RX8Club.com - Charles Hill engine rebuild on a 51k turbocharged RX-8

GOAL:

Charles will pull the engine, rebuild it from scratch, and reinstall it. All within an available time frame of three days (Really it's 2 1/2 days since the first day started at 2:30pm).

WHY:

There was a crack in the front iron that wasn't even visible (and you couldn't feel it when touching the housing), but it leaked oil when the engine was running. The oil leak might have started a few weeks prior, but it was getting progressively worse as the crack widened.

This (original) engine was tested with normal compression and ran wonderfully. Unfortunately due to spewing oil it is a danger to drive. So the rebuild was necessary.

Since Mazsport has shut down, I guess there is no harm in explaining what happened.

My car had been running wonderfully with Jeff's (MazdaManiac) tune and 3071R turbo upgrade. Flawless. Zero issues at all. I bought the Mazsport ignition upgrade and the car ran funny. It was going lean, so being worried about possible engine damage, I immediately stayed out of boost and arranged for Mazsport (Scott) to retune it. My car had the Mazsport Interceptor-x, the Mazsport fuel pump, and the Mazsport coils. If anyone should have been able to get the vehicle running properly, it should have been Scott. Right?

I brought the car to Mazsport, Scott and one of his techs looked over the wiring, and everything looked alright. He then took the car out for 1 to 1.5 hours to street tune it. When he got back he claimed it was properly tuned. I hopped in the car, and left for home. I did some light boosting and all seemed well. However, when I got on the suncoast highway, I hit the gas to get around a slow poke in the fast lane, and KLUNK KLUNK, it had detonation. The car still ran fine, but I was worried about damage.

In the end, the car ran fine, nothing was damaged besides the front iron developing a crack, which leaked oil and thus made the car unusable till the oil leak was fixed.

The question as to how the coils caused detonation can be speculated on, but I have two major theory's:

1. When Scott was retuning the vehicle, he was not yet aware of the dwell changes (as evidenced by him not telling other customers till a few months later to adjust dwell), which somehow caused him to not provide a proper tune for the vehicle.

2. The ignition upgrade (due to incorrect dwell) caused the leading coils to not spark, while there was enough time for the trailing to charge up and spark, causing detonation and the engine damage to occur.

Ultimately I don't think we will ever know for sure one way or another, but I can state that the car was fine before the ignition and tuning from Mazsport, and damaged afterward.

I took Scott to small claims over the damage and we reached an agreement. After only one payment, Scott decided to shut down Mazsport and not send the other 14 payments due.

MATERIALS:

We have all new rotor housings, seals, gaskets, water pump, etc. Basically the only things retained from the original engine are the rotors and the middle/rear iron housings. So engine compression will be like new because it is all new.

I hear there's been over 10 revisions made to the seals by Mazda, I don't know what impact that has, but I'm going from an engine built in Dec 2003 to one with the very latest hardware.

INTEREST:

What makes this interesting is that I follow closely the "rx8club" group think logic on many things. I have run 10w30 royal purple for a few years. I use the Sohn adapter with idemitsu. I also premix with idemitsu (4 oz) and fp plus (2 oz). I also sometimes use LC20 in the engine. The car has been taken care of, but I drive it fast and I boost any chance I get.

What we find in terms of wear, damage, etc. was anyone's guess. Basically it is nice to finally see what the effects of regular 9-12 PSI of boost is over a 2 year time frame in an engine that did not NEED to be rebuilt due to the engine dying or having catastrophic damage. Seldom is a 100% functional engine torn apart, especially with FI and synthetic/premix.

VIDEO OF REBUILD, INCLUDING ENGINE REMOVAL AND REINSTALL:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IDgJZA0aI5E

RESULTS:

What we found was very little wear on anything. Nothing was wrong with the internals besides the crack on the front iron. I can easily see this same engine going well over 100k miles with FI without having issues. I base this on just what Charles has said and what I saw, hopefully when Charles gets a chance, he can chime in with his thoughts on it.

Charles did amazing work on my engine. Charles tells me this process is simple, but after living it for 3 days, I don't think it's something I would want to do. The building of a RENESIS engine is simple enough, but if you screw something up, it's days of work to pull and fix, then reinstall.

I would recommend Charles and the BHR turbo kit to anyone without question.