The INSANE saga of Rob Dahm's 4 Rotor RX-7

I had a good friend that was in Michigan State Police helped start coordinating a sting operation as many people know the four-rotor was a project I've had in the works for many years it was a vision and I made it very clear that that was my intention and then I started the project and then I got quiet so there's a lot of things that happened behind the scenes that really taught me some good life lessons on what it takes to take on such an insane project the car started out originally as my very first sports car it was a 93 Mazda rx-7 that I don't since I was 18 a neighbor had owned a slightly older one I had no interest in rotary engine whatsoever my mom was like hey the neighbor has this cool little red car you want it and as soon as I had gotten that car was a little naturally aspirated 2nd gen rx-7 I fell in love with rotaries then of course I'm the typical fast and furious comes out and I went got an FD in 1993 rx-7 it was Montego Blue is the middle aged life crisis to me it was Montego blue and tan interior I couldn't fit golf clubs in there but I loved that car absolutely loved it and every phase of my life I upgraded that car more that was just like everybody else you know you know I'm a save up for this upgrade it wasn't until a point that my brother bought an r35 gt-r and beat me in a street race well I had 300 more horsepower than him that I realized something had to change and so I had to fight fire with fire and I was gonna go all-wheel drive because that was his advantage on the street long story short I had seen Gymkhana 7 fell in love with the who nakorn they had solved all the mechanical problems and challenges that I had seen at coming up ahead and so I reached out to try to find a way to use that technology in my car so it's really interesting because though four rotors started out very well planned for being somebody that has no experience with fabrication I knew what the result was gonna be and I think that's the reason that the car never stopped being developed the concept was this take the Japanese feeling of balance that the car has there's a very vehicle was not lopsided being overly one thing or another it was capable of doing everything really well and then take the raw American horsepower extremity mixed the two together so it wasn't supposed to be one of my other cars were it was just a drag car and it completely compromised the rx-7 is handling weight distribution it was rough it ruined ruined the car making a car like that is a very tall order because when you realize in the aftermarket for cars is that there are people that are drag racers there are people that are Auto crossers and they know their discipline very well or they're really good at selling if they're good at their discipline you don't either one but that that's the problem with being somebody that isn't capable doing it yourself yet is that you have to trust their word and so when the project started it was taken to a shop that was very experienced in drag racing and so the chassis actually reflects that the first parts of the chassis were built more like a drag car and of course I wouldn't know I can't look at a series of tubes considered the internet or considered a drag car do it doesn't it doesn't mean anything to me I just saw tubes being bent welded in place it was absolutely beautiful thing the other goal was to make an engine make more horsepower than anybody else had ever done on the street and I was dedicated obsessively dedicated with that and there were a lot of things are like you know what you being more realistic you shouldn't do that so the engine itself was gonna be a very difficult thing because four rotors aren't a production engine it's not something that Mazda made Mazda made two and three rotors but not four rotors so any four order you've seen is made by somebody it's this guy's engine and there's a story behind that engine which is those are fascinating stories but that doesn't help you make horsepower when it breaks because of the story I wanted to engine that by itself stood on its own merit and was capable of being reliable and make power building the engine became one of the biggest showstoppers ever I had bought the parts and they were infamously lost by a shipping company going from New Zealand to the United States in fact they made it to United States just fine they made it to the port it wasn't until they made it to a place in Kentucky that they were lost derailed the project for about seven months I had gone back and forth with the company they went and had their team look for this particular crate that had all my parts in it couldn't find it it wasn't until a fan saw it on eBay so not only had they lost the engine they tied me up for six months with not honoring the insurance so I had paid to protect them against themselves and they still won't even honor that the the listing on eBay was accurate there were details about these pieces that nobody would know even looking at them they were accustomed to my setup and so sure enough those are my parts and they were being sold by some metal recycling company Missouri and so I as well as the people around me thought that they'd been stolen internally I had a good friend that was in Michigan State Police helped start coordinating a