Recommissioning my 82 RX7

chiquito1228 said:

In reply to sevenracer :

Thank you so hard to find 4x110. I was just thinking of running the oem wheels

You can run oem's. I'd buy longer studs and wheel spacers to move them out toward the fenders.

One of my sets of wheels are steelies from Diamond Racing. If they are still around, I think you could get a set of 13X7's with 4" backspacing and 4X110. They were pretty cheap when I bought them compared to alloys and not that heavy.

Also, I think you may be able to find some adapters on ebay that bolt to the 4X110 rotors and provide 4X100 studs. I got a set of those adapters from  a 1st gen RX7 lemons racer that he used with some 4X100 Miata or Honda aftermarket wheels and said they fit fine. I haven't tried them yet.

In reply to sevenracer :

I seen the spacers and i know of some people running them on hpde/hsax events but to me thats just more things that could go wrong. Instead of 4 lug nuts per wheel now theres 8.

In reply to chiquito1228 :

I agree, adapters are not ideal. The ones I got I believe are steel, so pretty heavy too. 

I'm heading to the Deals Gap rotary rally this weekend. Last year I trailered the car up as I had just gotten it running and still had the startup tune. This year I'm driving the car up - its first road trip, and some additional sorting was needed. The car runs well and now has been fully tuned, but it's definitely a driving project.

Highlights:

Shocks: Swapped out the Tokico Blues. Those were way harsh on the street. On rippled pavement, the whole car shook and rattled. Swapped all four for a set of Excel-G's. I think they're the only stock fitment still available. Big improvement in ride.

Bumpstops: To address rear tire rub with bigger wheels/tires - infrequently with just me in the car, alot more so with a 220 lb buddy riding along. I had cut the stock bump stops years ago when I added lowering springs, so I swapped in new aftermarket ones - they were way too tall. Cut them down, and still may cut them more. These are pretty rigid, and ideally, I'd like some softer, progressive ones, but didn't find any that just bolted in. But no rubbing - good for now.

Trans mount: When I modded the mount for the turbo trans, I wasn't sure if I would need to change it to address vibrations, I just tacked it together to start. It actually works great, no vibration issues at all, so I finally pulled it out plated some openings and welded it up. Kind of surprised the tack welds held it together the past year.

No photo's, but I spent a good amount of time going over the brakes, oil and cooling lines, and wiring looking for anything amiss. Found a few minor things, but mostly all good. I did find the pin that connects the clutch pedal to the master was missing the circlip and the pin was backing out. Circlip nowhere to be found of course, but I was able to loop some safety wire into the groove and spin it tight, so I think it will do the job to retain the pin.

And I partially buttoned up the interior to quiet the car down a bit and reduce rattles. It all needs to come back out including the dash, but that's for another day.

I did also try to replace the circa 2005 wiper blades before the trip, but no dice. These are pin type arms, not j hook, and the parts store didn't have anything that would work (some had holes for the pins, but were too wide for the pins to snap in place. I put rainx on all the windows, and anti-fog on the windshield and door windows. A good amount of rain in the forecast for the weekend.

Also, aired up the original space saver spare - still had 50psi after 15+ yrs. And I put the jack back in. The pin for the jack handle went missing  at some point (I envision it having a grand time somewhere with a bunch of 10mm sockets). Luckily, I had some 1/4 inch rod that fit with just drilling out the hole slightly. tacked that in place.

And first leg of journey complete. Spending the night near Asheville, working from here tomorrow, then on to Bryson City tomorrow afternoon.

Car did great.

Oh and the car was a hit with the young guys working at both O-Reilly's stores I went to - they all came out to check out the car, ask questions, take pictures.

I did actually find some wipers that should fit once I got to Asheville

Good talking with you at DGRR as always. Car looked good! What's your impression of the Excel-Gs now? I swapped them into my SA just before DGRR and they made a huge difference. I don't think any of the original struts/shocks were blown but my car felt much better. The only thing I was unsure of was how much to torque down the top nut on the rear shocks. Going with the OEM 8(?) mm of thread protrusion seems to really compress the rubber bushing so I backed it off quite a bit - just to where all the threads were engaged.

