John, It started around 1970 when my dad ran out on us. My mom was a stay at home mom. I was the oldest at 15.5. I was able to go to work at B&R but we needed more money. I had been tinkering with electronic mechanical things since I was yeah high to a grasshopper. I had a natural ability when it came to mechanical stuff but not so much for electronics. My mom found a good job as a bookkeeper at a florist shop. I went to work at a grocery store as a box boy and I was starting to work on things for friends and family. A friend of ours saw that I had potential and asked me to come to work for him as an apprentice. By then my bother went to work at a casino. We finally got far enough a long that mom decided to buy a car. We had been using a friends worn out Olds 442. She came home with a Mazda RX-2. We had had the car about 18 mouths and we had put about 16K miles on it when the water seals failed on it. During the summer it was always a hot running vehicle and that is what destroyed the seals. The warranty on cars at that time was only 12 months and 12K miles. Mazda wanted $1K to fix it. We didn't have it. I bought the service manual for $25 and also read everything I could find in the library. Well I removed everything on the engine that I could while it was still in the car. We couldn't afford a cherry picker so a friend of mine helped me to pull it out of the car. Another friend let me use their little red wagon and pulled the engine home. I drained it on the patio out back and removed the thermal converter and the flywheel. I also removed the oil pan, oil pickup, front cover, oil slinger, oil pump drive gears, chain, and, tensioner*//* , balance weight, and thrust bearings. The engine was now light enough that I could pick it up and carry it. I took it in to the kitchen and disassembled it on the dining room table. My mom got a bunch of old towels to soak up the rest of the oil and coolant. I then took the parts to work and used the parts washer to clean them up. I bought a seal kit from Mazda for $75 and I put the engine back together on the dining room table. I did all of the other steps in reverse order. I don't remember if I put a new clutch in it or not. I did have to buy a clutch alignment tool for a few dollars. I had used the big hammer and the cold chisel method to get the flywheel nut off. To get the flywheel loose from the tapered eccentric shaft you just hit on the outside edge with a large hammer. Mazda let me barrow their flywheel locking tool, a very large breaker bar, and the very large socket so that I could tighten the nut back down. The problem that Mazda had with vehicles like this RX-2 that my mom bought was that the radiators were being block by the casting sand that was being left in the engine housings. This sand was being washed in to and blocking up to 1/3rd of the radiator on some vehicles. If you lived on the coast or in upstate WA where it doesn't get hot you were fine. But in the great basin area during the summer the engines were running hot and this was blowing engines right and left. It fired on the first try. I was thrilled. The rest as they say is history. I quit counting when I finished my 1 thousandth engine. My turbo engine had bridge ported intakes, The exhaust ports were opened up to the maximum. At first I started with a Holley double pumper. I found a nice twin bore Weber that I used for a while. I also tried a SU carb. I eventually modified a Volvo mechanical injector system. I found a four row radiator to replace the dual core radiator that came in the car. The dual core was fine for a stock vehicle but it was too small for this engine= .. Over the years I continued to upgrade my RX-3. I found an aluminum flywheel and heavy duty clutch. I also was able to find a 4.96 limited slip rear end for it. I put traction bars on it. I beefed up the bushings and installed Koni shocks. I replaced the front non-vented single plane brake rotors with a set of dual plane vented rotors off of a Volvo. I also replaced the rear drum brakes with the rear single plane disk brakes off of the same Volvo. I found a five speed trans from a Cosmos and put that in my car after I went through and removed every third tooth from the syncros. This made for really quick shifts but they were a lot more fragile. If you missed more than a few shifts you would have to take the trans back apart and replace the syncros. I replaced the stock 35 amp alternator with a 100 amp Chrysler alternator. I replaced the main power wiring with larger wires to carry the extra current. I enlarged the battery tray and I installed 1000 CCA battery. I also replaced the four headlamps with quartz halogen units. The original inside bulbs just had single filament high beams. I replaced these with dual filament bulbs and added the switches so that I could turn these filaments on separately from the standard low and high beam setup. I also upgraded the wiring for the higher current draw of these bulbs. I added fog lamps, drls, and aircraft landing lights. The ALLs could only be turned on when after the inside low beams and high beams were on. I rewired the rear lights so that the outside lamps were on all of the time and the inside lamps became brake lights. Also all of the parking lamps came on any time the engine was running. I used a relay to control this. I used Volvo coolant and all synthetic lubricants everywhere else. The exhaust going from the engine to the turbo was custom made from SS as was most of the rest of the exhaust going from the turbo to the mufflers and out the rear. The exhaust from the turbo to the mufflers and the tailpipe were 3 inches in diameter. I had custom aluminum 15 inch by 6.5 inch rims. I was running 15 by 295R50 BF Goodrich T/A tires. I could stop in 175 ft from 70MPH and I could do repeated stops from 120MPH with no fade. Corning was measured at 0.95 Gs on a skid pad. The top end was never measured. It was estimated at 200+. I did have it to 160 on three occasions. I didn't have the guts to drive it any faster. It didn't have the aerodynamics to stay on the ground any faster than that and it was getting light at those speeds. It was a lot of fun but it would kill you in a heart beat if you got stupid with it. That 160 was in fifth gear at 8000 rpm. I had pinned the rotor gears and the estimated red line was at 13K rpm. Do the math and you will see where the top speed estimate comes from. Well I'm getting tired. That is all for now. Thanks, rich! On 7/24/2014 11:14 PM, John Gardner wrote: > ...I was building lots of rotaries... > > Tell me more - An unfulfilled ambition of mine... -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .