Engine blown in my RX7, rebuild or V8?

[RobbieRX-7]

the best thing to do with a 7 is see tnker 27 and get a proper engine put in it a nice v8 instant power/torque and 25+mpg at least

All well and good if you have a spare £10k sitting in your bank:rolleyes:

[Kash_]

I know of at least 3 scooby doos where the engines have gone pooooof!! All were pushing between 360-400 bhp and all three melted pistons, one at 150 mph!! besides they are becoming as common as BMW\'s... they\'re everywhere! Maybe it\'s just me but I hate following the crowd and rather be different thus I have a RX7 :Thumbsup!

[pdtaylor18]

I think we must understand the wee problems the rotaries have and most of us accept what these are. Skylines and all the other Jap cars of that class all have their problems that are not publicised as much as the rotary.  
The trouble with these cars is that the warrenty is really not worth the paper its written on.  I only do 4k a year, others do far less, no warrenty would match that unless you came into the normal family saloon car with a 60k warrenty.  It should make no difference if the engine has been in 1 or 5 years..

I hope you find the cause because it will happen again, if it is an ignition or boost problems then they have to route it out.  The bathroom can wait but you will need to keep your missus happy somehow !!

[Ada7]

Had a similar thing happen to me with my first rx. Only done 600 miles in it since i got it and the engine decided it didn\'t want to play anymore. End up spending over 4k having things sorted out and was a nightmare saving and getting it sorted bu in the end it was worth it.
Stick with it mate. Its the pain that they cause us that makes us love them so much

Adam

[rx7veilside]

All well and good if you have a spare £10k sitting in your bank:rolleyes:

well most rebuilds by the specialists will cost u up to 4k and if u bit the bullet before the inevitable engine pop u shd get at least 2k for gearbox/rad/turbos/etc so that covers 6k of the cost for the sake of 4 more ur there with all the looks of a 7 but reliable power and decent economy
most scoobs going poof will be the import ones or abused uk ones..look how many people sevens have gone poof while taking it easy
the import sti scoobs allways had a problem with mafs and one cylinder allways running hotter than the other 3 and this only came to light after people started mapping this issue out
dont get me wrong the 7 looks a fantastic car but its unreliable/thirsty/getting more expensive to rebuild due shortage of housings etc

[gsb876]

All marques have their own issues,

Evo have crank walk issues, Skylines can have the issues of 4x4 power not working correctly, Scoobies do go "poof" alot and rotaries have heating issues,

the thing is you pick one you think you can live with and get on with it really, i have been lucky having 3 rx7\'s and no issues with any of them while i had them, others have issues straight away and sometimes it really is luck of the draw sadly :driving

[Hi RX7]

In my quest to replace my very reliable Pajero Evolution which never gave a problem in 3 years of fast motoring I tried many cars and as you all say they all have issues if you delve into the owner group forums.
The car I nearly got was the Honda NSX (3 times the price I paid for the RX7) I drove an RX7 then the Honda then the RX7 and decided on the RX7 because the RX7 seemed to be alive and responsive (I still have an older Lotus and have had a Lotus since 1973 and like the light handling) In my decision I decided that because these Honda\'s have a potential rear suspension issue which cost about £3k to correct I thought to myself no that would be too expensive if I have to do that. Well here I am and after a bit of thought today and having gone through it with Chris at Re-Worx I have decided to keep with the RX7 and each time it goes pop uprate it perhaps a single turbo conversion next time.

[Nik da Greek]

Peformance cars break, issa fact of life. There\'s no way of squeezing mad horsepower and performance out of an engine, especially not a madly high-revving 1.3 rotary ol, without compromising reliability. Everyone slated RX-7s for being fragile, but where has the legend of Skyline invincibilty come from? In my experience, they\'re just as bad as Rexes; they break the 4 wheel drive, they melt the back cylinder, their turbo blades break up, the 4 wheel steering goes off walkabout on its own when you\'re in a dead straight line.....

Scoobies are a hopelessly compromised design, the only reason they even sound good is cos the engineers couldn\'t be bothered to even get fundamentals right like getting equal length exhaust tracts from each head......

Every car has drawbacks. Even Hondas break, but the Big H overcome this by hyping the myth of reliability they\'ve built up around the V-Tec, but just cos they\'ve never had to honour a warranty on a V-Tec system doesn\'t mean the rest of the cars don\'t go wrong. Probably just about the only reliable Jap "supercar" is the late model Supra, but then you have to drive something with the handling (and size!) of a greased blue whale, and you\'ll wish it\'d damn well break just so you can buy an interesting car instead! It\'s the performance car equivalent of painting the house Magnolia.....

There\'s nothing like an FD for bang for the buck, handling, looks, all the reasons we all bought one. If it breaks, you fix it, and if you\'re canny you\'ve still paid less than the bloke in his flabby Supra with his slush-box and opaque plastic headlights!

It\'s rubbish that David\'s went so soon in to the love affair, but glad to see you\'re treating it the right way, dude! Think of the money you\'ve saved not fixing NSX suspension, it can go towards that single tubby now :Thumbs-up

[B9 KLF]

Sorry to hear your news David and glad that you are going to stick with it - it\'s always cheaper to go single when you have a rebuild, but, keep the wife happy somehow!

