I'm tired of Rotary shops ripping people off! Testing the 2 Rotor 13B "SECRETS" myself.

this is the beginning of a video series i have wanted to do since the beginning of building rotaries which is like a week ago i want to know how much boost how much power a stock two rotor is capable of handling so that way your money and time more importantly can be spent on better things we all know that it takes a year to do a rebuild because okay you got a buddy that's got a machine and he's busy but then you got a friend and you got to order things no those days are over i want to show you the maximum ability of a stock fd motor both with and without minor modifications that you can do yourself that way you're not spending months waiting on other people and you're not spending tons of money on rebuilding the engine i am so sick of all these shops saying oh we need to do this you need to machine this you no you don't you do not and i'm going to show you just how efficient these motors can be the very first step was testing the limits of the stock motor and i sure as hell found it not talking peak ideal situations we had issues we had like just like a normal person nothing's perfect in a normal street build and we saw where the limits were these are the irons from a stock fd two rotor this isn't remanufactured or anything like that and you can see some very interesting things showing up already this is the motor in the corvette that did about 550 foot pounds of torque and 500 horsepower before it finally let go what happened this is the rotor from the infamous rotary vet that did the 500 500 500 foot pounds of torque 500 horsepower at the rear wheels that was amazing but we kept pushing it more and we found its limits two things happened one is that it detonated or pre-detonated and that occurred for the same reason that this thing is so dirty for being a brand new engine what happened was i had the return line on my turbo too low and it was starting to spray crank case oil not my premix but also normal crankcase oil into the combustion chamber oil has a much lower octane rating than fuel and i paid the price for that but that's a very realistic scenario to happen nothing is perfect this is a stock two-piece apexel just a major piece of it nothing crazy about it it's oem piece that comes from mazda this is that same piece on meth not like meth like literally methamphetamine is not meth the fuel it chipped the tip there are two reasons why this occurred so here's one of the two issues with stock apex seals if you were to take this and hold it all the way to the very edge of the rotor housing it is the exact length side to side so when the engine expands from a combustion event like this the stock potential bolts are notorious for being slightly weaker than they should be and the whole engine expands well the party has to come back down to earth and once it collapses back in it actually contacts the tip of this seal to the irons these are made out of beautiful cast iron and they collapse and then you chip the tip why is that tip not as strong as it should be without being a metal guy you already know that there's things called heat treating and they do a lot of weird to metal to make it stronger or better in this case the top half of the seal right to that point coincidentally is heat treated so this top part here is meant to be heat treated so that way when it touches the inner part of the chrome surface you know harder metals they're more brittle but with oil they do well against each other and prevent wear the bottom half is much softer material so along here when you have an event occur it has a softer part to absorb more of the shock and of course it chipped the tip exactly halfway where the heat treating stops and there is no softer material behind this corner to absorb that sort of extra impact all of that together meant a catastrophic failure i speculate that the tip broke off on one run and then it waited until the next run when we were at peak torque to let go you can hear it you can hear it right at maximum torque this engine said i'm out [Music] very interesting the tip came out of the groove of the apex seal and then just decided to do a chimichanga right through the housing so i ruined both the rotors and the housings thankfully i got new ones in the interest of being really cheap it makes me wonder if you took this down about five thousandths of an inch could you use these stock two-piece seals but honestly at that point why not just buy new aftermarket seals they're already clearanced for this sort of reason there we go oh my god thank god this camera has stabilization because my knees just went weak so pretty doc fd rotors brand new in their own little cheese wheel brand new bearings brand new rotors never been used yeah yeah the oil on there to prove it that's right yes those are brand new fd or even fc it doesn't really matter at this point uh turbo two or uh fd rotor housings i think those are turbo two but same thing same difference brand new here go ahead turn those sideways oh yeah i am going out of my way to make sure this engine is as stock as possible so i even have a micrometer it's basically like a very advanced form of calipers that are very very sensitive we're going to make sure the rotors are clearanced to the housings the same way they were on this engine previously so no funny business this is still a stock motor minus two little things that we're gonna do that are the least expensive way to make this engine reliable already have it set for the other engine i'm gonna go ahead and compare these rotor housings and sure enough that is exact so that's a good sign for mazda that they're right there i'm jiggling it we're jiggling so these rotor housings are the exact same width as the other ones which means that the e-shaft is going to be almost identical and play in all that now it's the rotor's turn rotors should be you can actually hear it jiggling rotors should be clearanced so that way they don't hit the edge of this fd rotors particularly actually have a little bit more taken off the edges here not a lot people will take off more but fd rotors actually are clearanced on their sides which are called side clearance so we'll take a look at the actual part right here and tighten that in and that's about again we're about ten thousands somewhere in there you can see all these specs online this is not magic on my end so we're at just relatively speaking we're at 17 and then we'll go to here and that's about 13. and we'll go to the edge here as accurate as possible and that's about a five so even from this area here all the way around to the outer edges you went from