Connor’s overcomplicated simplify everything gen 2

So I’ve been going back and forth about posting a build thread on here for a while. I usually avoid it because I’m mostly learning as I go and I’m by no means a professional. But I do like reading others build threads so I figured I’d toss mine up, it can’t hurt. Just a little background on me for those who care, if not just skip ahead to learn more about what’s currently happening with the car.


I bought my 2010 mazdaspeed3 in 2015 as my very first car. I bought it up in Trenton, which was approximately an 8 hour drive one way from where I lived back then. Why a speed3? Well I needed something practical as a first car, it needed to have enough room for my bmx bike and my snowboards. I remember the day I went out with my parents to look at cars, and after checking out a few mazda3s, I saw a second gen speed in the back of the lot. I instantly fell in love with the looks of the car. I knew absolutely nothing about cars, I just knew it was something special. After going for a test ride (I didn’t know how to drive stick) I was hooked and knew I needed one. So the saving began. The car I ended up with had around 80k km on it when I bought it, which is like 50k for the non Canadians. Lots of highway use, as the previous owner used it to travel between Trenton and Quebec where his family lived. He was the original owner of the car and kept it in very nice shape. The car was essentially stock, with just a corksport intake on it for those turbo noises. To 16 year old me that was the coolest thing ever. I don’t have many pictures of when I bought it, like I said not really big into cars quite yet, and honestly it wasn’t driven too much. The car was way to nice and stressed me out driving it, with it costing so much and knowing if something happened I wouldn’t be able to replace it. Over the next like year I maybe put 3k on it in total. Then I moved and things changed a bit.


My commute to school and then work became an hour one way and I really started getting comfortable with the car. Still haven’t done anything to it, just oil changes and washing the car obsessively. I was slowly getting more into cars, and started looking into modifications. I didn’t really have money so I just mostly dreamed and saved just in case. One day, I’m pretty sure it was the dead of winter I think almost 2 years into driving the car? It had 90ishkm on it, on my way home from school I heard a terrible metal on metal noise. Limped the car home which looking back not knowing what was wrong at the time, I probably shouldn’t have driven it that long in case it was a motor issue. This was my fist ever forray into working on a car for real. My dad luckily knows lots about fixing cars so we dug in and found that the stock turbo let go. The compressor wheel was scraping the housing and was wearing away the blades. I called up my local Mazda dealer and got a price on a new oem turbo, and then ended up buying a bnr s2 turbo for it. That swap took a hot minute as I’d never been that deep into a car before ever. But got it done, threw in a set of autotech hpfp internals, and a jbr 3 port boost controller along with my corksport intake and finally an accessport, and got an e tune from Justin at freektune. Car ran amazing, made 18 psi and was quick enough to smoke all my friends cars so I was on cloud 9. No idea what the car actually made, probably like 270 or something but to me it was the fastest car I’d ever been in.
Couple pictures of said car with my ricer stickers on it.


That’s pretty much how the car sat for years. I just kept stacking on the km, it was my daily driver, put brakes on it, stop tech pads, rotors and stainless lines, obviously maintenance, and did the 2 front wheel bearings. I got my first real job where I started making a tiny bit of money so I instantly went out and bought a first gen rx7. After a couple of those I ended up with a properly built 13b rew swapped first gen with all the cool parts, big single and all the hp. I’ll toss in a picture or two of the rx7s I’ve owned for those who care at all. I did a ton of work on that car and learned so much. This upped my confidence a lot, but the speed still stayed untouched as it was just reliable. After a string of bad luck involving splitting an rew down the centre iron I sold my clean shell and tucked the grey car into the back of the garage to sit while I pondered what I wanted in life. This is when I bought my dream car, my black on black ap1 s2k.
My first ever rx7. Should have kept this one, it was insanely clean for a Canadian rx7 from 1982

My 13b swapped rx7

And of course my s2k. This is a more recent pic, you can all imagine what a stock ap1 s2k looked like.

Right around now is when things started going bad on the speed. Broke some engine mounts and upgraded to jbr mounts all around, tossed some cheapo k sport coils on the car, my throw out bearing started to sound a little rough so I put in an act 6 puck with the prolite flywheel. This was kinda the beginning of the end of driving the car as my daily. The act clutch did the thing where it engaged super high at the top of the pedal which I found very annoying to drive every day so I started looking into selling the car and getting a real daily. I work at a Toyota dealership now, so I ended up getting a good deal on a 2020 86 that had been sitting in another dealers showroom for 6 months. Instantly threw on an unequal length header and an exhaust and thought I was happy with my garage finally. In the back of my mind I had started out planning a resurrection for my rx7, and I had my s2k as my fun summer car.
Speed right before she went into storage with different and some may say even ricier stickers lol.


