hey, no need to apologise for having showing an interest hahaha!
They're valid points you make and I'm fully aware my story hasn't exactly helped the rotary's reputation for unreliability. BUT! there are mitigating circumstances to be fair.
Turbocharging is a lot of what breaks FDs certainly. (What breaks RX-8s is a compromised engine design aimed at meeting emissions legislation. Once Mazda re-introduced the correct number of oil injectors in the chambers, the Renesis RX-8 engines stopped breaking, but that's a whole new story). Yeah, turbocharging, or more specifically the heat it generates. A lot of these cars are coming on for twenty years old (mine celebrates her 20th this year) and the extreme heat of the twins is taking their toll, not just on making the solenoids and vacc lines brittle, but also wiring looms and other vital stuff like oilways.
The other main killer is the wretched state of imports. As I said somehwere earlier, a lot of the good cars from Japan are simply too expensive for the importers in this day and age, so they have to feed off scraps bringing in tired cars with issues and problems. No-one is going to pay 13 grand for an FD nowadays. If you buy one for less than five grand, even now, you have to expect it to need some serious love. When I bought my first one the average price was ten grand all day long. And even if it was a good-ish car in Japan, by the time its sat in an auction yard for months, then waited at the docks for weeks, then struggled over on a slowboat from the east, it'll be as like as not in the throes of water seal failure from the engine being static for so long...
Take any 20-year old car and try to literally double its original power output and see how well it stands up to it without a serious overhaul of the engine and supporting architecture! That's basically what you're doing, taking a 1.3 litre lump designed to run ~250bhp ish and asking it to put out 450 They're on a knife-edge of control by then, if you haven't got a good mapper all it takes is one lean cell and a moment's detonation and it's goodbye tips. That's where they really fail against reciprocating engines, you have a bit more leeway with a piston, it'll take slightly more abuse before something breaks. With the Wankel (snigger) It just goes bang
There are "equivalent" Japanese from the 90's crop of mini-supercars cars that have reputations for reliablity but break just as much as RX-7s, yet for some reason it doesn't make the press or forums so much. I bet you could go onto the GTR owners forum and pick ten threads in as many minute swhere the owners have burnt number six piston to a crisp, or the rings have dropped their locator tabs and spun into the bores. Evos have plenty of weak points, as you're no doubt well aware. Try getting a 300ZX to hit over 400bhp without paying a lot of money to overcome that weird cross-flow double intercooler malarkey Nissan obviously bunged in after a liquid lunch!
As to mine, well, don't forget this is five years of development stuffed into four pages, so it seems worse than it was at the time (my thread on FDUK is 80 pages, and I didn't even start that until 2008, years into the story!). Six years if you count my first FD which didn't so much go wrong as I murdered it lol. And who knows, if we'd realised the alarm was a silent assassin at the heart of it all, maybe I'd be two engines to the good.
My FB RX-7 has 60 000 miles on the clock on its original engine that's not been touched since it started life in Hiroshima 28 years ago, and there are cars that have done well over 100k on their original engines. In the States there are even higher mileages. Rotaries don't have to be unreliable; like a lot of cars sad to say, it's the owners that make them so
If that sounded liek a big long rant, it wasn't meant to, just my feeble attempt to redress the balance and patch up the damage to the Rex's reputation that my terrible tale of woe caused ;D
And yeah, motorbikes are dangerous bloody things. Don't do it, kids
They're valid points you make and I'm fully aware my story hasn't exactly helped the rotary's reputation for unreliability. BUT! there are mitigating circumstances to be fair.
Turbocharging is a lot of what breaks FDs certainly. (What breaks RX-8s is a compromised engine design aimed at meeting emissions legislation. Once Mazda re-introduced the correct number of oil injectors in the chambers, the Renesis RX-8 engines stopped breaking, but that's a whole new story). Yeah, turbocharging, or more specifically the heat it generates. A lot of these cars are coming on for twenty years old (mine celebrates her 20th this year) and the extreme heat of the twins is taking their toll, not just on making the solenoids and vacc lines brittle, but also wiring looms and other vital stuff like oilways.
The other main killer is the wretched state of imports. As I said somehwere earlier, a lot of the good cars from Japan are simply too expensive for the importers in this day and age, so they have to feed off scraps bringing in tired cars with issues and problems. No-one is going to pay 13 grand for an FD nowadays. If you buy one for less than five grand, even now, you have to expect it to need some serious love. When I bought my first one the average price was ten grand all day long. And even if it was a good-ish car in Japan, by the time its sat in an auction yard for months, then waited at the docks for weeks, then struggled over on a slowboat from the east, it'll be as like as not in the throes of water seal failure from the engine being static for so long...
Take any 20-year old car and try to literally double its original power output and see how well it stands up to it without a serious overhaul of the engine and supporting architecture! That's basically what you're doing, taking a 1.3 litre lump designed to run ~250bhp ish and asking it to put out 450 They're on a knife-edge of control by then, if you haven't got a good mapper all it takes is one lean cell and a moment's detonation and it's goodbye tips. That's where they really fail against reciprocating engines, you have a bit more leeway with a piston, it'll take slightly more abuse before something breaks. With the Wankel (snigger) It just goes bang
There are "equivalent" Japanese from the 90's crop of mini-supercars cars that have reputations for reliablity but break just as much as RX-7s, yet for some reason it doesn't make the press or forums so much. I bet you could go onto the GTR owners forum and pick ten threads in as many minute swhere the owners have burnt number six piston to a crisp, or the rings have dropped their locator tabs and spun into the bores. Evos have plenty of weak points, as you're no doubt well aware. Try getting a 300ZX to hit over 400bhp without paying a lot of money to overcome that weird cross-flow double intercooler malarkey Nissan obviously bunged in after a liquid lunch!
As to mine, well, don't forget this is five years of development stuffed into four pages, so it seems worse than it was at the time (my thread on FDUK is 80 pages, and I didn't even start that until 2008, years into the story!). Six years if you count my first FD which didn't so much go wrong as I murdered it lol. And who knows, if we'd realised the alarm was a silent assassin at the heart of it all, maybe I'd be two engines to the good.
My FB RX-7 has 60 000 miles on the clock on its original engine that's not been touched since it started life in Hiroshima 28 years ago, and there are cars that have done well over 100k on their original engines. In the States there are even higher mileages. Rotaries don't have to be unreliable; like a lot of cars sad to say, it's the owners that make them so
If that sounded liek a big long rant, it wasn't meant to, just my feeble attempt to redress the balance and patch up the damage to the Rex's reputation that my terrible tale of woe caused ;D
And yeah, motorbikes are dangerous bloody things. Don't do it, kids