I had bought an aluminum Fluidyne racing radiator a while ago, and it sat primarily against the wall of my garage for months. I decided to clean it up and tackle the install, since at this time I came up on a nice deal for a RX7Fashion FMIC.
As it goes, you always gotta start by taking out the old. So began the process of uninstalling and moving parts that were in the way. First was the bumper:
Since the bumper was off, I took this opportunity to remove the front fenders as well. I wanted to tuck the wiring harness that sat right above the front wheels, below the fender… if the car is lowered, there’s a good chance the tires could rub through the wiring harness. There was a metal ledge that I ziptied the wires onto to reduce the chance of contact with the tire.
Unfortunately, when it came time to reinstall the fenders, I encountered one of the most horrible bad luck streak ever… Needless to say, I was baffled with the amount of things that went wrong. When I put back the passenger side fender back on, it was slightly misaligned with the door which resulted in a lot of tedious tuning. In this process, 5 bolts out of 8 holding the fender on were stripped. Not all at once either, they happened over time, so you can imagine the amount of stress hovering when I was trying to get the body line even while dealing with stripped threads. I ended up retapping all the threads and buying new bolts. Eventually the passenger fender was on. Next came the driver’s fender, which aligned much easier than the passenger side did. Only a couple bolts ended up being stripped here, but there was one on the very bottom of the fender that had the bolt head actually break off. These are supposed to be “Grade 9″ bolts, yet they seemed like they were made out of twigs. I probably could have left that bolt out, but being the perfectionist in me comes out in these situations. After lying on the floor and drilling for hours, and breaking countless drill bits, it was fixed in the end…
I don’t know why, but reinstalling the front fenders was unnecessarily difficult, probably one of the most painstaking things I had to go through. Atleast they’re back on, so we can move on now.
I then turned my attention to the engine bay, where a few things had to be removed: stock (puny) intercooler, the airbox, battery and battery tray, and then the splash guard from underneath.
With all that stuff out of the way, the stock radiator was drained and then plucked.
Here’s a comparison of the Fluidyne versus the OEM…
The electric fans were transferred onto the Fluidyne, and everything was put back in and reattached. I bought a gallon of distilled water and some anti-freeze to refill the coolant system.
With the radiator taken care of, it was time to focus on the intercooler which had arrived:
The seller included some universal piping and a few random couplers. While I got the intercooler kit for super cheap, it just goes to show that nothing is totally free… because the piping and couplers were basically useless. Atleast the actual intercooler, which is an Apex’i GT-R delta-finned core, and the t-bolt clamps were still great.
Underneath the front bumper’s rebar is a crossmember that is spot welded on. Some convincing with a chisel and hammer took it off. The RX7Fashion intercooler then mounts across where the crossmember was.
A comparison shot of the new and old, I was surprised at how wide and thick the Apex’i core was… as you can tell, the stock intercooler is dwarfed. I never knew why Mazda used such a tiny intercooler in the first place:
Intercooler mounted on the car:
I had to make a couple notches in the hood support for the inlet pipes to go through:
Since the supplied piping was pretty much useless, I had to figure it out on my own. Around this time, I had to pause the install since summer was over and school started again. I took the next month and a half or so to gather up some new materials, which included a pair of specific transition couplers and new piping. I decided the best route was to buy a “universal” piping kit that included straights and various bends, then cut it up and make it fit. The actual pipes I bought proved to be good quality, with really thick walls too. I also ditched the stock plastic throttle body elbow for a greddy one.
After putting some more work in, everything was finally installed.
