E30 Race Car wreck, time for major surgery

[Maluco]

E30 Race Car wreck, time for major surgery

Indeed, a very accurate title to this post...

[Lance Racing]

Parallel to the front end work, we are getting the engine rebuilt. The engine in the car had 6 years on it, and was down horsepower to the other PRO-3 cars. We are not rebuilding the race engine, because the #5 cylinder had previously been sleeved. We are rebuilding a vigrin M20 engine that had never been apart. From a wreck automatic.

Bottom end going back together:



My shelf 'o parts at the engine shop:



Clean head:

[Lance Racing]

We let the seam sealer dry over night and are back the next night to tape out the car and paint.





Before we spray the primer, all surfaces are wiped down with this stuff:



First a grey primer coat:





Now the white paint goes on:









And a DQ snack!

[Lance Racing]

We've now moved the car to a secret paint shop where we are painting the engine bay prior to engine installation. Here we apply seam sealer at the welded connections between donor clip and firewall. The seam sealer is white. It keeps water out of the joints to prevent rust.





And here was a little dog hanging around the shop.

[Jean]

Engine swap is cake compared to this !!! Amazing !

[Lance Racing]

So far we have 130 hours on the car to this point. 75% is volunteer time.

[PiercedE30]

Very cool, looks like a lot of progress, and a lot of work, has been done and your in the final stretch.

[Lance Racing]

No hard feeling between me and Fred. We were both unlucky recipients of previous events.

Here we are back Saturday AM to lift the car off the Celette rack. The rack, with car, rolls really easy on the concrete floor. But you have to remember that once moving, you can have thousands of pounds moving, and you don't want it to slam into another car in the shop. So we push slowly.



It's free!



Existing suspension ready for install so we can roll the car. Subframe is being replaced, but it is not ready yet.



Suspension is bolted on and ready to roll to the next location. Work is scheduled for just about every day until race weekend, so the pics will come more often now.

[Keith M]

Go Lance! I'll never forget the smile Stephanie had on her face after her first stint at the PIR enduro in '06. This is all going to be worth it.
Glad to see that Fred's car is fixed and I hope there is no hard feelings between you two.

Keith
Team Green Dot

[Joe318is]

Very cool post! Thank you for taking so may pictures, i had an idea of how everything went together on these things but its nice to see it in action.

Any pictures of how the other car [the one that hit you] looked after impact?

[Fanzotti]

That's total insanity.

You are a brave man.

[TrackAddict]

Good eye!

This is not a SpecE30 car. We run up here in Seattle in an E30 spec class called PRO-3. PRO-3 is very similar to SpecE30 but the suspension package is open in the rule book (compared to SpecE30 which has a specific spring/shock combo, right?). We are not allowed to use remote reservoir shocks however. So the Ground Control ADs are legal.

Thanks for the clarification, Lance.

There's a chance that I may be moving up to the Seattle area next year (I work for Boeing) and it sounds like my BMW CCA KP class car might be eligible for Pro-3.

Good luck with getting her back up and running!

[Lance Racing]

6:30pm

Wow, it's been a long day, now it's time for the night shift to come in. Here shop owner Jeff shows us how to use this welder.



Tom swung after work to see how it was going. Here he's calling Regina to say he's going to be a little late for dinner. Like 8 hours eventually!



Jeff doing the more complicated welds.



Dinner around 8pm





Only 2 more hours of work to go tonight:



new roll of copper wire for the welder



welding the frame rail to the saddle:







I didn't get any final group picture of us, but the car is ready to wheel over to their lift and remove from the Celette rack, which we'll do Saturday morning.

1:15am and we're going home! Thanks everyone!

[Lance Racing]

5:00pm

One person mentioned how this was like climbing a mountain. You go up and up, and it just looks ugly and worse and worse. Then you hit the top, and there's still work to do, but now the car comes back together little by little. Well here was a very exciting moment, we place the donor clip onto the Celette metal jigs and start the process of making the car bigger again!

What is special about this Celette rack is they have kits of jigs for every type of car made. A body shop owns the basic rack, then they rent the jig kit for whenever they have a certain type of car in. Once done with the car, they send the jig kit back. In Seattle here, they rent the kits from a location in Portland 200 miles to the south. For very rare cars, they get the jig kits out of Chicago I think I heard.

The kits have these various pieces that the car sits on. The jigs are placed very accurate, and holes in the top plates of the jig align with holes or other points on the car. If the holes on the car don't align with the jig holes, they know the car is not in alignment.



Here Peng sets one of the front jigs.





As the various areas are looked at where the two major components will mate, the front end is slowly tugged back into place. The jigs will tell us when we are aligned in the x, y and z direction.



Here you can sort of see a gap between the fire wall and the donor clip edge. The firewall is still pushed in a little, so we'll tap on the firewall from the inside to nudge it back out about 5-10 mil. to allow the welds to work.



This jig to the left of the clamp uses the holes that the front sub frame bolts in to:

[Lance Racing]

Parallel to working on the main car, the same amount of work taking apart welds and prepping edges is going on with the donor clip. It is now cleaned up and ready to mate to the car!

With the clip very much naked, it was interesting to see some of the strategies for how they designed "crumple zones" that we hear about.

This shot barely shows litte dimples along the right side of the frame rail. These spots are designed to buckle in a frontal impact:



Here I've made orange arrows to more easily see the location of the dimples. I guess they are the opposite of dimples because they go out, not in.



Then note the orange circle. There are a number of holes, like swiss chess, both as shown and on the bottom side. This allows this area to deform. Basically they seemed to make the front part of the nose "softer" and the front end gets stronger and stronger as it gets closer to the firewall.



The swiss cheese holes on the under side: