Charred plastic and rubber littered the engine as we disassembled it.
We pulled the engine from the car and thankfully the damage was isolated to just the main engine wiring harness.
It’s a shame that we are going to have to replace this brand-new harness.
With the engine removed, we had to take a long hard look at the situation and our plans for Project FD RX-7 Restomod. Originally, we were going to do a lot of baseline testing of a relatively stock FD RX-7, as well as comparative testing against more modern cars. We were going to then going to go step by step upgrading each aspect of the car to wind up with a high-powered, single-turbo setup.
Since our brand-new engine wiring harness is gone and aftermarket harnesses have far more channels for sensors but are designed only for single turbos, we are going to jump right into a single turbo build.
Our fuel lines and injectors are also burnt to a crisp, so we are now forced to upgrade the fuel system to handle the single turbo. While we have the engine out of the car, why not go down the rabbit’s hole and completely tear down a brand-new engine and fully build it? Well, that’s exactly what we are doing. Stay tuned for some fun stuff.
6 comments
I see you have a Stant coolant cap on a Pettit coolant air separator tank. That cap took out the engine on my FD. Somehow the pin on the lever backed itself out and released the pressure in the cooling system while I was driving. I caught it pretty quickly but I ended up with minor damage to a coolant seal. I switched to an RE Amemiya air separator tank with a regular style cap after that and never had another issue.
I keep coming back to this fantastic series to refer to the older posts and was startled to see that post #10 had arrived, but very sorry to see the subject! I thought right away that it would be the dreaded FPD leak but shoddy work is far more frustrating.
If the damage is localized to only a few connectors and some wires why not open the harness up and repair it, and re-loom.
It was far more than just a few connectors, and it got into a lot of wires in the middle of the loom that would require a lot of splices. You can buy this one for cheap if you want to repair and use/sell it.
Does that fuel line say “Heater hose” on it!? Yikes!
Good eye. Yes it does, which is why you should be VERY careful with who works in your car. Even big-name shops do terrible work like this.