In my quest to get the 3 running again, I needed a
radiator. The last time I tried to get it up and running (a few years ago), the original radiator began to leak. I guess it developed a hole by just sitting there, dunno know what happened. Since a stock piece is difficult to allocate, I searched for an aftermarket item.
After a looking online and trolling the
Mazda forums. An order was made to rotary-works.com for one of their radiators. The reason why I went with them, is because they were the only ones who made actually made one specifically for the S124A (
RX-3 to everyone else) chassis.
With a quick glance, you can see that this radiator looks fantastic. It's a 3 row, 4 pass radiator. Definitely an upgrade from the old 2 row, single pass radiator. This should be able to dissipate the
rotary engine's
enormous heat output.
Though this struck me as very odd. The filler neck uses the smaller
radiator cap rather than the old larger cap that were abundant in all the old american cars of the same year. It's the same size as the corolla, so I can check in the back for some old spares.
Inspecting the rest of the radiator, the
Chinese quality control starts to appear. Some of the welds aren't as pretty as many of the high end radiators. There was also quite a few random shiny and dull spots all over the radiator.
The radiator construction itself isn't as great as i'd hoped it would be. Notice how the mounting bracket is a bit crooked. My chinese brothers must have been getting ready to go home when they built the radiator.
No matter, I'm not one to suffer from
OCD, as long as it works better than my old one, ill be a happy camper when the old yella can start moving on it's own.
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