My first gen 83 RX7 is smoking a bit when I start it up.
It only has 65,000 miles on it but it is near 20 years old.
As far as I know it has never been overheated but on the
other hand it does not have an oil temp gage either.
It has an oil water heat exchanger under the filter and
Mazda did away with those on the second gen.
I run it pretty hard for a car. 80 mph for about
45 minutes each way back and fourth to the hangar.
That is about 30 HP at 5000 RPM. It has an auto tx.
I suspect mere age is a factor in the failure of those
stock Mazda oil scraper O-rings as well as all other
O-rings in the engine. As far as I can tell Teflon
does not age as much as most other plastics and rubbers.
I got some 20 year old Teflon lying around that seems to
be the same as it was 20 years ago. On the other hand 20 year old
nylon gets very brittle. Aged plastics and rubbers are the worst
problem old low mileage cars have.
Paul Lamar
The AirCraft Rotary Engine NewsLetter. Powered by Linux.
ACRE NL web site. Copyright 1998-2002 All world wide rights reserved.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rotaryeng/ http://www.linux.org