There’s always been a block in my mind when it comes to selling the speed, and again I just couldn’t bring myself to sell it. At this point suspension bushings are pretty worn out, and the paint on the roof and wing is starting to fade. It had just under 200k km on it and didn’t leave me stranded a single time. I found a storage place and tossed it in storage to forget about for a while. This brings us to almost present times, I get a call in 2021 that my car needs to move because they want to get out a car behind mine. I have gotten into powdercoating, and some basic fabrication at this point so I figured it was time to throw my tube chassis rx7 on the back burner again and get the speed back on the road. I missed the car a ton and wanted to see her again.


I head out to the storage spot, luckily no mouses made homes in my car, and everything seemed ok. All the components corroded pretty good sitting for so long, but that was ok because it was time for a full refresh. I hooked a battery up and primed the oil system, and fired it up. Started up first crank like it hadn’t sat for years. I had the biggest grin until I got out to look in the engine bay and saw that my alternator was seized and the belt was just doing a burnout over the pulley. So instead of driving it home, we hooked it up to the back of my parents truck and flat towed it an hour home. This is how she sits in the garage.


I don’t want to spoil the entire build plans but just know that there’s not going to be a single bolt that’s not been touched by me. Next post will be more actual work and probably some more pictures as I pull the car apart to start the rebuild. Still nothing actually wrong with my engine, just want something different now that it’s not my daily driver, and I have the chance to go a little crazy with it without having to worry if it’s going to start every day. Usage is going to be a fun “street” car that excels in curvy backroad ripping and maybe a couple trips up to the track. My style as you can probably see from old pictures of my original rx7 build and how it sits now, is pretty racecar inspired so I’m sure that will translate over to the speed as well. I’m going to try and post somewhat frequently, and I look forward to reading comments and criticism from the people who know way more than I.

 

Welcome fellow Ontarian. For a guy who "knew nothing about cars" you sure look like you knew what you were doing, LOL. That is a nice livery you have built up!

Ill watch your thread. Im about to dig into my MS6 chassis with the every nut and bolt treatment too, so keep posting.

 

Will do for for sure, I made sure I’m a bit ahead on work before starting to hopefully keep up somewhat regular updates. Just need to find the time tomorrow to sit down and type up another update. That’s kinda my life right there haha, I just jump straight in and hope for the best. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. I have a bin of stuff I broke because of this mentality haha. It’s fun and rewarding seeing stuff go back together looking so new, but man does it take time and patience.

 

I guess the next job was to get the car in the air and start pulling stuff off of it. At this time in the build I did not have big plans, just a basic motor refresh, maybe swap out to a different turbo on stock block and paint the engine bay since it was starting to look a little crusty. Things escalated pretty quick as I’m sure you’ll see. This is the newest car I’ve ever stripped down this far, I have some experience with first gen rx7s, which are way simpler than a 2010 speed3 is. I decided the engine should be the first thing to pull. It wasn’t too bad of a job, maybe a couple nights worth of work taking my time and labelling as much as possible. Broke a few bolts off that are in the ac lines that bolt to the condenser, but that’s a future me problem. Luckily a lot of stuff was removed and reinstalled in the past with anti seize by me when I did the turbo and the clutch so most stuff came right off.


Once the engine was out of the way I started pulling a bunch of stuff out of the engine bay, and started prepping it for paint. I come back to this later on because I ended up removing everything else that’s still in the bay at this point. I used a wire brush on an angle grinder to clean up the surface rust on some parts and hit everything with self etch primer. The wheel wells were scuffed with 320 grit sandpaper and I sprayed rocker guard on them. I usually buy cans of the stuff, but this time I bought the bottles that you spray with a schutz gun….. would not recommend this method without masking EVERYTHING you don’t want overspray on. I’m used to the cans which have a nice narrow spray that’s very easy to keep contained. To say I undermasked would be a massive understatement. It took hours to sand off the overspray from this. I don’t think I have any good picture of the rocker guard stuff, I was too panicked trying to remove overspray before it dried on me.


