luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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Right, so moving on again... the Power Commander had a two-edged cut about it; it was nice having all this information at my disposal, but it also made me paranoid. I kept thinking "blimey, that injector duty's a bit high" or "intake temp's too hot" when I was stuck in traffic and could do naff-all about it. Or could I? The intake vent for the stock intercooler was a sad compromise at best, and investigation showed that the extra depth of the MazdaSpeed bumper had partially blocked it anyway. So I set to with some scraps of carbon and alloy I had lying around and fashioned a intake snout thing Which to be fair did look a wee bit traveller, but I was sure it'd make a difference. It was also nice and light, so I didn't feel too guilty about mounting it to the bumper It made a difference... intake temps dropped by at least two degrees. Oh well, it was on there now, might as well stay Got a set of Ganador Super Mirrors. It never fails to make me chuckle the way the Japanese love throwing words like "Super" at everything. These presumably fill a gap in the Ganador range between "Average" and "Astounding" mirrors. There's nothing wrong with the stock FD mirrors, other than they look a bit like errrmmm, spaniels' ears, if you know what I mean, but the Ganadors are proper JDM cool and pay homage to that style icon that made a thousand M*x P*wer Saxos and Corsa, the M-style mirror. What a pig to fit, though. The stockers are held on by these two bolts here; The Ganador have smaller diameter studs that slip through the threaded inserts that the originals bolted into. This means you have to tighten up nuts on the ends of the studs, and this means you have to get the doorcard off... ...and then get your arm up through the hole where the speaker mounts, inside the door, and working blind, screw nuts onto the studs for the mirrors. As you can see, that's quite a distance for someone who, like most humans, only has the two major joints per arm. Plus there isn't clearance to get a ratchet on, it all had to be done by spanner, five degrees-turn at a time. It caused me quite significant damage on the sharp edges of the doorskin, not to mention the number of fags I had to smoke in an effort to calm down between attempts. Fair to say, I hope they never come loose, I'm not sure I could face doing that again Here's the car rocking the prizefighter cauliflower ear look ;D Another purchase that was too good to miss came up when a club acquaintance sold up his FD and bought a nice, sensible Bimmer. He was selling up all his good aftermarket stuff, and who could possibly resist one of these.... yep, it's another OMG moment, a full ARC titanium exhaust system Its sooooooooooo beautiful and soooooo light, I didn't care if it worked like rubbish, I had to have it. I met the guy half-way, at Clackett lane services to collect it. In the snow. In a 300bhp RX-7, that's how much I wanted it. I nearly died eight times on the way, but it was worth it Every single part of it was pure titanium, every part. I get tumescent just looking at the photos, is that wrong? Even the little plate where some Japanes artisan had to etch the company logo and slogan was made from lovely Ti. And what a slogan it is too, gotta love Japlish. Or is it Engrish? It was pleasantly quiet, too, made the car have a lovely growl far removed from the boomy roar of the Nur Spec. It did mean the cat had to go, but hey. It's not as though wankels (snigger) are bad on emissions anyway Oh, that's right, they're terrible. Worry about that come MOT time. The summer was good, loads of shows and the car performed well. Here she is at Rotorstock; There was a cloud on the horizon, though. Quite literally. The car had been smoking for a while now, and not the usual rotary smoke on start up (they're filthy till they get warm). In fact, the warmer it got, the worse it got. Getting stuck in traffic was a nightmare, the longer I was stationary, the thicker the blue clouds of oil smoke from the exhaust became. Now what the hell was causing that, then? there's no valve guides to fail, no piston rings to blow-by and I knew the turbos were good because we'd put them on just that year. It was a mystery, so I did the only sensible thing, ignored it and hoped it'd go away Needless to say, it didn't. It got worse. I bought a set of HID light upgrades to treat the car in the hope she'd stop misbehaving after being rewarded with a bit of luuurrrve. The lights, dunno if I made the point strongly enough, are wretched on FDs. Here by way of contrast; before after before after That's right, they were still rubbish. They were better than they were, but it was hardly a night-and-day difference if you'll pardon the pun. I've found out there's no real cure for the fact the reflector bowl just isn't very well designed. It doesn't matter how much light output you're throwing into it, it just can't focus it well enough. Dang! A moment of ephipany came during the immense, stupid queues trying to get into the Trax show 2009... the car was smoking so bad it was just embarassing, people were pointing and laughing for all the wrong reasons. I had to keep pulling over and waiting with the engine off to cool it down and stop the huge plumes of oil covering everything. The car was now using about a litre of oil every 500 miles, which clearly is ridiculous. the show was great once we finally got in though, FDUK stand as awesome as ever but it was clear something had to be done. The fault had to be either the rotor housings were worn beyond limit or the oil control ring side seals were failing and letting oil compress into the chambers. Whichever it was, the engine was going to have to come apart. And, I figured, if we were going to that much toruble, we may as well go for massive overkill. ;D Go large or go home Coming soon..... shiny turbo goodness as modelled here by my lovely wife ;D
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gruss
Part of things
Posts: 242
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This is getting interesting. Can't wait!
