To pair up with the Alcantara wrapped door card, I also asked ESH Upholstering to redo the SakeBomb aluminum grip handle in Alcantara.

To install the new grip handle, the mounting hole at the base of the handle needed to be drilled out slightly and fastened with a machine screw into tapped threads on the grip.

Here it is joined back together with the trim piece.

Next, it was time to mate everything back to the door card…

…and then install the door card back to the car. To be comprehensive, I replaced all of the push-on fasteners with new OEM ones.

I taped up the sensitive carbon areas around the door cup to prevent scratching it when installing the door cup, which, like the driver side, is a cast aluminum reproduction.

I particularly like these door cups because they measurably increase the feel of sturdiness when pulling on the doors to open or close them.

Finished product.

I am at a point now where I am satisfied with the RX-7. Bugs that irked me have been corrected. Aesthetics that didn’t live up to the desired results have been redone. I took a step back and for the first time ever, took a mindful view of my journey with this car. I can admit to having done things to excessive levels. The point of diminishing returns was surpassed long ago. I am finally ceasing operations and the tail lights being outlined in this post will be the last major addition.

Although the OEM ’99 tail lights were befitting, I decided to take an extra step and try out the new Version 4 LED tail lights by Car Shop GLOW. The goal has always been to follow an understated, OEM+ path, but with the recent additions like the RE-Amemiya rear diffuser, my car is forking off towards the more modified direction. That’s why I felt like the changeup to LED tail lights would be worthwhile as a final accent. Unlike the more prolific Version 1s which had dotted LEDs throughout, these newer lights feature a diffused section of LEDs. I think these new lights have a more professional look.

The hardest part of acquiring and installing these tail lights was picking them up from my local USPS office. I ended up having to go twice, early in the morning, before retrieving the package. They left a notice on my door, but the first time I went to the office with it, the driver never unloaded and carried it around for another day.

Eventually it was in my possession and it was time to open things up.

I ordered all 3 pieces, including the third brake light section with LEDs.

Here is a closer look at one of the tails. You can see the diffused strip.

OEM ’99 versus CSG LED.

Backside with a branding placard.

Removing the tails from the car was a straightforward job.

Since the buckets behind the lights were dusty and dirty, I of course had to give everything a wipe down.

Installed!

Turn signals on:

Brake lights on:

And a better representation of the diffused LEDs with the garage door closed:

I wanted to get the fix done quickly, as in by this weekend. With only 5 business days to work with, I promptly started the process and made arrangements with my usual go-tos. I contacted Ray Crowe and ordered a new Mazda lock cylinder with expedited shipping. This would get me the part by Friday. I was then able to pick up the package after work and made a trip over to the same locksmith that helped me rekey the Silvia trunk. Like before, he was able to reconfigure the tumblers to fit my existing keys.

Old on left, New on right.

Thankfully, replacing the lock cylinder is an easy affair and can be done with minimal disassembly. Soon enough, the install was complete and the fix checked off the list.

I like to stay as productive as possible because I value time preciously. I find that I can be uneasy or feel downright miserable when I am not doing something worthwhile. In the limited free time that I have, I prefer spending it on activities that are engaging. This is why I constantly seek to learn and increase my skills. Learning how to weld has been on my to-do list for ages, and I finally made it happen this weekend. I reached out to a local fabricator who had a Mig setup and brought Albert along for the party.

This was the first time I played with a Mig welder, but it is incredibly straightforward and I can see how its peak can be reached relatively quickly with practice. It is literally something you can pick up and run with.

We spent a few hours mostly cutting up a steel pipe and welding it back, repeatedly.

Mig welding was good to try out and start with, but what I really want to learn is Tig, which has a far higher learning curve. Will need to add that onto the ever expanding agenda.

At long last, and after much prodding, oCarbon came through with the work and I had a well overlaid carbon fiber hood in my hands. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t fully install the whole assembly, because the 3 mounting clips on the underside of the hood were removed and forgotten. That delayed the effort yet another week until the clips were eventually tracked down.

After having to see the gauge fascia sitting lonesomely on top of my pool table for months, I anxiously mated it back with the hood.

The moment of truth… I then maneuvered the entire cluster carefully into the car, plugged everything in, and was granted this belated yet relieving sight. The momentary buttons, S2000 start button, and AiM Dash all came to life and operated without issue.

