Dream car acquisition; my FD RX-7 adventure

[lukeADE335i]

Wow - I didn't realise that FDs are that small. I'd always thought they were a similar size to an R32 Skyline, but looks not much bigger than a Miata there. Congratulations on the purchase!

[moatilliatta]

I remember talking to Ron Korman years ago. He said you think BMWs are big? You should campare them to the RX7's and other sports cars we raced against in the 80's They've always been bigger..

[Turbo30]

Wow - I didn't realise that FDs are that small. I'd always thought they were a similar size to an R32 Skyline, but looks not much bigger than a Miata there. Congratulations on the purchase!

Agreed. Mentally, I've always equated the FD to Supra or NSX size, but after sitting inn one for an entire summer, I realized it was actually pretty small.

[varg]

Multi-quote is broken, at least for me, and I am sick of doing it manually so I'll just tag you all with the questions and say thanks for the compliments overall. It is really nice to have this car after wanting one for so long and it is a cool car to drive, I really want to take it up to the mountains. It has similarities in ride quality to my E30 which is on my DIY coilovers and has a Z3 steering rack, but the FD definitely is the better handling of the two. The FD chassis feels stiffer and more direct even just driving around on the street. The engine feels torquier, and it's beyond comparison with any BMW I've driven as far as shift quality goes.

82eye Yep I have heard about the fuel filter filter on these, I had a fuel filter in my box of FD parts before I even had the car. E30SPDFRK & MrBurgundy so far I find the FD a great car stock, I don't have any issues with the seating position, but I am only 5'9". One of my friends owns an FD and is around 6'3", his has a sunroof too. He would share a negative opinion about its seating position. I have no concrete plans for mods beyond a gauge pod for boost and WBO2, a catless downpipe and likely a cat-back exhaust. I do want to put an R1/R2 lip on the car, I like how it balances the front end styling and from the FD data I saw in Race Car Aerodynamics - Designing for Speed by Joseph Katz, the lip measurably reduces front end lift at speed and has little effect on drag. Unsurprisingly, the R1/R2 spoiler seems to do nothing but increase drag, at least in the data presented which is probably at zero yaw angle. I am also likely to upgrade my intercooler, I probably will DIY it like my E34 based on what SMICs cost. Power wise, stock turbos will do 300whp with a tune, downpipe, intake, catback, and SMIC, and I think it would be faster than my E30 at the same whp because it actually has a broader torque curve. My FD and my E30 are probably within 30lbs of each other, and if I want to go very fast in a straight line, I still have an overpowered E34. Northern & BlackbirdM3 I do appreciate the unique nature of owning one of the few cars on the road that doesn't have a piston engine, and the engineering involved in this sequential twin turbo setup and the Wankel engine, but I'm realistic about my 13B. It is fragile, demands a different level of caution than other engines I've owned, and will not likely last as long in spite of my good treatment. That doesn't mean I want to swap it out though, if it wears out or break on me before its time I will rebuild or replace it. 2mAn rjmcdermott81 has a thread on RX7club which is fairly dormant and he's talking about selling the car.

As for the size, the FD was parked about a foot further forward in that first picture which doesn't help, here's the by the numbers comparison:

	E30	FD
Length	170.3"	168.5"
Wheelbase	101.2"	95.5"
Width	64.8"	68.9"
Height	54.3"	48.8"

It's a smaller car in every way but width, and it feels it.



moatilliatta
It has a black cloth interior, and it's in really nice shape.



I put it up on stands this weekend and inspected everything, no nasty surprises. It does need some suspension components, unsurprisingly for a 31 year old car. I did find that the passenger headlight cover had its rear mounts almost completely broken off. This is common in these cars, they tend to just fly off on you so I inspected mine before that had a chance to happen. This is a design flaw IMO. The mounting points on the covers are needlessly thin, I can't think of any engineering reason to make them so thin an sparsely reinforced, it doesn't look like a casting/injection molding design issue. I think they could have thickened them at the base, or at least filleted them, without causing release/ejection issues. I repaired and reinforced the mounts, and will do the other side soon. I've also devised a secondary "leash" so that if the reinforced mounts fail the covers will come loose but not fly away.