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Daihatsu Mira TR-XX Suzuki Alto Works
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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I decided I'd simply had enough of all the rats nest problems, the split vacc lines, the broken solenoids, the weird boost faults, broken turbos, all the niggling annoying little faults that had kept the car on the constant verge of breakdown for over a year. By going to a big single turbo coversion, you lose all the complicated switching system and gain... simplicity. And we all know, simple is the holy grail of the mechanic. K.I.S.S. and all that. You lose a bit of driveability, in terms of the seamless power of the twins from tickover, but that was small loss since mine had seldom been smooth. I'd take a bit of turbo lag over unreliability and ficticious smoothness, ta. So, once the decision was made to go single, I needed to source a load of parts, not least of which was a turbo kit, but also the ancilliaries to support it. Plus, I needed to budget for an engine, including opening up the ports inside to spool up a big turbo quicker. It was a challenge, but one I relished. My first purchase was... ....drum roll.... ....an H-reg 2nd gen Toyota MR2 T-Bar in a fetching shade of salmon-pink neglect Bit odd, I suppose you'd say, but I needed transport while the Rex was sick/in bits, and a guy at work was flogging the Mister Two for 500 quid, so it seemed even if it only lasted as long as it's MOT it'd solve a lot of problems. Of course, with a £500 car there's always gonna be some stuff wrong, the paint not the least. I set to with a mop borrowed from the semi-tame mechanic next door took a fair bit of elbow grease, but I finally managed to convince it to be red And some new mcPherson strut top mounts replaced the ones that looked like they'd started life on the Titanic. This was nice because it meant the suspension no longer fell over sideways at 45 degrees in every corner One day I'll buy a car that hasn't been owned by a Neanderthal Anyone who's ever owned an MR2 (hi there!) wil confirm that the cooling system is about as straightforward as quantum physics, only slightly harder to understand. It's about eight miles of random pipes, expansion bottles, several bleed points, god knows what else. To work it out you need to be able to think your way through a corkscrew without turning your head or using your finger. The previous owner clearly hadn't bothered, they'd just filled the system with radweld. And when I say filled, I mean filled... Good job we weren't in one of those funny English droughts where it rains for forty days and nights yet you still have a hosepipe ban back then, I'd never have manged to flush all that curse word out of it Besides these faults, the Mister Two was a fun car in its' way. Actually, it was awful, really shocking handling and no feel of connection to the steering at all (dunno if they're all like that or it was just my usual luck). But it was a fun awful, and I didn't give two hoots about it so I drove it at full throttle everywhere and it took it all without complaint. Right up until it completely ate its own electrical system six months later. But they all do that, sir, and it had served its purpose by then. Its purpose, as I said, was to take the strain off the ailing Rex while I gathered parts for the extravaganza rebuild, but that didn't mean I wasn't working on the FD in the meanwhile. Since this was now the depths of winter it was perhaps an odd choice to fit the vented bonnet on the coldest day of the year... still, the Mister Two made a great bonnet stand The bonnet I'd scored was a KnightSports vented one (another of those famous Japanese rotary tuning houses). It's very similar to the MazdaSpeed one, and fairly sympathetic to the original shapes of the car. You keep the lovely wing-bonnet-wing triple bulge of the original, it's just got a whacking great vent in the middle and yeah, it was brown. Well, it wasn't actually, it was some kind of no doubt hideously expensive House of Kolor-style mica burgundy and in the sun it was beautiful. Sadly, in anything other than bright sunlight, it was brown. Never mind, it wouldn't be staying that way. I got on with some more Blue Petering in the garage to while away the winter hours. I found a spare alternator, since my very manky one was letting the polished engine bay theme down rather badly. I managed to persuade it to come apart ( a hammer was involved, yeah) and cleaned about a kilo of carbon and clag out of it Wow! Loads of bits, hope I can get the bloody thing back together! Managed to break one of the webs trying to lock it with a screwdriver and stop the armature spinning so I could get it apart... before I realised there's a specially strengthened hole in the casing for doing this Doh! Annoys me every time I look at it I think that polishing an alternator is one of those jobs I'm unlikely to want to do again. Lets just say its intricate and leave it at that, yeah? Worth it? Yeah With the addition of a lovely anodised pulley from Kev at Billet Bitz www.millturncnc.com/billetbitz.html it looked dead glam! Kev is awesome, he's done CNC work for F1 teams and every piece he turns out is art as much as it is craft. Just beautiful, as the rotor-shaped pulley shows. He also has a 20B triple-rotor Cosmo he's self-converting to peripheral ports in his spare time (without going into mind-boggling detail about RX-7 ports, take it from me that this is a Massively Clever Thing ) Anyway, so that was the alternator sorted. I hoped the damned thing still worked when I bolted it on... Moar clever parts. I wouldn't be able to trust the Apexi ECU's rather rudimentary boost control with a big single, so forked out on probably the best boost controller for a rotary, the snappily-named GReddy Profec B Spec II. Trips of the tongue, doesn't it! Some DM Motorsports www.dm-motorsport.co.uk/ quality hubcentric spacers, front and rear. I'd never even realised the Border wings were wide-arched until someone told me, but it explained why my wheels were less manly-looking than I'd remembered A DM Motorsport idler pulley. The FD has an airpump that is supposed to blow air into the lower manifold and the catalyst to lean out the emissions to an acceptable level. Since I no longer had a cat, this was redundat space and it was going. This means the belt driving the water pump is no longer going around 60% of its circumference, more like 20% and this leads to the water pump slipping. This is clearly A Bad Thing, so this idler pulley restores the grip of the belt by fitting where the airpump pulley did The main piece of the jigsaw came up with a bit of patience, sooner or later it was inevitable. A FDUK mate was selling his turbo setup after his car blew up and needed breaking for parts (while he was mapping it, gutted!). So I managed to get hold of the rustiest, mankiest-looking Garret T04s turbo, HKS cast manifold, HKS wastegate, downpipe and the scabbiest heatshield evar Sadly, on closer inspection, it transpired that when his engine blew, it had fired a bit of apex seal out through the turbine vanes before exiting the exhuast. This is a common problem with blown FD engines, they often clout the hotwheel in the process De nada, I threw it into (one of) the boot(s) of the Mister Two and drove it down to Turbo Dynamics for a rebuild. We also agreed a price on ceramic coating the turbine housing, downpipe and screamer. The compressor housing I kept hold of. Yep, my polishing fetish needed feeding again Next, a set of the scabbiest-looking Ohlins coilovers in the world. But they were OHLINS ;D At last, the scaffold-pole kidney-pulping GET ones would be a thing of the past! Needless to say, the Ohlins were leaking and the springs on them were more suited to suspending a bus or mayve a suspension bridge. You could stand all your weight on one and it wouldn't visibly compress by so much as one millimetre. I was put on the incomparable Aurok www.aurok.com/ who are Ohlins geniuses and work on everything from Paris-Dakar trucks to