In reply to infernosg :

Hey - was great to see you again at DGRR. Your SA is like a time capsule - very cool.

I'm really happy with the Excel G's. My car has racing beat lowering springs and a RB front sway bar and no rear bar. With this combo, the ride is smoothed out, but body roll is kept in check. The Tokico blues were really harsh. I still need to cut down the rear bump stops further, it bottoms out on some larger bumps. As far as tightening the rubber bushings, I think I tightened them more than what you describe, but agree that they don't need to be really cinched down too much.

A quick recap of the Deals Gap Rotary Rally (meant to post sooner, but had to jump right into getting the FC race car ready for VIR this past weekend):

Car did great - a little over 700 miles of driving for the weekend, and I didn't have to even open my tool roll at all. There was a good bit of rain, but Saturday was nice.

Got to drive the tail of the dragon for the first time - which is crazy since I only live 3 hours away. The FB isn't a perfect match for that road, the turns are very tight, requiring a lot of input for the slow steering, and the speeds were often a little too fast for 2nd but too slow for 3rd. Luckily, the turbo torque was a lot of fun coming out of the corners - even in 3rd. And I continue to be blown away by the Conti ECS tires - phenomenal grip and no squealing at all from a 300TW tire.

I actually had a better drive on the way to the dragon. Connected up with a couple who live in the area and they took us on a great road out of Franklin towards Robbinsville. A lot less traffic, and lots of turns, but not as tight. I was following the husband in his FD at a good clip, but nothing crazy, and his wife was following (distantly) in her stock FB.

The event was great overall and I really enjoyed geeking out on rotary stuff. There was a good number of first gen RX7's this year from cars that looked show room new to ones that were pretty haggard. From all stock to seriously modified.

Some notables:

A 91yr old fellow drove his bone stock 79 model car from Missouri with his son. He bought the car new, parked it for about 15 years when it started smoking and about 4 years ago rebuilt the motor himself (first rotary build at 87!) and got it back on the road. He drove the dragon with it too.

Another favorite of mine was a guy who had a blow through turbo setup with a Nikki carb mounted to an S4 turbo motor. He had done this swap years ago and daily drove it for a long time. He said he hadn't checked anything like AFR's in years, he just drives it. But he said he hadn't been driving it much for the last couple of years because he built a Boxster with a supercharged LS motor , he dusted off the RX7 and drove it up from Charleston SC for the DGRR.

A couple of pics:

Haven't updated this in a while since nothing really has been happening with the car unfortunately. It's not all bad, I had a busy racing season this year culminating in my first SCCA Runoffs.

Shortly after I took the car up to Deal's Gap, it started leaking coolant into the passenger floorboard - heater core. I was plenty busy with other things, and a car with no AC is not so fun in the summer, so it stayed parked until recently.

But a couple of weeks ago I did bypass the heater core so I can drive it again. I already needed to pull the dash to put a cover on it, so sometime hopefully before the end of the year, I'll get a new heater core and swap it out while I work on the dash.

Otherwise, the car runs really well, but still needs some sorting. Here's the next things on the list:

Add a diode to the alternator excitor to prevent a current drain.

Fix the interior lights that stopped working.

Connect up the idle air control valve. The stock one is installed, just never wired up. A little annoying to keep it from stalling until it gets some heat in it.

Upgrade the blow off valve - when the car is running high boost and you back off the throttle even just partially, the power surges a bit before trailing off. Not a big deal, under most circumstances on the street, but not ideal. Hoping that an aftermarket blow off valve will handle this more gracefully.

There's plenty more after that, but this'll be a start.

Deal's Gap rotary rally is about 3 weeks away, and I'm planning to drive the car up again from Charlotte.

With that in mind, I'm trying to knock out a few things ahead of that. Looking at my list of things from my last post, the only thing I knocked out is fixing the interior lights, lol.

