Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 42
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Everything up to (but not including) Iron Chef's thread has been pretty much spot on.

rotors are fun and very reliable if treated correctly. In fact in racing circles, I've read more stories of RB26's dropping their guts than rotaries. My RX2 rally car has the same engine it had in it over 6 years ago. I do an oil change after every big event, and warm it up properly before racing. Other than that, I drive it like I stole it. Have had the temp gauge on the wrong side of 120 deg C a few times when I was popping fan belts, and had other major cooling issues (all fixed now), and it still runs fine.

Big carbied and ported rotors can be cantankerous in traffic and not much fun as a daily. An EFI 13B will still haul arse in an early RX, and be reliable and very easy to live with.

Yes, the rotary scene draws a lot of wankers, but so does the WRX scene, import scene, v8 scene etc.

Contrary to a lot of peoples opionon, i tried to kill mine for a year and it wouldnt die.

True that, If I could choose again I would never have sold my ser.3 RX7 to buy the skyline.

I'm on my 3rd motor in 2years of owning the skyline, In the 2 years I had the rotor (which was over 200,000ks old) it didnt miss a beat and it often saw 9500rpm+

Infact seeing this thread makes me want to go buy another 1st gen RX7 for a track car

A mate who knew nothing about cars bought a S2 RX-7 at an auction, then came by to show me his cool car...

The conversation started like this...

Me: You bought a rotary!

Him: What's a rotary...?

He learnt quite quickly that if he missed services stuff broke, and I can remember a $1k+ bill to re run all the oil lines.

It was quite thirsty from memory, but a shed load of fun to drive and always had classic looks.

My favourite rotary quote : "Rotaries, great to drive, not to own"

Jamie

a long time ago I had an Rx2 that I used for pizza delivery. It was pretty good on fuel as I had tuned it well. Extend port 12A.

Had a few rotors over time and as already mentioned they aren't for knuckle heads. They are really reliable if warmed up and treated right. This isn't expensive to do either.

As a daily they are fine if you do your research and learn how to keep them.

Everything up to (but not including) Iron Chef's thread has been pretty much spot on.

rotors are fun and very reliable if treated correctly. In fact in racing circles, I've read more stories of RB26's dropping their guts than rotaries. My RX2 rally car has the same engine it had in it over 6 years ago. I do an oil change after every big event, and warm it up properly before racing. Other than that, I drive it like I stole it. Have had the temp gauge on the wrong side of 120 deg C a few times when I was popping fan belts, and had other major cooling issues (all fixed now), and it still runs fine.

Big carbied and ported rotors can be cantankerous in traffic and not much fun as a daily. An EFI 13B will still haul arse in an early RX, and be reliable and very easy to live with.

Yes, the rotary scene draws a lot of wankers, but so does the WRX scene, import scene, v8 scene etc.

lol I was wondering how long it would take for the rotary Nazis to wander in here and start defending the reliability of their motors.

I've owned an R100, two RX-3s, a 13B turbo RX-2 (Fast Fours Project Pizza Delivery, for those old enough to remember), a S1 RX-7 and a S8 RX-7, so I'd say I'm in a reasonable position to comment.

There's a lot more to owning an old school rotor than how reliable the motor is (for the record, they're just as reliable as any other motor when serviced at the correct intervals).

Firstly, the fuel consumption is woeful - I defy any rotary owner to tell me otherwise. If you're going to spend 90% of your time stuck in traffic, you're better off keeping the rotor for weekend thrashes and buying something cheap and economical as a daily.

Secondly, as someone mentioned before, you're talking about 30 year old cars these days - parts are difficult to come by, and expensive to purchase when you do. For your own survival as much as anything else, make sure all the safety-related components have been modified (suspension, brakes etc) because hitting something at high speed in one would be far more disastrous than if you were in a car built in the last 10 years.

Thirdly, I wouldn't be leaving them in a public car park if you wanted to see the car still there when you finished work. You can install all the alarms in the world, but that doesn't change the fact that any 15 year old with a length of blue packing tape could be inside your car in under 20 secs. They were designed in a time where theft (in Japan at least) wasn't a very big issue.

My search in Japan still continues for an R130 Luce :blush:

the fuel consumption is woeful - I defy any rotary owner to tell me otherwise.

I beg to differ, it is not "WOEFUL", it's worse than that.

