OK, where do I start? Oh yeah, this 12A rotary RX-7 is a DOG! I suppose we could have added a turbo, or maybe nitrous to wake this thing up, but the motor would be running on borrowed time and probably run no better than 14's anyway. Not that a 14 second street car is bad, it isn't. But a 14 second street car that sounds like this one, through it's 'fart-pipe muffler', is bad. So that's where I stand on rotary engines ( I feel a joke coming on). Actually, Geoff has wanted to put a V-8 in his street RX-7 since he got it. He's been gathering parts almost from the day of the dragstrip test of the freshly built rotary motor (16.01 in the quarter). It appears that he has all the parts needed to do the conversion, so this weekend we hope to pull the rotary and give new life to his MAZTANG.
As you may have guessed, this RX-7 will be powered by a smallblock Ford. Geoff located a .030" over 302, with small chamber 351W heads, fresh from the machine shop, unassembled, for $500. Better yet, his friend took payments, so he had some money left over to get the rest of the parts to complete the motor, which we did, with the exception of the cam and intake manifold. The cam is on 4 to 6 week backorder from the suppliers we usually use, so Geoff was pretty bummed out. But he did find a Holley Street Dominator aluminum single plane intake for $150, and it's got a good running 302 attached to it! So, we swapped the Fox oil pan and new Melling oil pump from the fresh motor to the latest motor and also installed new head gaskets because of a curious oil leak. We will install the latest motor and work out the bugs, which should take 4 to 6 weeks or until the backordered cam is in stock. Sometimes things have a way of coming out all right.
A few previous visits to the junkyard secured a shifter from an '80 something Mustang, a Duraspark unit with the wiring harness, an AOD tranny from an '87 Lincoln and assorted other parts. The case of the transmission had cracked around the output shaft so we transferred all the guts to a good case and installed a B&M shift kit at the same time. I tested the Duraspark, and it works good and the shifter cleaned up good also. We have been bit by junkyard parts before, so we'll just wait and see. The installation kit from Granny's Speed Shop arrived a couple of days ago, so I think we're ready.
I'll post more after this weekend and try to include lots of pictures.