Jaco

I'm new to the forum, been reading just about every spare minute I have on here though.

I'm Jake; 33 years old, been working on/building cars for about 17 years. I restore the older FJ series land cruisers for a living. I was into sports cars first, have owned a Supercharged MR2, Mazda RX2, and an E30 M3 that made the cover of grassroots motorsports, also a slew of trucks. Welding/fabricating is my hobby but I find myself doing it for $ more often than not lately.

I've converted a VW vanagon to a SVX subaru flat 6 with a porsche 911 trans, helped a friend put a M42 in a 320i BMW, put a OM606 Merc diesel in a landcruiser and recently in the Ford in the pictures I put a Cummins out of an older dodge. I love cars, love modifying them and get OCD when it comes down to a project.

On to the FD, I purchased it very recently with the intentions of putting a 20B in it. The FD is a 93 with 151K miles, an automatic transmission (yuck) and either a blown oil control ring or a bad turbo. It smokes like crazy, but I picked it up for the right price. It's just clean enough to make a good project, but needs an engine and a manual trans...

The 20B is a non lettered block, but appears to have very low miles. All the rubber hoses are soft, oil passages look spotless and seems to be in very good shape. I have had some help on here with it's limitations being a non C or D code engine, but I think I'd like to attempt to do something with it.

The car in Phoenix before purchasing:



My wife took these when I brought it to our home in the middle of nowhere:











The dog "Nitro" approves



Love these cars



Here's my dumbass in the car. I have NEVER driven one of these, always wanted one, could never afford one, the previous owner loaded it on the trailer, and my wife drove the smoky bastard into the shop:



Started taking it apart; I bought this car for fun- as a project. I love projects and learning new things about new cars. I had an RX2 but didn't do much to it, I gave the car (not sold) back to the original owner who was my mentor/boss a long time ago.



20B, believe it or not someone GAVE me this 20B. Long story but it's mine now. I wouldn't have bought the FD if I wasn't given the engine, it's been the inspiration for this project.



Serial # on housing:



So, all that being said- I'm going to be doing this entire job myself. Short of any crazy machine work that is Rotary specific; I will do every last bit myself. I can't balance tires but all fabwork (with some help from a friend with a laser), welding, wiring, exhaust, tuning etc will be done by yours truly. That's why I bought it, I love the project aspect just as much, maybe more, than driving the car.

I'm planning on stock drivetrain, converted to a manual of course, a small single turbo (GT35?), megasquirt V3 pro, and will be fabbing up everything else. Quite possibly build it NA streetport with 9.7 rotors (really leaning that direction). I want the thing to run out of steam at about 7500 rpm to hopefully not kill this early code 20B (thoughts?)...

I know I can't compete with some of the guys on here, hol-e-cow there are some nicely done cars on here! Kudos to you guys, seriously, amazing builds on here. What I'll be trying to build is a somewhat affordable 20B somewhere in the 450 hp range.

The only things I know about rotaries are: Cool, bad reputation- uh I guess that's about it! So if you see me doing or about to do something dumb on here, please let me know. Any input is appreciated.

Jaco

What better way to celebrate labor day than to work on something fun!

Certainly not the most exciting thing, but it was pretty exciting for me. I've rebuild a lot of engines but never a rotary, I figured I'd open up the 20B to see why it doesn't have compression on the rear 2 rotors.

The apex seals were totally stuck on most rotors, and the carbon build up is really heavy. On the plus side the coolant passages are super clean, o ring grooves look really good and oil maintenance appeared to be good. I think it just wasn't driven hard enough ever.

Jaco

Jaco

These 2 housings are the worst thing I found, but I'm not sure if they're ok. Any thoughts?

This one has a groove that is close to the outer edge, inline with the edge of the apex seal. It's not real deep but seems to be marginal at best to me... It appears the apex seal was stuck, maybe got carbon behind it.



It appears that it got hot enough to discolor the chrome too.



This one looks really good except some chrome flaking, that from what I read is well within spec.