swoozie

yes I guess so. I do not know much about engines. I am just a gal in love with the RX8. Picked up car. They did an oil change for me since I was almost at 3k. But alas they used 5W-30. What's with these service people. I asked the service manger about it and he responded "oh you can use 30 no problem." I can't believe this.
Anyway thanks again to all who posted.
Hope your new your brings no floods...

downshift

Glad to know that the car is ok. I just can't help but be amuse by you referring to him as "your other half". You must be pissed at him, I guess.

brothervoodoo

Swoozie, just saw this post. Did they take it to Royal Mazda, curious if you remember any of the service techs names. Sorry to hear it was flooded, happy to hear you got it taken care of! :D

swoozie

downshift- other half is a she and I am not pisssed at her. I never told her about the 5 min running or reving to 3k. My fault. Althogh I still don't get why it didn't start this morning when the incident happened yesterday afternoon. Why does it stay flooded for all that time?

brothervoodoo-Live in Marin so car went to Marin Mazda.

take care

EX-S2000

Hi,
Not tooo worried about flooding as my dealer forewarned me about the problem ( after I paid for it ) and the oil consumption. What worries me is the abuse to the CAT in the exhaust system. I have seen no mention of this and unless I am very wrong the drastic effects on the internals of a CAT over a period of time by unburnt fuel will destroy it over time. As all cars are new, how will Mazda view future CAT failure claims when they deem it driver error. I have personnally changed many Exhaust CATS due to missfires etc and it does not take much petrol to destroy them. It is ok Mazda changing plugs and oil everytime but this I feel is very short term. Unburnt fuel = damage to CATS. If this has been covered I apologise. Still love me 8

sniper

I can't seem to understand how you guys just blow off this issue. Sorry but this is not normal. There is no excuse for them to produce a car that they know will have start issues if a certain event takes place. It may not have happened to some of ya'll but what about the owners that don't know about this site or have never heard of this? Nice to see some of the answers to, You shouldn't have bought it if you don't want to deal with it. Come on it's a 30K car not a freakin 100K exotic, that needs special attention or certain parts and service. Ferrai's ENZO needs a $7,000 oil change. Why? becasue they have special oil made by them for that car! (not sure if it matters) but do you think they tell potential buyers about that? I would suspect so.

As the time goes by more and more little things are coming out about this car. And not good either. That adds up to less buyers.

silvercloud

Sniper,

Hopefully Mazda will address the issue by informing buyers or better yet fixing the problem.

What made you chose the handle "sniper"?

Artifex

Don't count on it, I had an 85 Rx-7(gsl-se) and currently have an 87 rx-7 turbo, both had cold start/flooding problems.

Adamra

Ok, this might work for some. Over the holiday I asked a friend of mine to keep my car for me while we went away on a trip. He's a business owner and agreed to lock it up in his garage (since I've only got a driveway) Quite naturally, it flooded when he stalled it.

Discouraged, and wishing I'd found this site earlier, I thought I'd try to get it to run on my own. What I did:

- Tried normal crank, it sounded flooded, also sounded like it wasn't spinning fast enough to crank.

- The working solution I got (note this is only temporary, you still need to replace the plugs, oil filter, and oil) was to put a battery charger on the car, unplug the fuel injector fuse, and crank it until it starts. You will kill the battery w/o a charger on it, because it takes so long to kick it over. Also, don't just sit there and continuously crank it, you'll burn out the starter, do it in 10-15 second periods. It took about 7-10 tries before it would start, you could tell it was trying to burn the fuel by the amt of smoke pouring out of the exhaust.

Once I got it to run, I let it run as long as it would.. Then I shut it down and put the fuse back in. Now the check engine light stays on, but at least I can drive it to the dealer w/o waiting for them to arrange towing to the shop (65 miles away)..

Again, it might work for some, not for others. But it did for me. Still disappointed that this is even a problem, you would think they'd have a better fuel management system.