DTM cars to single-seaters to pushbikes and kindly lowered their standards to refurbish my humble coilovers Aerocatches to stop my nice KnighSports bonnet from flying open and breaking the windscreen... An HKS Twin Spark ignition amp to boost the signal to the sparks. Ignition is something you can never have too much of on an FD More clever electronics, an Innovate standalone wideband lambda sensor and display unit; Should make a nice Christmas tree flashing away on the dash! But I don't want you to think this is just going to be a shopping list from here on lol. I still used the car as much as I dared. Here are some nice pics from a photoshoot I did for a mate to keep y'all awake lol. Circumstances mean the had to sell on his 80k+ GTR and we commemorated it by doing a little shoot, since both cars were Border-kitted What's that? More of the GTR? Yeah, OK I tell you, this thing was the Starship Enterprise. It was sooooooo fast, so easily. It just rearranged time and space. Awesome car, finished to the highest standard v-Cam variable cam setup alone cost more than many lesser Skylines in toto Lovely. Wow, this post went sorta off at a bit of a tangent, didn't it I promise there'll be some progress in the next one. No, really. Say tuned, groovers
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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As the car wasn't being used all that much I took the opportunity to do some mods that I'd put off, such as changing the speakers. Not that it's particularly difficult, it's more that it requires a pretty comprehensive strip of the interior and it was nice to have the luxury of taking it to bits and not having to get it all back together in the same day. When I had the doorcards off to change the mirrors I'd noticed the front speakers were in a pretty bad way, but nothing prepared me for the state of the rears! The butyl rubber holding the paper cone to the cage....well, it simply wasn't there! time had completely rotted it away, no wonder the speakers flapped and buzzed at anything over a whisper's volume The rears are a very funny size in FDs, in a 6x9 ratio but smaller all round. I found some JBL GTO series ones that fitted more or less perfectly and the fronts were easy peasy. I chose Sony just because all the rest of the stereo equipment was Sony, but they could have been anything, I'm certainly no ICE buff. So long as it sounds good, I couldn't care less. And these upgrades sounded phenomenal compared to what had gone before, as you can well imagine! The last real outing for the car before it went away for major surgery was a run to Brighton with the Mazda Rotary Club... and damn! did it rain. But then, it was Februaury, I suppose. Nothing can damp the shine of a Spirit R-white FD though and I'd like you all to meet Ralph, the insane bridgeported RX-4, flip-painted and louder than Armageddon yet driven by the nicest blonde lady you'd ever meet ;D and he certainly takes an awesome photo in the rain... mind you, there was a lot of it about. We're hardcore, us rotards lol, whatever the weather Despite the weather, which had Noah looking nervously to the skies and muttering that he hoped he'd converted his cubits to millimeters accurately, my poor old Rex was still smoking like a Sisters of Mercy gig, and it convinced me if I didn't stop using it, she was going to soil herself in an ugly fashion, and that would be A Bad Thing. I was still hoping there might be useable components left in the engine, but there definitely wouldn't be if I blew it up! I sent the car away to Super 7 for J to start stripping her down, and concentrated on finishing and collecting the last few parts for the jigsaw. Plenty of stuff I won't bore you with pictures of, injectors for example... two 850s and two 1680s The damn things must look like a fire hydrant when on full honk. But you all know what an injector looks like. J made up a billet fuel rail to hold the primaries, which was a work of art. A fuel pump was procured from an R33 GTR Skyline, which should have been good for several hundred horsepowerz but again is a really boring thing to photograph, a complete set of braided steel lines with Aeroquip fasteners to replace the stock rubber oil cooler lines. oooh, so many things I can hardly even remember them all. I finished off polishing the compressor housing of the T04S. I guess it's a pretty large turbo for most applications, but it's considered fairly small on an FD. They flow a LOT of gas due to the more frequent power "strokes" and they can spool up really huge turbos quite fast compared to a piston engine of the same displacement (1.3 litres, remember?). Anyway, it looked like this when I'd finished; Pretty pleased with that, to be fair Of course, once I'd spent hours polishing the trumpet I realised no-one would ever see it because it'd be covered by the airfilter. But here's a pic just to prove to the world that I did it anyway lol Jumped into the long-suffering Mister Two and ran back down to the New Forest to collect the finished refurbed turbo. They'd put a new hotwheel on it, re-welded the flange (oooh, flange) for the downpipe, ceramic coated the parts, new bearings, loads of work. It looked... ....well, it looked pink, to be honest . It was supposed to be red. Ah, well, guess it'll work just as well, but had I known, I think I'd probably have gone for the classic motorsports white coating. Mind you, even the slightly bi-curious hue of the coating wasn't going to depress me, compared to what it looked like before it was an object of great beauty! Before; After; I mean, hell yeah! This was the horrid, scabby downpipe before coating; ...and after; I mean, yeah, it might be pink but I hope you'd agree it was a hell of an improvement! I also blattered over to Aurok to collect the refurbished Ohlins suspension. It was on this occasion that the poor little Toyota finally gave up the ghost at being given absolute Larry everywhere and ate its electrical system (that famous Toyota jolly jape of putting the alternator exactly in the best place for it to fill up with water every time it rains had struck again). The nice RAC man took us both home after I'd sat waiting for a couple of hours on the A27, but at least it was a scenic spot. I tried again, stealing the wife's Hahhhhnda Jazz Sport, which was frankly just embarassing. The coilovers were refurbed beautifully, setup with proper Ohlins springs, and with a little booklet guiding me through adjustment for rebound and compression, a service par excellence I dropped all these parts off at Super 7 where Jason had finished building the new engine up. It was on a big streetport, which is where the side-ports for the intake are opened up further (a bit like on a two-stroke) and the exhaust ports, peripheral in the housings likewise but no new holes are made. A bridgeport is the next level of rotary tuning, where the ports are opened up so large that a thin "bridge" of metal is needed in the plate so the rotor seals can sweep across it without dropping into the ports! This would have been overkill for my street application. A bridgeport isn't the most user-friendly of engines, the overlap makes emissions filthy, it's horribly untractable at low revs, lumpy and nasty. It's basically a race engine, and though they can be made more civilised for the road, there was no need for my humble car. A streetport was more than adequate. In addition to allthe mechanical parts, I'd scored an incredibly rare MazdaSpeed Type I rear spoiler, and just as well. The tailgate on my car had developed some rust spots around the screen, and rather than try to repair it was decided it'd be easier and quicker to just replace it. We sourced a good secondhand liftgate, deleted the wiper and washer for extra smoooooothness and fitted the MazdaSpeed spoiler. It was purple metalflake (yeah, honestly!) but this didn't matter because it was all getting sprayed anyway Not that you can really tell in that rather rubbish photo nope, nor that one lol. But we were getting there, I was starting to see light at the end of the tunnel!