My old 13b bp i got down to about 16ltr/100k in normal driving, having fun was 20+

Edited by W0rp3D
lol I was wondering how long it would take for the rotary Nazis to wander in here and start defending the reliability of their motors.

Haha nazi - ur funny :P If only you knew.

Well, since he asked about their reliability, I answered him.

I gather from the OP he's after something "old school", ie a bit different from your mundane shopping trolley, otherwise he would be looking at a late 90's Camry. Cheap, reliable, safe, cheap, economical and cheap. Can't go past one for a daily.

Of course if you want something "old school cool" then be prepared to put up with old technology, rare and expensive parts, poor crash safety, and high fuel costs. I don't think that's restricted to rotaries only.

16l/100km? pffft. I bank on about 75L/100km on special stages, and about 20L/100km on liaison. Of course I avoid driving it on the roads at any other time as much as possible (because it's a dog in traffic)

I had a series 1 rx7 for about a year. Was a fun little project car that i couldnt kill.

Sure might have been very thirsty on fuel but was a hell of a lot of fun and very reliable.

I would happily get another one

daily needs to be reliable, have power steer, air con, decent radio, electric windows and mirrors.

so rx2/3/4 is not really going to fit any of those.

would no doubt be a fun weekend car if you like rotaries but a rubbish daily.

daily needs to have power steer

Not neccessarily, depends on the driver. Have owned many non-power steering cars. Some of them are a pain, but I found the series one RX7 I had to be quite light in steering at slow speeds.

daily needs to have air con, decent radio, electric windows and mirrors.

All of the above are optional - in Tasmania I don't really care about air con, want air conditioning? Wind down a window. When I move to brisbane my opinion may change :D

Radio can easily be wired up, particularly easily in an older car takes an hour if your handy with a soldering iron, personally I prefer a simple stereo anyway.

Electric windows and mirrors and so on are good in a way but when you don't have them you don't care that you don't have them. If it truly bothers the owner anyone can fit a electric window kit quite easily. Have never cared about electric mirrors apart from thinking "Thats handy!"

Depends on what you want in a daily. At the moment I want comfort, inconspicousness (my fault that one entirely) and a touch of grunt - hence the turbo pulsar. If you want an old fashioned daily you don't particularly put that much emphasis on modern convenience. Hell, I don't put much emphasis on modern convenience even when I have it.

Its a personal thing really if you have to have modern kit you have to have it, if you couldn't care you couldn't care. I'm on the couldn't care side.

All this talk of RX-7's and rotaries has made me want to buy another - I'm already flicking through classifieds. 

its interesting i thought as soon as i saw a rotary thread on a nissan site all i would see would be how rubbish and unreliable they are blah blah blah You seem to get that alot, people just choose to think they are a peice of shit without knowing a thing about them, Personally ive only had 1 engine in need of rebuild as a split in the oil line has lost oil pressure and the motor was toast. But not bad considering ive had 12a turbo s1 rx7, 13bept s4, 13bept s5, 13bbp series2 rx2, 13bep 808 sedan, 13bbp rx3 sedan,12a bp rotary van, 12amp 323 and current 20bbp, tripple throttle bodies etc rx2 sedan. Great fun,, small, powerfull and out of controll!

as far as a daily goes just a standard 12a or 13b wouldnt be too bad just keep the 4 barrel and go easy on the secondarys, and once you hooked your f**kt

its interesting i thought as soon as i saw a rotary thread on a nissan site all i would see would be how rubbish and unreliable they are blah blah blah You seem to get that alot, people just choose to think they are a peice of shit without knowing a thing about them

Most of the poeple on here are a lot more mature and enjoy different cars for their different attributes regardless of what we drive.

