I won't bother with the full-history on my car, you're interested in that, feel free to check out
my CarDomain profile - I have an ongoing "build thread" over there that covers the time from when I purchased this FD up to present.
As a brief background: This is the second FD3S I have owned. I bought my first FD at age 17, and had it for a few years before selling it to fund a move to New York. While I was in New York, I got the rotary itch again, and purchased this 1993 SSM w/ Red Interior Touring model. The plan was to keep it in FL for when I visit family, but I eventually started bringing it up to NY.
Couple photos of the car when I bought it, near stock except a relocated battery, SSR wheels, a some kind of home-made dual-tip cat-back exhaust:
Between 2007-2011, I did quite a bit of work to the car. After a motor rebuild and some performance work, the car dyno'd peak power just shy of 400rwhp on 93, with a street ported motor and non-seq stock twins. With this setup, I was able to break into the 11s (exactly 11.98!) with street tires and virtually no suspension upgrades. Here are a couple of photos of the car at the end of 2011:
In November of 2011, while driving the car from NY to FL to leave it for the winter, I had an oil line come loose at 80mph, about 1100 miles into the trip. The motor never ran completely dry, but the short period of low oil was enough to cause an oil control ring failure on the rear rotor, which I found out after pulling and tearing down the motor.
I spent a few months considering what to do, and I finally decided that I wanted to go "all out" with the new build. There are a few things I've always wanted, since I bought my first FD at age 17: a RE-Amemiya GT-AD widebody kit, and a 20B motor. Well, I decided that 12 years later, I was going to get on the path to make that happen.
My soon-to-be-wife and I moved back to FL in August of 2012. The first thing I did, even before unpacking, was to have the FD trailered to my new house, which has a 2 car garage and plenty of space for me to work:
In a short period of time, the car went from that, to this:
The first step was purchasing a motor. It's certainly become harder and harder to find a good 20B to use as a starting point. I looked for at least a few months to even find one that was in my price range ($5000 for the longblock). After lots of dead-end leads, I finally came across an eBay listing for not one, not two, but FIVE complete 20B longblock motors. Listed at only $5500, it seemed to good to be true. Fortunately the seller was only 3 hours away, so I made the drive down to Drag International in Davie, FL to inspect and hopefully purchase a 20B.
The motor I was after was a "D" but the seller also had "C" and "A" series available. I really wanted the "D" or "C" but was willing to take the "A" if the seller was unable to come down to my $5000 limit. The seller had the motor out and hooked up to a battery when I arrived, so we compression tested the motor on the spot. After unflooding it, the motor made excellent compression on all three rotors, and after brief negotiations, I was able to get the seller to let me purchase it for the $5000 price I wanted. We loaded the motor up into my CX-5 (it barely fit) and brought the motor back to Sarasota to get the build started.
I'll begin this build thread from the point when I purchased the 20B, since it's really the start of a new life for my FD. I'll post more photos of the 20B longblock teardown, and some of the other work I've done to the chassis thus far, but I think I'll stop here for now.
theorie's "this is why I'm always poor" 20B-FD build.
Linear Mode
