Give it Some Air!

The RX-7 runs dangerously hot, so it is a must to get as much air as possible to the radiator, intercooler and oil coolers as possible. Luckily, the car I inherited already has a large intercooler and a v-mount radiator/intercooler set up to aide in air flow. Aftermarket front bumpers also help with airflow, and if I had my choice I would install a Mazdaspeed GTC front nose, but the budget just won't allow for that. I did however have a '99 spec urethane front bumper that was bought many years ago and had never been put on.

So, I decided to dust off the '99 spec bumper and see if I could get it to work. The bumper appeared to be in okay condition, but I was bit unsure due to the fact it seemed to be a bit warped. I wasn't too sure I could make it work on my own, so I recruited the help of my long time car friend Brent to give me a hand. I figured the bumper was free and Brent's labor comes real cheap, gotta love what people will do for free beer, and the bumper was just sitting around collecting dust so there was no reason not to try.



After we pulled the original front bumper off, and I almost found out the hard way that a couple of black widows had decided to nest on the backside, we placed the '99 spec bumper in place to see how it would fit against the original bumper support. The bumper support and a small portion of the backside of the bumper needed to be modified if I wanted to maker the bumper work. Below you can see the bumper support before and after the modification to the bumper support.

Before:


After:


After these adjustments were made we began the real fun because the new bumper didn't have any of the mounting holes drilled and it didn't have any of the metal mounting materials that come attached to the stock piece. So, we began the oh so fun process of drilling out the rivets on the original bumper, measuring for fitment and riveting the mounting pieces to the new bumper. This proved to be a challenging process as the new bumper didn't seem to want to cooperate. After bending, twisting, forcing things into place, and a couple of words not suited for this blog we finally got an acceptable fit for the bumper.

Now that we finally saw that the bumper would fit we pulled it right back off to outfit the bumper with the '99 spec front lip. This lip doesn't just look nice, but it will become functional later on down the road (I will save that post for another time). Brent went to work mounting the lip to the bumper while I attempted to clean up some of the wiring mess the car had under the hood. Once Brent had the lip mounted we installed the '99 spec turn lights ( yes, I know that I have said '99 spec about 100 times so far this post). After a day and a half of test fitting, drilling, riveting, cutting, putting the bumper on, taking the bumper off and test fitting some more the bumper was finally on. The final product is below and with a comparison to the stock bumper so you can see how this bumper will help the car get a bit more air to all the right places. Thanks Brent!!!