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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See? progress! You can tell we were working hard by how filthy the poor ol girl got! The engine went in no problems, and all the nice new ancilliaries got stuck on I'd splashed on a set of pulleys from Billet Bitz to match the alternator one, simply because I couldn't resist I'm not sure the pick-up style FD body will ever quite catch on though The battery had to be relocated into the boot. This isn't too much of a loss, because the boot of an FD is about two inches deep and a really funny shape, even with the seats fodled down the strut brace is in the way so you can't fit any luggage bigger than a briefcase, unless it squishes. Squishy is different, I've packed tent, sleeping bags, overnight gear, copious amounts of gin, all the essentials when I've had to ;D The reason the battery had to go boot-mounted was that the space it used to take up in the engine bay was now needed for a piperun to the new HKS-made FEED front-mount intercooler. There was no way my little Trust stock-mount would manage the temperatures generated by a T04S on ful shove In fact, I'd learned plenty of my original thinking had been pretty flawed. All the titting about with ducting and heat shields and such was a total waste of time. The "cold air" feed I'd left in the I/C ducting to feed the airfilters was totally pointless. Yes, the filters might be getting air that was one or two degrees cooler becuase of it... and it was then being squashed by twin turbos and heated right back up to exactly the same temperature as if it hadn't been cooled in the first place. It would have been better to ensure that all the air from the nose was being forced through the I/C for greater efficiency. As for the heatshield around the filters, most of the heat from the engine bay is sucked backwrads under the car and down the transmission tunnel, so that was totally redundant as well. Live and learn, eh! Anyway, I now had a proper front-mount so it was all academic. A brass FEED uprated radiator complimented the new cooling power of the intercooler. We kept the aircon system, not that it worked, but that seemed to be down to the clutch on the compressor. I'd pressure tested the system, and it was fine, held pressure perfectly. So I had it re-gassed... and it still didn't work. We put it down to the pump clutch, and it's been on the "to do" list ever since. That was five years ago, and I've still never got round to sorting it Anyway, the aircon rad was sandwiched between the I/C and water radiator in case by some miracle I should ever get round to sorting it out. My shiny new alternator took pride of place on top of the build (fortunately it stil worked, too) The magic sparks box was found a home behind the ABS and wired in the braided lines for the oil system were plumbed in suspension bolted up, along with braided steel brakelines all round and new Racing Brake American-made discs and pads whilst underneath ceramic met titanium in a rainbow riot of colours and a Dragon Performance diff brace fitted to give the diff bushes a slightly easier time holding it all together under hard launches the plumbing for the intecooler was fitted together up front and a giant Blitz stainless airfilter covered up my beautiful shiny trumpet the Innovate AFR gauge found a new home on the last spare bit of dashboard, along with a sensible-sized boost gauge to match the other GReddys... in a single pod mount on the A-pillar with adequate hairy knuckle clearance this time tailate and new spoiler went on, the right colour now and the bonnet was now the right colour as well, with it's aerocatches fitted Oooooooh, we're getting close now ;D can you feel the excitement?
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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IT LIVES! Mwahahahahaha ;D This, it's fair to say, was one of the happiest days of my life. Well, the birth of my kids, my wedding, discovering two-girls-one-cup, all the major things we all go through, but this was a close fourth. You can hear the uneven idle of a ported rotary really clearly in those vids, the burp-burp-burp sound. A bridgeport is often referred to as a "brapper" because of the distinctive "brap-brap-brap" noise they make. Sounds awesome enough to me It wasn't all totally smooth going, of course. When you change that many components, you have to expect things won't all work perfectly out of the box. Actually, that's not true at all. The ONLY problem we had was a boost leak. Which frankly, was unbelievable. To have one minor problem and only one, well it was more than either of us could have hoped for. The boost leak was easy enough to trace by the simple expedient of listening to the exhaust. The wastegate was stripped and we found; wedged in the piston was a shrapnel piece of apex seal from the engine that had blown up and I'd bought the turbo kit from This is the little critter. This is all it takes to wreck an entire rotary engine and turbo And this huge teetering pile of stuff is what you have left over when you build up a single turbo RX-7 from a twin-turbo one Funny really, there's so much work in there, nigh on four years of mods and polishing and changing hoses and fabricating ducting and god knows what else, all just a complete waste of time. This is what I mean when I say I could have saved so much time and effort and money if I'd just gone straight A to B instead of Z and back again. But, je ne regrette rien as the song says, it was a wonderful trip and I learned a hell of a lot on the journey. and hey, dudes, it's about the trip, not the destination, yeah? So, that's it, happy days then? yeah, all I had to do was a thousand miles running in, and then map the ECU properly and it'd all be gravy. Finished. You can all stop reading and go home then. .... nahhhhh, you know it's not gonna work out that way
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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So what was I waiting for? Got right on with the running-in. At first it was horrible, limited to 4,000 rpm and keeping off-boost altogether but as the engine loosened up and bedded in it got more pleasant to drive around. It was still frustrating as hell, but I kept myself motivated by the thought of how fantastic it'd feel to finally unleash the beast and feel that turbo hit for the first time. To keep the passion alive, I parked her up against a pretty background and took some "money shots"; I was feeling pretty smug looking at those, and knowing the potential of what was lurking under the bonnet. At last I could sit back and go "Dang!" for the right reasons! It seemed the best way to run it in was to go to as many shows as possible, so that's what I did, and the car never missed a beat. The culmination was the Seven's Day London run. this is the 7th July, long celebrated in Japan as being the RX-7s special day. It's got a special meaning to me as a train driver as well, since it's the anniversary of the bombing