Canadian turbo vert project

[Cairn]

Hey everyone,

It's been 2 years.

I go back and forth between the US and Canada so I brought my turbo to AGP Turbochargers in Phoenix, AZ and had them build me a new turbo using the same on-center exhaust housing. I brought it back up to Montreal, installed it, and the smoking issue has been solved!


I've also replaced the 30lb red Bosch injectors with 42lb green Bosch injectors and put in an 8.7psi wastegate spring to replace the 7.3psi wastegate spring. No clutch slippage and no issues with the Permatex holding my ICV bung onto the cold side charge pipe, so I think I'll be keeping it at this boost level.


Welded up the charge pipes and sanded them to a more dull finish to look more at home. Replaced the red elbows at the intercooler with black ones and changed out any shitty quality failure-prone clamps with quality ones from Princess Auto.



I had ground clearance issues so I had a friend weld up 3" oval pipe from front to back with a Borla Pro XS muffler.

[Cairn]

Last year I decided the rear looks too stock, but I didn't want anything looking era-incorrect, so I took it upon myself to make some custom Startec taillights for myself. Definitely a labour of love. A friend of mine gave me his old broken-lens taillights, I tore the lenses off, disassembled the housing, painted the reflectors, ordered coloured bulbs, sharpied the edges, sanded the edges of the ebay champagne lenses to fit the housings better, and used black Permatex Ultra Black to seal the lenses to the housings.


I also took inspiration from the E12 5-series with how chrome surrounds the front grills. I liked that so I fitted chrome trim around my euro grills while also changing my browned out windshield lockstrip for a new chrome one from FCP Euro.

[Cairn]

My next challenges within the next 2 weeks:

-Intermittently when I press the clutch, my head unit powers off and tells me there's a wiring issue. Confused how those can be related.

-Replace the torn weather seal on my hard top to stop rain from coming in

-Recharge A/C with UV dye (it's been R134 converted before i bought it)

[Cairn]

Side note, I bought an E34 525i Touring in Arizona and am manual swapping it. I’m looking for a 3.07-3.23:1 ratio LSD to replace the stock 4.10:1 LSD if anyone reading this happens to have one.

[varg]

3.23s are fairly common since they were OE in the manuals but if you want anything below that like 3.07 you'll probably have to buy an E30/Z3 diff and swap the internals over to the E34 case. That's what I had to do with my 2.93.

[Panici]

Glad you got the oiling issue sorted. Did the rebuild shop tell you what was wrong with the old setup?

Nice attention to detail roughing up the charge pipes. They look good.

Appearance mods are adding up too. Going to need sunglasses with all that chrome shining.

[ehrawn]

… while also changing my browned out windshield lockstrip for a new chrome one from FCP Euro.

Ooh shiny. What is the part number for the chrome windshield trim?