Driving the Audi reminded me that I miss having a project car in the garage. The 2.0T has a surprisingly tempting aftermarket, so before I went too far with what’s supposed to be my daily I decided I needed to haul my Rx-7 out of storage and start work on it again. It didn’t take long to realize that FC Rx-7 parts have skyrocketed in price since the last time I looked, so the only practical solution was to pick up a parts car.

This one showed up on facebook marketplace, it’s a 1989 GXL with only 65k miles. It looks like it sat outside in the Kansas sun for the past 15 years and every seal (as well as the paint) has deteriorated. Water pooled in the floorboards and there are good sized holes on both sides, as well as in the spare wheel well in back. It also took a hit on the driver’s side fender at some point, though fortunately the damage seems to be limited to the fender itself, the bumper mount, and the headlight support. The dash and seats are sun damaged, with the driver’s side showing the worst of it.

Otherwise it’s in ok shape and is shockingly complete. It has the cargo tray, clean speaker covers, mostly dry sunroof, plastic undertray, FTP lenses, etc.. which are nearly impossible to find outside of outrageous ebay pricing. I’m still undecided if I’m going to strip it and junk it, or fix it up and throw the turbo driveline in it. So far the rust seems to be more isolated than on my other Rx7, but it’ll be hard to tell until I pull the carpet out.

Since I just bought Rx7 #4, thought I’d dig through old photos to find #3. This car was a pure parts car I picked up winter of ’08. It was missing quite a few parts and the floorboards were rotted through, so not worth saving. The only good thing about it was it was an identical model to my first Rx7, an S5 GTU. I stripped the remaining interior parts, carpet, seats, and door cards and junked the rest.

Four years and 65k miles later the LR3 is still going. It’s taken me across the country several times, often with a trailer in tow. It’s comfortable, capable, and surprisingly reliable. But it’s a terrible city car. So I’ve added an Audi:

I recently took the T100 and 4Runner out for a road trip through southern Colorado. The trip was a combination of highway driving and unimproved roads and with myself in the T100 and my SO in the 4Runner, and it was a good chance to see them side by side. On the highway the 4Runner showed better gas mileage than I expected, 11.3 vs 12.6 gallons for the T100 over just about 240 miles. With the same engine between them, the difference has to be down to weight and the manual transmission. While that impressed, washboard roads early on did uncover a problem with the 4runner:

With over 208k miles on it, the original shocks were still in service. The passenger rear shock ended up failing at the top bolt due to metal fatigue. It was an easy fix once the game of “what’s that noise???” played out.

After that excitement we took the million dollar highway down to Durango, then back up to Silverton where we picked up the road to Animas Forks on our way to Engineer pass. While the road wasn’t particularly challenging, the views were incredible.

We continued on to Wheeler geologic area, a site with eeie volcanic ash hoodoos in the middle of nowhere Colorado. The road to it was 16 miles of loose rocks and confirmed that the T100 ride is miserable. What the 4runner could do at 15mph was a pain at 10 in the truck.

On the way out of Wheeler we hit a surprise section of forest road marked “damaged”, which made for the roughest roads on the trip. In hindsight, I can’t believe the road was ever not damaged to begin with.

All in all everything worked as expected and I’ll moving forward with selling the truck. It’ll be hard to let it go, the bench seat and extra width make it more comfortable on the highway than the 4Runner, but just about everywhere else the 4Runner comes out ahead.

Not much of an update, but I stumbled across old photos of my ’92 F150 (and canoe.) Didn’t think I kept any, I didn’t own it for long before I traded it for an Explorer.

I’ve been planning to start work on the RX-7, but first I needed to clear another project out of the garage. I have a Honda Nighthawk 650 with a bad ticking noise coming from the top end of the engine. It sat for a while before it developed the noise, so I was pretty sure air had made it’s way into one the of the hydraulic tappets. The fix was easy, but getting to the tappet meant pulling the valve cover as well as the upper part of the bike.

I made a short video for anyone else who runs into the same problem, finding the right procedure to bleed the tappet was hard to find on youtube.

Now that the bike is back together and running great, I’m out of excuses to avoid working on the RX-7. First up is the roof, body work supplies are already starting to arrive.