usually are bad on these cars (mostly electrical problems), and it didn’t seem to be showing any signs or symptoms, so the wheels started turning. How am I going to get money for this car? When am I going to be able to make the trip across MO this week? How am I going to sell my current car? At that time I was already talking to Gabe’s brother-in-law, Kevin, for a few weeks about buying my current car, so I already had a possible buyer. I talked to Kevin again the next day and see if he could buy it that week, and I also got to the bank for a loan for the price of the new (to me) car.

Everything seemed to be working out. I made arrangements with the owner to meet him that weekend, look at the car, and most likely, buy it. I told Nate that I was going to pick up the car and told him to get ready to go. He already had plans that weekend, so he backed out. I still tease him about it sometimes that he promised me he would pick up the car with me. J Since Nate couldn’t go, Gabe and I planned on making the long trip. We thought we could drive from central Illinois to the other side of Missouri and back in one day. It was a hot day, and we rode for along time with the windows down because I thought the air didn’t work. This was another funny part of the trip. Really, it worked, but it didn’t work that well in stop and go traffic I drove to work in every day.

We drove through St. Louis on the way:



I brought my camera, but must have been camera shy because this is one of the only pictures I took. It was still pretty hot out, so we decided to try the air at high speeds. Of course it worked fine. Gabe still teases me about that sometimes. Finally, after some St. Louis traffic and a few road construction slow-downs, we made it to Joplin.

We talked a few minutes to the car’s owner and his dad, and found out that the bank would be closing within the hour since we had arrived later than we planned. Gabe and I took a quick look at the car, and the only disappointing thing about it was that it had been in a wreck. That was one of my questions that he had danced around, but now that I’d come all this way, he told me about it. It had a 2-year-old paint job on it, so everything outside was looking good. There were some spots in the engine bay that didn’t get as fixed as they could have, but I was already in love. I didn’t care. We had been on the road for 8 HOURS and I wanted to take my baby for a spin. On the test drive, I could tell that it already was a lot faster than my current car. I probably scared the kid a little, and I wasn’t even driving as hard as the rotaries like it, up to 7-8K on the tachometer. I kept it to 5-6K just to let the turbo boost for a few seconds. When the test drive was done, we had to rush to the bank to get a notary to sign a bill of sale and transfer the title.

Finally, the car was mine!!! The seller was even nice enough to fill up my gas tank on the way out of town. I was driving the new white Turbo II and Gabe got to drive the maroon SE back. St. Louis was only about 5 hours away. Since it was already late in the afternoon, we called our friend in St. Louis to see if we could hang out with him that night and finish the trip home in the morning. I don’t see how truck drivers do it. I guess it would be more of a luxury ride in the big rig than in the compact sport cars. And it was fun taking turns following each other home in the RX-7s. It probably looked pretty cool to people when they saw two sweet-looking sports cars pass them.

We got back home the next day, and there was still one piece of the puzzle to sort out. Who was going to buy the SE so I could pay for the TII? I talked to Kevin a week later, and he was ready to buy the SE. We settled on a price, and the car was his. Remember that Kevin bought this car because it is another funny story.

I’ve got the new car now, so what am I going to do with it? Here’s a couple teaser pictures: before and after shots of the first thing I did to the car on my budget mods.


Before: White Wipers


After: Black Wipers

Stolen from PammieCakes

My wife, PammieCakes, took this out of one of her posts, but since I took the picture(and because it's so cute) I'm posting it here.

EMMYLOU, EMMERSON, EMMELIA EARHART

Please enjoy this adorable picture of our cat, Emmy.

Making PammieCakes Wait

I've been tagged by my wife PammieCakes to answer 5 questions. I keep postponing it, but I think I am finally going to answer since she posted a link to my site and people might actually be looking for the Q&A.

1. RX-8 or a garage stocked with every tool and car part you could ever want? Pick one and tell me why.
This is a very hard question. I'm leaning towards the RX-8 right now because then we would have a brand new car that wouldn't have any problems. But I would really have to go with a garage stocked with every tool and car part you could ever want. This would have to be someone else's garage, since our garage is so small. Then with all these parts, I could fix up my RX-7 exactly how I wanted to, and try to do all the work myself with the new tools.

2. You are a car. What’s your make and model? Also, name three things included in your standard package, and three optional extras. Be as creative as you can.
A tricky question with endless choices and options. I'm going to have to be the Gen3 Mazda RX-7 to keep within the rotary family. The standard package would have to include a 5-speed transmission, leather interior, and twin-turbos. Optional extras would have to be a single turbo conversion to install later after I blew up the twin-turbos. Then I'd add a FrontMount InterCooler, Intake, and Exhaust. I know that this adds up to 4 extras, and it wasn't that creative, but that's been a dream car of mine for along time.

3. If you could have any job, what would it be?
Of course it would be the job where I got paid tons of money and didn't have to do any real work except browse on the internet. Really, I'd probably go away from comptuers and either try to be a real hands-on mechanic. Or I would try to be one of my first dream jobs, like a Professional Golfer or Bass Fisherman. :)

4. If you could give one piece of advice to someone, what would it be?
Don't sweat the small stuff is the line that I usually hear. I'd put it more like don't let the little things in life get you upset.

5. How come we can’t get a puppy?
Now, you're putting me on the spot. The final answer is...
We can't get a puppy until we have our own house that has a big fenced in backyard. Since you're working 12 hour days and will be in school soon, we won't have enough time to care for our puppy. So we need a house with a backyard to make it easier to care for our puppy. I do agree that we will be getting a small dog, when we finally get one.

I hope everyone was able to enjoy my answers. And I hope PammieCakes is a little happier that I finally answered the questions. This was fun because I got to read other people's blogs, and it made me put another post on my blog.

Come back soon for pictures of the RX-7's shadetree transformation.

Cougar fixed, but driveway not

Pam's car, the Cougar, has been worked on a few times the last few months. It has been leaking oil in the driveway about the past 6 months. After a few times to the shop, an oil leak and a tranmission leak have been fixed. Here's a picture of the damage that it caused on our driveway though.


Now that we fixed the leak, we need to work on the squeak. :)
It has a squeaky belt sometimes, but it still drives great after the other work was completed.

I have some concrete cleaner solution that needs to be used on our driveway soon. Since we have found time to stop the leaks, I just need to find time to clean up their mess.

2/3 cars with no leaks ain't bad. Cougar and Civic don't leak, but the RX-7 is still has a small oil leak that might be fixed someday. I just can't park it in the driveway after we clean up this oil spill. I'm getting tired of talking about things that need to be fixed, so that's the end of this post.

Virgin Blogger

My wife is so excited that I'm starting a blog. Even if it is for posting pictures of my car projects. I'll have to add more later. Just want to see how it looks now.

Here's a taste of what is to come:
1988 RX7 TurboII
1992 Civic HB DX
1996 Cougar XR7