So I decided to take advantage of all the knowledge on these forums, by posting info on my '91 TII and the very slow progress of modification. I hope to read some replies with comments, info and tips to improve my car, and reach my goals faster/cheaper/more efficient.

So lets begin from the start. Not so long ago I wrote a paper on Felix Wankel and his engine. This paper wasn't very impressive, but it didn't have to be to impress the teachers and my fellow students, since they didn't know anything, or very little about rotary engines. My goal was to inform my fellow student on the workings of the engine, the history of rotary engines, and take away some of the misconceptions. I thought people who will have a career in the automotive business should have some basic understanding of Wankel engines. Ofcoarse I got a 9, which is a A or A- in the US, what else were they gonna give a student who knew more about the subject then them? LoL! Now a couple years later I forgot most of the things I used to know, so I guess I have to look back into it sometime.

During my research I decided I wanted to have a rotary powered car soon, and decided on the FC3S. I remebered playing Gran Turismo 2 with my dad as a kid, and we won most of the races with a Mazda that looked very fermilliar now. It turned out all this time we had been driving a FC convertable in the game because of it's great handling when I was a kid back in 2000 or so, which we used to call the ugly car... I still don't like the FC convertables. I do however have a weakness for cars from the FC-era and actualy prefer the FC over the FD. I'd also rather have a R32 over a R34 Nissan. I decided I wanted a turbo and I wanted a S5, preferably a '91. I started looking for one, and found there were big differences in price. I also noticed they are alot more rare over here in Europe then they are in the US. Alot of '91 TII's also turned out to be convertables. I decided to buy a cheap FC which needed work, because I knew I was gonna replace everything eventualy anyways. I wanted one with an engine that would run for another year, and then I would rebuilt it.

After a couple of months I found one near Berlin, which seemed kind of decent, but was only moved around the block every week for 2 years for the street sweepers. I know: Not good! Now, I'm not a very good car buyer, I fall in love with cars, and buy them even though I shouldn't. So I did, got me a export registration, and drove the car home to the Netherlands (I believe it was 6 hour drive). I stopped at my dads place who lived in Germany back then. I drove the last hour home during night time, the car held up great, and after running it in for 5 hours, I trusted the car a bit more and increased speeds on the nightly autobahn home. It performed great! I ran the car for the remaining 2 weeks the registration was valid, and got to know the car a bit better, and decided it was to heavy, and not very quick, but a nice base to improve on. When registration ran out I parked it here, and left it there for about 6 months.



I didn't have money or time for the car, and first had to get rid of my two VW Bugs, to create some playing room cash wise. My dad sold the crappy parts car, and we got the damaged Bug fixed.

Here you can see both V-Dubs:


My 'good' one:


It was in exelent shape with most parts replaced and rebuilt recently, had a little damage on the front though. When that was done I sold it to a friend's brother.





I now had some cash to import the FC to the Netherlands (until then it officialy didn't exist, being exported from Germany, but never imported anywhere). When I checked out my car after those months it stood there it had two flat tires and a dead battery. No problem, inflated tires, and replaced battery. Then I paid all taxes, had it registered and insured, so now it was officialy mine. Before the import process I bought a set of JDM S5 tail lights from Tom (Circuit Theory) to replace my S4 EU tails. This created a smaller space for licence plate mounting, so I would get special "US size" plates.



I also mounted a set of 2-piece 17" ATS wheels we had lying around. They used to be the winter wheels of my dads Supra. I traded the winter tires for a set of Bridgestone Potenza RE 050 A with decent thread life. These should help make the car handle alot better then the Uniroyals I had on my stock rims.





Then I started taking out crap out of the interiour I don't need, which is most of it... I started removing the sound deadening with a heat gun, since I have always done it that way, but since it leaves so much residu, I'm gonna give dry ice a try for the rest soon. I also removed doorpanels, audio, AC stuff behind dash windshield fan. Still have the heater because I haven't decied on how to delete it.







