Build Thread: RX8

[AkursedX]

So I am getting a new driveway poured right now, so my RX8 is currently imprisoned in my garage for the next 7-10 days. I plan on getting a fair amount of work done in this time and this is what I have done so far.

First off, I received a K&N panel air filter. I installed that and then did a couple of airbox mods. Here is the stock airbox:




I removed the two side-fins from each side of the venturi and I also removed the 1st screen. I have never seen a car that has two screens before the MAF.

After pic:



I have also started working on installing the Oil-Metering-Pump adapter. The basic instructions I followed can here found here . It was a pretty easy job although getting the plastic oil lines moved to the other side of the coolant hose took long than I thought and I spilled more coolant than I wanted to. Also, I found it quite easy to get at the two back-bolts through the wheelwell with a long extension.

Here's a pics of it installed on the engine:

(You can see the nozzle right to the left of the pulleys and just below the horizontal coolant hose)


Disregard the clear hose in this pic. I am going to install something that is a bit smaller and fits better:


Now I still wanted to keep my windshield washer fluid so I picked up a $10 universal coolant reservoir from Advance Auto. It fits quite snugly between the washer fluid bottle and the air pump (I think) bracket. I am going to pick up a fitting like the one on the SOHN adapter and fit it in the bottom of the tank and get some better fitting clear hose. It'll be a few days before I get it done as I won't have any garage-time for a few days.

Here is a test of the new reservoir (I made a couple of fitment adjustments and painted the bracket after this pic):

[AkursedX]

So it's been a bit since I posted an update so I thought I would show where I am in my suspension install (Bilstein shocks and H&R springs).

I started out doing the rear suspension as I though it would be a bit easier. I ended up having a few issues along the way. First off, the swaybar endlinks were quite stubborn coming off. After some heat, I was finally able to get them off. I decided to order some new Moog endlinks from rockauto.com.

After I took care of that, everything else came out nicely. I followed the removal procedure on racing-beat's website http://www.racingbeat.com/manuals/14027-sprg-shock.pdf

Here's a pic of a comparison of stock springs vs the H&R springs:





The H&R springs are about 3/4" short than the stock one and you can see by the design that they are a progressive rate spring.

Now another hiccup I had in the install was my own stupid mistake. I installed the wrong nut on top of the shock which was a different thread pitch. I ended up chewing up the threads and wrecked the allen threads on the shaft trying to get it unscrewed. I ended up having to take a cutoff wheel to the nut to get everything undone. I had to order an additional shock at $120. Ouch.

After that, everything went back together nicely. Everything was torqued to spec on a loaded suspension. I don't have any pics of how the car sits, but I am very happy with it. I hope the front will sit just as nice.

And pic of the shock/spring combo installed.



This Sunday and Monday I am tackling the front suspension install. If I have enough time, I will also be installing my BHR Ignition System and new plugs. I hope my next update will be a good one!

[AkursedX]

Lowering is now all complete!

Now that I'm all done, I have to say that doing shocks and springs on this car is one of the easiest suspension jobs I have done. Everything is easy to get to and besides some spring compressors, all you need is basic hand tools. I feel I could do a full suspension job in a full-day now.

So anyways, I did the front suspension by following the directions I found from Racing Beat: http://www.racingbeat.com/manuals/14026-sprg-shock.pdf

I had no major hiccups doing the installation. You need to make sure you really compress the stock springs as they are quite long. Here are a couple of suspension component comparison pics. I was a bit worried about how the low front was going to be when I put the parts side-by-side, but it turned out ok.


Stock shock vs the Bilstein shock (The spring mount is roughly .5" lower than the stocker)



Stock spring vs H&R spring (The taller one is the stock and although the H&R spring is much shorter, it also has one extra coil)



Here's a quick pic of the parts installed:




And now here's the result. I am very happy with the ride height. It's pretty close to perfect (for me) in the looks department. Ride quality is a bit more firm, but it's not anywhere close the teeth shattering. I haven't driven it much, but in the little bit I did, it feels even more confident in cornering.

