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