That's all for now, I'm gonna continue the story in a few days, I know you guys don't care right now, but give it some time. If my plans come true it should get interesting soon enough.

Anyone have ideas on the heater delete?

 

I like where this is going...

RE: heater - just take it out and plug up the hoses on the engine side.

 

I was thinking just linking them together, therby deleting the heater. I daily the car at the moment, since I blew a big-end bearing on my daily drive Corolla. I'll probably do that at the same time I remove all unnecceairy crap in the engine bay.

Riz.

 

OK, I was planning on waiting for the next big thing before updating, but things have slowed down so much that I'll just update now. See, I lost my drivers licence for speeding and won't get it back till April. So that has slowed down everything alot. The next couple of weeks I will see what happens. Or I'll try to get a garage or something simmilar where I can work on the FC, or I'll just leave it there and go to my dad for a couple of months. He lives on Mallorca, and I probably won't miss driving that much over there.

Anywho: What little have I done since where I left of in the last post?

Well first of all I replaced the oil and oil filter. I had no idea what oil was in the engine, and whether it was mineral or synthetic, so I flushed the engine with medium quality (MPM) mineral oil. Had it run on that for about 10 mins, then replaced it with Valvoline VR-1 mineral Racing oil.

Since I had the car in the air for the oil-change I decided to cut-up my bumper and mount the lip I had laying around. It was cut in two, but for the quick fix zip-ties should do the job. I dunno about the red (it came like that), but it'll probably stay like that until the whole car gets painted. I also mounted my licence plate off-set because I'm cool like that!



When I had the dash back in, I decided to change the steering wheel to a used Sparco one, which I traded for a Big Mac. Pretty good deal, since I got the hub for 45 Euros. In my eyes this is a huge imrpovement for 45 bucks + Big Mac.



I also got me a better feeling shiftknob, the only non-rice I could find also Sparco, and some gripy pedalcovers which I can cut up and bend to make the pedal layout a bit more convenient. I haven't installed those yet, nor have I removed all the sound deadening yet. I know: Lazy bastard!

Lastly I got me a used Sparco Rev seat which I haven't installed either. Not so much because of laziness, but more because it's too small, or I'm too fat. probably last... One might think I'm some kind of Sparco fanboy, but that's not the case. I'm gonna get a bigger driver seat and use the Rev as a passenger seat. I'l also try and lose some weight, I promiss...

This all should make the workspace a bit errr... LESS comfortable, but alot more effecient.

Well, I hooked up the important stuff in the interiour (indicator switch, headlight switch and stock gauges) and took the car with me when we were going for a tuning session of a friends Opel Corsa A.

Here's the Corsa:



That all worked out pretty nice. He was putting out 130 HP to the wheels IIRC, might have been to the flywheel though... After that we put the FC on the rollers to see hwat she had to offer. Here's the results:





As you can see we accidentaly printed out the 2nd (blue) run, instead of the 1st (green) run. We did three pulls, which got worse every time because of I/C heatsoak.

Now I dunno about the Tq, but the HP seems a bit (alot of bits) to high to me. 196,7 RWHP seems totally unrealistic for a stock FC. Also I should add that I did a compression test which gave pretty much 6 bar on all six faces. This was all kind of confusing to me, since I have no idea how much WHP I should have. The engine has 120.000 kilometres on it...

I stopped worrieing about the power figures, and got on with the car. I bought some parts of Yahoo Auctions in Japan. I got a MazdaSpeed front strutbrace and went with a Cusco unit for the rear. I was gonna get MazdaSpeed for the rear aswell, but like the Cusco unit better because of the one piece design of the strut mounts.





For the rear you need to cut a hole in the speaker mount, or just remove it completely. Since I don't need speakers or any of that stuff I decided to remove the mounts using spot weld drill bits. You can't get to all of them, so some agression might be needed to get all the unwanted metal away.







