It moves the port down to open it sooner, but keeps the top edge in the stock location to help combat overlap. For the exhaust, I chose the Racing Beat 'street' turbo template. The first step was to obtain the templates. With the diffusers sent to hell where they belong, it was time to start the 'real' porting. I could have just swapped in TII exhaust sleeves, but it's kind of a pain to remove the pins that hold them in and risk damaging the housings. Here's a few of the stock NA exhaust ports.įirst step is to remove the diffuser present in the NA exhaust ports. So in the fall of 2003, I finally got around to the actual engine. The brake master and brake lines will be highlighted black before the engine is dropped back in. This included the leading/trailing coils, charcoal canister, fuse box and bracket, brake booster, hood latch clutch master/slave and a few misc things. The primer was Rust Check (this stuff is amazing).Īside from the engine bay, all the components that are going back under the hood were also cleaned and detailed. For the record, the paint I used was MotoMaster Cherry Red metallic. Sorry about the lack of pictures of the primer, I just plain forgot to take them.Īll painted up. The bay was then masked with newspaper, primed and sprayed. 300 grit sandpaper was used to break the existing finish. 16 years of grime, grease, rust and general crap were removed with a wire brush, Castrol Super clean, and effort. The purpose of this paint job was not to make it look amazing, but to clean it up and make it roughly match the exterior paint of the car. Basically, it sat like that until the fall of 2003, but I'm getting ahead of myself.įirst, it was time to use the good spring weather to strip and paint the engine bay. When we last left off, the engine was disassembled on the bench. But anyway, in the past few months I have been working steadily and have some significant progress. Because of this, work has been slow, with spurts of activity separated by periods of idle time. I had a busy time in my life, with multiple side projects, big meets (can you say Revolution?), and of course my day job. I honestly can't say that I put massive amounts of time into the project until early last summer.

After that, the project ballooned to include a quick engine bay painting, interior replacement, Microtech LT-8, bridgeport, big turbo, new exhaust, transmission rebuild, etc. 2002 I decided I would pull Tina's engine for a port and rebuild.

The last update, posted in early 2003, contains the first part of the story. It has been nearly two years since I last posted the status of project Tina (phase 2). Home > RX-7 > My RX-7 > Project Tina > Project Tina, July 15th, 2004: Painting The Engine Bay, Porting The Engine, Shaving Lower Intake Manifold Project Tina, July 15th, 2004: Painting The Engine Bay, Porting The Engine, Shaving Lower Intake Manifold Project Tina, July 15th, 2004: Painting The Engine Bay, Porting The Engine, Shaving Lower Intake Manifold

Standard abrasives deluxe porting kit