I noticed that the water pump was weeping, so installed a new one. I also ordered a larger radiator fan. The water temps start to climb at stop lights in heavy traffic. I actually had an old Ford Taurus 16 inch electric fan/shroud installed in the car when it had the 12A. Fit the stock radiator pretty well and moved a lot of air. Not enough clearance to the water pump with the 13b. I trimmed down the shroud, hoping I could offset it to the side and clear the water pump, but that was a no go. So, I ordered a couple of fans from Summit that I should have next week.

Revisited the tire rub at the rear. Taller bump stops stop the rub, but leave very little suspension travel. Time to fix the root cause. I took the bump stops off and taped the wheel arches and went for a drive. Hard to see, but tires are just barely rubbing the inside lip of the fender. 

Thanks to Dusterbird, I have use of a fender roller:

Passenger side went pretty well, although the metal was pretty stubborn, did not fold in easily. unfortunately, and even with heating, the paint didn't survive intact:

On the driver's side, I paid for sins from 20 years ago (I bought some track wheels and tires, and discovered the driver's side rubbed the night before a track day. Tried to make it better with a body hammer, and unsurprisingly made a lumpy mess of things):

Tried to even out the metal with the roller, and then with the body hammer. Ultimately, was able to roll the fender, but the paint was worse for the wear. A repaint of the car is planned for some point in the future, so not the end of the world.

 I decided to roll the fronts too, and the thinner metal rolled like butter.

I haven't installed the interior yet because I need to pull the dash and replace the heater core, and if I'm pulling the dash, I need to install the dash cap, and dye/paint it to match, and all the lower dash, and center console and door panels will need dyed too. So, yeah not ready to tackle all that. For the time being, I wanted to better mount my CANbus gauge, a way to mount my phone to the dash instead of the windshield, and have a usb charger. Still in progress, phone mount will be on the right side, but you get the idea:

So, after buttoning up the water pump, I had one of those wake up in bed moments-i put 2 paper towels in the water pump housing to keep gasket pieces out. Did I remember to pull the towels out? Surely, I would have noticed them. Ugh, 90% sure, but not 100%.

Pulled it back apart, no paper towels in there, re-assembled, filled and test drive. And... the block to housing gasket is leaking. Didn't think I disturbed that.

Back apart again this evening.

I'm such a hack!

Long time no post, but I am trying to get some momentum over the winter on actually doing some of the sorting/finishing that the car needs instead of just driving it as is.

To that end, I decided to try to eliminate the current drain that kills the battery within a couple of days. I pulled all the fuses in the car, and still had about 170mA current drain. After that, I disconnected the alternator, or tried to. Couldn't get the harness plug to unplug, and wound up boogering up one connector trying to hold it with pliers, and pulling wires out of its crimped terminal.

But that connector was going to need to get replaced anyway, 'cause I found this:

Clearly something's not right. Back when I was trying to get the TII swap in and started, I wasn't sure how the Haltech harness wired to the alternator. I was working with a well known tuner, and he told me how to connect it - but he didn't seem to know how the circuit worked, just how he had gotten it to work. So, now I've embarked on a deep dive in how the orig car wiring and alt worked, how a stock S5 would be wired, and then how the Haltech should interface between the two. Which I should have done in the first place. Anyway, I think I have a pretty good idea of what's needed, and I sent an email to Haltech to hopefully confirm.

There's actually a lot of posts (and a lot of confusion) on RX7club about using an S5 alternator in a first gen with the original harness, but nothing I found about how the Haltech fits in. Current drain though the alternator is a common problem on 1st gens running S5 alternators, due to how the ALT warning lamp is wired, but I don't have that connected.

So, yay running car now disabled. Wasn't so bad just re-connecting the battery neg cable when I wanted to go for a drive and popping it back off when I got home. Should've picked something else on the list as I tried to build momentum! 