what 13 to 5. that is to prevent this corner from hitting over here so what you can actually see is on the stock motor it did actually contact when it was going nuts it did contact a little bit and produce a little bit more wear there is no actual step wear but it did you can see start polishing it a little bit more than we want so these rotors are identical in width to the previous stock orders which is good mazda's got consistency here we don't have to spend more money one more thing we're going to do just to verify a couple of different things all at once is check the weight 4366 so 4366 four three six four that that's very rare to have mazda even have it that close so these rotors are almost identical to each other that's like they were almost designed for this combination just for reference so you guys know they have casting numbers as the casting gets worn out you know what series they are these are c which is pretty common in my line of business in my world the c the c series all might have been c yeah all you know the millions of rotors i've dealt with which are five uh are all c or d and don't let those numbers fool you because they actually can be very similar even though some people say that is the weight it's not you can have d that are close to c and so on they're not it's a little deceiving there let's go ahead and weigh the stock ones and compare those as well i took all the oil seals and every sort of seal off there so we are comparing these apples to apples but as you can tell there's more oil on there so the other ones were 43 66 43 38 43 44 so these were a little bit more out of spec so these are slightly lighter than those and let's see what numbers these are funny they're actually d which should have been later in the casting which means they should have been heavier the other thing is these counterweights as you saw logan in my previous video on the four rotor balancing this is no joke but a two rotor benefits from the fact that it's not as long say a six rotor even a small weight imbalance out here is insane on a two-rotor you can get away with a little bit more now this is me giving advice and i truly believe it because i did it myself the stock fd motor was manual right you can't swap clutches here's why this is the stock flywheel the flywheel itself has your counterweight built into it right there so you think oh cool that's neat i'm good i can just swap clutches nope this thing's heavy as hell and just isn't conducive for the standard clutch setup what do people do they swapped an automatic rear counterweight this counterweight is off of i don't know what and obviously it automatic but check this out the counterweight system is built into this and then all you do is you bolt any aftermarket flywheel slash clutch setup onto here i've now changed from a known counterweight to an unknown one thankfully again two rotors are so stable so solid that never caused any extra wear the bearings are perfectly fine there's not an issue so in a pinch obviously again we're avoiding all that insane machine work this was ran for quite a while did the long road trips back and forth to vegas all of this is wonderful but the very first step to building a rotary engine actually starts with the most obvious part of the car packing the rotors that's kind of the phrase for this what we're going to do is put the side seals in the corner seals the apex seals these are all pretty standard it's making these custom for each of these links they're off by a slight bit and nothing's perfect so we're going to go ahead and go through that whole process get these things ready to be put in the engine that's a whole day process by itself assembling the engine is another day i want to point out this is not sponsored i paid full price for this stuff so the jury's out right now but this is a set of after-market apex seals we'll be testing them and making sure they work obviously before i start talking about who they are but you can probably figure out who they are it's a very interesting difference and we'll go through the difference between these and stock seals as well aftermarket apex seals you still go with the stock size seals so these are all slightly longer so here are the stock coolant seals i want to bring this to you guys attention because they're a one-time use thing especially these orange ones they've got three pieces in there once the engine's kind of heated up or even if you're like me and you use vaseline they'll swell a little bit fine but again one-time use alternatively you can do after-market seals so again we'll be testing these as well that way if there's an issue we would have all heard about it but if there's an issue on my build it's just honest documentation of what's going on i get asked so often what apex seals are you using and the problem with that is if i tell you what apex seals i'm using you're going to think that that is the only brand that works that kills me to no end yes it is the brand that worked in my build but for example my three rotor for all those years used ra super seals you hear a lot of controversy about those but you also see that my engine made tons of power for more than 10 years on those seals you get what i'm going to it's anecdotal at best but what i want to do is profile all these different apex seals and then just share with you the results here's a literal back to back comparison between aftermarket seals on the right with stock two-piece seals on the left and so far nothing too crazy the other finish looks different but oh there's the issue right there the first thing you notice is the aftermarket seal adds more of a chunk to that corner piece meaning that it's less likely to snap off if the tip hits something crazy but the overall length when you combine these all together they're also clearanced for that as well not going to be noticeable on camera because it's like a couple thou so the whole point of this is that that little tip on the right side of the aftermarket seal is not going to hit the iron on the right side in the case of a insane detonation event we now have this rotor right here ready for packing it's interesting because you know you think oh epic seals apex seals that's the very first thing nope don't even touch those i'm gonna focus on the side i'll take the ones out of the previous engine these are all the oil control rings and their springs and since they're out of almost a brand new engine we're gonna put them back in we're gonna split these up by color nice little trick to this process okay if we still have all the rubber at least everything's all accounted for those are white and white blue blue blue yeah you don't