For someone who wants some increased performance without a harsh ride, I would say that this Bilstein / H&R combination is a good choice.

Anyways, here's a couple of pics:

[crzyone]

Very nice, great stance. Sure changes the look of the car from stock. Are you going to winter drive this car as well?

[AkursedX]

Very nice, great stance. Sure changes the look of the car from stock. Are you going to winter drive this car as well?

Thanks! Yes, the stance of this car is so much better now. I can't get over how much grip this car has. I can't wait to get it on a track.

No, it won't be driven in the winter asides from an occasional short jaunt on a dry day to keep everything loose.

[AkursedX]

So I installed my BHR ignition system a couple of days ago. Install is pretty easy and the instructions that came with it very easy to follow. I also changed out my sparkplugs. Even with my discount, the plugs still cost me $17 a piece! Fitment is tight on the harness-side and you have to make sure you have things set up in the place you want before you put the new bracket on the old one.

I noticed right away that it smoothed out the idle. But other than that, I haven't noticed any difference on the butt-dyno. But then again, my stock coils didn't have too many miles and my plugs looked near new (I'm guessing they came with the new engine).

Here's a pic of the ignition system installed:




Right after I installed the ignition system, I took the car out and ran a bunch of errands. I stopped at the post office, got out of the car to mail a letter and when I came back and started the car, I lost my power steering. I was quite annoyed by this especially since the power steering rack was replaced in July. I drove a short distance and went to have a bite to eat. While sipping back a Harvest Ale from Bastone, I did some searching about my problem. When I got back to the car, I did the computer reset where you turn the ignition and hit the brake pedal 20-times. After I did this and started the car, I had my power steering again, until I got home. I tried to start the car again and it was gone.

I checked the receipt for the power steering replacement and found that they only replaced the rack. The harness was still the original. I had already known that this harness tended to cause a lot of problems due to poor connections and the fact that the coolant reservoir overflow tube dumps right onto two of the power steering harness connectors. I determined that this is probably what happened to me. I added coolant to the reservoir after I installed my OMP adapter since it required popping a coolant tube. The day this happened was the warmest day that we had in awhile and it was a bunch of stop and go driving so my coolant probably got warm enough to pour the excess coolant out.

I decided to follow this harness cleaning DIY. When I pulled the intake box off, I could see the evidence of spilled coolant that was still on the radiator shroud which confirmed my suspicions. So I pulled all the harness connections, made a couple of bends to ensure better contacts in the connectors and used dielectric grease in all the connectors.

I also extended the coolant reservoir overflow tube so it dumps at the bottom of the rad shroud now (The clear tube in the pic):


Things are all now back together and it seems to have taken care of my issue. I also went through tank#2 and got 20.1mpg. I am trying to drive it as much as I can before the weather turns bad. The only immediate things that I still need to do is to change the oil.

[The Dark Side of Will]

Lol... LS1 coils > *.*

Good to hear you found the PS problem.

[AkursedX]

Lol... LS1 coils > *.*

Good to hear you found the PS problem.

LS1 coils go on everything nowadays!

As for the PS problem, I'm glad RX8Club has as much data on it as it does. Pretty much everything has been covered at one point in time and there is a bunch of detailed DIY's. If my PS problem comes back, the next step is to replace the PS harness. Fortunately it's only $120 and it looks like an easy enough job. Look at the part number, they are now on revision-D of the harness.

One thing that has really impressed me about the design of this car is that it almost seems that the engineers designed the car to be assembled and disassembled with basic hand-tools. Pretty much every nut and bolt I have had to get to has had enough room to get a wrench or a socket on. After working on Fieros and VW's, it has been a pleasant change.

[AkursedX]

Not much of an update but I stopped by Oakos Automotive last week and bought some RPF1 center caps and some Muteki spline lug nuts. I think they make a bit of an improvement in the look of the wheels. I have some other parts on order from Corksport as they had an 11% off sale on 11/11. That update should be a bit more fun.

