Project [Rotary] FD RX-7 Part 1 – Regenesis

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With the oil baffling complete, it is bolted into the oil pan. It's important to make sure that the clearances to the bottom of the pan have not been affected by weld distortion and that the trap doors swing freely. Once this test fit is complete and everything works as intended, the bolts are removed and reinstalled with some Loctite applied to the threads. Generally hardware inside of an engine should be avoided (one of the reasons the new baffling was welded in), but sometimes this is not easily achieved and we have to make do.

Here you can see the gap between the bottom of one of the trap doors and the pan bottom. This needs to be as close as possible, but far enough away to ensure that they don't collide which could effectively prevent oil flow in both directions.

Extending the oil pick up tube is the final step to completing the modifications necessary to use this oil pan. Once this is done the O-ring is installed in the pan in conjunction with a little bit of gasket maker and the pan is bolted to the engine. The gasket maker helps hold the O-ring in place while the oil pan is installed and gives a little extra sealing capability.

With the deeper oil pan, the pickup tube needed to be extended so that it would be closer to the bottom of the pan. This will help in our mission to keep the pickup submerged and prevent oil starvation. This extension puts the oil pick up screen only 3-4mm off the bottom of the pan.

Oil pan installed. Longer hardware is needed since the pan rails are so much thicker than the factory pan. Using a torque wrench on these M6 bolts is highly advisable because breaking them seems to be a very common occurrence among RX-7 owners. Also, notice that the engine mounts are bolted to the block at this point as well. Banzai Racing polyurethane mounts are used for this project.