-Adamra

mv /etc/flames /dev/null

NE14A69

New to the board - First post:

Hopefully I can offer some statistical validity . . .
I have personally driven Rotary powered cars/truck for over 300,000 miles and have experienced the flooding on multiple occasions in a each generation of the 7 and now in the 8. My wife came home the other night from the movies about 8-10 miles away and parked the car. I heard her perform the throttle tap prior to shutting the engine down which will generally alleviate flooding issues whether cold or hot. Nevertheless the engine was hot and a day and a 1/2 later I went to fire it up and the RENISIS was dead. Lets just face it the 8 has a glorfied 13B with a revised intake contraption as ridiculous as the 1st gen 7, only this time they named it RENISIS and marketed the heck out of it. Nevermind all the hardline hoses intentionally placed in front of the plugs to keep us from maintaining our own vehicles.

There is no good place to tow from on the car like the hooks on previous the previous 7's, so I ended up having to tow my car from the strut tower brace. We towed it in gear until it started about 1/2 way around the block. Luckily my buddy has a Dodge Cummins Diesel with 550 lb ft of torque. There was a massive cloud of black smoke and finally it ran.

My primary concerns, as has been mentioned before, are the damage that is being done to the Catalyst and what is Mazda doing to resolve the problem.

I'm guessing all it is, is that the fuel pump is releasing the "vacuum" on the fuel line as the engine is turned off and any fuel injectors that are open dump the fuel in the combustion chambers - Just my humble opinion.

But definately an valid complaint that Mazda needs to address.

Let me reitterate - this engine was hot went the flooding occurred.

twospoons

My wife (nice to have somebody to blame!) moved my rx8 about 30 feet and shut of the engine. It was flooded when I tried to start it.

What I did was what was suggested on this site; I floored the pedal and tried to start it for about 10 seconds. Then let go, waited some seconds and repeated without the pedal pressed.

After about 10x this procedure it started with tons of smoke pouring out.

I took the car for a drive to warm it up and it behaved nicely. When it was warm I floored it and when the rev hit about 6.5k's, it stalled.

I let go of the gas pedal, and tried about 5 other quick accelerations with revs up to 7.5k with no stalls.

Not sure if my ports were clogged up or something the first time I hit 6.5k after the flooding..

/twospoons

neit_jnf

The car has a start up procedure where you floor the gas and crank, it's on the manual. What this does is kill the gas pump, essentially the same as removing the fuse.

rotarygod

How did you keep the car running without the fuel injection fuse? Lost me on that one.

Every time you get in the car, you should push the pedal all the way to the floor while you try to start it. Only hold the pedal for a couple of seconds and then let go. It shouldn't flood at all.

neit_jnf

maybe it had so much fuel in the chanbers that it kept going even without the fuel injection fuse? Doesn't the side exhaust ports recirculate unburned fuel? I keep thinking the flooding issue is possibly due to the rich maps we have...

I know the following comparison is way out for a car but here goes: my 2 cycle RC truck keeps running for a few seconds after I cut the gas supply, I can even start it again for a few more seconds to "clean" the engine of the nitro fuel...

sferrett

Here's a copy of something I posted on the West regional forum regarding some thoughts over flooding and revving the engine prior to shutting it off:

Here's my theory on the "rev to 3500" option...

When the engine is above idle and you're completely off the gas (such as when you're coasting down a hill in gear), it will completely shut off fuel delivery as the engine decellerates until it gets down to somewhere near idle.

So the thought being if you rev the engine up to 3500-4000 or so, then let off the gas completely then turn the key off as the revs are coming down it should (in theory) be much less likely to flood becuase there is no fuel delivery to the engine prior to you shutting it down - no fuel, no flood.

The other theory I have is that it could be easier to flood the engine when it stops running unexpectedly, such as when it's stalled when cold or when it's running rough and conks-out rather than you shutting it off with the key. My thought on that is there may be a brief period after the engine stops/bogs/conks prior to when the ECU stops firing gas in there, causing some residual fuel to be hanging around.

Just speculation, but it makes sense to me.

Simon.

TY_888

Just wondering how the car gets out from the factory floor in Japan without flooding issue? Can somebody find out the trick or explain why they do not have the flooding problems.