[CincinnatiFiero]

Very cool!

Keep the updates coming.

[Emc209i]

Enjoyed reading about the upgrades. I noticed your writing style is a lot like mine. Is the car stored now?

[AkursedX]

Enjoyed reading about the upgrades. I noticed your writing style is a lot like mine. Is the car stored now?

Not yet. We haven't had any salt or the roads yet and tonight will be the 1st night below freezing. Hopefully I can drive it till Thanksgiving. After that, it will probably be put up for the winter.

[AkursedX]

So it's been a couple of months since I've updated this. In that time, I really haven't done much to the car besides drive it and accumulate parts. Fortunately due to this mild winter, I have been able to drive the RX8 a fair amount and it has been running great.

So anyways, here's a couple of pics of the parts I have collected:






Here's what's all there:
-Lamin-X blue-tinted headlamp covers and yellow tinted foglamp covers
-Yellow Fog Light Bulbs
-Corksport LED lighting kit
-Front and rear stainless Rotary Bumper Emblems
-Cobb ACCESSPORT (With Accompanying MazdaManiac tuning service)
-Corksport Single-resonated Midpipe
-EBC USR Front Rotors

Not pictured here as I already installed it was a brushed-stainless shift knob repair cover as mine was chipped and ugly. That's pretty much the only thing I have installed recently (Yeah, I've been lazy/busy). Oh, I also installed the the Mazdamaniac base map on the car.

So, as you can see, I have a fair bit of work ahead of me to get all this stuff installed. None of it will be too hard. Even the midpipe should be pretty easy as the front bolts that are usually a big pain were removed a few thousand miles ago, so they shouldn't be too bad to remove again. Most of the other work I have is basic cosmetic stuff which will just need a bit of patience.

As far as stuff I still need to buy, the only things I need for this year are brake pads and rear-rotors. I know I am buying Porterfield R4-S pads for the front, but I am probably going to go with something like the Hawk HPS for the rear as they are quite a bit cheaper than the R4-S's. I will probably buy some matching EBC USR rotors for the rear as they are pretty much the same price as the other performance rotors out there.

As for other stuff that I hope to buy, I might also buy some stainless brake hoses during the brake installation process, and I also hope to buy some track tires for my stock wheels. Right now, I am considering the Nitto Nt05's in 245/40/18 as they are cheap and a fairly new un-tested product. I like to test out new tires. One of my stock wheels has a bend, so I need to get that fixed, plus I want to powdercoat the wheels (Magnesium Blue is my current front-runner for the color). How much of this I get done depends on how much overtime I can work in the next couple of months.

Work probably won't start until March, but from there I should start posting more updates.

[AkursedX]

So I have been up to a bunch of work on my RX8 over the past couple of weeks.

First off, I installed my Corksport LED lighting kit. All the interior, trunk, and rear license plate lights installed nice and east with no issues. The running lights located in the headlights were another story.

First off, unless you have the hands of a 5-year-old, you are not going to get to the passenger side running light without taking a bunch of stuff apart. I was able to get to the driver's side light, but I didn't install the light hard enough and it popped out into the lense.

At this point I conceded defeat and decided to pull of the front cover off so I could just pull out the headlight assemblies to install the LED's.

While pulling the front cover, I also found out the extent of the damage to the driver's side of the front bumper. I knew that some things were broken there as my side indicator didn't work and shook around and also the lower-lip wasn't securely attached. None of this was major, but I found it quite annoying.

