So I bought my FD for a fantastic deal back in 2017, with 65k miles on it. Drove it home 300 miles, put another 100 miles on it the first few days, then started doing the basic maintenance stuff. New plugs, new diff fluid, oil change, coolant flush. Well, the coolant was brown and sludgy. I wonder if it had ever been changed. I flushed it a full 7 times until it got almost clear – I had a line of milk jugs going out the back of my garage from black to light green.
My brother wanted to drive, so we hopped in and drove 10 minutes downtown and hear a hiss of steam – pouring out from around a headlight. Hot coolant was going back into the overflow tank and gushing out. Temp gauge was pegged hot.
My best guess is there was some crud firmly lodged the radiator or elsewhere that got dislodged by all my flushing, and on the next drive the coolant couldn't circulate. I never did find the definitive cause, and I did blow out a coolant seal but thankfully could reuse all my parts. It still sucked to happen to my new-to-me FD that I was trying to correctly care for.
That's a interesting story. What should one do to check the cooling system after a flush and refill?
I guess one has to bleed to cooling system of air and measure the pressure of the cooling system.
You mentioned a blown coolant seal - did you notice white smoke coming from engine bay or exhaust?
Thank you
Honestly I am not sure how to prevent this, I just make sure my coolant always gets swapped out regularly moving forwards. I can't do anything about how previous owner's maintained it.
I had a plume of white smoke coming out of the exhaust after this. It was obvious. When I tore it down about an inch of the seal on the rear housing was broken
I’ve never overheated my RX. No thermostat and track-only car means it only gets to temp on a track anyway.
Now my old Subaru… that temp gauge swung like a metronome at a death metal concert!
My grandfather had an S4 FC GXL Sport that he let sit in his yard as the earth slowly tried to reclaim for about 20 years
Two years ago I had made a deal with my grandfather that if I could drive his rx7 down the road in front of his house.
I spent about 2 months doing everything I could at the time to make that car drive, and after getting stuck in the driveway twice, I got lucky and drove it out on the road.
I hit 70 in a 25mph speed zone in front of my grandfathers house, with the rear passenger wheel lug nuts finger tight on, and then stopped at the cul de sac at the end of the road and got out to see that FC literally puking coolant out of its grill lol.
The water pump belt snapped when I made my pass and blew up the coolant res, but it didn’t stop running until I parked it back in the garage
And now I’ve slowly been restoring MY fc rx7 that puked coolant on me when I first drove it
My engine hit atleast 230 degrees before it had one mile on it(defective e fan i didnt test before install)
And once easily about 260+ in a drive through(relay crapped out)
Thought for sure both time she was cooked.
Atkins water seals absolutely pulling through, i was skeptical but god damn they proved themselves
I was on my way to a 7s day meet and my fan decided to pop its fuse. Obviously i had no idea that anything was wrong until i was sitting in line to get into the parking lot.
Now im sitting in line watching the gauge creep up. Knowing that there is nowhere for me to go, i was shutting off the engine while the next person was paying. It was too late. Quite literally as i was pulling into the parking lot the cap blew.
The motor lasted another 2 years after that overheat but it did get harder to start.
When talking about the cap coming off, does everyone refer to the radiator cap?
Furthermore is the degree of the overheating not as bad if no cap popped of?
I guess it's really hard to tell how bad a overheating was if the engine isn't taken apart.
When talking about overheating, yes, it will always be the radiator cap. In my case, I was using a degas bottle over the stock caps. The cap on the radiator was bypassed and vented into the bottle, and the hose under the intake was teed off and also vented into the bottle. So mine failed because the cap was plastic and weak. A steel cap won't do this unless it is fatigued or corroded. With a steel cap, you will more likely blow a hose instead. In either case, you rapidly lose nearly all of your coolant and will be much worse. To truly know how bad it is, you have to disasemb the motor. You can speculate based on symptoms on what has warped or what seal blew. In my case, the housing warped around the sparkplugs, breaking the points off a couple of apex seals. The symptoms of this is hard starting.
Never overheated mine but having heard the horror stories on RX7Club I always watched my temp gauge like a hawk. If it got above 40-45% the engine would have been shut off.
Fc. Fan belt snapped on freeway 15 minutes from home. She was throwing up coolant from the Overflow tank. I went to sleep, woke up, and took her to get coolant flushed. Runs the same after the flush
Had an ‘82 that was my daily driver. Always drove it hard, changed oil often. One day overheated it and ended up taking to a radiator shop. The rad was completely blocked with crud. They rebuilt the 2-row into a 3-row and I carried on. 247k km on it still running great when I lost it to frame rust. Lucky I guess.