atrocities in London on the Tube and the one bus. In Japan they meet in the reststop under the concrete roads in the sky and look at each other's cars. Here in Blighty we decided to commemorate Sevens Day with a run through the Smoke. We persuaded a reporter from Japanese Performance mag to come along for the craic, and set to pack of FDs plodding along the A40 overpass and a walkabout parked up in Westferry Plus some photos from the night, hope you agree a whole phalanx of FDs makes quite a sight starting at the Ace along the Embankment and finally Docklands and home over Tower Bridge The article in Japanese Performance came out pretty cool as well and that was it, run in. Time for the moment of truth. I wanted to get it done NOW because Rotorstock was fast approaching and It'd have been nice to make the premier rotor show with the car finished. Unfortunately, J couldn't fit in the mapping because his dyno operator of choice was in the middle of moving premises. So I took it to a mate on the forums who does mapping and indeed does it extremely well. His own drag car is running the frisky side of 550 bhp so I knew I'd be in safe hands. Strapped her down, run her up and let her rip all was going well, her's a quick vid of one of the early runs and it even managed to climb a bit above that, this was the best graph I got out of the night; but then things seemed to be going wrong. All sorts of rough running crept in, and as you can see the AFRs were all over the place. The dyno guy and mapper started fiddling around under the bonnet trying to cure it. The boost controller was a suspected culprit, so they tried to re-plumb it to the wastegate to gain more control. Before you knew what was going on, there was a boost spike of well over two bar, just for an instant, but long enough. Now it sounded sicker than ever. The guys persisted trying to sort it, but it got worse and worse. Eventually around midnight we had to call it a day. Ignition breakup was diagnosed as the problem, and they handed the car back to me with the warning it'd probably run really rough because the plugs were now fouled. I got in to drive back home as their van disappeared into the night... and straight away knew there was something badly wrong. Yep, it had dropped an apex seal. The engine was ruined. This, it's fair to say, was one of the low points in the story
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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Well, needless to say, I missed Rotorstock The previous post sounds bad, but it's not meant to. I don't blame the guys who blew it up on the dyno. You can't, can you, no dyno operator runs a car without you signing to say its at your own risk, so even if I wanted to shout and scream about it, it wouldn't have helped. Don't get me wrong, I was p****d off, more angry than I've been about almost anything else, but it was no help. It was done. It's a terrible situation to be in though, caught between Scylla and Charybdis, to quote ancient Greek porverb lol. The engine builder says "well what do you expect if you boost it two bar above what it should be?". The dyno operator says "why did you bring us a car with weaknesses like that in it?". The mapper says "the ignition was breaking up long before it overboosted". Who's right? They're all right. To this day it's never been conclusively proved what killed the engine first, or why the faults developed... although later events would shine some further light and show the way forwards... So there's li'l old me stuck in the middle sucking on it. I drove the car home that night so angry I've almost no recollection of the journey. When a Wankel (snigger) drops a tip it can hardly idle, it's got random compression, its throwing neat petrol out through the exhaust, it's terrible. The only way to keep it running is to keep it spinning fast, when centrifugal force almost overcomes the worst of the damage. I got it well over the legal speed limit on the way home, and I was so angry I never once thought of calling recovery, or even of the added damage it was doing to the motor. And that's the catch-22 of a rotary. So fragile in some respects, then quite able to add 20mph to the speed limit... with only 50% of its engine working Fickle bloody things. Once I'd calmed down I drove it up to Super 7. J was more gutted than I was if anything, after all he was the one who'd put in the hours with the die grinder porting the engine and sticking it all together. But there was no sense in crying over exploded apex seals, we had to strip it apart and find out what was left back to square one it was literally like tearing your heart out. The strip-down revealed the expected carnage. This is the tip that went, the pesky li'l critter. One of the ends is supposed to be missing, the tips are two-piece with a triangular section at one end for sealing purposes. The other end isn't supposed to be missing There was no sign of the missing bit, but you could easily trace its progress around the engine by the scrapes in the rotor housing the nicks where the rotor had bounced over it the chunks taken out of two of the rotor faces the horrendous gouge in the housing where it had got trapped under the rotor edge before exiting through the exhaust port and of course the nicks taken out of the turbine wheel blades as it made its final bid for freedom through the hot wheel Dang! I really can't pay enough of a homage to J over his attitude. He was gutted, clearly, but as a businessman, he didn't need to take responsibility for the disaster. There was no proof anything he'd done had led to the destruction, indeed it seemed as likely if not more that the boost spike is what done the deed. I was certainly not going to try getting into legalese about it because that would have been a nightmare for everyone and probably would prove nothing. He stepped up to the plate and offered to rebuild the engine for the cost of the parts alone, and I don't think anyone can say fairer than that. Hey, ho, it's running in (again) we go
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ian65
Part of things
Posts: 276
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I feel gutted for you just reading this..... god knows how you felt that night. I'd have been temped to read the small print of my agreed value and then done something terrible to it involving a box of swan vestas
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I've spent the afternoon reading through this and have enjoyed it immensely - thanks for the entertaining history! Rotary engines have always fascinated me but I'm too much of a coward to ever take one on. Good to see you sticking to it, and I love the look of yours with the Mazdaspeed kit
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Clement
Europe
ambitious but rubbish
Posts: 2,095
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This thread is excellent! Although it is altering my mood depending on what woes or joys your car is giving you... Very nice story, and funny to read, too Please keep it coming!
