So uhh... I'm still doing the apprenticeship. Halfway through my 3rd year (about 1.5 years to go). Still on pretty rubbish money and being treated unfairly recently
. I haven't touched any of the blown engine parts to check/measure anything. I was trying to get my hands on a short crank 3 rotor shaft, but Jeff Bruce has retired which is frustrating. He is a Kiwi that has been making multi rotor shaft since forever and I grew up down the road from his shop. I was gonna get a mate to grab it for me until I could get it transported over here. Not sure what will happen now
I've since moved to Kidderminster which is another 30 odd minutes away from my unit. Which makes it a mission to get there and back (1 hour each way
). With the help of my mate Jamie, I've managed to get most of the work done on the FC subframe swap before I moved, and it's pretty much finished.
Rack and pinion steering is something I had wanted to upgrade for a long ass time. I was originally planning to design my own kit, but ended up buying the FC subframe from Ian. It took a lot of research on how best to get the swap done. There are various ways to do the job and some of them are nicely done, whilst some are pretty sketchy. I went with one of the more professional (IMO) ways to do it.
Researching was quite difficult as a lot of the forum links and pictures no longer existed. Thank goodness for Wayback Machine
https://web.archive.org/. This helped recover a lot of old info and pictures. Here are some of the links I found to have the most useful information with the swap aye. I also spoke to a few guys who have done the swap properly and they love it.
This thread was particularly helpful. Although he has since taken it further
https://www.rx7club.com/build-threads-2 ... p-1101100/
https://www.rx7club.com/1st-generation- ... s-1075439/
https://www.rx7club.com/1st-generation- ... b-1134044/
There were a load of other links I read through which were somewhat helpful. All of these combined allowed me to come to my own conclusion of the best way (IMO) to go about the job
So on to the subframe. I went up and bought this off Ian as I previously mentioned. It was as you'd expect from a ~35 year old car. My plan was to change all of the service parts - ball joints, poly bushes, new bearings in the hubs etc. Will go in to more detail later on. I hadn't initially realised the vert subframes differed from the coupe by having some extra brackets welded towards the rear of the subframe. I believe the verts have extra bracing between these brackets to add some rigidity. This will hopefully play in to my favour in the future
I got the old subframe and steering setup off the car. I managed to drop most of it in 1 go. The steering box needed to come out on its own though.
If using the OEM chassis studs to bolt on the front of the FC subframe without any mods, you will have way too much caster and probably hit the front wheel on the front of the wheel arch. To sort this out, you need to weld some thick plates on to the FC subframe and re-drill the mounting holes to move the subframe back some. The ideal measurement is to drill 25mm forward from memory. Info should be in the links above. You also need to space the rear of the subframe down, as the FC chassis rails are angled differently to our cars. I also used the rear spacing to weld a bracket for mounting the subframe to the OEM steering box and idler arm mounts. This swap does give the front end lower roll centre in relation to the rear end. Unless modifying chassis rails or something, then this is about as good as it'll get. But I have future plans with the watts link
The plates and welds have been tidied up/flattened to eliminate any fitment issues. Front FC OEM bolt holes welded up and new ones drilled 25mm forward
I mentioned earlier about wanting to replace all serviceable items. Well I found out that it is a bit difficult to replace series 5 control arm ball joints
. They are built in to the control arm and would need to buy whole new arms to replace them! No circlips or anything holding them in.
My solution was to buy some series 4 control arms which have replaceable ball joints. Sorted. This ended up being a double whammy upgrade as the arms I bought had SuperPro caster adjustment poly bushes in! Score!
The caster bushes are generally used to
increase caster. But with the issues I mentioned earlier, I swapped the bushes to the opposite control arms (or just flipped the bushes around? I forgot
) so they ended up
reducing caster. This definitely helped as my wheel was a bit far forward for my liking.
S4 arm with replaceable ball joint
I'll leave it at this for now and post up other sections of the swap in separate posts. I hope it all makes sense - I'm pretty tired atm
. It probably doesn't look like too much, but bloody hell there was a
LOT of measuring. I don't even want to think how many times I installed/removed that damn subframe
. Plenty of fettling involved with various bits along the way. Likely still more to do as I still haven't finished it due to living so far away from the thing