I figured this would be the point where I buy a bit of black paint from my local body shop supply store and give the bay a quick spray and get the car back together….. but no, I caught a big case of while you’re in there.


I removed everything. Not kidding in the slightest. Anything not welded to the chassis was removed. Every stitch of interior, every nut and every bolt. I guess I had decided to do a semi resto-mod kinda thing? Took me just over a week working every night for a bit to reduce my speed3 down to just a bare chassis. To this day I still question what in the world was I thinking. I guess I just made my quick little project a whole lot longer. Before anything goes back on the chassis it is going to be fully stripped down and restored to the best of my abilities. Anything questionable is going to be replaced so hopefully I have few issues once it’s time to drive this again. I’ll toss up some during pictures and I’m sure I’ve got a few of it looking very lonely and stripped. Next update will be about the underside and the paint. We are almost caught up to present day at this point, so updates will be happening in a bit more real time. I’m in the process of building a bigger oven for my powdercoating so that I can do my subframes and such.

 

Fascinating that you are doing a frame off restoration of a twelve year old car. I admire your energy

 

Canadian winters are no joke lol. Seriously though I don’t know what over comes me. Simple builds snowball so fast to where I just want to mess with everything.

 

Because the factory never seems to get it quite right!

+1 on Canadian winters...where you located? Im in Sudbury, winter can get real here!

 

Right now I live right near Windsor, but I used to live just to the west of London. We for sure don’t see the kind of snow you see in Sudbury, but man do they like to salt our roads like we do haha.

 

So are you keeping the color or going with something not available from the factory?

 

It’s going a very different colour than factory. My next update will reveal the colour I think.

 

do you happen to have a picture of the front subframe with the sway bar and steering rack installed? im about to try and change the bushings on mine without dropping the subframe and it would be super helpful to see with my eyes what i will be looking for with my hands

 

I don’t have any very good pictures of the subframe stuff, it’s all stripped down now so not much of a help. The sway bar brackets bolt on using the same long bolts as the lower control arm rear mounting point, so if you pull those bolts out your sway bar will be free as well. I have a picture of them powdercoated how they sit with the subframe in between the 2 layers of the bracket. Not sure if that’s at all helpful but I’ll toss it in here.

 

thats really helpful, i am replacing the control arms anyway so yeah less work for me.

i f you havent yet, hit up damond motorsports for poly bushings

 

Funny you should mention that...I was looking at the shell pix and thinking the car would look nice in Jaguar Dark Sapphire, lol

 

Toyota used a great navy blue on some cars recently too

 

I will for sure be installing all new poly bushings, I have a few already and have to buy some more for the rear end also. The colour is actually a Toyota colour that I chose, but not blue haha. People are going to be pretty split on it I think.

 

Now that the car is fully stripped down I had to make a decision on what I wanted to do with the underside. It’s not near as rusty as I thought it was going to be after being driven in Ontario winters since it was new, and having never been oil sprayed or undercoated in any way. There were just some crusty spots of surface rust that needed to be taken care of. I bought a wire wheel for my angle grinder, but wasn’t super happy with the results, and it was impossible to fit into a lot of areas. I think I mentioned before that I do some powdercoating on the side, so that got me thinking. I have a nice sandblasting setup, so what if I just moved my gun setup outside and siphoned out of a bucket to sandblast the underside. This in theory was a great idea. In practice it sucked. I got the car down on some wheel roller things I have for my rx7 chassis to roll around on, and shoved it outside. I tarped all around the car and made a tent as best as possible to try and contain most of the mess and also so I could collect and reuse the sand. I bought 300lbs of media to start with so I didn’t have to sift it as often. Not sure if I have any good pictures of this process, it took all day and I ended up having to finish in the dark with a flashlight as my only light in my makeshift tent. I’m sure my neighbours thought I was completely nuts lol.


While the process sucked, and would definitely recommend a professional to come in and do this as it would have been way faster, where I live would make this pretty hard. I live in a subdivision in the city so I’m sure I’d have some complaints if I had a company in blasting media all around the subdivision. I was pretty happy with the results and immediately after cleaning the underside with a lot of compressed air, and some rubbing alcohol, I etch primed all the bare metal to prevent any flash rusting from sandblasting. Then I painted the underside with 2 thick coats of a chassis epoxy and then one coat of rubberized rocker guard. The rocker guard is to hopefully protect the epoxy, and also makes it possible for me to touch up any areas that get chipped easily as the rocker guard blends with itself very well. Only thing left was to fit a nutsert in the rear most gas tank strap hole, I broke the existing nut free when I took the gas tank out. I took a couple pictures of the underside, but it’s only on jackstands so the pictures just look dark and black. It does look really good, and will be super nice to work on it in the future.