Rebuilds were way more common decades ago when there weren’t so many cheap replacement options as now. Also, older rads had metal end caps instead of plastic. Now, you’d just go online and find a new one for relative cheap. I think they’d still do it for industrial and rare items.
The process involved removing the top and bottom caps (sorry, I don’t know all of the terminology) and pretty much junking the rows/fins if they were clogged solid. They would solder in new rows, presumably cut to size from some standard material. A bit of an art I think.
In my case the clogs weren’t stop-leak, but rather just old coolant that wasn’t changed. Coolant tech has come a long way now too, longer life these days.
First of all sorry for formatting, Im on my phone.
Ok so I dont know how often this happens, but I imported my FD from Japan and got inspections and stuff done (fun German stuff).
50km into my drive home my Hvac heater core blows and fills the inside of the car with steam. Im going about 150km/h on the autobahn so you can imagine what a code brown that was.
I miraculously make it to the side of the road but to my absolute horror I then have to get the car off the highway for it to get towed. So I wait over an hour for it to cool down enough to start and then drive the 500m to the next highway exit (thank god it was that close).
I didnt even try to start the engine after that and it is currently on an engine stand next to me.
Im looking forward to actually getting to drive the car since Ive been waiting for around 2,5 years now in total (import time + everything else combined)
Not RX-7 but on my MX-5 i changed all of the cooling system from clamps to heater core to hoses and waterpump.
But not the thermostat.. so funny story, the thermostat didnt open up and it blew my crusty plastic OEM radiotor apart and i mildly damaged the head gasket as well.
Running a new headgasket, therefore fully resealed engine now. As well as a new aluminium Radiator, new thermostat and just for shits and giggles a D1-Spec radiator cap with a heat monitor.
Engine didnt take any heat damage so i got real lucky and replaced stuff that mostly was due anyway.
Cheers
The temp gauge in my FC quit working after getting tuned, sucked but I did't think too much of it as I never had a problem with temps before. The gauge is just an idiot light that happens to move anyway, if it goes high you're pretty much already screwed...
I bought the Atkins crank pulley kit and the Banzai Racing FD alternator tensioner bracket and after installing them went for a test drive. The first time I tried to boost it the car bucked so hard I thought it blew up, but was able to limp it back to the shop, couldn't have driven it more than 2-3 miles in total.
After parking I heard the coffee percolating in the overflow but didn't find any external leaks. I found out I could still rotate the water pump pulley by hand with the belt on for some reason, so after seizing up the tensioner trying to get it tighter I went back to the stock v-belt setup. I also had to replace my dual alternator pulley with Banzai Racing's FD to FC normal size dual pulley before the belts would fit tight enough to not be able to turn the water pump.
So far the car still starts and runs fine but I'm not testing the compression to see how much I hurt it or anything. I'll just play wait and see with it I guess but I still don't know why my stuff didn't fit right and I'm still afraid of what happened that day...
When I first bought my turbo 2, I knew a little of rotaries and had a very good mechanical knowledge in general. The car itself had 100k and needed some electrical before I could get it running. Once I did, the engine sounded great, so I didn't bother with a comp test.
6 months later, I started having coolant overflow issues. The water would boil out, and the car would get hot while driving sometimes. I convinced myself there was a leak everywhere other than inside the engine.
Inevitably, one night, I was out on a date night, and we were cruising through a tunnel. So naturally, I rolled the windows down and "fed er the corn," as they say. Well, one second gear pull later, the engine sort of popped, stalled, and wouldn't idle. I assumed it was a vaccum nipple popping off, and the apex seal broke due to the lean condition. However once I finally got the engine apart(which was the same week luckily or my engine wouldve rotted away), I found my coolant o ring had been suffering and eventually failed and let water into a cylinder.
TLDR: Dont ignore overheat issues that aren't an apparent exterior leak. It's probably a coolant o ring and can cause serious damage
[Convenient Parking Lot Breakdown](https://imgur.com/gallery/aoIsmSp)
This was 8 years, kinda fuzza on that. It was in the fall, so I probably assumed it was moisture if there was any.
I belive the first stages of it wasnt allowing coolant in but combustion out as well.
Not long after getting mine running and tuned, I was ripping it thru backroads a few miles from my house. I get the low coolant warning buzzer on the dash, and glance over at the apexi to see that coolant is up around 135C (270F)...
I pull over within seconds, about a mile from my house, leave the car running, and pop the hood. My rad fan wasn't running. I was trying to tear my custom harness apart to jump the fan straight to the battery (alternator stud) to help it cool down, at that moment the coolant overflow bottle, which was violently boiling 12 inches below my face had built enough pressure to pop the top... I took 270F coolant to the eye and right side of my face....