sting operation the Missouri State Police so I end up talking to the agent from the shipping company I'm doing hey listen you guys have had failed me I'm taking it in my own hands I'm gonna get my parts back with of this this sting operation and they call me back and they like call it off do not do that that man legally owns those parts I'm like let's reword what you just said you just said that that man legally owns my engine there's no there in no world is that does that make sense and I guess we sold it to do not understand how that sounds that you sold my stuff to him and they're like oh well the the shipping label must have fallen off bill awaiting the identification that you you must not have marked it I had my name all over the the crate and the most damning piece of information is that the information that he had was only information that would have been on a sheet of information you can't look at the pieces and recreate the information that how he had listed it at eBay so I go and buy my own stuff back on eBay and I tell the shipping company I want a refund from my shipping a-to-z you didn't make it you didn't honor your your insurance I want to be refund it was like $1,000 for a massive crate from New Zealand to the United States they said no and so 3:00 in the morning I did what I do best and I complained I ranted and I launched the video I think one morning and I go to sleep I wake up look at my phone and there's like 23 missed calls no I'm not that popular I then go to my YouTube and look and the video had a million views all the missed calls were from their head of legal in their head of PR they ended up finally refunding me my money they're funding my shipping and they asked me to take the video down and so a lot of people assume that I made money off of that I didn't I'm not a greedy person I simply asked that since I bought the motor twice refund me what it cost from your mess up dollar for dollar I just wanted my money back and then free shipping so I thought that was the end of my problems yeah that the story's over that is the beginning of the adventure now I have half of a motor rotor engines are very much like a sandwich once you have the unique ingredients the rest is just bread Mayo it's it's a very stackable thing and you can end up just making almost as mace text you want it within reason that is back in 20 end of 2015 2016 so you know we're moving forward make him serious progress and the build people are saying okay you know what if you're gonna be tearing into this car buy a new chassis bhaiyya buy a roller and I was like emotionally I can't this is the story for this car it was bone stock when I was 18 and I've gotten it to this modified car that's the car that needs to be my for order I had a strong suspicion that I was gonna go all wheel drive but it wasn't set in stone but now I had confirmed it because it had gotten way more attention because everything okay Rob's got they were very aware millions of views Rob's got this engine he's gonna make something crazy I started learning CAD to build the custom pieces now I'm adding drive shafts and axles and it's not an engine that is very conducive to that you know piston engines actually have kind of a y-shaped and so there's a nice space for things to travel such as drive shafts and axles rotary engine everything's on one side that's the side that I needed to get you know stuff through so that made it very difficult well I guess I had taken it to a shop in California and a very competent shop but there were drag racers this is where a very interesting phase began it was the phase of pay and in two weeks you'll have something we'll have something in two weeks I had made it clear I wanted to take this engine that was now famous and put it on the engine dyno where you don't connect it to a car you just simply have the engine sitting you know suspended in space and you measure the amount of power that comes from the back that's what most manufacturers do and that's where the Hellcat has 707 horsepower is from there to summarize that that was three years of paying oh well if you just get this if you just get this and I kept paying and even to this day I still don't have that engine running so in 2016 a lot of people saw a massive push forward where my car was transformed into a concept of what the end result would be I very clearly wanted the Hoonah Korn setup which the Hoonah Korn you can take the body it's not it looks like a Mustang it's not a Mustang anymore but it's similar like a truck where you can take the body off of the frame so it's a tube frame chassis I wanted that I wanted that naked car that raw exposed mechanical look I was told it let's not go that route what you saw in 2016 was a car that was partially done like that with the intention of not finishing it not my not my intention the shops they're like no you don't need to do that right but that's what I want that chassis again excuse after excuse the chest he never got finished and it was a friend of a friend who's gonna help come show up and they're having marital problems but then the other guy can't show up it took me six months to get a steering rack swapped there was one steering rack that showed up a 2016 at SEMA car unveils the world goes crazy for it and in retrospect it looks hilarious because oh my