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.