So besides the new LED's, here's some other things I had to fix:

-The side-lamp bulb socket and connector were so corroded that I had to cut off the whole thing and I installed a new connector and socket from some parts pulled out of the junkyard
-The front cover was broken into 3 pieces at the upper fender mounting point. With the help of some JB Weld, I managed to piece it all back together.
-The lower lip was broken and missing some screws. With some junkyard-sourced hardware and some more JB Weld, I was able to re-secure the lower lip to the cover
-The plastic mounting piece where the upper part of the bumper snaps into was destroyed beyond repair and I had to buy a new part from the dealer ($23)
-I also had to secure a piece of the foam impact material back together with a ziptie, haha.

Pics:





The JB-Welded bumper corner:


The busted mounting piece:


Everything went back together quite nicely and my front end is much more secure now. I am glad I took the time to fix all the broken pieces and replace all of the missing hardware.

[AkursedX]

I have made a bunch of small exterior changes recently that I am really pleased with.

In the lighting department, I installed the Corksport LED running light and rear license plate light which resulted in a much cleaner and whiter light. I also installed my yellow foglights.

Along with that, I installed Lamin-X covers on both my foglights and headlights. The foglights have a yellow tint and the headlights have a blue tint. Installation didn't go as easy as I had hoped, but it was due to my own fault. The spray bottle I used to wet the lense must not have been totally clean of soap and I got a bunch of small bubble underneath the lense. I had to use a pin to put holes in the lense to get the air out and then reseal it with a heat gun. I am just about finished with this process and I am pretty pleased with the results.

I was worried a bit about how dark the blue is on the headlight lenses, but after driving it at night, it doesn't seem to have had much of an effect on light output.

I have also plasti-dipped my front and rear emblems black. I think I am going to take off the 'MAZDA' on the back of the car though as the rear trunk seems too busy to me now.

I also think I need to change to some clear sidemarkers on the front. But other then that, I am pretty pleased with the transformation so far.
Pics:





Nighttime pic:

[AkursedX]

I installed my Corksport single-resonated midpipe.

Installation was super-easy. Fortunately the usually-stuck header bolts were replaced recently so it was a cinch to get the stock pipe out. the rear blts and O2 sensor also came out nice and easy.

Installation was simple too as Corksport provides new hardware and nice instructions.

I forgot to get a weight on both parts, but the new midpipe is easily a 10-15lb savings over stock.

The only bad part was that the exhaust hanger was hitting the rear underbody brace. I had to bend part of the brace down and slot it forward just a bit to ensure that it wouldn't vibrate against it when it was running.

As far as driving experiences, I really don't feel any gains on the butt-dyno. As for sound, it's BARELY louder than stock and virtually no drone. It's actually so quiet that I will probably pick up a cat-back exhaust eventually.

Here's a crappy pic of it installed:





And here's a video out the sound. Don't mind to water and smoke as I only had the car running a couple of minutes before I shot the video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_PiWscYwc




On another front. I once again am having issues with my power steering. Three times in the past few days after letting the car sit for more than 6 hours, the power steering would fail at startup. Each time I drove about half a mile, turned the car off, cleared the B2278 error code and restarted it and it worked just fine. But today after letting it sit, I had no problems with it. So I am going to re-inspect and clean all of the power steering harness connections and then zip-tie them together so they will hold tight. If that doesn't do it, the next step will be to buy a new harness.

[AkursedX]

About a month ago, I started losing my power steering again intermittantly. What was strange is that I could drive about a 1/4 mile, turn the car off, turn it back on, and my power steering would come back to life. I also noted that the car would have to sit more than 8-hours for it to happen. Things like large temperature changes and high humidity days also seemed to exacerbate the problem.

One cool night about 1.5 weeks ago I was driving home from work and hit a small bump and it set the power-steering warning light on. I then decided I was going to tackle this issue once and for all (hopefully).

The day after this happened, I was going to pull out the battery and intake box and clean and regrease all of the connectors again to see if it would help. As I went to get started, I noticed that the positive battery cable had worked itself loose which I figure was the reason I satrted losing my power steering while driving. I decided to just tighten the connector and see what would happen. The good news is that I didn't loose my power steering while driving anymore, but I was still having the problems at startup.

