1968 Mazda 1000 Pricing and Specs

Rubber window seals are a constant source of frustration for car restorers (and let's not forget the RX-7 Convertible is getting on for 40 years old now). The seals don't last forever (particularly in Australia with its UV radiation) and once the dealership supplies dry up, there's not always the demand for rubber manufacturers to continue to make them. Popular makes and models don't have quite the same problem, but even newer niche models like, say the latter-day Holden Monaro, is giving owners all sorts of problems sourcing replacement rubber parts.

Social media might be your friend here. Try to find an online RX-7 owners' group and ask the question, Even if there are none readily available, some car clubs have enough members that specialist manufacturers will run off a batch of replacement parts, provided the club buys a job lot. If not, you might just find another RX-7 owner who has stumbled on to a replacement rubber that was originally made for a different car (or application altogether) that will fit and do the job. Don't rule out finding a similar rubber seal and modifying it to fit your car by slicing off part of it.

That's quite high mileage, but in a modern car with vastly better metallurgy, engineering design and oil quality (particularly multi-grade oil) it's not impossible for a car with that sort of mileage to still be in perfectly serviceable condition.

Frankly, if you're not after something newer with newer tech and convenience, and you're still happy with the Mazda, the advice is probably to keep it and drive it till it will drive no further. As it is, if it's getting close to 300,000km, it's not worth very much to trade-in or sell second-hand, so keeping it and squeezing every last kilometre out of it is the budget-conscious way to go. The exception would be if a bunch of little things all go wrong at once. At which point, you're probably wise to quit it  - even though it's worth very little - as a means of not throwing good money after bad.

Rather than the steering completely locking up, it’s more likely you’re feeling steering that has lost is power-assistance. It can make the wheel extremely heavy and could feel as though the car won’t steer at all. This is linked to the engine stalling, because the power-steering on this vehicle is driven by a belt from the engine. No engine means no power-assistance.

The other questions, of course, are why is the engine stalling and why only on left-hand turns. There are plenty of things that can cause a modern engine to stall from a dirty fuel filter to a blocked injector or an electronic fault. And about a million things in between. An electronic scan of the vehicle might throw up a fault code that will help a mechanic unravel what’s going on.