need those colors but you can actually uh do it by hand but that saves you a little bit of effort you have them up like this one this end goes down this end goes up and then on this side this end goes down and this goes up you can't flip them like this that was one of my first questions they're they're built with a pointy tip for the bottom side let's say this is the rotor and the funny part is it depends on your mood and which rotary you want it to be but the pointy tip goes into that little hole right there oops yeah on the smaller one you spin it and then it actually ends up catching in that hole so and then that no longer spins obviously once it's pushed down i just broke it free of that i think there's two yeah there's two sides two holes doesn't matter which but she said i'm gonna grab jason's magic tool okay so yeah there's like a whole art to just these but yeah one here one here and the other one one here and one here so the way we determine obviously we're going to use each one of one of these for one side of the rotor we don't use all these uh you know all whites on one rotor or all blues on one rotor so we'll set that aside first plate is actually the very front of the engine this will be the first rotor so the gear is actually gonna be sitting at the very front of the engine so that's the very first rotor we'll even put it on both sides just in case but we're going to look at it from that side we'll just put one rotor one so we know rotor one is rotor one and that's literally the rotor that we'll do top dead center off of all that sort of so this is the front of the engine the engine is going to rotate from up here you know intake combust or compression combustion exhaust so it's going to spin this way and actually when you spin this way in physics terms you like to use like this so it spins like this when it spins that way you don't want the rings to spin this way you know because they're going to spin with the the iron so you're actually putting these in based on the direction that this rotor is going to spin to keep the oil control rings to stay with the rotor so right now we have the engine spinning like this so there's a force going backwards right you know like they want to stay still so you actually want the spring organized to block it this way this would do it yeah this one this is this is the correct choice and there's like guides i'm like okay white goes on the front side of rotor one or whatever but let's say we put it in like that play pretend there's a notch on the inside there that's flat notch now once that's in that's that's gonna prevent it from rotating this way so as the engine's spinning that stays with the rotor rotor two the gear is this way so we have to go with reverse on the other side it's basically anything that's on this side of the engine gets the what is this the white set so anything that's on the front or when we're stacking on the bottom of the engine it's the white set so it's preventing them from rotating that way and then the blue set goes on the back on the back side of this you can if you put these upside down here make your life really bad but there's two notches as well there so it catches on white one in there so both the white ones are pointing up in that direction okay perfect we're actually using this just to really hold it in it's not it's not lubrication as much as it's just holding it and these do hold it really well by themselves we'll go ahead and put this one in this outer one and this one's the inner one find the notches put them upside down so the next thing we'll do and this is actually for the sizing part of it we will use the the old uh corner seals these stock corner seals we'll be fine with that for the moment so stock corner seals are very weak right there it's by design and they have this rubber piece on the inside it's meant to seal it i mean this is technology from back then people found slightly better technology and you know it's one of those controversial kind of things you never have to actually take this out i just want to show for the camera we're going to go ahead and use one of the um old apex seals it's kind of like a tool as we go you get three of those ready and you can actually see on these the darker side was the back side so you actually also see the spring where it was at on those these are very fragile too i i squeezed one like this and it popped i needed to know i needed to know if that would work and we're also going to take from the previous motor we're going to take this little earring looking things those are the springs that go underneath this stock mazda springs a lot of these things actually just use stock springs apex seals side seals they all use stock mazda springs the older ones were actually like really stringy looking things from like the first gens you don't use those either so what can happen uh this happened a lot in my previous installations put a little bit of and put that on the snug fit is a good fit that's in say you go to install the rotor and you do this while it's sitting on and in these will actually spin the spring underneath this will get cockeyed like that and when you go to drop the apex seal in it won't go through so what your goal is is once you have this packed you don't you know you make sure that it's all clearanced like that and then when you go to set it into the motor you do not adjust it otherwise as soon as you adjust it those good out of whack some people will actually install it with this the seals like this like without springs and they'll pull them back out and do that there's a lot of other you know tricks they all work and then some people actually super glue the two pieces together which i think is actually kind of a cool thing because i actually had on the three rotor somehow i was i've opened it this way that little corner piece didn't go the engine didn't go all the way down and it crushed the very tip of the corner piece good we won't do that with this engine that was a kind of cool thing yeah building freaking motors unless you're building these yeah so we'll go ahead and put this in there and we'll put this in there we're setting these up to figure out the lengths of the side seals [Music] these are all previous side seals and side steel springs we will we will reuse the springs these were for different rotors those are the original rotors so what i'll do i'm not going to put it in there because i'll screw myself over really quick i will put a spring in there this is something i got roasted on before rightfully there's this minor detail again i'm going to use really light pressure on these because they're very small and soft so they both on