More spare parts for the BFMR, that is. The convenient thing about amassing a giant pile of spares is that you’re guaranteed to find something missing, broken, or jabroni’d on the project car which requires replacing, post-haste. Usually something trivial, too!
See, I knew this stuff would come in handy one day!
Been ferrying things daily from the lockup down to the garage as I need them, today’s pile of swag includes the radiator overflow bottle, a factory blow off valve return line, the rear washer bottle, a piece of intake J-pipe, and some assorted sensors and electrical parts for when I start testing that side of things.
Anyway, in my first project BFMR update I mentioned briefly that I had a theory the supposed engine failure wasn’t catastrophic. After the jump is a related photo, and some rumination on why I think so:
Different intake manifolds
on the left is my spare complete pre-facelift intake, and on the right is the intake which was attached to the engine when I got the car… and it just so happens to be a facelift one, with facelift injectors and sensors still equipped – although it’d been disassembled by the time this photo was taken.
Now, the seller mentioned that the old guy who owned the car before him replaced the engine at some point, but “it never ran that well”… I think I can explain one possible reason why.
when the facelift version of the BFMR was released, a rather significant change in engine management also occurred (very similar to the changes made between the Series 4 and Series 5 FC3S RX-7). One of the biggest differences – apart from the revised intake manifold design – was the switch from 330cc low-impedance peak and hold injectors to 300cc high-impedance saturated flow ones. That’s only the start of it of course, but I don’t want to bore you with the details.
In a nutshell, when you try and run the facelift injectors and sensors on the pre-facelift engine management, bad things can start to happen. While I don’t think this directly caused the engine to stop functioning, it certainly contributed to its eventual decline. Or I may be on the totally wrong track and the damn thing’s just spun a bearing…
next update: some rudimentary cranking of the engine takes place. Things are starting to get more and more interesting!
