I've recently started a rotary engine build got a shell and building a chassis for rotary drive train with rwd

I do remember someone in the Bay Area trying to turn the famous one stroke rotary sideways on a Mini trans and getting it to work. I also remember reading about a drivers meeting were the officials at a street race in Baja California had to warn the other competitors not to follow the rotaries to closely to avoid the resonance of the exhaust breaking their windshields. This appealed to me at the time as a way to deal with tailgaters during my commute. 

There was a bugeye with one at the British by the sea event last year at Harkeness park in CT.  It looked really cool, but the bugeye config worked - he made a new subframe and used the RX7 trans too.  Mini config is all wrong for this motor IMO, unless you're building a RWD, which also would be a cool project.

I have owned 1 RX7, an 86 NA car.  I loved the smoothness of the rotary, and how I could rev it to 9K driving it around, but low RPM torque was missing.  Also, once you change the exhaust to spomething less restrictive, where you can actually hear it, it sounds like a dentist drill to your soul.

a friend of mine had a rotary in a bugeye. it was really fast. i agree with johnincm. we would probably have seen them in minis if they had came in fwd configurations.

Found this.

It's got me thinkin... 

I was just given a GSLSE with a fully worked motor.

Having owned several rotary cars, including a 500hp beast, I will say they are not fond of running lean. As with any engine that is build up for power, the life span of the engine decreases. Properly tuned they will last plenty long and yes even reliably. For the best exhaust sound you really need to be running 3 rotor or listen to the 787B 4 rotor sometime.

Years ago I read some pages about people mounting the mazda engines to a festiva using a stock or other mazda front wheel drive box, I cant seem to find any pages currently, but well, that's a thought.

Chris

The fastest open-class car in SCCA Solo (autocross) for past few years is a 400HP Wankled Bug eye.  It now has a monstorous muffler after many rejections for noise rules.

They make a lot of power for their size, but don't last long, and they have high fuel consumption; the extra fuel must go towards making noise.

I feel the primary reason for the lack of rotory swaps is the lack of a rotory/front wheel drive powertrain package. Here in North America the rotory has never been offered as a front wheel drive option.

Almost all of the FWD swaps that turn up in a Mini use the complete FWD powertrain of the donor car (think Honda & Suzuki).

Both of the rotory Mini's in the videos posted are rear wheel drive.

I expect if Mazda had offered a small enough rotory/FWD combo we would have seen plenty of them stuffed into Mini's.

Just my thoughts,

John

helpmymini,
I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
There's not enough ear-muffs/ear plugs to get away from that horrid sound. Fingernails on a blackboard for me.
A Jaguar straight six running through two megaphones at 7,000rpm is music though.
And an A series winding through the gears is a sweet sound anytime.

They aren't lighter, just smaller. The apex seals work until they don't. When they fail they destroy that section of the engine. No boring a rotary either. You can get hundreds of hp out of them at 16k rpm. Sweeeet sound!

I figured there were reasons why there haven't been many built. I've seen a Suzuki swap, even some Hayabusas (sp?), but reading the article and that Mazda had fixed some of the problems inherent in the design, I thought there would be more then there are because of how light it is, that it would be better than a B or D series Honda engine. I thank everybody who answered.

all wrong apex seals are also prone to failure, it's dirty, burns oil and gas thirsty

//youtu.be/ptaTmm_KNLU

 

//youtu.be/xp_iS_qbVdM

 

Ok, looks like at least two of them exist already!!!

I recall seeing a rotory mini "work in progress" a few years ago...

I was recently doing google searches about Mini engine swaps, and as happens frequently, I end up on wikipedia. Long story short, I make it to the Wankel entry and read this: "The simplicity of the Wankel makes it well-suited for mini, micro, and micro-mini engine designs." And "Wankel engines are considerably lighter, simpler, and contain far fewer moving parts than piston engines of equivalent power output. The elimination of reciprocating mass and the elimination of the most highly stressed and failure prone parts of piston engines gives the Wankel engine high reliability, a smoother flow of power, and a high power-to-weight ratio."

Thoughts?

And I apologize if this is a duplicate post, I did a topic search and didn't get anything similar.