Today ended up being a really good day of working on the RX-7. The carb rebuild that I'd been putting off and rather dreading really ended up not being too bad. Everything came apart pretty easily. Once I got it apart, there was, as would be expected, evidence of it having been gummed up:
Note the float bowls have a lot of junk in the bottom, and the main jets (which are in the bottom of the bowls) were pretty nasty as well. However remember that the engine actually still ran, somewhat surprisingly, but fuel only seemed to be coming from 3 out of the 4 barrels.
When I removed the jets and metering rods, it wasn't surprising to see that the metering rods were various degrees of clogged, in some cases very clogged or gummed up. That said, everything cleaned up really well after soaking in the Berryman's carb dip. I made sure to put all the needles and jets back in the same locations, and other than the question about that one brass part that was for the accelerator pump, nothing was surprising.
All cleaned up, and back on the car:
I did do one bit of simplification/modification, since the rules of Lemons allow it.
@Half Fast had to run the secondaries as vacuum secondaries in the class he was running. I'm allowed to modify the carb however I want in Lemons, and so I removed the vacuum secondary diaphragm (and made sure the hole was appropriately plugged) and wired the secondaries so that they're now mechanical. I can always put it back to vacuum if I want, but theoretically this should help full throttle horsepower. Beyond that, I didn't want to mess with the carb as it was tuned properly. Assuming I put this back together correctly, it should run well. We'll find out when I start it.
Another thing Lemons allows me to do is relocate the battery. The factory position for it is a fairly standard (but very poor for weight distribution/handling) on the driver's side in the very front under the hood. It's about as far forward and to the corner as you could get, not ideal for something that weighs that much. I'm going to relocate it to the passenger side area, behind where the passenger seat would be if there was one. That keeps it low, about in the center of the car's mass, etc.
The brake calipers, those are going to be more of a challenge. I got all 4 of them off of the car. I couldn't get the pistons out of any of them with compressed air as recommended by others. they were known to be seized up, but these may be a challenge. Normally I'd just buy rebuilt ones (and would've done that a long time ago), but nobody stocks these. And there's not a particularly straightforward replacement. I'll keep looking at it and working on it, but I know one way or another that's a problem that'll be addressed.