Here's a slightly better picture from a different parking lot. Not as many busy reflections here. Unfortunately the weather hasn't been cooperating so I haven't had a chance to wash the water spots off, give it a fresh coat of wax, and take some nice photos. Just phone snapshots...

[e30davie]

The FD is a cool car for sure, bucket list. I cant believe how the prices have changed in what seems like such a short amount of time, here in Australia at least they were so cheap for so long. now prices for anything decent is out of control.

Closest I've come so far is putting some FD seats in my e30 hah. back when they were $250/pair, who knows what they are worth now.

[varg]

I am attacking the "rat's nest" of vacuum lines and solenoids under the manifold. I had a split check valve, a reversed one, and a misplaced vacuum line under there. I am replacing the lines with silicone, and replacing some hardened hoses on the bypass valves and crossover tube which were surely leaking boost with silicone as well. All of this as a big ass hurricane is looming for a landfall on the other side of the state and could cause me trouble if it strays south and retains strength. The car will just going up on stands for the duration in case we get any unprecedented flooding, we do not typically see flooding here but it has been raining a lot here for the past couple of days. I really feel for the folks on the west coast who have already had it once this year, and the people in Appalachia who saw record flooding due to the weather leading up to the hurricane and the geography of the region.

Washed and waxed, this car looks so good.











I've been trying to learn about detailing because I finally have a car that needs it. I'm sticking to cost effective but proven products and getting good results. I need to detail the door jambs and engine bay next. The engine bay will be a lot of work, it has dust and some rust protectant gunk on it. my research indicated that mineral spirits will remove the gunk and not harm the paint, which is fragile on these cars. I hope to get the engine bay to match the body in the end. There are also a couple of oil leaks I need to fix too, unfortunately. As an aside, I had no idea how spoiled I was with my E30 and E34 as far as parts availability and reference info (realoem is unmatched) until I got this car. Parts are expensive, the third party aftermarket is small, and some parts are just hard to find. US FD sales are similar in number to worldwide E30 M3 sales, but there were 2.4 million E30s made and only around 70,000 FDs.

[Simple_Smith]

FDs are such good looking cars in stock form. Just needs ganador mirrors IMO. We are definitely spoiled with realOEM as a resource, although you can still get a decent amount of parts through the dealership. One point of warning BE CAREFUL with any plastics on these cars. It looks like your interior is really clean but that Mazda plastic tends to break under a stern glance. Get it back to baseline regarding maintenance then put some 200tw on it and get it on some mountain roads!

Re the flooding in Appalachia: I was down there like a week before all that went down, wild seeing pictures of places we stopped just completely under water or some of the towns just erased from the map.

[Northern]

Washed and waxed, this car looks so good.

Can confirm.

Hoping that hurricane settles down and stays the fuck away from this.

[strickland]

Looks great. Like, really great. Hope that hurricane won’t F* up anybody’s cars& homes.

[varg]

Thanks guys, we got very lucky in this hurricane. The south side of the storm was weakened considerably. I don't think we had gusts over 60mph here, and barely got any rain. However, there were a historic number of tornadoes, so I was glued to the local news the day of landfall. The closest one was a couple of miles to the west of me and apparently reached EF3 status. I was watching the doppler radar and listening to the news when it went by, I went outside and could not see it due to a tree line, but I saw the dark low hanging portion of the cloud it was coming out of. I know someone whose house took a hit from the tornado and saw pictures from the areas it went through, it destroyed a few homes and businesses and lots of cars. Even left a 20yd dumpster on someone's roof. This is why I have always been one of those guys who shutters up even when the hurricane looks like it won't get too close, the storms they throw at you can be nasty.

FDs are such good looking cars in stock form. Just needs ganador mirrors IMO. We are definitely spoiled with realOEM as a resource, although you can still get a decent amount of parts through the dealership. One point of warning BE CAREFUL with any plastics on these cars. It looks like your interior is really clean but that Mazda plastic tends to break under a stern glance. Get it back to baseline regarding maintenance then put some 200tw on it and get it on some mountain roads!