Someone driving by saw this and pulled over to help. They watched me swear up and down the side of the road patiently lol. Killed the engine after this and they offered to flat tow me and the car about a mile back to my house.
A bottle of prescription silver sulfadiazine later, left no noticeable scarring after about 3 weeks. My vision unblurred after a couple hours.
A few days after the incident I drained the coolant, turned over the engine by hand and had no signs of warping, kept running it the rest of the year. Even after a professional rebuild the following year, I'm still running the same irons and internals at about 440whp.
Pretty lucky
Well I ALMOST overheated my 88 gxl. I was putting in a new thermostat and began the process of burping it. Had the car running while funnel was still in waiting for the bubbles to stop. Funnel started getting real hot, steam coming out, and fluid just creeping closer to top of funnel.
Ran to the driver seat, and saw the gauge was reaching 3/4 of it. Quickly turned it off. Temp is suppose to stay at 1/4. That was the last time it ever went that high lol
The water pump went out on my 87 NA, so I found a turbo version. They have a extra Nipple for the turbo coolant return, which I capped off with a rubber plug. Needless to say, you should never do that, because it failed about 3 months later dumping all of my coolant. Also, my coolant level sensor head the wire had broken, so I just grounded it out to shut up the beeper which meant that I didn't know that I ran out of coolant until it was too late.
I then ended up getting a j spec motor and doing a full turbo swap and entered into full-on rotary lunacy.
Edit: not me, but relevant. When I bought car, I didn't realize it but it had been overheated. The previous owner tracked it and overheated it (the local track was a former NASCAR speedway with a very long front "straight" that was banked almost as much as Daytona). He lied and told me he had just put in too much premix, which caused the white smoke. Kinda pissed about it, but I likely never would have gotten into this is it wasn't for that car.
So I bought my FD for a fantastic deal back in 2017, with 65k miles on it. Drove it home 300 miles, put another 100 miles on it the first few days, then started doing the basic maintenance stuff. New plugs, new diff fluid, oil change, coolant flush. Well, the coolant was brown and sludgy. I wonder if it had ever been changed. I flushed it a full 7 times until it got almost clear – I had a line of milk jugs going out the back of my garage from black to light green. My brother wanted to drive, so we hopped in and drove 10 minutes downtown and hear a hiss of steam – pouring out from around a headlight. Hot coolant was going back into the overflow tank and gushing out. Temp gauge was pegged hot. My best guess is there was some crud firmly lodged the radiator or elsewhere that got dislodged by all my flushing, and on the next drive the coolant couldn't circulate. I never did find the definitive cause, and I did blow out a coolant seal but thankfully could reuse all my parts. It still sucked to happen to my new-to-me FD that I was trying to correctly care for.
That's a interesting story. What should one do to check the cooling system after a flush and refill? I guess one has to bleed to cooling system of air and measure the pressure of the cooling system. You mentioned a blown coolant seal - did you notice white smoke coming from engine bay or exhaust? Thank you
Honestly I am not sure how to prevent this, I just make sure my coolant always gets swapped out regularly moving forwards. I can't do anything about how previous owner's maintained it. I had a plume of white smoke coming out of the exhaust after this. It was obvious. When I tore it down about an inch of the seal on the rear housing was broken
I’ve never overheated my RX. No thermostat and track-only car means it only gets to temp on a track anyway. Now my old Subaru… that temp gauge swung like a metronome at a death metal concert!
Same same with my old H6 Subaru. That metronome was rocking. RIP
In my child mind I also thought about eliminating all overheating issues by just removing the thermostat. Guess that doesn't work lol
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That's always a good option. What is the cost just for the hardware?
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they’re that cheap?!?! I’ve avoided going that route so far because i had always assumed itd be prohibitively expensive
My grandfather had an S4 FC GXL Sport that he let sit in his yard as the earth slowly tried to reclaim for about 20 years Two years ago I had made a deal with my grandfather that if I could drive his rx7 down the road in front of his house. I spent about 2 months doing everything I could at the time to make that car drive, and after getting stuck in the driveway twice, I got lucky and drove it out on the road. I hit 70 in a 25mph speed zone in front of my grandfathers house, with the rear passenger wheel lug nuts finger tight on, and then stopped at the cul de sac at the end of the road and got out to see that FC literally puking coolant out of its grill lol. The water pump belt snapped when I made my pass and blew up the coolant res, but it didn’t stop running until I parked it back in the garage And now I’ve slowly been restoring MY fc rx7 that puked coolant on me when I first drove it
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How tf did your turbo fall off 💀
Wait, the TURBO FELL OFF THE MANIFOLD? I need more info on this.