Next up was tackling the body work. Luckily the car is in decent shape so it won’t need much in that area. Most of the body was just a scuff for the new paint to stick. Still took forever as body work tends to. Both rear fenders were rolled and pulled quite a bit, I have plans to stick as much rubber under them as possible, 255? 265? Not sure yet, don’t want it to poke too much but I do want all the grip. Since I was painting the car I just took a big hammer and a dolly and smacked the fenders till I was happy. Don’t love the look of the insanely pulled fenders so stopped before I distorted things too much. Outside is basically fully prepped for paint, just a few small jobs left.


Interior wise, I stripped out all the sound deadening, 14.8lbs for anyone wondering how much weight you save in a gen 2. I stitch welded the chassis real quick, not sure if I’ll see any benefits but I was itching to weld something and make more work for myself I guess. The welding I did before I painted the underside, just forgot about it till now and too lazy to insert this paragraph where it belongs. I also removed the factory tabs in the engine bay for the stock heat shield behind the turbo, I have plans for the location of the turbo to change so it won’t matter, and they looked ugly. I also lopped off the tabs for the abs pump, this falls into the simplify but actually overcomplicate the build for no reason. I plan on running manual brakes, with no abs. I prefer the feel of properly setup manual brakes, and my planned electronics package doesn’t include anything for abs. I’m sure some people are gonna disagree with me on this one but it is what it is I guess.


Finally it was time for primer. This ended up being an absolute nightmare. First primer I bought ended up being some odd specialty underbody primer that was supposed to be applied to bare metal, which obviously I didn’t have a lot of as I didn’t strip the existing paint off the car. The second primer I got was so thick even after reducing within an inch of its life, that I couldn’t even get it to spray out of my gun. To preface all this, I’ve literally painted one engine bay, and one front bumper in my entire life. Im not a professional painter and I explained that to the paint store, but seems they couldn’t get me a primer that was just a regular ol primer. I went to a different place to see what they had and finally got an epoxy primer that worked. This sprayed out pretty well for doing the entire paint job in the garage with just an extraction fan over the man door rigged up from a mix of cardboard, a bit of plywood and a mishimoto slim fan with a furnace filter.


I let that dry about 12 hours, and then jumped straight into base clear. I did one coat on the interior, just in case someone’s ever under the interior panels, just to make it look like it came this colour from the factory. Then 4 coats of base and 2 heavy coats of clear. It came out decent, definitely some dirt and dust in the clear, most of it will sand out, but for a garage job and my first ever full car I’m pretty happy. The colour I ended up going with I think will be a colour some people love and some hate. I went with Toyota nitro yellow off the new mk5 supra. I’ve wanted a yellow car for so long, and ever since we had a yellow supra come through the dealer I work at I fell in love with the colour. Overall I’m very happy with the results and can’t wait to get the car back together.


My ruined mishimoto e fan lol.

Now I’m fully caught up, so from here out there should be more detailed looks into what I’m doing because I’ll actually take some pictures. I think the next step is to get my fuel tank ready to go back in. I’ll have to order some parts to change the pump as I didn’t cut the hole in the chassis any bigger so I don’t want to have to pull the tank in the future if my pump ends up going bad or something.

 

Totally amazing! You arent afraid to tackle a lot in a home garage. I love the yellow...It dosent look like much right now, but once you get it all assembled with some contrast from wheels, windows etc, it will Pop!!!!

I think you should consider something over your underside coating. Rocker guard should be coated to seal it up, even if you have to brush something on. Rocker guard is like plasti-dip, it dosent really bond with the surface like paint does, but "sticks" well.

 

Thanks! I’m pretty happy with it, definitely need to see some more parts on it to get the whole picture haha. That’s good to know, I did not know that. It is just a topcoat, the epoxy paint under it is the majority of the protection, but I will look into painting maybe some sort of tremclad or something over top of it to help it last longer. I know I will have to touch it up every year from rock chips and such, but the longer it lasts the happier I’ll be.

 

How has this been going? Are you making anymore headway?