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excellent write up! and that ti exhaust is a think of beauty!
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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Owning a modified rotary is a roller coaster of emotions, that's fer shure ;D It was OK, J was as good as his word and re-built the engine for the price of the parts. It was back in and running within a couple of weeks, and I can't thank him enough for it. He could have turned his back and left me to fight it out. So, plug over, but if you've a rotary needs sorting then Super 7, yeah? lol www.super7autos.co.uk/A few things got changed along the way, since some weak spots had been isolated during the running-in period before. In particular, I got a set of uprated MazdaSpeed plug leads as there was a question mark about the ignition side of things contributing to the blow-up. The coils were tested and appeared to be absolutely fine, but I had Magnecor plug leads that were a nightmare for seating properly. The boot formed too strong a vacuum when you pushed them on and even when they seemed properly seated the electrode sometimes wasn't in proper contact. The Magnecor were red, which matched the colourscheme and the N.O.S. MazdaSpeed ones were a fetching shade of turquoise, which didn't, but you can't have everything! The little Blitz dump valve had proved to be feebly inadequate to flowing the amount of shunt the new turbo was pushing out, and a GReddy Type R was pressed into service instead; The pulley setup had been chafing slightly on the oil cooler lines, so a bag-load of cable ties sorted that little problem before it led to disaster! The fuel pressure regulator was a secondhand one of unknown provenance, I think it was a Nissan one of some sort, and since there was a question over the fueling too, it seemed prudent to change the poor little thing Rotaries simply cannot take being run lean, because of course that makes the chambers hot, the carbon deposits form localised hotspots and then they get hotter and hotter. The mixture pre-ignites before ignition. Yep, that's good old-fashioned pinking right there. A piston engine will tolerate a certain amount of detonation like this, but a rotary will just blow itself to bits; it breaks apex seals, and in extreme cases even puts dents into the rotor faces. So, the moral is, don't let it lean out. Ever. With this in mind, I sourced a nifty SARD fuel pressure regulator which should be more than manly enough and the injector system was double-checked and refreshed. Here's the end of the Super 7 billet rail with ballast resistor load-protected injector gubbins That was pretty much that, normal service was resumed. Even from the word go this engine seemed a lot more tractable than the last, even with the limits of 4k rpm and no boost imposed again. Not sure why really, it was just smoother and more pleasant to drive on. And so I did, racking up the miles. I was pretty broke bynow, as you can imagine, so there wasn't much budget for any new toys, though I did manage to score a MazdaSpeed alloy rear strut brace to replace the standard steel one and to match the front That's my cuddly lucky Cthulhu there as well, he's been in the car since the Montego Blue one. I'm not actually convinced he's really all that lucky, to be honest, but you never know, perhaps things would have been worse if he hadn't been there . Not much else to report, except I stickerbombed the battery box in a moment of extreme boredom I also managed a swap for some wider spacers because the ones I'd bought proved to be slightly too bi-curious to really fill the arches as I'd hoped. Fortunately, a fellow FDUKer had some wider ones that were too manly, so we exchanged. Much better; Except now the wheels rubbed heinously on the arches I thought about getting all ghetto on them with a scaffold pole but the way my legendary luck was running in 2010 I thought that might well end in disaster. So I rented a proper arch roller and got a brave mate round for moral support... I know he looks a bit like a monkey with a jar of peanuts, but this is my very bezzy mate Ada without whom none of this would have been possible lol. Whenever the lurrve flags and I felt like chucking it in he'd show up and just attack whatever the problem was full-on. Sometimes everyone needs a mad mate to kick them up the backside. Metaphorically. What a clever doobrie these are, too. Even our hamfisted efforts worked wonders, one rolling the arch and the other keeping a heat gun aimed to soften the paint and prevent it from cracking. Two years later, it still hasn't cracked. Winner! Encouraged by our stance-stylee success we threw a bucket of elbow grease over the engine bay, along with a few litres of autosol As summer drew to a close, I had well over a thousand miles on the car and things were looking up. All summer I'd also been working through the death of my old man, and trying to settle his estate, but this was now drawing to a close, and the money we inherited took some of the strain off the finances. It incidentally meant that the long-suffering wife sent in the builders to start work on her long-awaited loft conversion and extension. Then... ...riding home on the bike, all of ooooh, ten miles an hour if that across a roundabout in town, some wizened arthritic old pensioner decided she was far too important to give way to the right on a roundabout .... BAM! she just drove right over me. The bike was wedged under her front bumper, right under the number plate. Oh goody, haven't done any upside-down riding in ages. She was very peeved to be so sorely incovenienced by my inconsiderately interfacing with her car just because I clung to tedious out-dated notions like right of way and my liberty to go about my lawful business without being assualted. She was in a hurry, her passenger would miss his train at this rate. As you can imagine, I was very sympathetic to their plight and showed my understanding by not beating them to death with my bare hands. However, she had managed to rip out my cruciate ligaments, tear the cartiledge off in the knee joint, pull my shoulder joint apart, all sorts of fun things like that. Amazing. Chuffed. So I finished the summer stuck in a building site, no roof on the house, every room torn to bits, building dust everywhere, on crutches, unable to walk let alone finish the car. (I'm still in the midst of sorting out the legal case for compensation from the accident 19 months later, despite her admitting 100% liability and the police thinking about charging her with dangerous driving. The law's an ass. Haven't seen a penny yet, and that includes having had to have an operation to put my shoulder back together. Don't do it, kids, stay rubber-side down lol). You gotta say one thing for my luck, it's consistent My incapacity wasn't necessarily a problem in as much as the car wasn't going anywhere, it was just a matter of time, except... I'd put myself forward as a decent car to feature in Japanese Performance magazine. The editor had written a piece appealing for more street-driven cars, and buoyed on the success of the tunnel run feature I'd sent in some details. Out of the blue, an email... can we feature your car? Errrr.. that'll be the one that blew up and that I can't drive cause two of my favourite limbs no longer function, then. Dang! I had no choice but to ring J and plead with him to map the car up at short notice, it would have been rubbish to try and sell a piece on a car that wouldn't rev above 4,000 rpm and couldn't boost. He stepped up and took it away to map. By now it had well over a thousand miles on it, so it'd all be fine. Nothing could go wrong, could it? Could it?
