I blew up my K-Swapped RX7

well I blew up the [Music] RX7 so uh what happened was I was taking the car to a local charity event which is why it wasn't on camera it wasn't being filmed or anything they were like Hey we're going to do an exhaust competition and I was like oh cool my car shoots Flames why not so I went and shot flames and everybody loved it and they voted for my car and I went on to the next round and so you'd Loop her around the parking lot and you do it again against whoever else is in the next bracket it's like a tournament bracket kind of thing and so all I'm doing is sitting there in a parking lot revving this thing in twep to shoot flames on the final round it was a markv Supra versus my RX7 which is pretty cool for the championship win um and uh you know revved it up shot some flames and then it shot some smoke um because I burnt the exhaust valve up but um uh I won so I got I got first place this is the trophy for it it's pretty cool uh was it worth it uh it was for the children so uh yes now I know what you're thinking Hondas is supposed to be reliable but you know Ben he's very hard on his cars and if this was a rotary he would have gone through like three of them by now and that would have been expensive but thankfully this is a K series which you can buy like 14 of them for the price of a rotor yep no no compression so we'll just buy an engine off of eBay or Facebook which is exactly what we've done so this is a K20 Z1 out of a 2005 Acura RSX Type S and the reason that we picked this is cuz it's the same engine that's already in the RX7 but it has the type S oil pump so you can rev it out to 9,000 RPM quite easily and it's it's h it's good to go we bought it for just over $1,000 which is a whole lot cheaper than the $14,000 Factory engine um and uh yeah it should be in and out of this car all within one up episode can you believe it one episode to do a full motor swap normally we'd stretch this out to like a three episode series um but this this should be pretty pretty simple Mark you know that's a fiberglass bumper right I never climbed in the engine bay like that before what you never [Music] an [Music] we'll be removing the engine from underneath the car so we'll have to disconnect the suspension so we can drop the entire subframe all right well the engine's out that wasn't too bad no not at all once I uh started getting the Rhythm yeah yeah it was really easy to pull and it was nice to pull the whole thing right the whole it's it's weird that that's faster I mean you can't otherwise you have to pull the motor out the top cuz the subframe blocks the bottom yeah definitely going from the bottom is the easiest way yeah it's like a quick disconnect now only we had the quick disconnect on the harness that'd be even better was this faster or slower or more difficult to pull than the RX8 motor um this was this was much more easy it's almost like a K series is better than a rotary definitely better than a RoR interesting now that we have the blown engine pulled let's strip down the new engine to get it ready to go in the car huh competition clutch that's cool a lot of the parts and accessories on this engine are front-wheel drive specific so we obviously won't be using any of these I'm not sure how many miles this engine has but it's a Honda so I know it'll be fine but I don't like how dirty it is so I'm going to clean it up so I'll be able to see any future potential fluid [Music] leaks there's a bunch of stuff that needs to be converted on a K series to work in a rear whe drive car but thankfully we've already done that hard work when we put the original engine in so it's just a matter of transferring over parts from the old engine to the new engine the transmission that we're running is this guy which is an AP1 S2000 transmission this is the weak Link in the setup currently 400 horsepower is about the most you can put through this transmission you can kind of tell why it's pretty like narrow not a lot going on um so if I'm going to make more power in the future unfortunately I'm going to have have to change the trans out let me know in the comments what you think I should swap it with this clut looks practically brand new okay so this clutch doesn't look that bad it is a little bit discolored but it's gone through 20,000 Mi so that's not surprising it does still have plenty of meat left on it so we're going to reuse it on the next motor um and maybe the next one after that who knows but considering the number of burnouts I've done on this thing it's quite impressive and considering the fact that this is a stock clutch and I'm making over 400 horsepower to the wheels um yeah very impressive so I think this is definitely the formula if you're going to make around the 400 wheel horsepower range however I am running an act pressure plate so it's kind of an interesting combo just extra clamping Force but still the organic sprung clutch feel of a stock clutch it's a very nice combo and it's a combo that we're going to continue to run in this new [Music] motor [Music] okay now that the engine is off of the subframe um I want to clean the subframe up it is starting to show some Rust um I painted this 20,000 Mi ago or whatever and it is not holding up Al be it we did drive through all 48 states so I want to take this strip it down basically again and give it another paint layer of paint so that it doesn't rust but also so it looks nice um and that way we can find more leaks that might happen in the [Music] future so we need to go ahead and take this oil pan off switch it over to here take the engine mount switch it over we've pretty much already done the rest of it like a new oil filter we cleaned up the the entire engine actually put the valve cover new pulley all the accessories pretty much almost ready to go Ben this this oil pan is just pretty pretty nasty looking there's a lot of debris in