After reading this thread, IMO we want too much from an RX-7 and expect it to tick too many boxes maybe.

First of all, it must be the best looking of the mid 90\'s Japanese performance cars and can have very good power and can still hold it\'s own with any modern coupe. Secondly, if you plant your right foot on the floor a lot and have big power then the fuel consumption is going to be pants. Reliabilty is ok up to 60k but drops with power mods and who\'s carried them out.

So we want it to look good, which it does, we want it to handle well and have good brakes, which it does, some want power between say 350-450bhp which is easily achievable, we want limitless cosmetic and/or tuning mods, no problem, we want to take it to show and shine events but also take it on the track and run it up the strip and all for a purchase price of £4-£5k and pay tax on a 1300.

It seems to me that if you want to drive it hard on road or track or strip and mod the performance, keep some ££££\'s aside for a rebuild - a rotary rebuild must be the cheapest of the jap perfromance cars though.

If you want to go crazy with the aero and interior mods then maybe keep the power standard and stay away from a car with close to 60k mls on the clock. If you must go single keep the boost reasonable and sort out fuelling.

But if you want the RX-7 to do everything then be prepared for disapointment and deep pockets.

Just my 4ps worth

Keith :Typing

[Red and Single]

in a 7 every time u boot it you think please dont break every time u start it u think please dont flood every time u fill it up u think please let me get 15mpg this time and after all that from the moment u rebuild it it will be like a ticking clock loosing compression.if u use it daily ur looking at another rebuild in as little as 3-4 years time with poss failure before then
the best thing to do with a 7 is see tnker 27 and get a proper engine put in it a nice v8 instant power/torque and 25+mpg at least

what a load of sh1t :WaveBye

you were either unlucky, unforgiving, underfunded or uneducated :rollin

[Laeeq]

what a load of sh1t :WaveBye

you were either unlucky, unforgiving, underfunded or uneducated :rollin

I agree ... well said Red:yes

I think he is just trying to make himself feel betta as he knows he never should\'ve sold his rex in first place:Nono!  If you hate taht car so much then why put your heart and soul into it making as stunning as his rex was...:Tongue1

[BenLewisMav]

Interesting thread.
I\'ve been looking at scoobys, silvias and FD\'s for sale recently and it really hit home how (regardless of the marque) you have to treat 2/3rds of the \'Jap Performance Turbo\' cars as a liability. The amount of potentially dodgy scoobys amazed me. A handful of clean/well modified examples, but thats it.

My friend\'s Sti actually blew up on the way home after he bought it! He got it rebuilt with forged internals etc, then a few thousand miles it blew again! (doesn\'t say much about the gazzilion scooby \'engine builders\' out there either, every man and his dog seems to claim to be able to rebuild scooby engines around here)

I often wonder if RX-7\'s would be anymore reliable if they really did have a 2.6l Turbocharged V6 in.        (:2eek)
People would still tune the hell out of them and blow them up.. There\'d probably be more dodgy back-street \'RX-7 V6 Specialists\' ready to build you a crap engine.
The fact that \'the theory behind the engine\' is different doesn\'t really matter, because, as an engine it still uses a fuel pump, it still uses coil packs, Spark plugs, ECU, etc, and 9/10 times when they go boom it\'s because of components that AREN\'T rotary specific.
It\'s easy to group rotaries together because they\'re different, but, like piston engines (that also differ), they all need the right mixture of fuel, air and spark, adequate cooling and correct lubrication, and that\'s what should be focused on. That\'s what causes any engine to fail, regardless of whether its got an Apex Seal or a Piston Ring, a Headgasket or a Water Seal.

 :yes   :wiggle    :yes

[BenLewisMav]

:guinness + :Typing   =   :Thumbsup! FTW

Also been thinking about how I feel bad for engine builders recently. When an engine is under warrentee and it goes pop due to an ignition or fuel pump failure, it\'s then through no fault of the builder -who could have basically blueprinted the engine to the best standard ever- he\'s still going to have to loose out/redo ££££\'s worth of work.

I guess you cant expect a builder to check everything, the labour would be huge! but then who\'s responsibility is it to make sure the fuel pump is working right? :xconfused

[Hi RX7]

I do hope that my \'tale of woe\' does not put off any potential new owners who may be reading this thread (I browsed this web site for ages before deciding to buy an RX7) because it is just a case of really bad luck and the car is in my opinion one of the best looking, handling performance cars I have owned and believe me I have owned a lot.
Just to put running costs into some sort of perspective I owned one of the first BMW M5\'s in 1984 and somewhere I have a service invoice dated early 85 for £400 plus VAT from the main agent.

[pdtaylor18]

Well maybe then I would pay a few hundred pounds more to have the tuner check the \'add on bits\' to ensure they are satisfactory and matched to the work done.  When my engine in the FD got rebuilt by Jimmy\'s he would not issue a warrenty unless I had a Apexi ECU fitted because of the mods already done to the car.  They might in the course of checking these components that some might need replacing........hey.....it might be the reason why it blew in the 1st place!!!

I think that if you are reading this thread then we all know about the rotaries and I expect many of us have been through the rebuild bit many times before..... but........  we are still all here.  Goes to show the passion and understanding we have for the cars.