AndyD's Build - lots of pictures.

[AndyD]

A little story as to how I got the car,

I was finishing my third year at uni, and had decided that I wanted to start a project that I could get into when I was done school. I like the LS motor, so I decided to use it as a base and the two swaps which I found most appealing were the RX7 and the fox 'stang. After doing a little research and deciding what I wanted out of the car, I decided to go FC (I wanted a car that could turn, and not a car that everyone else drives). Not long after, I saw my car on Kijiji and got a hold of the seller; it was an 1987 TII with a JDM S5 swap that wasn't running right. The guy seemed like a great guy and was selling at a good price, so I scheduled a time to go look at the car. However, not 2 hours before going to look at the car the seller called me and said someone had shown up with a trailer and cash, so the car was gone. I was a little miffed I'd missed out on a great deal, but I kept looking.

Not two months later, I see an add on RX7club.com and what do ya know, it's the same car! I get a hold of the seller, and within a week, I bought the same car I was looking at a few weeks earlier for half the price of what the original owner wanted. It seemed the guy had bought it for a 5.0L swap, then decided not to go through with it for one reason or another and wasn't worried about taking the hit on the price. Nevertheless, I snagged a perfect base for my swap; I say perfect because Ontario mandates every vehicle year 1988 and up needs to be emissions tested every other year and with this car being an 87, it's omitted in the testing regs.

Anyways, here's a couple pictures of how it sat for the first few months before the summer, where I had a chance to work on it a little.






This came off almost as soon as I could get my hands on a razor and solvent....


I have a size 13 shoe, and the can almost swallowed it. JDM I guess?



Once I got home for the summer between 3rd and 4th year, I did what I could do that didn't cost anything (typical student thing - be as cheap as possible!) . I pulled the S5 drivetrain and started selling stuff and by the end of the first month of summer I had made back what I had paid for the car, plus a little, on selling just the motor and turbo. I realized then that this was the only time this car was going to MAKE me money! I also went through the car to see what it was going to need for a safety and found the main things that needed to be addressed were some good old Canadian weight reduction, and that it needed a set of front calipers from sitting. Some pictures of the aftermath of the engine pull and when I had a look through....









From here, the car wasn't touched for a while. I didn't have a whole lot of disposable cash as a student, so it sat for a year until I finished my degree. The last day before I put it away at the shop; one of my favorite pictures with the my Firebird and my old man's Vette.

[AndyD]

After an LQ4 I got for free from a good buddy was found to have a bottom end too far gone, I started looking for an LSx combo. A couple months before I graduated,  I found a local guy selling a low km LS1 with a 6 speed harness for very cheap; I wanted to buy a engine/tranny set, but this was too good of a deal and I figured I could splurge a little on the tranny since the engine consumed so little of the budget.




Buying the motor drained the student budget, but within a couple months I had graduated and was one of the few in my engineering class who had a job leaving school.

With this new found thing called money, the search for a tranny ensued. Luckily, I peruse this site regularly and was quick enough to spot Digitalsolo's FS thread before anyone else could lay claim and made a deal to pick up the T56 set-up he was selling. As I have told Blake, I couldn't have found a better set up at a better price than what he offered! Thanks again Blake!




Now came the mounting method; after searching and firing off some PMs, the decision I had made earlier in the swap to use the Hinson set up was swayed by all the good words about the Pez mounts. Not long after buying the tranny, I found a set of Pez mounts from a fellow member and just recently found some C5 pedestals off of ebay. Once I get both of those, I'm going to try my hand at making my own tranny mount; I have an idea for an exhaust that will demand a lot of room under the car and I'm not sure if hinson's or granny's will give me enough room.

This brings the whole thing up to where I'm at now. From what I've seen through this and the "other" site, this is where the nitty-gritty of the swap happens, and I can't be more excited!

I plan to clean up the engine bay while I wait for the mailman with the mounts, which means sorting out the Mazda harnesses and dumping what I don't need, then throwing some paint in the engine compartment. Updates to ensue as more work happens. 

[AndyD]

slowly working on it...

I have what I need to put the engine in the car, I just have to clean up the engine bay then I will put it in.


this brings me to where I need to get rid of some of the wiring. After reading, I think all I need from the harness that is coming from the passenger side is the wipers/cruise. Can these come out of the original engine harness before I pull it out of the car? Is it necessary to remove the HVAC to get the harness out as a whole?
Just a couple random pictures....





i still need to source a PCM and accessories and im finding it's a slow process.... I plan on going manual steering at first; what brackets do I need to run just the alternator and waterpump?