god it was an unfinished carpet because nobody was in that space it was unique and useful you know you can be unique but not useful this was actually a cool concept the world felt to fit a need after I brought it to SEMA 2016 I'd unveiled it at Garrett's booth which is a very prestigious thing to me to get a turbocharger is a company I've looked up to for years I'm a huge fan of forced induction and they had taken a chance on me and so everybody was really sketchy they were really worried about it and then they realized that oh my god it's generated some serious awareness of our products while it's in our booth at this point I'm like I'm starting to get beat up by the audience saying where is the car I'm just waiting for the rest of the drivetrain to be finished I was waiting for the rest of the tube chests to be finished so spoiler then ended up never happening I actually took the car from that shop and we're talking politically we're not talking forcefully I'm not I'm not somebody that hits head head because I was being almost held hostage I'm like well I'm the only guy that can build your engine and I knew this I had never built a rotary engine you know they're very modular but you know there's black magic there I don't want it I don't wanna mess with that so I politically took the chassis and is like hey there's this other shop that's willing to take the chassis and finish it and so that caused a lot of stress in 2017 through 2018 I was able to get the chassis finished I say that in quotes because there was a lot of work done incorrectly from the beginning that propagated throughout the rest of the car all four wheels were on the ground connected to my dream car the interesting thing was now I was working in Reverse my goal was to finish the engine to then help provide the funds to finish the car and now I had done the car and I'm still waiting on the engine and so I started doing other projects did buy time because okay I'm being told two weeks again I'm being told two weeks again so many people saw through that towards the end they saw me do the rotary Corvette the c5 Corvette while that project had been a plan for a long time the timing that was really weird because I had no other project I was out in California I was waiting on that engine and I in confidence in private it said please assemble this version the engine I kept being told okay well we have parts a B and C but now there's XY and Z and those are way better and I'm like I can't do XY and Z I have a hundred percent of a B and C let's make a B and C work the funds form a B and C we'll finish the car the worst part about that was there are three other cars and this is very verifiable there are three other cars that were waiting for the same type of engine to be assembled what happened was this is the best twist of circumstances the rotary Corvette comes out I go to LS fast I storm L as fast event ends up being managed by a huge company who then becomes one of the biggest supporters of my projects so Holi ends up doing a phenomenal job helping me well that combined with the views from those videos generated enough revenue as well as the shirt sales of you know the ls swapped crossed out with the rotary swap I made that a limited shirt until the car fired up to show that okay if anybody bought that shirt they truly believed in the project they're just kind of fun but it ended up becoming so pivotal in the future of my endeavors so they're up keema engine for sale a complete engine and not only that it was a billet engine billet is you know just a raw chunk of metal that is cut out to do what you needed to do and and well it's kind of a running joke on my channel it's also founded in a lot of truth that a lot of the parts that are on my cars are so custom that they're one offs they are billet billet aluminum billet steel shaved down to the shape I need because you can't buy that widget off the shelf so this billet engine was experimental and that resonated with me because I'm pushing limits you know if I'm gonna be more I'm willing to push the limits and try things that nobody else has done so it ended up becoming the very first billet engine to run in the United States it was truly my commitment to pushing the limits of rotary engines it's really neat because I had met the guy through a friend he had came to the States year before and so he had taken a chance on selling it to me when he cos sold to others for more and so he took a chance on me and I through and so my goal was to do exactly what I had said from 2016 get the engine running I'd be kind of acquiring fabrication tools welding cutting whatnot and so I built this rickety engine stand partially just show off the engine partially to run the engine in the middle of 2019 I have this piece of metal next to this engine this $55,000 engine tons of wires hanging off it looked like some sort of lab creation we fired up the billet engine our selves the next three months following the engine firing up to all the way through SEMA - after SEMA was one of the greatest times of my life because instead of relying on experts and waiting and being given tons of excuses this guy that the audience thought didn't know what he was doing because I've been showing that I've been airing on it being my fault the questions went from that to now wait