There is no doubt you have to wait when it comes to dealing with oCarbon… but you do at least get what you paid for, at some point. I just wish their extremely overdue turnaround times did not have to overshadow the quality of work, because I have no complaints about the delivered product.

Many years of effort have led me to this interior. I lost count of which iteration this is, but it is surely the closest realization to my ideal specifications.

A while ago, I sold my custom ordered Nardi Gara Sport and picked up a new MOMO Mod 88. I just felt like it was time for a new look and that the MOMO would suit the overall theme of the new interior better. It is also D-shaped and all black suede. I was finally able to run my red Mazdaspeed horn button, that I purchased a year ago, below the optional MOMO Competition horn ring.

Months of hard work and patience have now brought me one step away from the finish line. The passenger side door card is all that is left. Hopefully it won’t be long.

Long story short, I had to re-buy the X5 lenses a total of 4 times. The glass was extremely difficult to detach and repeatedly broke. Eventually, after a couple months of slow trials, both the left and right side lenses were traced and successfully cut. When I went to pick the up, I decided I didn’t like the results of hand cut glass. They would have worked, but the edges were rougher and not completely uniform. And just like that, I paid the shop for their efforts and immediately abandoned the finished product. Instead, I made a pivot that led me down the production and design route of my very own CNC cut lenses.

In the end, it was a successful outcome because not only did I obtain lenses that fit my requirements, I was also yielded a business endeavor from it. As it turns out, I’m not the only one looking for blue tinted and convex Ganador lenses.

After cleaning up the Ganador backing plates, I used clear silicone to glue on the new lenses. I used tape to hold everything in place overnight while the silicone cured.

Next, the lenses were popped back into the mirror bodies. Excuse the dirty fingerprint marks.

With the mirrors fully adjusted on either side, I am able to obtain a desirable viewing angle. I purposely left the mirrors adjusted slightly out of spec, however, because I didn’t like the gaps and the way they looked being completely cranked to one direction.

I entrusted ESH specifically because they had experience wrapping RX-7 door cards. From these prior jobs, they were able to finalize the pattern to cut with and the adhesion process to ensure success.

To ensure that no small detail would be missed, I asked ESH to trim the underside of the map pocket lid to heighten the level of finish. They ended up adding more of the go-to material – Alcantara.

The party doesn’t stop here… a couple months ago, I caught wind that the interior door cups were being reproduced in cast aluminum by the same folks that brought me the aluminum exterior door handles. I scooped up a set with haste and have been eager to get them installed ever since. At least now I can throw the driver side door cup in. I am pleased with their fit and finish.

New, metal version on the left and old, plastic stock piece on the right.

Not only has the tactile feel improved being able to grab metal when pulling the door closed, but the entire cup area is now greatly reinforced. In combination with various black magic work on the backside of the door card, everything feels sturdy and rock solid. The stock door cards and door cup areas of RX-7s are notorious for creaking and flexing at the slightest touch, which is simply unacceptable.

Driver side door card all mounted and ready. Now to wait on the passenger side.

I never imagined my Alcantara wrapping would spiral out to this magnitude after doing the dash. A good majority of my interior now features the more premium touch of the material, and I think is now at the right balance.

Being surrounded with so much Alcantara now gives me a feeling of quality whenever I sit inside, enhanced by the custom carbon fiber work and the less palpable reinforcement work.

As progression was made and the car grew increasingly modified, it naturally followed a more aggressive look and has now reached a point where the explicitly preserved rear end is suffering from being too underwhelming by comparison. With all of the exterior modifications around the rest of the car, it was time to enter back into the fold and consider a diffuser to keep in flow. Over the years, I casually surveyed all of the available diffuser options and found a few interesting choices, especially the one from DAMD in Japan. In the end I could not deem an alternative to be more preferable and I still sided with the tried and true RE-Amemiya Street diffuser. I believe it stands as the quintessential choice for a stock body RX-7.

