A little background on Dan, I was checking out random cars at 7stock when I stumbled on his car. Turns out he did the swap at age 68 a few years ago, never did anything other than oil changes and brake flushes. He was one of the first guys in CA to do the swap, when it was only Hinson offering any sort of parts. Pretty amazing!

If the car looks funny its because it’s jacked up from the driver’s side.

Anyway, pretty much have the fuel system down, plans as of now is to bypass the stock Mazda fuel filter, run the Corvette fuel filter / FRP in the engine bay with the stock hard lines for supply and return. Pretty nifty how the Corvette has a filter / FRP all in one, I haven’t seen something like this before. Alternatively, I can run the vette filter in the back, near the fuel tank and the start of the hard lines, just use 1 of the lines for supply and connect that to the LS1 fuel rail. We’ll see if I can find a suitable mounting position, having less fuel stuff in the engine bay is always safer.

After checking out Dan’s car, he called up a buddy of his, Mike, from the v8rx7 forums so I could take a look at his work in progress. It’s pretty amazing, steel wide fenders in the rear, repainted satin black engine bay, built engine, even stripping out unnecessary wiring from the harness. Whole 9 yards! My original plan was to do the bay in flat black like this, but I was scared of how it would hold up. After seeing his car though, and how easy it is to touch up spots, maybe this is the direction I want to go in.

Amazing doesn’t even begin to describe this car.

The car as it sits now:

If you look closely, you can see the steering wheel sitting on some books. When you loosen the bolts to the steering column, you need to support it somehow, something that the Mazda instructions neglected to tell. I decided that I should probably put something there when I saw it hanging by the wiring. Not good. There’s also 2 blue wiring clips on both the passenger and drivers side that need to come out. I found this out after a good amount of yanking. The bolts for the parking brake bracket also need to be taken off, and put aside so the dash has room to come out. The instructions I tried following really weren’t that good, but now I know!

What a pain in the ass. I’m not looking forward to trying to shove it back in.

Next step is to take a billion pictures of the engine bay and how everything fits, and strip it.

First of all, what the hell is this:

2 of these bolted in the bumper into the bumper support, I have no idea how Mazda expects me to get this out, or what kind of tool is required for it. The first one came out after 15 minutes of banging on the edge with a flathead screw driver, the 2nd one took much longer. Eventually PB Blaster + vice grip worked their magic after a few hours. I was actually thinking about cutting away the bumper tab where it connects. Seriously, worst engineered car ever. Even the forum community I turned to didn’t know what screws I was talking about, I suspect all the cars are now on their 3rd, 4th, 5th+ owner; once the bumper is removed and these screws come out, there’s no way anybody is putting them back in, so not too many people have to deal with it.

This is how the car sits now, after another stripped screw and breaking some tabs on the headlight cover, I finally got all that crap off. Next step is to completely strip the engine bay, I really hope I can put everything back together.

On another note, I was very impressed with the roller, before this, the fenders have never been removed from the car, paint is all original, and I suspect the bumper and headlights have never been removed either. Clean is an understatement!

Apparently, the car has quite a history, it was owned by a respected rotary enthusiast on rx7club.com, he pretty much did all these is to do to the car and blew it up about 3 years ago. It’s been sitting in his garage until his job relocated him earlier this year which forced the sale. It went to another guy who parted out the entire car, definitely making it worth his while, before ending up in more or less stock form, in my garage.

So far, I’ve yanked out the tranny, with plans to strip the engine bay for a repaint as there’s some surface rust which will never get taken care of if not now. As for the motor, the best bang for your buck is still the LS1/T56 combo. I was looking into the LS2 (c6 longblock) and LS6 (c5 zo6), but in the end, the price of the stock LS1 and potential for power with just cams and heads would be more than enough in a car that weighs about 2800 lbs. In stock form, I’ll be looking at ~330whp/tq, with the heads and cams, 400+, definitely enough for me.

I considered building a rotary for a while, but after my first experience, I decided I wouldn’t be able to justify putting money into an engine that could fail anytime. I was already experiencing overboost issues on the stock twins with just ~3k on a rebuilt engine, all it takes is 1 case of detonation and you’ve got yourself a paperweight in the garage. Single turbo is also a pretty popular way to go, but the cost of a single turbo FD is comparable to an LS FD, hp #’s are similar but the v8 puts out low end tq like no other. Other benefits include not randomly blowing up. That was the end of the debate for me.