Re the flooding in Appalachia: I was down there like a week before all that went down, wild seeing pictures of places we stopped just completely under water or some of the towns just erased from the map.

Yeah that plastic... I am not looking forward to doing any work on the interior of my FD, I know the reputation for cheap crappy interiors and I know the gauges often fail and need capacitors replaced. Even my door handles are still good and I already close them via the door frame. As far as cosmetic mods, even those mirrors, I can't think of any that stand out to me as something I like other than MS-02 wheels, which look particularly fitting and period correct on A-spec cars. Excuse me while I digress on cosmetic FD mods. Even most period FD builds are just unpleasant to me, but I was one of those people who never thought "tuner car" builds or the fast and furious movies were cool, even when I was a teenager and they were new.

Early car with MS-02s


A-Spec with MS-02s


Somehow I don't hate the top fuel viper look kit. Probably because it doesn't significantly alter the lines of the car and the Viper is also a good looking car.


And if it weren't for the fenders with that horrific cutaway I wouldn't hate this specific RE car either. The rest of the RE kits can pound sand.


Pandem should be tried for crimes against humanity for what they do to FDs though, I won't even dignify it with a picture. In the BMW world it's like putting a widebody bucktooth M4 kit on an E24, in the art world duct taping bananas over The Creation of Adam or a skrillex brostep remix of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Repugnant!

[uturn]

Didn't someone take that banana off the wall and eat it?

Anyways... at least you don't have to worry about engine parts. Just shipping from Australia if you going to replace with billet pro stuff.

I have access to a couple FB RX7s, part of me wants to resurrect them but the other part knows better. Let them sleep a little while longer for a true rotary fanatic to come along.

[Simple_Smith]

TPandem should be tried for crimes against humanity for what they do to FDs though, I won't even dignify it with a picture. In the BMW world it's like putting a widebody bucktooth M4 kit on an E24, in the art world duct taping bananas over The Creation of Adam or a skrillex brostep remix of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Repugnant!

The only pandem/rocket bunny kit I remotely enjoyed was their original S13 silvia kit but looking back it really hasn't aged well and the only thing that still looks cool is the duckbill wing, all the rest of their kits belong in the garbage. The RX3/FD and the Musclecar/S14 kits were interesting but overall fell flat. Rivet on flares just ain't it, simple as that. And don't get me started on Liberty Walk and RWB...

[econti]

Phenomenal vehicles. I always liked them, and then I rented one in Japan to flog around Hakone area, and now a rotary is a must-own. The chassis is good, not super noteworthy, but that engine... my god. Single turbo on these is a real treat for reliability and ease of maintenance. Few mates have had so much trouble getting the original twins to work well, so be prepared for that.

Great cars. I love the early ones. I need one some day

[varg]

My first drive of the new year was my FD, I did also drive my E34 and E30 so I started the year out right driving all of my cars.


Engine bay shot with the full OEM look, I usually leave the battery cover off since I put a battery tender on the car in my garage.


Since buying it I have done some typical FD maintenance; I replaced all of the vacuum hoses and check valves under the intake manifold, repaired a broken solenoid, fixed a high idle I caused in replacing lines, and chased a low boost issue I caused by inadvertently getting rid of the restrictors in the wastegate actuator lines. Luckily I kept the old hoses and was able to fix that pretty quickly after pressure and smoke testing everything and finding no leaks. The high idle was weird, as many things in this car are. The primary injectors have a port that draws air from the turbo Y pipe, and in effect it's a deliberate vacuum leak that uses a pretty good sized hose (6mm). This is for atomization. That hose was pinched, most likely when the dealer that did the fuel line recall on this car years ago worked on it, and the service history shows that there was a low idle afterward. When I replaced that hose I caused a high idle and I didn't realize it until I found out where that hose went. They had opened the primary throttle to compensate, which was a harder fix than it should be since the adjustment is at the back of the throttle body, but I fixed it. Now I get full boost and have a solid idle, the car is running great. Not that it wasn't when I got it, it just lacked power because the boost reservoir check valve had split, and it lacked power after I replaced all of the hoses and valves because of my previously mentioned restrictor mistake.

