Originally Posted by RIWWP

Doing anything with the seals requires an engine rebuild. Look at some pics of an engine in 'exploded view' to grasp why.

The warranty covers the entire engine block. Housings, plates, rotors, and seals. The only way to tell if the seals are failing is with a compression test. And it doesn't tell which seals are failing or why.

However, if your engine is still running smoothly and you have low compression the seals are just worn. Destroyed seals will make your engine "lumpy" and barely driveable due to all the internal damage it would cause. At the time of the event you would have felt the destruction, and possibly even heard the seal bits rattling through the exhaust. This would also destroy other seals in the process from the debris. At this point, you wouldn't be able to start it, and would only be able to keep it running with LOTS of throttle usage and keeping the RPMs higher than ~7,000 (enough natural compression to keep firing at that point, depends on which seals are still intact). Though all the air and fuel you are dumping in is largely getting wasted in combustion, as most of the combustion would be occurring in your exhaust, superheating the entire exhaust system to the point that it glows bright red and starts catching your car on fire unless (in theory) you can keep at high enough speed for the air flow to make enough of a barrier to the heat. If you hunt around you can find people on here that had multiple apex seal failure at once (usually from one seal taking out additional seals), and kept it driving, but the exhaust heating up lit their car on fire when they came to a stop. Usually the rear bumper.


Nothing you have mentioned suggests any of this.

Originally Posted by kboom36

Ok, I will ask dealer about the seals. Is there a way that the technician can tell the difference between the two by doing a compression test. I know with conventional engines if you dump some oil in the cylinders on a engine with low compression it will bring up the reading on your compression guage to tell wether its the rings or valves. The technician did say something about the seals but never wrote it up as such, he wrote it up as this

Recommend doinq compression test on both rotors.
Performed compiessibn test :
Chambef 1; 1r 3.4kolcm2 II - 7.4kq/cm2 III - 3.5kq/cm2
Chamber 2i I - 5.7,8k4/em2 Ir - 6.6k!'/cm2 IrI - 7.2k!'/cm2 Min soec is 6.9ko/cm2'
Rcoecsot ftfioe nrde prel'apelaec iirq enqine, and qasket kit. en$ine"$5,272. 36"kms

I will try to get him to send it to manufacture as seal failure and not the rotor wear. The dealer seems quite willing to help because I think they want the work however its Mazda Canada thats being hard to convince.

Ok, just found the answer to my question. While doing the compression test you should see three pulses on each chamber and they should all read the same, within reason however, if you get one or two strong and one or two weak its the apex seal. As you can see in the techs results chamber 1 had good compression on one side of the rotor and low on the other two pointing to the apex seal.