each end of this thing have the spring actually goes up like this i'm curved they go up or if you go this way they go down if you install it with those tips down and for some reason while the engine's going crazy that can slide under the corner ceiling that get crushed and it really won't do too much but that's could it could gum it up it could create you know issues it could where it could cause this to wear harder so we're going to install it with the tips of these corners up if you think about it it makes sense but yeah exactly yeah if i'm really thinking about it i'm like it's a spring who cares yeah on this if were going to reuse these seals you can actually see the the notches they're not notches but the notches where the peaks of the spring rub against this yeah where marks yeah so and then the other side's you know flat so you would go this route we'll just gently try this one randomly and you can already see the the problem it's way far away that's a whole bunch of boost pressure yeah yeah boost just slide through so i'm gonna go ahead and grab the that now i didn't clearance them on the four rotor because it was again the same ones we just kind of figured out which ones were which point oh and we have 0.004 pretty cute okay so this is pretty standard easily passed through and out of curiosity i'm actually interested in seeing how big is the gap bigger than that so that's 18 thousands the difference between that and that dave taught me a really cool trick if you don't have a feeler gauge is basically i'll actually do it on this one is that you push it in the middle you push it on the sides middle side so that little bit of bend if the sides touch it's too close but so it was really cool because clearly it's not even remotely touching either sides so these should be the mazda oem ones that are slightly oversized for this very reason so we should see the reverse problem happening right now we're already uh hitting on both sides this is going to take a little bit of guess work you know getting comfortable with it and everything this is a chunk of a rotor right here and you're actually going to go like this and then [Music] a little guide we'll see how well that worked you can actually feel it it took it took enough off to get it to slide in and i could force it in but it would wedge so we're going to rinse and repeat okay so so we're gonna use this as a finishing tool only because the the surface looks so much better obviously the smoother it is the better the oil likes it i'm being very gentle i'm not bending this at all so we'll go ahead there go ahead there and so that's almost exact like not in a good way this is 1500 i'm sure you could go you could start lower so it feels like almost good but then as soon as you start to do the bend you can feel it binding up there we go that is perfect so this is now soul bonded to this side of the rotor face get any sort of metal filings on that's a good sign too it's not ponding binding up there either dropped in really smooth yeah okay so we'll breeze through a lot of this but i just wanted to show people that it's a rinse and repeat process and the hardest thing i think for a rotary engine to me is remembering to do every single small step hey make sure that the tips of these go up hey make sure you even put a spring in there before you do that and so on because you're like oh yeah i just was focusing on machining and sharpening this and you forget to go to the next step because that's definitely not gonna fit look at the second one done as expected too large i'm going to tighten this one up fitting this last one [Music] okay let's see how we're doing finally that's such a let's see if it passes the we are in business okay one rotor face is done there's a couple different ways to do this and i think i'm gonna keep everything on there put the baby blue blanket under there and so we're just gonna simply flip it over rinse and repeat so we're gonna keep these here and then of course the corner seals will turn well once we get them the rotor finished and we set it outside we'll just re-straighten these out call that a day but that way we don't have to mix these up so here goes the pizza flip there [Music] i was angry [Music] there is rotor number one all cleaned up ready to go all six side seals are in properly all six corner seals are looking good jason's working on rotor number two he's got the oil control rings in and he's starting to set in the side seals [Music] we now have rotor one completely finished ready to go minus apex seals jason finished this side beautifully so we're gonna flop that one over and get that for the last final side i prepped this surface this is the very front of the engine see like that so my rotor actually is gonna exactly how my rotor is sitting right now is going to transplant over here of course we'll stand it up on its side make sure that the side seals and corner seals on the backside look good but that's its home [Music] so when it comes to assembling an engine there's three things i like to use i actually do like to use the motor oil especially if the parts are completely bone dry because that's the oil that's going to be used to lubricate it might as well introduce it to his new best friend so especially with the vr01 with the high zinc it's perfect for coating the outer surfaces of the rotors anything that really just generally needs a soft amount of lubrication when the engine is running that's what's pumping through the heart of it that's what's going through all these bearings and through the e shaft and all that but until then if you're going to be cranking it over by hand to test compression make sure nothing's weird i'll use like a full grease it doesn't have to be synthetic but just a grease works really well and then also this one's a little bit of interesting approach to it i'll use a gear oil or even i'll go back to oil if i don't have gear oil but i'll use an oil on the outer surface of the rotor housing and on the irons so that way these aren't rubbing metal to metal when you're first spinning it over by hand until you build oil pressure and for those of you wondering this wild crazy grease ends up dissolving into the oil you want to do an oil change pretty quickly after building an engine especially a race engine but all that grease that's sitting on the inside of the bearings needs to get out and so sure enough it does it actually goes to the oil and then you do an oil change and now you just have the correct oil in the engine

Channel: Rob Dahm

Views: 445,254

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Id: _D62VnUXrNo

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020