In order to not repeat history, although now under a slightly different context, I decided to go with the plainer FRP version this time. There was a reason why my first go around with the diffuser created discomfort and lead me to removing it so hastily. As aforementioned, having a prominent blanket of carbon fiber hanging from the rear was too ostentatious for my liking. And since I settled on FRP over carbon fiber, I placed an order for the diffuser directly with RE-Amemiya in Japan, who only makes it in the former type of material. The Shine Auto replica or counterpart is prolific, especially in the United States, so it was hard to find an application of an actual RE-Amemiya diffuser installed – except to go for it myself.

Within about a month, a freshly molded diffuser arrived at my painter’s doorstep and was ready for prep work. They come with a black gel coat which many people install straight away, but I wanted to make sure all minor imperfections were fixed and smoothed out.

Here it is after primer and sealer.

Once the initial prep work was ready, the diffuser was ready for fitting before the final spray. I drove my car over to the shop, sans gauge cluster and all.

I asked to have it sprayed in a satin black, but the color ended up coming out closer to a semi-gloss black. So after all that work, the finish of the diffuser circled back to being like the original gel coat – until you’re about 5 feet away, of course. Either way, the tone of the black is dark and the diffuser fit up well, a quality that I was especially keen on finding out.

I had the rear mudflaps removed and then reinstalled over the diffuser, following its line as closely as possible to flow together.

Another cool feature of the RE-Amemiya version is the addition of tow hook cutouts. I was able to retain my driver side rear tow hook.

Overall, the fitment and construction were great. The predrilled holes lined up and the install came out clean.

When the flow is active and tasks are being accomplished at a desired rate, that kind of momentum tends to also be reflected in the frequency at which I bring up posts. Anyway, enough of the excuses, because waiting or not – I do still have content to talk about. So let’s get back to the groove.

With the gauge fascia completed and in my possession, the next step was to work on the implementation of LED momentary buttons. Previously, I had non-illuminated buttons mounted on the fascia to control the menus on the MXG dash. One night when I was driving through a dimly lit street, I peered down and realized the inadequacy of having the dark buttons in the car, exaggerated by the fact that every else featured illumination. During the past Winter, while I was first getting started with this interior revamp project, I purchased a set of metal momentary buttons that matched my existing ones, except they had a red LED ring in the middle.

But before I could get into the wiring, I had to fix a small problem with the MXG itself. I accidentally put a scratch on the bottom of the screen (by the logo) when removing the fascia from the car. Trying to polish the scratch only marred it and made it worse.

Luckily, AiM has great customer support and their technical services center in Lake Elsinore was willing to replace the entire screen and bezel for me at no cost. Conveniently, AiM recently released a new bezel that is slightly sharper and I was able to acquire that upgrade in the process.

With the MXG returned and looking fresh, I mounted it back into the fascia and resumed tackling the new LED buttons.

Like before, the momentary action required a positive and a negative lead to be wired, per button. And now with the LEDs, each button had an additional pair of leads which required, in total, 16 individual 22-gauge wires to be connected. This was quite time consuming because I had to manually wind the stripped ends of each wire around the tiny poles on the buttons and then solder them into place. I used aircraft grade Tefzel wires for this job, which is overkill by an extraordinary margin. What can I say, I like excess.

I had the Tefzel wires in the first place because of my original intent to step up the connector to an 8-block Deutsch DTM. The wires were in the same neighborhood so I bought everything at once. Previously, I used a basic Molex connector for Computers which served its purpose handily, but was lacking in terms of overall quality. Arguably, for a simple and low-stress application like the momentary buttons and their LEDs, using Deutsch connectors is like eating cereal with a 24-karat gold spoon… it is beyond reasonable comprehension but still damn cool. And I’m glad I did it because I was able to see first hand how well designed and superior the Deutsch stuff is. Yes, even plastic wire connectors can be over engineered.

With the provided male and female crimps, everything clicked into place and assembled together inside the housings effortlessly. The pins are sequentially numbered and the housings feature rubber seals for weatherproofing (not exactly required for the interior of a car). After all of the soldering work I have been doing, I finally bought one of these Helping Hands to hold the wires in place instead of awkwardly balancing objects together all of the time.

Here is a look at the connector from the car side.

And from the fascia side.