The home brew pressure testing and smoke testing setup, with 3D printed plugs that I make for whatever flange or hose I need to plug.

Phenomenal vehicles. I always liked them, and then I rented one in Japan to flog around Hakone area, and now a rotary is a must-own. The chassis is good, not super noteworthy, but that engine... my god. Single turbo on these is a real treat for reliability and ease of maintenance. Few mates have had so much trouble getting the original twins to work well, so be prepared for that.

Great cars. I love the early ones. I need one some day

That sounds great. I've seen a place in Japan where you can rent classic sports cars and go on a driving tour, I would love to return to Japan some day and do that as a part of my trip, a bucket list item. Their FD is modified quite a bit so I'm unsure if I'd go for the FD or the NSX, especially since I own an FD now and don't want an NSX but would love to drive one. Funny you should say that about the chassis and engine, I've had the opposite observation of the FD. I've never been a Wankel engine fan, I was totally OK with finding a swapped car to buy or one that had no engine and could be swapped, I just happened to buy one that is completely original and I plan to keep it fairly original. I do like the power delivery but the chassis blows my well sorted E30 away. I have stiffer springs, adjustable Konis, stiffer bushings, the most desirable Z3 steering rack, sticky summer tires, as far as E30s go mine would probably be one of the best handling you'd ever drive, short of those with cages and higher end suspension. My FD even with its old all season tires and 30 year old suspension shows its chassis superiority, oh and there's the shifter which is something BMW took the longest time to get right.

The FD is more direct, stiffer, and has better steering. It also stops well. Even jacking it up you can see that it flexes a lot less than an E30. The chassis and suspension is more advanced than anything BMW made at the time, it's a true sports car. I haven't pushed it with the old tires and shocks, and it's so nice I'll probably be afraid to push it when I eventually take it to tail of the dragon with better tires, but it's clear when I'm driving it that I'm driving a true sports car like the 911s I've driven, not a modified compact car like my E30. I love the sequential turbos. It has so much low end torque which is exactly the opposite of the rotary no torque stereotype. It delivers power more like a V8 than a small turbo engine and that's awesome. I don't want to do away with that, you'd need a $2,000+ modern ball bearing turbo like a BW EFR or Garret G series and a well designed manifold to come close to the stock response and boost threshold, and I own a 500hp+ E34 and a 400hp capable E30, I don't need to make this that fast to enjoy it.

From an engineering standpoint, the engine makes it a more fascinating car. The 13B in theory is so simple but the car as a whole makes up for that. The REW is complex for its time period and price with the sequential boost control system that involves 6 solenoids, 4 actuators, and two bypass valves. It's made more complex by the US market emissions additions such as EGR and the Accelerate Warmup System. That AWS is a second idle control valve and associated hose, it revs the engine to 3,000rpm for several seconds on cold start and keeps the idle higher than it would be otherwise for an additional period of time before dropping to normal cold idle. The car has high tech for its era like sequential twin turbocharging and staged injection, and then it has anachronisms like a thermowax cold idle linkage which is something you'd see on a car from the '60s. Other Japanese cars of the era were at times as complex or close to it, 3000GTs, GT-Rs. This doesn't have rear wheel steering, active aero, or AWD. But the FD was also significantly cheaper than those cars, especially the GT-R, and at ~2,800lbs, it is the lightest of its cohort.

[econti]

My first drive of the new year was my FD, I did also drive my E34 and E30 so I started the year out right driving all of my cars.


Engine bay shot with the full OEM look, I usually leave the battery cover off since I put a battery tender on the car in my garage.


