Posted by leo | Posted in Car Development, Uncategorized | Posted on 24-08-2010
I picked up a new present for us yesterday. 
Motor! It’s a pulled block from an n/a S4 (there were two kinds of 2nd generation rx7s, we have the earlier S4 car). I saw it pop up on craigslist and jumped on it straight away. It was pulled from a daily driver that was getting its own turbo II motor upgrade. It has only been out of the car a month and looks to be in good condition. It’s been rebuilt by FD3s engineering at some point. We don’t have a lot more history than that. The coolant seals were tested fine and it was running fine a month ago. It cost us way less than a rebuild would cost. The plan is to put this in the car as our primary motor. The motor that’s in there now will then become our known good spare.
The guy we got it from was a real rotor head and hooked us up with a bunch more spare parts. That’s the great part of running the lower trim levels. No one wants the parts!
Manifolds, a tranny, starter, alt, and a cut wiring harness (good for replacement connectors!). While we were fiddling with the new motor, nick get started on mounts for the new wingy.
We started swapping parts off our blown motor on to the new (to us) shiny one. First off, the flywheels.
Just a couple of 2 and 1/3 in nuts later and were good. The bearings in there were shot. We have some spares but the seal at the end will need to get ordered. Some of the coolant lines on the blown motor were… bad.
The rats nest comes off.
Some block off plates are moved and the motor is shifter back so we can get at the water pump. It’s amazing how light the “keg” is. Two people can easily lift it.
On this motor, we are going to take some advice we got (several times already 
) and premix the gas. Rotaries are like two stroke motors is that they need their lubrication sprayed into the combustion chamber. These motors have an oil pump and oil injectors that serve this purpose. These pumps can fail and when that happens you can kiss your motor good bye. So we are going to mix oil into our gas as we fill up the car and remove the oil injection system. This is where the injectors once went.
The tentative plan right now is to just blue it with a bolt. We also removed the water pump. It looks serviceable still but we want to make sure we have a nice tight seal for the housings and the pump (it could be what caused our failure at the last race). The pulleys have to come off first. (We have a good spare set now!)
Boy was this thing a pain to get off. One of the studs was so rusted that it filled the passage with rust and it took us a good ten minutes with a hammer and penetrating lubricant to get it off.
That’s it for tonight. I have a good shopping list to work with and I think we have a great new motor!