Due to the small size of the momentary buttons and consequently the LEDs inside of them, they are DC 3V instead of 12V. This meant I needed to incorporate a resistor into the circuit to convert and bring down the voltage. I wired the 4 LEDs in series and the calculated resistor needed appeared to be around 220ohm. After soldering in the resistor, I brought everything to the car and did a test run. Modern day LEDs are highly efficient, especially in comparison to conventional bulbs. This is why LEDs are far brighter under the same power circumstances. In my case, even though the car’s 12V current was being tapered down by the resistor for the 3V LEDs, I still found them to be too bright.

I cut off the 220ohm resistor and experimented via trial and error with different ohm resistors. This took place gradually over the course of a few weeks because I ended up needing to test multiple resistors.

Our eyes detect brightness logarithmically so it is not necessarily straightforward to determine exactly how much the LEDs should be toned down. After many repeated trips to the local electronics store and a whole range of resistors later, I settled on 2200ohm. This placed the brightness of the LEDs about equal to the brightness of the Pioneer headunit’s illumination.

And with that, the new momentary buttons were installed and complete. Let there be light.

We all know how poor the visibility is from the Ganadors, being that they are aimed for RHD vehicles and the surface area of the mirrors are undersized. This was another issue I wanted to improve. These new mirror lenses are both CONVEX on the left and right side for the widest possible viewing angle. This should help add back in the much needed visibility. It won’t be perfect, but it will be as good as it gets for LHD adaptations.

* If your original glass is already Convex, then these will not yield an improvement as it will be the same. Verify if yours are convex or flat to be certain.

They are also Blue Tinted, which is the more expensive option. Whether or not you’re trying to add back in more angle with the convexity, these lenses will be a worthwhile replacement if your Ganadors did not originally come blue tinted.

Specifications:

• Direct Copies that fit ALL Ganador Mirrors
• CNC Precision Cut in the USA
• Seamed Edges
• Convex / Wide Angle
  • Increases Vision by 30-40%*
• European Sourced Glass
  • Thicker than Original Glass
• Blue Tinted

*In comparison to Flat glass.

This will also be a LIMITED run, so if you just want to stock up on a spare set, now is the time.

After going through the design phase, I received the first sample set of the lenses, which is what the production run will look like.

The lenses were traced off of the backing plates.

A look at the thickness and side profile.

It’s hard to show the amount of curvature in the convexity in pictures, but this should give an idea.

NOTE!

These lenses will fit ALL Ganador Mirrors for ALL Makes & Models. The actual mirror portion is identical for every application, it is the cast bases that are bespoke. This is why, although subtle, the driver side mirror on the FD3S RX-7 is physically tilted inwards more than the passenger side. Most likely a cost-savings measure, but this is how Ganador fits and aims the mirrors.

So again, it doesn’t matter if you have a set of RX-7 or Civic or Prius Ganadors, these replacement lenses will work. The original lenses are stuck on to the plastic backing plates with double sided tape and is easily removed. The tape can be peeled off with your fingers after. Given the curvature of the new lenses, I recommend using silicone to attach them to the backing plates, which will help fill up the gaps.

I am about to push through a small production run of these lenses in pairs with the manufacturer. I need to know how many people are interested to get an idea of the numbers.

If you want a set, I am accepting Prepayments now.

They will be $110 Shipped for a pair. Production time will be about 2 weeks. I will update this post accordingly.

To get in and buy, please send payment to:
paypal@grandmighty.com

So with 9 caps left, I whittled them down further to select the 4 best to grace the wheels on my car.

Next, I had to figure out what to do for the spoke decals. The goal was to outfit these wheels in an honest and complete manner. Between the available Desmond logo and the RegaMaster SuperForged logo, I opted for the latter. I first bought a set of decals from a seller overseas, but the text color couldn’t be printed light enough on the clear vinyl to contrast with my grey wheels. That meant I had to get creative and go custom.

I contracted a graphic designer to vectorize the logo so that it could be printed.

I was then able to have a set of decals produced with the RegaMaster text in a special oil-slick chrome and the SuperForged text in a gold chrome. I also had the dimensions upsized accordingly for the 18″ spokes.

Because the decals were die-cut and the individual letters would be prone to damage, I requested to have a matching set of clear, protectant covers made that could be applied over.

I think the end results are great!

Yes, I know the crown valve stems are ricey, I will take them off… at some point. The wheels look much more complete with all of these furnishings implemented. This is where I’m going to have a stopping point because things are on the verge of becoming too busy. For that reason, I will not be applying the red rim decals.