DARKMAZ8

I was under the impression that Fanman was still using the emanage blue. He didn't have the interceptor in his sig. ANyways, I think it's better to get the mazsport kit because everything about that kit is better and same goes for his customer service.

Fanman

I'm in Los Angeles. Sorry, that is Glendale, CALIFORNIA, not Canada.

I'm not using the EManage Blue. Truth is I was using the HKS PF Con V Pro as a stand alone fuel management. I had it tuned by one of the best outfits in the country. They are known for putting out 500+ whp RX's, and 1000+ hp Supras. We had a specialist come in that is one of the WORLD's preeminent tuners of the V Pro and they dyno tuned it for hours on end.

I had upgraded the spark plugs to one heat range colder, the cooling system (upgraded radiator & silicon hoses). Upgraded injectors, was using Royal Purple 5W-30 synthetic motor oil, was using the Pettit racing's Protek-R pre-mix, etc. When we lifted it to be towed, we did notice that several of the couplers were cracking, so if you do get this kit in the future make sure to swap out the rubber hoses for silicon (I already had a few of them taken off and replaced with silicone, just not the ones below).

Unfortunately Mazda did not send me a recall notice. When I brought my car in on a tow truck, the service advisor punched it up, and said I had a recall notice. Apparently they didn't inform you/me by mail, but until you bring it in to Mazda, then they do the service. If you are turboed and take your car to another mechanic you don't know about the recall. At least I didn't. My service advisor was a nice guy,but even he couldn't pass this through. If you blow your engine, tow it somewhere else (unfortunately that means no roadside assistance) and have them take off the kit before you go into the dealer. You MIGHT be able to get them to cover it. Mazda didn't tell me much, just said the engine was "toast" and no way to recover it. Wanted to charge me in the neighborhood of $8000-$9000. When I told them no way, they called me later and offered it to me for a "special" price of $7000. Still taking it to my other mechanic.

I'm going back to NA. I really miss the reliability when it was NA as I had a gaggle of problems even when I had the tuned EManage Blue, now the other EMU. Also in a lot of cases when you blow the engine the apex seals has a tendancy to exit out the exhaust and tear up the turbo anyways, so I'm not going to go out and get another one.

Skiptomylue

i love how whatever RG says everyone sticks buy it,
he says Greddy Sucks, all of a sudden everyone says greddy sucks
"drop that greddy garbage and go with the mazsport"
yes
Drop that 2k POS and Drop 8-15k on the mazsport kit.. becuase we all know everyone is made of money..
kthxbye!

Ps: im not bashing you RG.

DARKMAZ8

This is why your name isn't rotarygod.....If you look carefully at the us currency, you'll see that it specifically tells us to trust rg.

shaunv74

Fanman, I'm really sorry to hear about your loss. My advice for your next step is when you have your mechanic rebuild your engine have them figure out, step by step, exactly what happened along the way so you make sure to shore up the weakness and teach the rest of us. We hope you can share it with pictures with the RX community so we all can learn and avoid what happened to you.

Create a new thread on your engine teardown and rebuild so your engine will not have died in vain!

XDEEDUBBX

Sorry to hear about this fred!! that really sucks, hopefully you can get things back in order..im gonna miss your kit btw...it was fun test driving it those 2 times =(

slavearm

Sorry to hear about your loss. Maybe you should hit up guitarjunkie? He may still have a rebuilt renesis laying around ready to dump into a car.

Fanman

Unfortunately (or at least fortunately for my wallet) I am not going to do a rebuild. I'm going to do an engine swap. I was talking to a very prominent outfit out here (they were at Sevenstock with one of their race cars) and they would do the rebuild for about $5500-$6000, more if I would have gotten other reliability mods done to it at the same time.

As for RG, I do listen to what Fred has to say because he knows far more about rotaries than I ever will, but my disdain for Greddy has nothing to do with his statements & everything to do with their kit & their customer service. I had their turbokit, their BOV (type S), and their boost controller (profec Spec II), so obviously I went in wholeheartedly, and can speak from experience on their products. but this experience has really opened my eyes on their quality & their business practices. Needless to say I will not be purchasing another Greddy product again. Just my personal experience and in reading about others with similar experiences.

I'm not saying everybody should run to Mazsport (though Scott is quite good at customer service, and from what I could see of their kit at Sevenstock it is top notch in fitment & quality of the parts). While some question it I did see the Pettit Racing SC at Sevenstock, and talked to a few people who have had some tremendous experiences with pettit Racing. The kit looked great, and they told me that they have had over 20,000+ miles in several vehicles to test & tune it.

Also, I have talked to Richard Paul over at Axial on occasion. His Axialflow unit is pretty interesting. Worth a look. The unit itself looks to be high quality, like his shifters.

brillo

you guys have to remember, that sometimes with FI, **** happens, and there isn't always a clear reason. FI has risk, you can reduce it dramtically, but its still there. Regular old NA granny driven engines fail too. If you have a weak engine, even for reasons that have nothing to do with you, a little FI could push you over the edge, even with a good tune. Some people may have also damamged their engines with the blue emanage prior to installing something like the Int-X, but the damage decided to rear its head later on.

I think the vast majority of the engines can handle boost tuned well with no issue. There will always be some exceptions however.

Fan, I'm sorry about your engine, I hope you get the car back up and running soon.

MadDog

I can see why you hate them. That said, you can't be placing the blame on GReddy for this failure. Perhaps the FCON, the tuner, random probability, a hex, but in all seriousness, you can't realistically fault the GReddy metal that was still on the car. I'm not trying to defend them - I'm trying to defend reason and deduction.