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • Or just wire a multimeter in, sit it up like it's a gauge, go for a drive, read temp gauge, read multimeter, speak to phone and tell it to take notes.
    • This is the other log file, if only we had exhaust manifold pressure - would understand what's going on a bit better   Can you take a screenshot of your wastegate setup in the Kebabtech?   Engine Functions --> Boost Control (looks like this):  
    • You just need a datalogger of some sort. A handheld oscilloscope could do it, because it will make the trace visible on screen, so you can look at the peak, or whatever you need to look at. And there are cheap USB voltage loggers available too. You could get a 2 channel one and press a button to feed voltage to the second channel at points that you want to check the sensor voltage, when you knew what the guage was saying, for example.
    • it's not the issue with making power, it's the issue with controlling boost, and this isn't the first time I've seen a 6Boost having issue with controlling boost down low.   The boost control here looks interesting.   Looking at your logs, looks like it's set to open loop boost control strategy (which is fine). We can see VCT being kept on till about 6600RPM (no issue with that). Ignition timing (I'm assuming this is E85, seems within reason too, nothing too low, causing hot EGTS and boost spiking). There's about 15 degrees of advance when your boost shoots up, however can't be this as the timing isn't single digits. I'm assuming there's no EMAP data, as I wasn't able to find it in the logs. We can see your tuner sets the WG DC to 0% after 4300RPM, trying to control boost.   My thoughts, what frequency is your wastegate set to?  AND why aren't you using both ports for better control?
    • While that sounds reasonable, this is definitely a boost control problem, but the real question is why are you having the boost control problem? Which is why I pondered the idea that there's a problem at ~4000rpm related to head flow. In that instance, you are not yet under boost control - it's still ramping up and the wastegate is yet to gain authority. So, I'm thinking that if the wastegate is not yet open enough to execute control, but the compressor has somehow managed ot make a lot of flow, and the intake side of the head doesn't flow as well as the exhaust side (more on that later), then presto, high MAP (read that as boost overshoot). I have a number of further thoughts. I use butterfly valves in industrial applications ALL THE TIME. They have a very non-linear flow curve. That is to say that there is a linear-ish region in the middle of their opening range, where a 1% change in opening will cause a reasonably similar change in flow rate, from one place to another. So, maybe between 30% open and 60% open, that 1% change in opening gives you a similar 2% change in flow. (That 2% is pulled out of my bum, and is 2% of the maximum flow capacity of the valve, not 2% of the flow that happens to be going through the valve at that moment). That means that at 30% open, a 1% change in opening will give you a larger relative flow increase (relative to the flow going through the valve right then) compared to the same increment in opening giving you the same increment in flow in outright flow units. But at 60% opening, that extra 2% of max flow is relatively less than 1/2 the increase at 30% opening. Does that make sense? It doesn't matter if it doesn't because it's not the main point anyway. Below and above the linear-ish range in the middle, the opening-flow curve becomes quite...curved. Here's a typical butterfy valve flow curve. Note that there is a very low slope at the bottom end, quite steep linear-ish slope in the middle, then it rolls off to a low slope at the top. This curve shows the "gain" that you get from a butterfly valve as a function of opening%. Note the massive spike in the curve at 30%. That's the point I was making above that could be hard to understand. So here's the point I'm trying to make. I don't know if a butterfly valve is actually a good candiate for a wastegate. A poppet valve of some sort has a very linear flow curve as a function of opening %. It can't be anyelse but linear. It moves linearly and the flow area increases linearly with opening %. I can't find a useful enough CV curve for a poppet valve that you could compare against the one I showed for the butterfly, but you can pretty much imagine that it will not have that lazy, slow increase in flow as it comes off the seat. It will start flowing straight away and increase flow very noticeably with every increase in opening%. So, in your application, you're coming up onto boost, the wastegate is closed. Boost ramps up quite quickly, because that's really what we want, and all of a sudden it is approaching target boost and the thing needs to open. So it starts opening, and ... bugger all flow. And it opens some more, and bugger all more flow. And all the while time is passing, boost is overshooting further, and then finally the WG opens to the point where the curve starts to slope upwards and it gains authority amd the overshoot is brought under control and goes away, but now the bloody thing is too open and it has to go back the other way and that's hy you get that bathtub curve in your boost plot. My position here is that the straight gate is perhaps not teh good idea it looks like. It might work fine in some cases, and it might struggle in others. Now, back to the head flow. I worry that the pissy little NA Neo inlet ports, coupled with the not-very-aggressive Neo turbo cam, mean that the inlet side is simply not matched to the slightly ported exhaust side coupled with somewhat longer duration cam. And that is not even beginning to address the possibility that the overlap/relative timing of those two mismatched cams might make that all the worse at around 4000rpm, and not be quite so bad at high rpm. I would be dropping in at least a 260 cam in the inlet, if not larger, see what happens. I'd also be thinking very hard about pulling the straight gate off, banging a normal gate on there and letting it vent to the wild, just as an experiment.
×
×
  • Create New...