It's not how the alternator light wiring is wired, it's the choke and check relay.  The specific issue (by memory, I did do a long writeup on it on rx7club) is that there are other things on the circuit that goes to the voltage sense wire, in a 1st gen.  But not a Series 5.  When you turn the ignition off, that wire gets grounded by the other things on that circuit.  That keeps something in the S5 regulator awake, causing the drain.  In a Series 5 that wire is electrically dead with the key off.

The fix, for me, was to splice a diode into that wire so that it never sees ground.  What specification diode?  I don't know, I had an airbag module from an SN95 Mustang that had a row of discrete diodes on the circuit board, so on the theory of if I don't know how to size a diode, any place is as good as any other to start from, I desoldered one and used it.  It's a low current circuit so probably anything would work. 

Edit: https://www.rx7club.com/1st-generation-specific-1979-1985-18/s4-alt-vs-s5-alt-into-fb-question-1011841/#post12087258

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Yeah, I was being general about "how the light is wired", the choke and check relay being part of that. But right now for me - that's not connected to the ALT. So, the current drain fix is still an unknown. I need to see if it's still there when I correct the wiring.

And it was many years before I realized you here was you on RX7club 

In reply to sevenracer :

That's where the P in PJ comes from 

On my car, the drain would go away with the alternator unplugged.  Another fun thing that I learned, while trying to find an electrical noise issue (that led to swapping in the S5 alternator) is that the Mitsubishi alternators that Mazda used will self energize!  I had a weird electrical glitch that would occur after driving for 40-50 minutes.  I thought to unplug the alternator to see if the problem went away.  What I found was that it would happily keep charging even unplugged.  So I took the belt off   It was in fact the alternator diodes going crappy when they were hot, so I swapped in the S5 unit because it was all I had kicking around.

Just had a chance to get back to this today.

tldr - I'm dumb and wired it wrong which smoked a wire that shouldn't have been connected, but no other damage. Haltech support was great, and they gave me something to check for the battery drain. Car is running again with slightly kludged wiring, so still some additional steps to take when I have time to get it fully sorted.

I emailed Haltech and they responded with useful info the next day. Basically, the 13B harness they sell had 3 wires to the ALT, and I assumed that meant all were needed, but it turns out there are more than one scenario for 13B's, so they give you the leads you might need. And they did confirm a mistake I found in their wiring diagram that wasn't really relevant to my issues but did cost me some time trying to figure out why the heck I still had power to the ALT connector when the fuse in their docs was removed. And they also gave me helpful info on what might be causing the battery drain. Overall very happy with their support - fast response and helpful.

For now, i just wanted the car operable again, I didn't chase the drain which is still present. I just replaced the scorched connector with the correct wiring, and verified proper operation.

To sum up the change - I just removed one lead that was from the Haltech fusebox that supplies constant 12V. I had connected this to the Battery output of the alternator (mistakenly thought that lead needed 12V - not that it was supplying 12V). This provided another path of current from the ALT to the Haltech fusebox, and it was flowing too much current for the pin in the connector and the 20awg wire in the harness, luckily, I think the pin was the fuse.

Car is back in action (and it loves the colder weather), voltage regulation is good (which was expected because nothing changed there).

So still to do on this:

Finalize the wiring - I did a bit of a hack to the existing wiring because the stock intercooler blocks access to the back of the ALT, and re-installing said intercooler is finicky at best (the bracket for it is tweaked). Today, I just wanted to verify operation.

Find the drain - Haltech may have the answer here - their setup powers their relay coils with constant +12V (assuming a kill switch I guess), so they suggested changing that to an IGN switched line that is also in their fusebox.

Get the Alternator light to function. Currently not connected, but I'd like to have it as it also indicates if I lose the belt that drives the water pump. With Haltech harness, voltage regulation happens with a 12V source and 470ohm resistor. Stock 13B's use the ALT light instead. my 12A car uses a relay to light the ALT light. I think I can make it work, but need to game that out further. Probably will use a new relay instead of the gigantic 42 year old stock one that also controlled the choke.