Wanganrx8

ok i'm confused, i'm FI so should i still go and get the recall fixed? or will i be fine? I run the greddy turbo, int_x and upgraded fuel pump and injectors, fan mod, and radiator..so should i just get it checked? i mean the car runs fine but will it blow after a few more thousand miles?

arghx7

Man you really should've paid for a compression test at the dealer. Then you could post the numbers up and we could see exactly what happened, like which seal you broke (side seal, apex, whatever). It was probably on the rear rotor.

Fanman

No, I'm not placing the blame all on Greddy. I can just relate what are the issues that I had with the company. Like I said, Mazda did have an extended warranty on the 04's for 4 years/50K miles so something was up (whether it was an oil metering pump defect, etc), or whether it was just random probability (like Brillo said, **** happens). Honestly it could have been a Mazsport Turbo, and blew the engine. Just rotaries break, it happens. The only issue I had with Greddy is that I didn't think their kit was particularly high quality, a lot of compromises (rubber hoses, turbo bearing failures, etc.) their quality control (missing pipes, defective EMU), and their customer service (lack of). Does that mean that the Greddy turbo was THE cause for the failure, don't know. Could be, maybe not. I rolled the dice, and came up craps. Just relaying my experience of this kit & the company behind it.

Fanman

Thanks man. I actually already got one from Mazmart. Will be doing the install next week.

MadDog

Fair enough.

By the way, consider replaceing the engine yourself. Its really not that bad. MazdaManiac and I did mine in less than a full weekend. It will sure give you the knowledge that hardly any other mechanic has about the RX-8.

Good luck.

BigOLundh

iTrader: (1)

you dont know what your talking about.

People will blow motors when running any FI system, its gonna happen. Unless you can pinpoint the problem to the turbo... there could be a million different factors to cause it. If your turbo dies, and you need to have the turbo rebuilt... ok theres an issue with that. Meh... im gonna stop typing, its pointless reasoning with some people.

Somebody with the Mazsport Kit will blow their motor one of these days. When that happens, dont go running to Scott to tell him his kit is garbage.

-hS

Razz1

Sorry to hear what happened Fanman.

After I sent you the invite to the San Berdo meet:
Since your the oldest Greddy out there, other than the original Sharwf1's which is a garage queen, I was getting concerned about you and almost sent you a private PM to see if you had all the Greddy fixes.

I read all the patches and acknowledge what you said earlier in this thread.

All I can say is you need to know turbo applications as the Greddy is an incomplete kit.
I talked with one our sponsers here and they had one on their car too! They said it was an undrivable daily driver and was a complete kit.

If all the patches were known before the install maybe your motor would have never blown. Who know's too bad you and others had to suffer through sucky service and Greddy's lack of acknowledgement to address the issues and fix them promptly.

Besides Racing Beat recomeds their MOP service for any FI application. I belive this and maybe that was the heart of the issue.

That really sucks you couldn't run a low boost of 6.5 and keep it as a daily driver for 100k miles or more.

I hope you will re-consider the SC applications in 6 months when they are out.

Funny thing is I really think the Renesis can handle low boost applications and be reliable.

Skiptomylue

im canadian.. i dont care about us currency..

dastallion951

hey fanman.........just out of curiousity u said ur cel light was blinkin n then u had no power...........had u had this happen before??? ie............had ur cel light blinked a bunch of times before........reason i say that is my 8 feels a bit sluggish n the cel light blinks when i usually go WOT..........now to any of u experienced rotary fans, does that sound like a seal on its way out.........if so i gotta hold back on my turbo install........pm meif any of u have any ideas on it........

Fanman

I used to have the blinking CEL light when I ran the turbo for longer intervals (10 seconds, etc) and the EGT's would get higher. Thought it just might be the O2 sensor getting too hot, as I have the RP Supercat and the turbo. But lately it seemed to blink at lower tolerances, and a bit more random. Then on the day it blew, after it blew, it was blinking and no power whatsoever (for obvious reasons.

BigOLundh

iTrader: (1)

sounds like you'll qualify for a new motor. take your car to the dealer and get that before installing a turbo kit.

-hS

Fanman

Yeah, I did tune the EManage Blue when I had it, and I pulled it pretty early on (a good 6 months before the Ultimate package came out).

Not sure if you are talking about Mazdatrix, but they had similar issues with the Greddy kit, and they now refuse to sell it.

What sucks is that I never got it over 6.5 psi of boost. I would understand if I was pushing the limits with 12 psi of boost, but I tuned the hell out of the EMU, it ran fine and I was at normal boost levels. Again, I'm not saying it's definitely Greddy's fault. It might just have been one of those bad engines that people talk about.

Nah, I'm pretty much done with FI. This whole experience has really jaded me. I used to have a friend that lived RX7's and I saw what happened to his 13B's, but I thought the new Renesis might be a bit different, if I did a bunch of thngs to try to maintain reliability, if I kept the boost level down, etc. But rotaries are just "fragile" (his words), and I just want an everyday driver's car and not have to worry if I am breaking down my engine faster, or if I might not make it to my destination, etc. I just want OEM NA reliability.

Fanman

Yep, definitely take your car in before you do anything major to it. If they see the turbo, they won't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Right now you have a good case for them to do something.

guitarjunkie28

5-6k???????????
man, drop that **** off at my shop and i can get you rollin' by next monday for probably about half of that, depending on the total damage.

oh hell, i just built richard's new motor. talk him into letting you have it and i can get you running by midnight

MadDog

its NOT a seal on its way out. Sound like you are running too rich and are getting misfires. That's the cause of the blinking CEL.