The MazdaSpeed unit is very nice with the gold bits being anodized alloy. The Cusco rear tower bar uses the same alloy bar, but for the blue mounting bits they use steel, which makes it a fair bit heavier. Still pretty nice though.

I noticed a big improvement in handling, which became even better after I had the car re-alligned. Definiatly worth the money.

I also managed to pick up a good condition FTP to replace my broken one. It shows how hard it is to find parts over here when it's cheaper to get a EU-spec FTP from Japan (Where they use FTP's with integrated lights) then to get them over here.

With an eye on the future I also picked up a Knight Sports FBCD (Fuel & Boost Cut Defencer), for when I delete emissions. I might not need it with stock exhaust minus cats, but it can't hurt and I wanna get a full exhaust soon anyways.

Well that's about it. I now have the front calipers of, which I will rebuild. I'll also rebuilt the rear ones. I will be running Brembo brake discs, Ferodo pads (DS2500 or DS3000) Goodridge brokehoses, high quality brake fluid and some ducting. I'm pretty seriously contempleting removing the brake booster aswell.

Anyone got a different oppinion on brake pads?

Also I phoned Goodridge (Dutch company) on why they don't have '91 TII brake hoses. The guy said they don't have the measurements and that I should send my old ones in to have them made. Anyone can confirm whether I can just use other FC Goodridge hoses?

Lastly I remove the airpump, since I'll be removing all emissions. I am looking for a 100% complete block-off plate kit with every single block-off plate I could ever need. Anyone got ideas? I also wanted to remove my A/C pump, but it's on the same bracket as the PS pump, so I will have to figure that out first.

That's it for now. 2010 was gonna be the big year with lots of driving and even some competion driving, but that's all unsure now. I have a sposor offer from Cusco (nothing spectacular), but I need a couple thousand bucks to atleast cover a big part of the costs for next season. Let's hope for good news on the next update. Let me know what you think,

Riz.

 

Noone can tell me about the brakehoses? Or the block-off plates?

Maybe I shoud start seperate threads for them?

Riz.

 

As long as you get brake hoses for a 5-lug car with vented rear discs any '87-'91 FC brake hoses will work.

For the A/C, you can just remove the A/C compressor and leave the bracket for the P/S in there. The aluminum bracket weighs almost nothing.

 

OK, thanks for the hoses tip. I'll just order them then.

Yeah, I'm just gonna look at the bracket, but in the cold outside I didn't have time to check it out realy. I realy need a dry place to work on the car.

Riz.

 

I really like the way that you Put the rear strut bar in!..shows ingenuity!..
But I like Tunes!..haha!.

 

That car looked really nice. Why did you remove so much stuff from the interior? It does not really weigh that much, looks a lot better, and without interior paneling, and sound matt, your car will sound like **** when you drive it. Do NOT delete the heater. It is usefull as a second radiator even in a race car, and it helps to clear up fogged up windows when it's raining out. Deleting the heater improperly has also resulted in engine failure when people lost all their coolant....

What you should do, is take out the black box between the heater and the blower fan, reinstall the blower fan and the logicon, and use a piece of house heater duct (round soft aluminum pipe) bent into shape to make the air flow across to the heater.

I am really disapointed to see such a nice FC get totally hacked up, my car is not as nice, but it's modded a lot more smartly.

In the engine, there really is not a whole lot to remove. You can get a Koyo radiator, electric fan, and a custom intake built (1 2.25" inch filter, i 2.5inch coupler, 45* pipe, and a 2.5" to 2" inch reducer coupler into the turbo. you will then also need a new BOV, so go for an HKS ssqv, HKS makes a pipe that goes in place of the stock bov pipe. They also sell samco intercooler hose kits on ebay for $30 to replace the TMIC rubber hoses. The TMIC really isnt that bad unless you are planning to make over 300whp.

