I'd put money on a bad coolant seal. There were a rash of bad coolant seals from the factory last year, maybe his motor had one of the bad seals. We went through 4 motors in about a month last summer due to bad coolant seals. It turned out to be a defective lot.

 

2006 MT...yeah alot of mileage in a short time. I drive about 100+ miles a day for work. I use idemitsu premix oil and oil. I have no forced induction or nos. Intake and exhaust are my only engine mods. I was premixing about 6 ounces for every 12 gallons roughly. Car's at the dealership, enterprise gave me a hefty F150 (four door boat), and currently waiting on what's going on. I redline once a day. Had no previous problems on start ups, cold or not. Idle'd perfectly, no strange sounds or over heating. I'd like to guess and guess but unless i took the engine apart personally looked at it I can't say. But because of the warranty I'll happily leave it in Mazda's hands =). I'm feeling positive about results.

 

We didn't ship a single MT until about late august/sept. , AT's were closer to oct. if I recall and we haven't had a seal issue on the bad returns from our facility when we tore them down for investigation. We had a couple metering oil pump wouldn't move returns, we found that after cleaning the parts the metering oil pump shaft would hold a little water causing the shaft to not turn or the oil pump itself would lock up due to a little water or dirt getting into the gears and it wouldn't turn completely but I thoroughly check that before I build them now that I learned that. We leak test the eng\ines now for both coolant and oil leak, if a gasket gets pinched it will/has failed the leak tests. The previous engines before aug/sept. were coming from CAT reman though. They still have all the 6spd. AT's also there.

On a odd note we do testing on the side with engines to see if they would pass our tests, for example we left one side seal spring out of a motor on purpose to see how it tested after being ran and it managed to pass the compression test with mid/low 9's, something we didn't want to discover could happen but it did.


My guess is the either his engine wont start or is making a noise and lacks power, probably 90% of the problem. Although we are now investigating the no start engines ourself, retesting a selection of them as they come in.


And finally on a 16x side note, I haven't asked the Japanese engineers about it but I asked a few supervisors and there reply was its kept in secret but with the way the economy is now its probably on hold. Part of the reason why the opened our facility was to bring in a engineer from japan to investigate on how to improve the next engine and see why some fail. Depending on how the research goes and how well our reman engines are will have a huge determination on whether there will be anymore rotary engines built in the future, no joke. Like I said when we started our trianer from mazda japan(Yoshii) told us to please do a good job, his job depends on whether we do a good job in both building and investigating since we may determine the future. So nothing really new on the 16x, Mazda is not doing great right now but its doing better then most, its very small compared to other car companies and has survived tough financial times in the past.

Sorry rambled on.

 

How did you know there was a problem? What were the symptoms? Seems odd that it would die that fast, but maybe you're just a lemon magnet.

 

Sleepy, I was referring the seal kits themselves being bad. We weren't the only KONI team popping motors at that time either. None of our motors went back to Mazda for rebuild either.

 

any idea what month you received bad seals?

i purchased mine in the jan/feb timeframe of 2008, so I assume they were made late 2007 or earlier.

 

Thanks, Sleepy-z. This tends to confirm what Ashley reported from an inside source.

 

Is there a 13 Engine Club? Do I get a prize?

 

You get the prize. But I also get a prize in the form of a new engine =)