towing with all 4 wheels down
 

Please dont even ask why I am considering this, can someone just tell me if it can be done? Can you use a tow bar on an 8 like you see when campers are pulling cars? I will need to tow my 8 occasionally and its too low and too difficult to load onto the trailer that I have with ramps.

If it can be done and I can purchase a tow bar ------ "where"

AT, or MT? (Automatic Transmission, or Manual Transmission), if you're MT you can probably get away with it... for short distances
But it will stress your tranny/carbon driveshaft, and likely overheat your tranny's grease, significantly shortening their lifespan. Also ,if you forget to put the car in neutral and release the handbrake you will cause catastrophic failure of many very expensive components of your driveline.

Dont even think about it if youre an AT. You will boil your tranny fluids and destroy your transmission in as little as 10 miles even in neutral.

Also, adding the heavy tow bar at the front of the car (along with the reinforcement to the bumper that it would need) will add weight at one of the worst places you'd want it on this car (the very ends of the car where tha polar moment is the greatest, Mazda engineers spent countless hours designing the car to reduce mass/weight in this very area) It will make the car nose heavy and sluggish, not to mention the bar would look fugly, and you'd have to drill holes into your front facia.

Bottom line is... This car wasn't designed to be towed in that way.
You can always get a couple of wooden boards and use them to extend your ramps on the trailer. That will make the entry angle shallower so you can get the car on the trailer without scraping the undercarriage.
That is your best option.
If not, get wheel dollies, (like the ones tow trucks use)

They do make Tow Bars for our car, see attached .PDF

When I was racing the RX7, I didn't have a trailer and I towed the car behind my motorhome. I never went more than a couple of hundred miles at a time. But I never had a problem. I just left the transmission in neutral. You could disconnect the drive shaft from the rear end for extra safety.

its a manual

it happen @ a toronto dealer... CAA towing it .. so yea never CAA :fingersx:
http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/7661/dsc00086oo0.jpg

^ ooo that is bad ^

That guy's a contractor. One of the many tarnishing the name of CAA. The real CAA guys would have dollied it or better yet put the thing on a flatbed. We're more professional than that here in Edmonton.

I doubt a short tow is enough to damage the manual transmission, especially if you just got done driving it so there is a bunch of gear oil slung up on all the bushings and bearings. I wouldn't tow it more than 20 miles that way though, and I would start it up and drive it around before you tow it to get the gear oil nice and warm. In fact, if you made a little electric pump that sucked oil from the drain plug and injected it through a nozzle onto the output shaft you could flat-tow it all day long.

The problem with flat towing a manual transmission is that they're usually splash lubricated by the countershaft, which is below the main shaft. Countersahft rotates when the input shaft is turning. In neutral, the countershaft is not turning, so there's no splashing. The mainshaft is also spinning through the gears faster than it would if you were in any gear.

Ken

What if you towed the 8 in reverse, so that the rears are lifted, and the fronts are down?

That's OK. In fact, that's one of the approved ways described in the owners manual.

Ken

You could tow it backwards with one of these
http://www.demco-products.com/Pages/RV/kkss.htm
http://www.demco-products.com/Media/kkss-sequence.jpg

And lose my front lip? Not if I can help it...

You said you already have a trailer; I'd do everything within my power to make use of it.