I would not recomend removing emissions in case you have testing over there, and the components do not affect horsepower at all. In fact, I do not really recomend removing the top intake at ALL untill you have all the components, otherwise it will take forever to get all the little hoses, gaskets, and etc ordered, fitted, and hooked up properly. I also do NOT recomend to remove the thermowax pellet on the throttle body, because your car will NOT idle well when its cold, and there will be other issues as well.

I would get a new fuel filter, a Walbro 255lph fuel pump, and an RTEK 1.5 chip (unless you are planning on getting a standalone engine management system like Haltech, etc)

 

Yeah thanks, I guess I don't! Maybe in my daily...

Thanks, but it realy wasn't that nice... Pictures can trick you I guess.

The thing is that the car is just to heavy, it needs to loose atleast 200-300 KG, so it can be in the 1000 KG range (dry without me). I will first of all remove everything I don't need, and then start replacing parts with lighter weight parts to achive that goal. My limited expierence driving track prepped cars tells me the car will feel alot better then. Plus we all know it will improve in all directions (acceleration, deceleration and turning).

I was actualy surprised by the amount of weight I was able to take out of the interiour alone. When the interiour is clean, I will weigh the car again for the total difference.

I don't realy care how the car sounds when I drive it around. Don't forget this will be a track car and I'm sure even as hardcore as it could get, it still will be alot more comfertable and quieter than the formula cars I have driven... LoL!

We are currently looking into what we will need to keep the windshield fog free. I never had seriour problems in my VW Bug without a blower fan or windshield heater. Just air picked up from infront of the windshield. If needed we can instal a smaller blower fan with electric heat element.

As for temp issues I will instal a aftermarket temp gauge, do good ducting and probably preplace the radiator.

I would love to see more of your car. I like the FC, but I don't have it as a car to cruise around like a ***** magnet. It's not a ***** magnet, even the nicest FC out there is just an old Mazda to the chicks. So I'd rather have a good performing car that looks decent then a decent performing car that looks good. At the moment it's neither though... LoL!

Yeah, we'll probably go that route. I'm not realy interested in alot more power... She is kind of slow, but I realy want better handling, weight and reliability.

I disagree. The Cats are killer defeniatly a power killer when it comes to turbo cars. Whithout that restriction boost should climb a bit. Rotary engines don't have to pass emmission in the Netherlands, they fail anyways... I have to say I'm not sure about the thermo wax yet, I don't mind having to keep it running until it will do on it's own. Sometimes I feel you guys should all buy some realy old cars, just to see how spoiled you are with all those modern day gizmos.

I will definiatly make sure fuel delivery is in order, and do want to go stand alone in the future. I don't know anything about Rtek though...

Riz.

 

looks like you still have lots of sound deadening to get rid of.

Good start though, looking forward to what you have planned in the future.

Threads like this really make me want to restart my build from scratch.

 

Banzai's awesome for block-off's (they also have OMP if you ditch that as well)
http://banzai-racing.com/store/FC_block_off_plates.html

You may also want to look into adding AI if you're going to start tracking/looking for reliability/etc, it's becoming the 'hot new trend' around here and there's a lot of topics about it in the 3rd gen section, or in the AI section itself.

https://www.rx7club.com/auxiliary-injection-173/

 

I must have missed the track car bit, because this thread had an strong resemblence to all the other ones where a kid gets an FC and begins hacking it up to build a "race car" that will probably never end up on the track. If you will build it proper, then by all means, power to you.

I must have not understood your mechanical aptitude when I wrote the comments I made, just forget all that, do whatever you want.

PS: Why do you need a Track car if you already drive formula cars?

 

This is a bad *** build. I'm happy to see the rotary legend continues to live all around the world. You should post some videos if you get the chance, it makes everything all that much more exciting. I wonder though, what are you studying in school?

 

looks like the beginings of an awsome project. It'll be fun to follow a "track car that can be street driven" since I'm trying to build a street car that can be taken to the track.....until I have another daily that is...

 

Yeah, I'll just plan in a full day to remove the ****...

