RX7 Engine Rebuild Progress

"SantaRita" (SantaRita) 10/19/2016 at 16:52 • Filed to: None

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Well, I’m through with most of the reassembly of the core and I’m heading into the rest of it. 2.5 months seem to have escaped, but such is the work/life/#rotarylife balance.

I did have had extra time to check things out, study the workshop manual, watch videos, but wrench time... fleeting. Some issues I ran into prevented me from just diving right back into assembly once i had my core apart. I had a front housing with damage to the coolant passage...it wasn’t leaking any BEFORE...but it very feel confident it would spring a wide open leak if I ignored it.

Junked housing with a bad coolant channel.

And the end result so far..it turns relatively freely.
It makes the correct ‘pop’ ‘pop’ ‘pop’ noise.
And thankfully no additional sounds have turned up.

I know the world is on the edge of its seat reading what is basically a totally disjointed non-epic and slow as the speed of life build log.

I’ll see you all in a month or so!

lone_liberal > SantaRita 10/19/2016 at 17:15

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To me all rotary builds are an epic journey in to the unknown.

Manwich - now Keto-Friendly > SantaRita 10/19/2016 at 17:54

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I’ve heard that rotary engines are probably the easiest engines to rebuild.

Flavien Vidal > Manwich - now Keto-Friendly 10/19/2016 at 19:36

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They are... 2 people who know what they’re doing can rebuild one in 4 hours.

RangerSmith > Manwich - now Keto-Friendly 10/19/2016 at 23:18

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The engine is built like a sandwich with 13 bolts that hold it all together. Other than that, it’s just installing various seals

SantaRita > Manwich - now Keto-Friendly 10/20/2016 at 10:17

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It helps that the 13B is very iterative across years, so knowledege appies across the board moreso than in other makes engines. Mazda is able to build on itself for decades. The two center oil control ring metals, seals, springs, for example, are the same part number from 1979-2011, but rx-8 adds an additional set called oil scrapers..