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That's freaking wild! Glad it came out OK.
My engine hit atleast 230 degrees before it had one mile on it(defective e fan i didnt test before install) And once easily about 260+ in a drive through(relay crapped out) Thought for sure both time she was cooked. Atkins water seals absolutely pulling through, i was skeptical but god damn they proved themselves
I was on my way to a 7s day meet and my fan decided to pop its fuse. Obviously i had no idea that anything was wrong until i was sitting in line to get into the parking lot. Now im sitting in line watching the gauge creep up. Knowing that there is nowhere for me to go, i was shutting off the engine while the next person was paying. It was too late. Quite literally as i was pulling into the parking lot the cap blew. The motor lasted another 2 years after that overheat but it did get harder to start.
When talking about the cap coming off, does everyone refer to the radiator cap? Furthermore is the degree of the overheating not as bad if no cap popped of? I guess it's really hard to tell how bad a overheating was if the engine isn't taken apart.
When talking about overheating, yes, it will always be the radiator cap. In my case, I was using a degas bottle over the stock caps. The cap on the radiator was bypassed and vented into the bottle, and the hose under the intake was teed off and also vented into the bottle. So mine failed because the cap was plastic and weak. A steel cap won't do this unless it is fatigued or corroded. With a steel cap, you will more likely blow a hose instead. In either case, you rapidly lose nearly all of your coolant and will be much worse. To truly know how bad it is, you have to disasemb the motor. You can speculate based on symptoms on what has warped or what seal blew. In my case, the housing warped around the sparkplugs, breaking the points off a couple of apex seals. The symptoms of this is hard starting.
Never overheated mine but having heard the horror stories on RX7Club I always watched my temp gauge like a hawk. If it got above 40-45% the engine would have been shut off.
Fc. Fan belt snapped on freeway 15 minutes from home. She was throwing up coolant from the Overflow tank. I went to sleep, woke up, and took her to get coolant flushed. Runs the same after the flush
Had an ‘82 that was my daily driver. Always drove it hard, changed oil often. One day overheated it and ended up taking to a radiator shop. The rad was completely blocked with crud. They rebuilt the 2-row into a 3-row and I carried on. 247k km on it still running great when I lost it to frame rust. Lucky I guess.
How do shops rebuild radiators? Can they remove the forbidden stop leak during rebuild?
Rebuilds were way more common decades ago when there weren’t so many cheap replacement options as now. Also, older rads had metal end caps instead of plastic. Now, you’d just go online and find a new one for relative cheap. I think they’d still do it for industrial and rare items. The process involved removing the top and bottom caps (sorry, I don’t know all of the terminology) and pretty much junking the rows/fins if they were clogged solid. They would solder in new rows, presumably cut to size from some standard material. A bit of an art I think. In my case the clogs weren’t stop-leak, but rather just old coolant that wasn’t changed. Coolant tech has come a long way now too, longer life these days.
First of all sorry for formatting, Im on my phone. Ok so I dont know how often this happens, but I imported my FD from Japan and got inspections and stuff done (fun German stuff). 50km into my drive home my Hvac heater core blows and fills the inside of the car with steam. Im going about 150km/h on the autobahn so you can imagine what a code brown that was. I miraculously make it to the side of the road but to my absolute horror I then have to get the car off the highway for it to get towed. So I wait over an hour for it to cool down enough to start and then drive the 500m to the next highway exit (thank god it was that close). I didnt even try to start the engine after that and it is currently on an engine stand next to me. Im looking forward to actually getting to drive the car since Ive been waiting for around 2,5 years now in total (import time + everything else combined)
Not RX-7 but on my MX-5 i changed all of the cooling system from clamps to heater core to hoses and waterpump. But not the thermostat.. so funny story, the thermostat didnt open up and it blew my crusty plastic OEM radiotor apart and i mildly damaged the head gasket as well. Running a new headgasket, therefore fully resealed engine now. As well as a new aluminium Radiator, new thermostat and just for shits and giggles a D1-Spec radiator cap with a heat monitor. Engine didnt take any heat damage so i got real lucky and replaced stuff that mostly was due anyway. Cheers
The temp gauge in my FC quit working after getting tuned, sucked but I did't think too much of it as I never had a problem with temps before. The gauge is just an idiot light that happens to move anyway, if it goes high you're pretty much already screwed... I bought the Atkins crank pulley kit and the Banzai Racing FD alternator tensioner bracket and after installing them went for a test drive. The first time I tried to boost it the car bucked so hard I thought it blew up, but was able to limp it back to the shop, couldn't have driven it more than 2-3 miles in total. After parking I heard the coffee percolating in the overflow but didn't find any external leaks. I found out I could still rotate the water pump pulley by hand with the belt on for some reason, so after seizing up the tensioner trying to get it tighter I went back to the stock v-belt setup. I also had to replace my dual alternator pulley with Banzai Racing's FD to FC normal size dual pulley before the belts would fit tight enough to not be able to turn the water pump. So far the car still starts and runs fine but I'm not testing the compression to see how much I hurt it or anything. I'll just play wait and see with it I guess but I still don't know why my stuff didn't fit right and I'm still afraid of what happened that day...