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NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
come back, tell me more!!
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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lol. OK then. Of course it was all fine Gahh, what you'd think there'd be any problems after all that? I was due some good luck, surely ;D three hundred and ninety-six very real and emotional horses. How d'ya like them apples! Felt like all the hard work had been vindicated, just a gnat's short of 400bhp from a 1.3 litre twenty year-old car. What a result. J delivered it back to me the night before the photoshoot was scheduled. It was filthy, and the morning dawned freezing cold. I couldn't wash it, the hose had frozen. I could hardly stand anyway. I drove it up to the local Polish car wash. Their pressure washer had frozen. Went to the automatic car wash. Yeah, that's right Does no-one lag their goddamned pipes nowadays!? Went home in a massive strop and phoned Ada for help. He came straight round off a night turn without having any sleep and we managed to fake the car into being shiny. We literally were just finishing when the reporter and smudger turned up. The photoshoot was a strange affair, I didn't really know what to expect. We tried to find somewhere nice for the pics, the photographer had an idea of getting onto the beach since we were by the sea, but in Darkest Worthing it's not that easy, it's all high promenades. Eventually we tried the council. Yeah, they were happy to let us get onto the beach. A fee of £300 ought to cover it... We bade them a fond farewell and eventually wound up on the waters' edge on Littlehampton's west beach. Scary. It ain't called L.A. for nothing, you know. Still, I thought the location came out OK in the pics (these are stolen from Ada as I was too busy being a helpless cripple and telling the reporter my life history to take any photos) my sad story being taken down by the inestimable Carolgees Adam's T-Rex watching the proceedings Snapper doing shapes and colours lol Still talking rubbish.... note how I spent the time sat down, even driving was a bit painful. I was crippled by the end of the day! Right, that's enough of that. Safe to say it all felt like another vindication. I took Carolgees out for a blast up the bypass in the car and it blew both of us away, to be fair. It was soooooooo fast now, as you'd expect in a 400bhp car weighing just over a ton. He left muttering about having to get one of these, so I felt that was job done. Even if we did nearly get rear-ended by some dappy old geezer in a Punto who hadn't noticed the traffic had stopped in front of him Fortunately the squeal of brakes ended with him stuffing it into the central reservation rather than right up our ass. Y'know, that sorta thing happens around me all the time So, once my leg and shoulder had healed up enough for me to drive again I got on with enjoying the fruits of my labour. Figured I;d earned it. Of course, it was the depths of winter by now, so it wasn't as much fun as it could have been (or more, depending on how much fun you consider total lack of traction to be). Still, the li'l 'un enjoyed it "I love Daddy's car cos it goes really fast and makes whooshing noises " Bless him, he was only 3 1/2 ;D It was beggining to dawn on me that this wasn't the most ideal form of winter transport, however. Since the Mister Two was dearly departed, and the bike clearly not an option, I had no choice. It's no fun starting the car at three in the morning and seeing water and air intake temps on a running engine of; but what choice did I have? I'd made my bed, ploughed everything I had into the car, and now I was stuck with it for better or worse. I only had enough money to buy a cheapy set of spare Volk splitrims and winter tyres and bung them on to save the GT-Ps from rotting in the salt You want pepper with that salt? Gahhhh, just think what this caustic cack is doing to our lovely paintwork Fortunately, the problem was solved for me on the way up to Milton Keynes for a FDUK meet up and dinner. The car blew up again. Open road from Dunstable, out of a roundabout, second gear... short shift at 6.5k, it's one degree above freezing...third gear.. go for gearlever at 6k.. BOOM! Night sky lights up with sheet of flame from exhaust...Car loses way immediately... Starts rattling... running rough as a three-legged dog... won't rev... oh, no, not again, come ON you evil, vicious b***h... please don't be dead again.. drop to second.. give it a big bootful... BANG!.. more flames... engine stutters... ...and dies. coast to halt at roadside. Get out in forlorn hope it's blown the vacuum line off the MAP sensor, they run rough like a dropped tip if that happens. My mate Andy who'd been following pulls up "What happened? I saw the flames! How's it blown up, you weren't even caning it..." Map sensor's still plugged in. I've killed it. Again. Get her started after ten attempts. Idles like a tractor, shaking to bits. Limp the last few miles to the pub. Car dies again and won't run at all. Call RAC the driver's a great guy, a Carribean fella who's been all over in the Army and has a hundred great stories to tell. It's just as well, he's my company for the next four hours as we totter along at 55mph all the way back to the South coast I'm happy to listen, he's a fantastic storyteller and to be honest, I don't reall yfeel much like talking anyway. Get home at two in the morning. Drop the car on the drive, crawl into bed. The wife's watching from the window as we unload it. She doesn't need to say anything
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D'oh.... wish I hadn't asked! ;D this reminds me soooo much of a slingshot gixer I had, except I just about got that sorted, mechanically done, just needed the bodywork tidying up and had to sell it as my wife was pregnant and I knew I'd find it harder and harder to justify tyres every 1500 miles, and chains every 6k.... so after a constant wallet drain for a few years I sold it... to someone who could just get on with enjoying it I had a love/hate relationship with that bike all the time I owned it, and possibly the big bore, cams, porting/polishing, blah blah didn't help this does end as a happy story, right?
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goldnrust
West Midlands
Minimalist
Posts: 1,872
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Wow. I never realized what a journey you've been on with the FD Nik.