who's who's tuning that who's running it who you know what how is this being done to them seeing oh it's being done in house right after SEMA we were tuning the engine this is a very experimental thing and through the rush of it all we had aluminum goes through the motor fortunately aluminum is a very soft metal and so it just stuck things there there seals in the engine and stuck them in space in in ways that weren't open or fully closed and so the engines start having weird compression with the guidance of one of my more experienced friends we corrected the engine open we open Pandora's box we begin cleaning all the aluminum out of the engine what that allowed us to do is understand what was inside of it now you know a rotary engine rotors apex to zero the key words but to see the tolerance is to see the clearances to see exactly how this one is set up was a thing of beauty so what a lot of people don't know this is a VIN wiki exclusive we reassemble the engine for YouTube I get it all together and I said three days we did it in three days literally three times 24 hours is the amount of time from cracking it open to reassembly the shops back in New Zealand that machine the center of that engine didn't realize I was that serious about being that quick and so I get an email back on the fourth day saying hey when you go to reassemble at engine make sure there's not even a fingerprint on these tapers these areas were the two pieces of metal touch each other and they're supposed to hold friction and all I saw was like this like there's alarm in my head going I all of that I'd greased the parts that were meant to be metal on metal I stood at the engine that night like this whole thing has to come back down so that night by myself no cameras and anything I tore the whole engine apart again which I wanted to to get good at it toward the engine completely apart again and then cleaned all those the tapers off and then reassembled it a lot of people and the videos are like oh you know that engines never gonna run this engine that was assembled by me alone one night the disassembly every assembly is the same engine that did all the burnouts and made all of the record horsepower on my tune-up - idling it's a fair of weird engine so it doesn't idle like a normal engine you can't treat it like anything so I used my tune at the very low end and then a friend of mine Elliott came out and helped me tune it to the high end but we went and strapped it down to an all-wheel drive dyno and we did what we set out to do when you're doing YouTube videos your goal is to be interesting but I'm also I feel also that three hundred four hundred thousand dollars invested in this car interesting is still running after the dyno so my goal was to go there for the first dyno night and was to make six hundred horsepower a very solid number but nowhere near the numbers I was claiming or the numbers of my goal but just to set the ego at the door and get this car on rollers we get it there and unlike anything people have seen from a Rob Dom video no problems car had no issues absolutely not a single problem there was another car there he had tons of issues like you know an alternator giving out fuel lines any problems like the typical thing that you have when you were building a custom car this nothing so we're all like well that was it we got to the six and reverse power like in minutes you guys wanna try 4,000 but all we're all like okay let's pause and think about this yeah we want to do it and so I did I made I'd make another wiring harness that night install a couple more things I purposely didn't because I didn't want to get greedy but next day we came back through the new wiring harness on there that I have 16 fuel injectors dumping tons of fuel into this engine and on our first essentially dyno session collective session made a thousand all wheel horsepower which I wanted to show my audience that I thought was an all wheel horsepower is actually substantially more power than a thousand rear wheel you know you've got a lot of power loss going to the drivetrain but the amount of torque it takes it there's just a lot more involved and so the if you take that car right now and were to go to a normal rear world I know you'd make closer to 11 1150 but that isn't where I'm going to stop that was where I started and so it we learned a lot we collected a lot of data from that and we're gonna now go into a zone that nobody's ever been especially for a street car and just keep pushing it further further you're here because you like a good car story but let's be honest we probably watch enough YouTube videos for a lifetime during the pandemic it's time to get out of the house and make a story of your own extreme experience puts you in the driver's seat of some of the world's most exciting cars like this 2024 Vette c8 at over 30 racetracks across the country and right now we're giving away 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,139,393

Rating: 4.9296069 out of 5

Keywords: Mazda, RX-7, RX7, Rotary, Rob Dahm, 4 Rotor, 3 Rotor, UPS, project car, youtuber, michigan, Nissan GT-R, Hoonicorn, tube frame, fabrication, engine builder, nightmare, eBay, custom, one off, billet, built motor, awd, all wheel drive

Id: 77beMI-_Rec

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020