LoL! I just checked and noticed I never stated what the cars purpous was! DOH!!! You couldn't have known... It's probably because the goal is simply so clear to me, I never thought about writing it down. Yeah, we're at the tracks a couple of times a month either driving or supporting friends/colleges.

Oh yeah, about Formula cars: They kick ***! Even low powered old Formula Fords like I drove are awesome. So precise, and the fact you can see the wheels totaly changes the expierence. You can rent them in these group events. It's pretty sweet. I would love to one day own one with a NA 13B. Often they don't have stock (in this case Ford) engines anymore. Mine had a Opel 2.0 8-valve. Stock output of these is 150 HP, and it is pretty stock. But the car weighs next to nothing. The earo is also nice, but probably not nearly as effective as todays formula cars.

I have very little track expirence. I'm deffeniatly a novice and wanna learn to be quick in my FC.

Wow, the comment are alot more positive than I expected! Get's me motivated if you guys believe in me... LoL!

I did do a technical car related study, but switched to a managing study (still car business oriented). I quickly knew I wasn't gonna be a mechanic for the rest of life and now use the very small basic knowledge I picked up originaly, as a basis for the things I will learn trough personal studies and expierence in the field of motorsports.

Yeah, my focus is gonna be totally track, with few concessions needed to keep it street legal for now. I wanna go around driving the Nordschleife (never done that in this car) and that means your car needs to be street legal. I will deffo not daily this car...

In my next update I will clearly state my intentions with the car. What use it will see that is.

Thanks for the support,

Riz.

 

Well people not much new when it comes to the FC. I have yet to finish up the brakes. The calipers are being rebuilt right now, and haven't decided on pads yet. Probably will run Ferodo though because of availability. I have ordered a FD UIM and TB, which I'm gonna run when I'll convert to FMIC/VMIC. But not just yet. I've also ordered some new wheel nuts... yeah I know: I'm baller!

This is kind of a blog so since there is so little news I thought I'd show you what we're working on aswell. Well our main project actualy is a '85 Opel Corsa A which is in the process of being built from the ground up as a track car. We had the body lying around for a while now as a spare body to eventualy replace the dirt track body. This is the dirt track car of my friend Jan.



I'm not very much into this type of motorsports, but he enyoyed competing for several years now. Last season he decided to quit for once and all with dirt track, now concentrating all his efforts on grip driving. Not yet competitive though, we both need to get more track time and realy orient where we wanna be in a few years.

Back to now: So for his first purpous built track car he decided to go with a Corsa I just wrote about. The reason being he knows the car, and already has a very well built 1600 engine for it.

We had the body kind of sandblasted. I say kind of because we had retards do it that only did halve of the parts we needed blank metal. Anyways, it was cheap and saved us time grinding of the sticky stuff. When we got it back we got to work removing all the rotten parts of body and slowly replacing needed body section. At the same time we removed as much as material we don't need.

To get faster we add lightness.

This is how she sits today:



The front couldn't be saved, so we welded in a new one. This was done before the sand blasting, so the front was clean aswell.



Jan removed most of the inner panels above the rear wheel wells. There also were a ton of brackets and such to be removed. We also cut out the spare wheel bucket and replaced it with a flat piece of metal. We're gonna need the clearance for the diffuser. Yeah, the Corsa will have flat underpanels ending in a carefully designed diffuser.







We have a rollcage we salvaged from an ex ralley car. We'll modify and install that soon.

The lightweight body which we expect te be 650 - 700 KG combined with the power of the 1600 cc engine (140 HP / 170 Nm) should be pretty quick round Zandvoort.

While I'm talking about this I might aswell tell you about the previous project we kind of put on hold. We were into drifting so we decided to build a E30 BMW for drifting competitions in Belgium. It was gonna have a M3 engine (S50) the 3 litre for some serious power in once again a very light weight car. That stopped early because of costs. At that time it was hard to combine the dirt track with drifting on a serious level for Jan. But also we kind of lost interest in drifting. It's not very big here, making it hard to grow in the sport. Anyways, this is the E30 we haven't worked on for months:



Again the same business of removing unneeded crap. This time without the sandblasting though.