Last week I went to the dealer and spent the $130 and ordered a new power steering harness. I installed it today. It was a pretty easy job. The hardest part was getting a ziptie around the steering rack to hold down the torque sensor wiring in place. So far, so good, but I do have a feeling that I am still going to have a problem.

I am starting to feel that a weak battery might be part of the reason I am losing the power steering. I noticed that my battery was manufactured in 3/2005. I'm wondering if it's losing too much juice from sitting and the power steering isn't getting enough power at startup causing it to throw a code. I will get my battery tested shortly and I have a feeling that it's not going to be good. I should note that the car fires right up within the 1st crank, but I don't know. I really do hope that this new harness will resolve my power steering woes though. It's quite annoying.


On a brighter note, I managed to be home for a Mazdamaniac tuning session and I was able to get my 1st tune back and installed. I will say that I'm rather impressed with how spot-on he got the MAF in one session. My LTFT went from +12.64 to 0 in nearly every area except for a +2 at idle. I have done my fair share of tuning (on GM cars) and getting a MAF dialed in that quick and that accurate is pretty darn good. I'm looking forward to the next tuning session and to see what he will do for my WOT tuning.

Also, my Centric Cryo-treated rear rotors have FINALLY showed up so I will start installing all of my new brake bits this weekend. I'll have some pics of that process.

[AkursedX]

I have actually been driving my RX8 a lot more than I have been working on it over the past 2 months, but I finally decided that this week I was going to get some work done on it.

The first thing I did was change the oil. After reading all 78-pages of this thread, I decided on using Royal Purple 0w40 synthetic oil. I also 'upgraded' to the 2nd generation oil filter as it's a bit larger. A paltry 4qts drained out replaced with some fresh oil and a new filter and I should be good for the summer.


Here's a side-by-side of the 1st gen filter vs the 2nd gen:


And an installed pic of the new filter:




I also finally got around to upgrading my brakes! Everything went pretty well and straightforward. Even the rear calipers spun back in with little difficulty. All the slider pins were still free and greased. This makes doing brake-work much easier, haha.

While I had everything apart, I painted the calipers and dust-shields. I also applied some 'Mazdaspeed' stickers from Polak Graphics to the rotors. The calipers were done with a blue-caliper-paint-kit from the parts store and the dust shields were painted with some high temp engine paint.

The pads are Porterfield RS4's all around. I bought them from http://www.lpiracing.com as they were the best price I could find. They shipped out real quick and I had them within 4 days. The front rotors are EBC USR (From Summit Racing) slotted rotors and the rear are Centric Cryo-treated rotors (http://www.tirerack.com)

I have done no other driving other than bedding the pads in, but I am happy with how everything is working right now. The pads definitely grip strong.

Pics:
New front:


New rear:


The color-changing fronts after I bedded the pads:




Up next, I think I am going to add an aux. jack to the radio, and I think I'm going to pick up a stock spoiler or possibly a GTO spoiler and install that.

[crzyone]

Rotary engines go through oil so quickly between consuming it and frequent oil changes that the smaller filter would have been fine. I change my 7s oil about every 1800 miles. The 7 likely runs a lot hotter than the 8, so you might not have to change out as often? I could go longer but I was pushing it pretty hard and I still have the factory twins which get stupidly hot. I will be swithing to Royal Purple as soon as I figure my engine is good and broken in.

[AkursedX]

Rotary engines go through oil so quickly between consuming it and frequent oil changes that the smaller filter would have been fine. I change my 7s oil about every 1800 miles. The 7 likely runs a lot hotter than the 8, so you might not have to change out as often? I could go longer but I was pushing it pretty hard and I still have the factory twins which get stupidly hot. I will be swithing to Royal Purple as soon as I figure my engine is good and broken in.

Mine doesn't consume any between changes thanks to my Richard SOHN adapter.

I would suggest that you buy one for your car so you can have fresh pre-mix running through your oil-injection system over nasty used oil.