[RTRx7]

Looks like you have some work on your hands as far as reversing that rust goes but you're on the right track.

What kind of engineer are you?

Keep up the good work!

[AndyD]

Rust is just a part of owning a car in Canada; though deffinetely a PIA.

I'm an automotive engineer.

[kdwebber]

I think you mean to say rust is part of owning a car in ontario. Rust and emission laws are enough to keep me out west

[spacevomit]

You need POR-15 Metal-Ready (it is non-toxic though). Having just used it for the first time, I would not want to tackle a rust removal and prevention job without it. Thanks Metal-Ready!    (don't drink the blue stuff)

[digitalsolo]

Andy,

You can separate the wiper harness without cutting anything, no problem.

Not sure if you have to pull HVAC, I just always have.

[AndyD]

I've heard POR15 is magical stuff; I may have to try it when I fix the rust.

I did some work today,

pulled the wiring harness after pulling the HVAC. It was a pretty easy job for sure. I then masked some things up and went to town painting. Once dry, I threw in the Pez mounts.





is this all I need to keep from the wiring harness? (cruise and wipers coming off to the left, the rest of the harness to the right)

[AndyD]

so some more work has been done.














One issue I may have is that the oil pan is veerrryy close to the rack. Depending on how the trans is mounted w.r.t. pinion angle,  I may have a problem. Has anyone had the same issue? I'm using Pez mounts by the way. Either way, I have a manual rack sourced to help with clearance. See picture below; the passenger side of the rack with the larger diameter is the problem...



any suggestions are appreciated!

[Pez]

Many people have the steering rack issue with other kits and they space it up with washers.  The problem with the others is that their engine mounting points aren't vertical, so you spacing inward as well.  Good thing about my mounts is that you can shim it upward by putting a washer or something between the cushion and the C5 pedistol.

[AndyD]

so it's been a long.....long time between updates. I've been lurking the forum, though just never had mind to update my thread. Well...here goes. I apologize for any strange references to tracks/vendors/posts that I imply to be known, I'm going to copy/paste from a local forum where I somewhat kept an updated thread. I'll try to date the updates....

_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________



Aug-23-2010

lol, I still have some work to do and some money to spend before it makes noise.

I got the Walbro in the stock sending unit and the wierdo TII fuel relay circuit better suited to be controlled by the GM PCM. I have the GM to Mazda wiring all sorted out too, now I just have to do it lol.

things I still need...
- alternator/starter
- fuel lines to be ran
- long 27 spline yoke/TII drive-shaft flange
- cooling system
- exhaust
- more hours in a day
_____________________________________________

Then about a year goes by - it was in storage through the winter months. When I brought it out it was ready for exhaust. It was a bit of a pain to find someone to be willing to do exhaust on it. I trailered it to two exhaust shops. The first shop was known in the city for doing mandrel stainless, doing a good job, and at a fair price. He had a look underneath it and outright said no. It would take him too long to do it, and he was too busy. So I went to another place in the city, and he didn't even look underneath and said he could do it no problem. GREAT!......I thought. He then went on to supply me a quote. If I supplied ALL pipes (he didn't have a bender), flanges, gaskets, etc., he would do it for $2000. This brings me to the next post
______________________________________________

July 2nd 2011

long time - no update. Been a little weary of posting details of this car seeing what happened to my last. But....screw it.

Not going to go through all the updates, but it's damn near a car. I had posted a few weeks ago about finding an exhaust shop - kind of got the run around and said fuck it. I bought a TIG welder and went to town. I finished it this weekend, took me about 2.5 weeks and cost half of what I was quoted by someone in London....including the price of the welder and chop saw. Here's a couple crappy pictures of it.



_______________________________________________

July 4th 2011

Found the welder on kijiji. AC/DC Tig, plasma and stick inverter combo with a bunch of consumables for 400.

Thanks for the compliments guys-took it out yesterday and it feels great. No vibrations, everything feels butter smooth and it's pretty quiet. The car gets pretty hot inside though.

_ _ _ _ _

Still running stock stat. Stock temps for the fans aswell - 226 for low fan, which is crazy to me. The fans never came on when driving it so that will be one of the first changes when I get HP Tuners.

When I was out with it, I filled the thing up. Found out today i have a leaky gas tank when filled past half, so that's the next thing. I bought Lou's old rx7 for parts-hopefully the tank in it is alright.
_______________________________________________

July 10th 2011

I put the good tank in, no more fuel leak. I put the coilovers in this weekend as well as the oil pressure sender (now all the stock Mazda gauges work with the GM drivetrain). Did a few other little things too, to make it more livable.

