Tearing off the accessories from the longblock to shortblock, I found it best to take your time here! Taking the time to stay organized here will help greatly in the long run. Thoroughly clean parts and inspect them as you take them off, place all small items (nuts, bolts, keyways, etc.) in plastic bags and label them. Label all parts that you aren't very familiar with. My project took longer than I had expected, and if I were a little more organized, that would've saved headaches down the road.
Staying organized is even more vital when you get into the motor! After teardown, cleanup, inspections, and measurements, I found that I could reuse a lot of parts from this motor (keep in mind it was just rebuilt a few thousand miles ago), and I also found parts that probably shouldnt have been used during the last build.
I found some uneven wear on the stationary gear bearings. Rather than build with a bit of doubt, I replaced them with RX8 gears. I could have replaced the bearings and reused the gears themselves, but looking at the price options for the bearings and the necessary special tool, I decided just to save the work of installing gears and spent a little more on new RX8 gears with bearings already installed.
For some reason I found 11 of the FD blade type corner seal springs, and one older ring style spring. That corner seal happened to be cracked at it's thinnest point, may be just a coincidence, maybe not. I didn't realize it until that point, but I probably had low compression on those 2 rotor faces. I ended up replacing a few worn corner seals and 12 new corner seal springs.
It's a mystery to me as to how it got there, but I also noticed before that my rear iron is from an automatic. My car model is an R1, so it was always manual transmission, but I guess in one of the previous motor builds they used an Auto rear iron. No big deal.
As I was unstacking the housings, the water seals popped out by themselves. They were HUGE in diameter and looked swelled/stretched. Is this a usual occurance even on a low mileage rebuild? Does this indicate overheating?
09-11-2008, 06:34 PM
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