Since buying it I have done some typical FD maintenance; I replaced all of the vacuum hoses and check valves under the intake manifold, repaired a broken solenoid, fixed a high idle I caused in replacing lines, and chased a low boost issue I caused by inadvertently getting rid of the restrictors in the wastegate actuator lines. Luckily I kept the old hoses and was able to fix that pretty quickly after pressure and smoke testing everything and finding no leaks. The high idle was weird, as many things in this car are. The primary injectors have a port that draws air from the turbo Y pipe, and in effect it's a deliberate vacuum leak that uses a pretty good sized hose (6mm). This is for atomization. That hose was pinched, most likely when the dealer that did the fuel line recall on this car years ago worked on it, and the service history shows that there was a low idle afterward. When I replaced that hose I caused a high idle and I didn't realize it until I found out where that hose went. They had opened the primary throttle to compensate, which was a harder fix than it should be since the adjustment is at the back of the throttle body, but I fixed it. Now I get full boost and have a solid idle, the car is running great. Not that it wasn't when I got it, it just lacked power because the boost reservoir check valve had split, and it lacked power after I replaced all of the hoses and valves because of my previously mentioned restrictor mistake.

The home brew pressure testing and smoke testing setup, with 3D printed plugs that I make for whatever flange or hose I need to plug.







That sounds great. I've seen a place in Japan where you can rent classic sports cars and go on a driving tour, I would love to return to Japan some day and do that as a part of my trip, a bucket list item. Their FD is modified quite a bit so I'm unsure if I'd go for the FD or the NSX, especially since I own an FD now and don't want an NSX but would love to drive one. Funny you should say that about the chassis and engine, I've had the opposite observation of the FD. I've never been a Wankel engine fan, I was totally OK with finding a swapped car to buy or one that had no engine and could be swapped, I just happened to buy one that is completely original and I plan to keep it fairly original. I do like the power delivery but the chassis blows my well sorted E30 away. I have stiffer springs, adjustable Konis, stiffer bushings, the most desirable Z3 steering rack, sticky summer tires, as far as E30s go mine would probably be one of the best handling you'd ever drive, short of those with cages and higher end suspension. My FD even with its old all season tires and 30 year old suspension shows its chassis superiority, oh and there's the shifter which is something BMW took the longest time to get right.

The FD is more direct, stiffer, and has better steering. It also stops well. Even jacking it up you can see that it flexes a lot less than an E30. The chassis and suspension is more advanced than anything BMW made at the time, it's a true sports car. I haven't pushed it with the old tires and shocks, and it's so nice I'll probably be afraid to push it when I eventually take it to tail of the dragon with better tires, but it's clear when I'm driving it that I'm driving a true sports car like the 911s I've driven, not a modified compact car like my E30. I love the sequential turbos. It has so much low end torque which is exactly the opposite of the rotary no torque stereotype. It delivers power more like a V8 than a small turbo engine and that's awesome. I don't want to do away with that, you'd need a $2,000+ modern ball bearing turbo like a BW EFR or Garret G series and a well designed manifold to come close to the stock response and boost threshold, and I own a 500hp+ E34 and a 400hp capable E30, I don't need to make this that fast to enjoy it.

From an engineering standpoint, the engine makes it a more fascinating car. The 13B in theory is so simple but the car as a whole makes up for that. The REW is complex for its time period and price with the sequential boost control system that involves 6 solenoids, 4 actuators, and two bypass valves. It's made more complex by the US market emissions additions such as EGR and the Accelerate Warmup System. That AWS is a second idle control valve and associated hose, it revs the engine to 3,000rpm for several seconds on cold start and keeps the idle higher than it would be otherwise for an additional period of time before dropping to normal cold idle. The car has high tech for its era like sequential twin turbocharging and staged injection, and then it has anachronisms like a thermowax cold idle linkage which is something you'd see on a car from the '60s. Other Japanese cars of the era were at times as complex or close to it, 3000GTs, GT-Rs. This doesn't have rear wheel steering, active aero, or AWD. But the FD was also significantly cheaper than those cars, especially the GT-R, and at ~2,800lbs, it is the lightest of its cohort.

The chassis for me feels comparable to Nissan R/S chassis, and even E9x BMW (except a lot lighter) so that's probably why I didn't find it hugely noteworthy. Not that its bad, by any means, but on par with the others in its class from that time. Comparing it to a E30 isn't really fair and a FD is leagues ahead because it wasn't designed in the 70s.

Rotaries do have a reasonable amount of torque given their displacement. I suspect most people who say it are used to V8s and not turbo things. A mate had a KE55 Corolla with a heavily ported n/a 13b and that thing ripped as soon as it wasn't in overlap.