I had an appraiser out on Wednesday and that is now the only thing keeping this thing off the road. I hope by the weekend to hang a plate on it!
________________________________________________

July 11th 2011

I called the appraiser today to make sure he knows I need this done.

The car isn't much to look at, but hell if it isn't a go'er.
________________________________________________

July 21st 2011

I'm driving this thing to work tomorrow - I can't beleive it. Maybe head to Sparta in the afternoon aswell.

So jacked.
________________________________________________

July 23rd 2011

Drove for a good four hours last night and a couple this morning and have had no issues. Damn is this a fun car to drive.
________________________________________________

July 26th 2011

Originally Posted by Wagoneer View Post
Did I miss something, did the car in your sig get stolen??

yeap, it was stolen over a year ago - all I got back were the plates.

and as for pictures - the thing looks like a bomb, not really picture worthy. I'm going to try and make it out for the meet tomorrow though, so come take a look if you'd like
________________________________________________

August 4th 2011

It has been just about three weeks to the day after I've got it on the road, and I broke it. A shift into 2nd gear ripped not just the diff mount apart but the floor is now dented and the cross member, where the mount bolts, has ripped off at the welds. I have my parts car cross member all cleaned up already and am ordering some new bushings tonight. Going to do some research on a solid front mount and make something up.

I was planning on hitting sparta tomorrow....guess not
________________________________________________

With this, I ended up welding some plates to my spare crossmember, installing a comp-mazdatrix front diff mounts and installed a snubber to limit snout's movement
________________________________________________

August 27th 2011

Thanks for posting the video - my best for the night was a 13.1 at 110mph with a 2.1 60'. Hopefully with a tire it makes its way into the 12s. I'm pretty happy with it -a couple weeks earlier i pulled 29mpg, so I can't ask for much more.
________________________________________________

May 5th 2012

so it's been a while....

last year, the car worked flawlessly until the drive to it's home for the winter, when it decided it didn't want to hold coolant anymore and the waterpump started puking. That was the biggest breakdown, including a visit to a couple tracks (Sparta and Grandbend Speedway), which were a blast. Have a look



Throughout the winter, I gathered more parts. What I got was a G5X2 Cam, 243 Heads, wideband, HPTuners, and of course, a new water pump. Before putting the heads on, I ported and polished them myself, which was enormously time/beer consuming. This is at a couple points through the swap, which was about a month ago.




The swap was relatively simple, and I had it finished in a weekend - but I had to wait forever for the special length pushrods, that could only be ordered after the entire engine was assembled.

The hardest part of the swap was to get the tuning started. I tried to use a shortcut and download a tune from HPTuner's "tune bank" for a car with the same mods as mine. Thinking it was that easy, I threw the tune on and started driving. The first couple hours went well, then I started getting some leaner AFRs and decided to go home. Tried starting it the next morning, and it didn't even try to fire - just smelled like pure gas. It took a week or so, compression test and injector test to find out all it had done was wrecked a set of plugs. So I threw a new set in and started tuning from scratch. I did that for about a week and started getting closed loop tuning pretty close - 14.7 under normal driving and ~12.5 for WOT. So I decided to go to the track. Here's an incar of my best run - dont bother watching after the run, I never edited it.



12.6 at 117 MPH - obviously traction was an issue, and if you did happen to watch the whole video, you may have noticed I was coasting pretty slowly on the return lane. That was when I was REEFING on the shifter to get it out of fourth. I finally did, but when leaving sparta, it would not come back out of fourth after shifting into it one last time. So I took the trans apart - this is what I found



those are synchro keys - mostly from the 3/4 synchro assembly strangely enough. So as of right now this is how the trans sits.



I'm now trying to find a vendor who will ship to Canada and has the parts I need to get this back together. I also have a set of new RPF1s waiting for tires - but that will come after I get the trans back together.....
________________________________________________

May 30th 2012

My parts should be arriving in port Huron tomorrow. Hope to be back on the road by next week.
________________________________________________

September 26th 2012



car's working awesome. real rubber/brakes are pretty darned cool. needs an alignment.

There's one more GB track day on Oct. 6th - I'm going to try my best to make it out. I will post GoPro videos if I do.
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________

And this is how the car sits in winter storage. I have a couple more short videos of some track visits that I'll post.

[AndyD]

Here's the GF 's run at the local track - she does pretty good!


and here's an autocross I attended.