Here's the Sparco cage installed.



And some pretty ******' cool FRP M3 body parts. They are very light and help lowering the total weight of the car a whole bunch. He also had some coil-overs built by H&R and we are gonna run bigger brakes. (The car started out as a 316i BTW. LoL!

One day we are gonna start on this car again though, then probably for grip to replace the Corsa (when he realises RWD kicks ***! LoL!) We have already started fantasizing about a nice engine for the Beamer. Maybe a Subaru 2.5 boxer turbo, or a bridge ported 20B... WHo knows?

The few drift events we did in this vehicle of win: LMAO!





That's gone now in case you wanted to buy it HaHa! It's now stylin' in Bulgaria! :-)

That's it for now,

Riz.

 

Looks like you have a lot of stuff.

 

i have a bad feeling about the fate of this thread

 

Well, actualy I don't. I have never had this few cars... The FC is the only thing I have left. The rest is all gone. When I get my licence back I'll have to get a DD again. Probably some crappy car I'll trash around. In the long run for DD I want to get a W124 Benz Kombi 320 sorta like this:





Only with less chrome!

Why is that?

I like your location: "On The Lake", mine is "In The Mountains"...

Anyways: I promissed I'd give a quick explaination as to the purpous of my car. Well, the FC and the Corsa of my friend Hend (Jan) will be mainly built to have fun with on the track. Whereas I only want to get my car ready for action, he has decided to go all out right at the beginning. The fact that modifying a Opel Corsa is much cheaper then doing the same to a FC (atleast here in the Netherlands), helps make his choices a bit more reasonable. We will do track days and time attack. Plans are also to enter very low level competative racing in either the Netherlands (through DNRT) or in Belgium (SkyLimit).

So that's that,

Riz.

 

WTF? whats wrong with this thread?

Anyways, I find this thread quite entertaining and enlightening, it's not everyday that I get to see someone building cars the way I dream of especially coming out of Europe. Well I could search for that, but either way I enjoy what you've shown us so far for sure. But yea, it's always good to see someone showing there build, it's inspiring and informative, so as I go deeper into my build I'll have some sort of idea of what to expect, and how I want mine to turn out.

So I like your idea of your DD the W124 Benz Kombi 320, but I would try and get it as a diesel and run that bitch on waste vegetable oil or biodiesel. btw, you know Opels are pretty rare here in the states right? I've seen ONE that I can remember, and it was at an autocross, probably some dude from somewhere in Europe, lol.

GL with the build, keep updating!

 

Wel een beetje doorwerken he!

 

Aaargh! There's that word again... Diesel. Don't ever mention that again in this tread! Nah, just kidding, LoL! I'm not a big fan of diesel cars. I don't like to drive 'em. There was a time when I thought it might be OK conciddering costs and such, but then I did the calculations, and decided it wasn't worth ruining my driving expierence every single day. A 3.2 Benz should have decent oomph, but still be almost twice as economical as the FC.

Yeah, I know. There are plenty of Opels sold though rebadged as other GM brands. The New Buick Regal is a Opel Insignia.

Ik doe men best, HaHa! Maar ik ben echt focking broke!

Riz.

 

suscribed.

 

the car feels heavy because of the stock high ride height, spongy old rubber suspension bushings and soft road feeling stock struts.

don't let those things fool you, even a stock FC is plenty light compared to most RWD cars, even track prepped. my FC took on a whole new feel after upgrading the suspension and power output level.

i drive my car in full street trim with plenty of crap in the bins and it feels plenty light to me, much moreso than when it was 100% stock. i suppose it's fine if you are building it into a track car but if not then you are destroying it slowly, not upgrading it. i just shake my head when customers bring in street driven cars with no interior, i feel like punching a baby.