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Old 02-18-2018, 06:05 PM   #64
John V
No more BMWs
 
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Carmudgeonly Ride: Ram, MS3, CX-5, RX-8
Location: Glenwood, MD
Posts: 14,753
The Max Jax is great! I confess I haven't actually used it (here) yet. The RX-8 is going to stay on jackstands for a bit longer. The service ticket was there from the previous owner who had the compression checked. When it failed he put it up for sale.

So I bought some parts! I got my 2.5L engine from a big dismantler on eBay. They periodically discount the crap out of them, so this 2.5L out of a Fusion with 18,000 miles was only $300. I got it in the garage today, stripped it of all the stuff I don't need and did an inspection. All seems well with it. But what I really wanted to do was put the coolant manifold on the back of the cylinder head and see how it fits.



That nice new aluminum casting is what I bought from the guy in Australia. It's a really nice piece of work! Fits perfectly. And it is so much thinner than the stock piece. This should solve a lot of the problems I had with clearance to the firewall. In the pic below I'm holding the stock water manifold. You can see it is almost two inches thicker than the new one.



The coolant routing will be a little different than the MX-5 installation, so I'll have to get creative with the radiator connections, but that's a problem for another day.

I also got the third-gen RX-7 transmission I talked about before. I don't have the bellhousing that will mate it to this engine (the guy who makes the water pipe makes the bellhousing) but I did put it side by side with the MX-5 transmission and sure enough, the shifter is 4" rearward compared to the MX-5. I think this will work perfectly... or at least it'll put the shifter really close to the stock location. If it's an inch forward or backward that's fine, but 4" forward was going to make things really challenging. It's a nice bonus that the FD 5-speed is very strong. My tape measure slipped as I was taking this pic so it's a little wonky but you get the idea.

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