here here you go so I don't think it's uh I don't think it's because of valves dude what this isn't a Subaru I'm so confused so it's not a it's not a burnt valve it's definitely not a burnt valve we assumed it was a burnt valve I was like oh maybe I can get ahead and replace it um no I definitely have a piston failure um dude I'm shocked the engine was still running yeah there's more there you go there's the engine continued to run all right Mark we got to tear this engine down now I want to know cuz I could have sworn it was just a burnt exhaust valve why wouldn't it be a burnt exhaust valve I was in a parking lot the car was under no load all it was doing was shooting flames you just got bad luck they just blew it right out the bottom so I blew out the backside of my piston in a parking lot free revving it in an exhaust competition but I won the exhaust competition so was it worth it you know what the trophy was for an exhaust [Music] [Laughter] competition will it fit can we put this one in it's it's you know it's kind of close it is a little big yeah But the irony that they handed me this trophy should you hand them this back yeah [Music] [Applause] right you'll notice the inside of this engine is a little brown and that is evidence of somebody who did not keep up with their oil change intervals it's actually a lot more frequent than you'd think um so all this kind of brown tarnish here obviously you want it to look like silver when it's brand new it's silver and that's where I'm not changing the oil frequently but I'm not concerned about that anymore because valine has a product that just came out called restore and protect and what that does it actually cleans all this out reverses it it's like totally new uh oil that no other like brand has kind of an interesting New Concept but we can run valin restor and protect in here and then get all this to be perfectly [Music] clean [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the K series is ready to go back in the RX7 the transmission's on the turbo is on I don't know about you but I'm ready to hear this thing start up and shoot more flames [Music] all right well I'm going to leave it up to you guys to finish up for me yeah I'll go home like that' be [Music] great so we could have obviously swapped this engine out much quicker but the nice thing about this is we are actually taking our time for the first time I think ever on Gears and gasoline so we have the opportunity to clean up some of this wiring we're we're just wrapping it with some black electrical tape making it uh nice and [Music] tidy so I've actually had this sitting on the shelf for a while this is a scrap piece of aluminum that is kind of shaped to uh fit on the front as somewhat of a shroud over the radiator so this actually be nice nice way to be able to cover wires and hoses and like the catch can line runs through here so we're going to put this right on top of the core support basically and that will help clean up the engine bay a little bit more okay so I have a full torque drive shaft this is a custommade drive shaft since obviously I have an S2000 Trans in a Mazda chassis going to a Ford Explorer rear end but we still have vibration so I'm going to measure the flange angle of both the uh transmission and the rear diff and we're going to see if the angle is square if the angle is off in any way it can cause a lot of vibration so I want to get the flange angles to be as on the nose as possible and then if it still vibrates after that then I might have to go to a two-piece drive shaft all right so this front one's reading actually perfectly level 90 89 90 90° which because I'm measuring vertically figure I can get a wider hit on the flange surface but the rear definitely pointed up it's 1.1 to 1.2 de off I don't know if that's enough to cause vibration but we can lower the front end of this down a little bit to get that to be spot on the nose so we might as well that way I know for sure it's not an angle issue [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] 6.6 mm so that's how much we're going to shim it by about give or [Music] take for the next time that Ben breaks down which is going to be inevitable we're going to go ahead and install this tow hook because uh yeah he's going to need [Music] it so Mark I think we've got the engine bay all tidied up now everything looks great we didn't actually make sure that the engine works before doing all that though yeah I thought about that about about halfway 3/4 of the way through but I figure you know it take you maybe a month to find another $1,000 motor I would hope less than that honestly um but yeah I probably should have done like at least a compression test on this one or something given that I found it on Facebook how many miles does it have on it I have no idea well that's a reassuring mhm mhm yeah based on the wear of the timing belt timing chain I should say probably like 150 or so which is pretty normal noral all right well let's start it up that's a smooth gay [Music] series well there you have it all in one episode we've swapped this motor out and we did a bunch of extra stuff we've cleaned up the engine bay we've painted this up frame the car is looking a lot better it's running great everything is looking a whole lot better it definitely looks a lot better I mean and the K series Motors are so strong and cheap so now you're not going to do what you did before right no no I would never do that again all right no more hot boy stuff yeah yeah no I've learned my lesson all right cuz I'm tired of working on this car you it's so expensive yeah yeah yeah all right [Music] [Music] really say if he breaks I'm going to leave him up [Music] here

Channel: Gears and Gasoline

Views: 248,173

Keywords: Mazda, FD, FD3S, RX7, Kswap, K20, K24, Gears and Gasoline

Id: hkNPGCYzOxE

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024