I have to say though this thread is like one of those alpine mountaineering documentarys, you watch it and everyone is dying in the most horrific circumstances, but at the end of the programme all I can think about is wanting to climb big mountains!
I shall keep my eyes peeled for the next installment!
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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Hahaha, I did tell you that in my experience it isn't possible to blow an apex seal without it damaging the housing in some way, Steve I wasn't just guessing dude, unfortunately, I've had a bit of experience at it ;D As to the Gixxer, John, sounds like you had a narrow escape! Those slingshots were evil bloody great things, that perimeter flexi-frame trying to contain all that massive grunt from the monster engine. Reckon you got rid before it could seriously try to kill you Joking, we all have big regrets on vehicles we wish we'd never got rid of. Mine was a YZF750, best bike I ever had and sold it for a FireBlade that was utter rubbish. Guy who bought it rode it up a tree a week later and both he and the bike passed away But enough of that maudlin stuff, of course there'll be a happy ending on this thread eventually. ....errrrr, I bloody well hope so, anyway
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I can carry on reading then ;D
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luckyseven
Posted a lot
Owning sneering dismissive pedantry since 1970
Posts: 3,839
Club RR Member Number: 45
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I'd better press on then I mean, it sorta goes without saying that this was another one of those low points. It was the piece de resistance when the guy who came to trailer the car up to Super 7 managed to crack the bumper winching it into his wagon. It also goes without saying that the conversation was rather fraught this time. The way I saw it, there was clearly some underlying problem which was causing the car to keep breaking. The way J saw it was that he couldn't just keep throwing engines at me in the hope one held together. We settled our differences and came out the other side better for it, I think. This time, the engine didn't even cost me the price of parts However, I'm getting slightly ahead, lets have a look in the old one before we move onto the errrr.... fourth , shall we? Errrm, yep. It was FUBAR. The front rotor had blown again, which is slightly unusual. Generally the rear fails first, presumably due to the increased heat management problems back there. So at least it was consistent... Considering this time I'd driven it about five miles after it blew as opposed to the fifty the previous time, it was in a much worse state, it had let go big style The rotor was scrapped, it had dropped at least part of all three tips this time. To be fair, I've got quite a collection of these now, including one on the hearth in the front room. My wife's marvellous, she's very understanding Pretty, innit! Don't think I'm excessively weird, I'm just a true rotard lol. I deserve pity, not contempt ahaha. *ahem* Right, back to the autopsy. The three disappearing tips had obviously totally destroyed the rotor housing as well, it was ruined comprehensively. More depressingly, the turbine wheel of the turbo was now scrap as well (yep, that one I'd only had a year, barely boosted, and had paid about a grand on refurbishing, that one). A new wheel wouldn't have been a disaster, but in addition to that... It had broken the turbine casing as well. This is a bit of a dodgy one, I can't prove anything one way or the other, so I won't go throwing blame around, but it appears the weld where the flange (ooooh, flange!) had been fixed was no good. It's hard to see in these pics, ignore the black stuff, that's where petrol sloshed through the broken seals and washed the carbon out through the fracture. Makes it easier to see the break, I guess but of course, the casing's cast iron, which is hard to weld at the best of times. As I understand it, it needs to be heated befoe welding to allow full penetration. Now the fault was clear, it was easy to see on close examination where the welded flange was simply stuck onto the surface without any real penetration. The local fabricator, a man of immense skills, sucked his teeth and shook his head. He said it was more likely to shatter into a million pieces than fix it if you tried a repair. There is an argument that the ceramic coating might have contributed to the demise of the metalwork by keeping too much of the heat in, forcing the metal to expand and contract too quickly. I don't know, I'm in no way qualified to hold an informed opinion on that. However, given the rate of failure, the dodgy colour of the coating, and the brief timescale since refurbishment, would I go back to the firm who did the work? Nope. Would I recommend anyone else did? Nope. Oh, and the manifold had cracked as well, in the web where the runners joined the turbo up-pipe. So, to recap and precis... 50% of the engine was broken; the turbo was scrap, and the manifold. Oh, and I'd managed somehow to do the impossible... Yep, I'd managed to break a titanium exhaust God alone knows how, but one of the strengthening webs was missing and this crack in the weld for the mid-box was where the brace had been. I can only assume it took a clout from a speedhump or something, and the brace took the brunt of it, but cracked the weld in the process. Because the exhaust was designed as a system, a normal FD mid-pipe wouldn't fit with the titanium back box, the lengths were wrong. So I needed both sections while I searched for someone who can repair titanium So.. engine, turbo, manifold, exhaust. Anything else? Well, yeah, actually. As I alluded to, J said he'd do the engine for free this time because he felt so bad for my situation, but we had to be able to gaurantee this was never going to happen again. That meant further investigation into the cause of the blow-ups, and changing everything that was suspect. So I had to promise to commit to this, whatever it took. Fair enough, but I honestly wasn't sure if I could... or if I wanted too So I sat back and sulked for a while. I listened to a lot of Rammstein, Killing Joke and Spacemen 3, which helped a bit. I made lists of all the bits on the car, and what I could expect to sell them for if I broke it for parts. I looked into selling it as a project. And a few things became apparent; 1) it was worth naff-all either as parts or shell in the current economic climate (this was early 2011), especially considering how much I'd spent on it. 2) I hate to lose. 3) I had such a fantastic group of mates in FDUK who couldn't have been more supportive, offering everything from a shoulder to cry on to parts from their own stashes, and even off their own cars to help with a rebuild. 4) I really hate to lose 5) There was no other car that I could think of that offered the same thrill, amazing ride, fantastic perfromance, gorgeous looks, etc etc and there was no way I was going to while my life away growing old and grey in a soulless econo-box with the other doomed souls. 6) I really ****ing hate losing, and the car deserved better. That was the decision pretty much made then. Go large, or go home. Again ;D
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