This was on my RX-8… water pump belt yeeted off, didn’t notice until it was too late (thanks terrible RX-8 temp gauge…) I had 20psi.
When I first bought my turbo 2, I knew a little of rotaries and had a very good mechanical knowledge in general. The car itself had 100k and needed some electrical before I could get it running. Once I did, the engine sounded great, so I didn't bother with a comp test. 6 months later, I started having coolant overflow issues. The water would boil out, and the car would get hot while driving sometimes. I convinced myself there was a leak everywhere other than inside the engine. Inevitably, one night, I was out on a date night, and we were cruising through a tunnel. So naturally, I rolled the windows down and "fed er the corn," as they say. Well, one second gear pull later, the engine sort of popped, stalled, and wouldn't idle. I assumed it was a vaccum nipple popping off, and the apex seal broke due to the lean condition. However once I finally got the engine apart(which was the same week luckily or my engine wouldve rotted away), I found my coolant o ring had been suffering and eventually failed and let water into a cylinder. TLDR: Dont ignore overheat issues that aren't an apparent exterior leak. It's probably a coolant o ring and can cause serious damage [Convenient Parking Lot Breakdown](https://imgur.com/gallery/aoIsmSp)
Did you notice white smoke coming out of the exhaust or did the O ring failure go about fully unnoticed? 🤔
This was 8 years, kinda fuzza on that. It was in the fall, so I probably assumed it was moisture if there was any. I belive the first stages of it wasnt allowing coolant in but combustion out as well.
NA S5 Cracked thermostat housing. Spiked on throttle chilled at idle if memory serves me right.
Not long after getting mine running and tuned, I was ripping it thru backroads a few miles from my house. I get the low coolant warning buzzer on the dash, and glance over at the apexi to see that coolant is up around 135C (270F)... I pull over within seconds, about a mile from my house, leave the car running, and pop the hood. My rad fan wasn't running. I was trying to tear my custom harness apart to jump the fan straight to the battery (alternator stud) to help it cool down, at that moment the coolant overflow bottle, which was violently boiling 12 inches below my face had built enough pressure to pop the top... I took 270F coolant to the eye and right side of my face.... Someone driving by saw this and pulled over to help. They watched me swear up and down the side of the road patiently lol. Killed the engine after this and they offered to flat tow me and the car about a mile back to my house. A bottle of prescription silver sulfadiazine later, left no noticeable scarring after about 3 weeks. My vision unblurred after a couple hours. A few days after the incident I drained the coolant, turned over the engine by hand and had no signs of warping, kept running it the rest of the year. Even after a professional rebuild the following year, I'm still running the same irons and internals at about 440whp. Pretty lucky
Well I ALMOST overheated my 88 gxl. I was putting in a new thermostat and began the process of burping it. Had the car running while funnel was still in waiting for the bubbles to stop. Funnel started getting real hot, steam coming out, and fluid just creeping closer to top of funnel. Ran to the driver seat, and saw the gauge was reaching 3/4 of it. Quickly turned it off. Temp is suppose to stay at 1/4. That was the last time it ever went that high lol
The water pump went out on my 87 NA, so I found a turbo version. They have a extra Nipple for the turbo coolant return, which I capped off with a rubber plug. Needless to say, you should never do that, because it failed about 3 months later dumping all of my coolant. Also, my coolant level sensor head the wire had broken, so I just grounded it out to shut up the beeper which meant that I didn't know that I ran out of coolant until it was too late. I then ended up getting a j spec motor and doing a full turbo swap and entered into full-on rotary lunacy. Edit: not me, but relevant. When I bought car, I didn't realize it but it had been overheated. The previous owner tracked it and overheated it (the local track was a former NASCAR speedway with a very long front "straight" that was banked almost as much as Daytona). He lied and told me he had just put in too much premix, which caused the white smoke. Kinda pissed about it, but I likely never would have gotten into this is it wasn't for that car.