1, The car moves few yards to the parking lot from the factory
2, move to the car trailer or rail and move to staging area ready for the ship
3, at port they drive it up to the ship car carrier
4, move the car to port from ship
5, move to auto trailers or rails
6, unload from trailer to dealership

I guess they know something, the shipping agents must have big sticker "WARM UP 5 MINUTES BEFORE SHIFT IN GEAR"....or they installed a timer in car you can not shutoff after 5 minutes…
Plus... it is a empty tank!

red_rx8_red_int

If you do a search, you'll find that people have flooded the 8 delivering it to the dealers. I think your big sticker conjecture is spot on.

M-ster

Ha!
That was just exactly why many people had their engine flooded shortly after they received their car. I don't think the rotary engine will just get flooded after 1 short drive, it might takes a couple of short drives/ons and offs without driving off to flood the engine. So it might not be the owner's fault, it could've started way before when the car is just rolling off the production line.

CERAMICSEAL

Reminder: the battery is a key part of the problem (or it's state of charge rather). The chance of flooding it with a fully charged battery is much lower. This is why there are more flooded cars during the winter time;when battery's state of charge are generally lower across the board. When they're new the charge tends to be up.When they get to port they've been sitting,when at the dealer they sit. There-in lies part of the problem.
When you buy one of these you may want to trickle charge your battery to reduce this incidence.

Artifex

This seems to be a piece of misinformation thats going around. A dealership mechanic tried to sell me on it as well. The proof is in the pudding. Depress the pedal and have a friend listen to the gas pump, it stays running. I also observed that the throttle body servo doesnt actuate via the gas pedal during starting.

My guess is this came from the Rx-7s. Starting in 85, all rx-7s had software in the ecu to stop the fuel injectors if the gas pedal is fully depressed to evacuate the motor in the event of a cold start/flooding problem. Prior to 85(and non gls-se 85 models) the driver owuld have to pull the ignitors on either side of the distributor and crank the motor. Some of us rx-7 folks still had to pull the egi fuse and spark plugs every now and then if it flooded bad.

I don't know if the rx-8 has any code for flooding but it would seem to make sense. Since taking an asm dump of the 8 is almost worthless, we may never know what code the ecu has for this.

MazdaManiac

iTrader: (3)

Well -

1) The owner's manual specifically lists the same de-choke procedure as any other Mazda that had the 100% throttle cranking fuel cutoff

2) There is a 0% injector duty cycle during the de-choke. Verified that with my trusty new Extech MultiScope.:p

The MAzda de-choke routine never cut the fuel pump, only the injectors.

rotarygod

Maniac beat me to it. The fuel pump still runs with the pedal pushed all the way down. The fuel injectors just don't spray anything. It is not misinformation. It is fact.

The RX-7's did not have this feature until the 1989 S5 bodystyle upgrade to the 2nd gen. Prior to the '89 2nd gen, the '86-'88 S4 2nd gen did not have this feature either.

You do not have to pull ignitor on the distributors of 1st gens. There is no point to this. That would kill spark and this you do not want to do. You want to stop fuel from entering. You want spark. Pulling the EGI fuse is common on 1st gen GSL-SE's and '86-'88 2nd gens. I have never once had to remove plugs and clean them when the engine is flooded. Just push or pull the car and pop the clutch. It'll start. I'm not too sure about the credibility of the person who works on your car with such a huge amount of "misinformation".

BTW: I have an '84 GSL-SE 1st gen, have had an '88 2nd gen, and now have an '89 2nd gen. This is how I know.

Kenco

They do flood in port.

My dealer is the nearest to the port, and has had several flooded cars in to remedy delivered on a flat bed truck!

Silver7

Thank You! I could not agree more.

Brian_TII

No, this is a common misconception that I've heard mentioned here a few times. The flooding will not build up. Once the engine starts successfully and warms up to operating temp it is not more likely to flood again. If the spark plugs are covered in fuel it should burn off once the motor does start. Fuel getting into the oil is the only real lasting effect of flooding, but it shouldn't contribute to future flooding.

The flooding it caused by too much liquid fuel being present in the combustion chambers. Once the engine starts this fuel is burnt off / spit out the exhaust.