e30 318i touring with M52 swap

[zoona]

Just ordered some Michelin PS3s yesterday… but thanks anyway.

[Panici]

Looks like good progress. What are you using in the front for the 5-lug swap? I've heard mixed results about steering geometry.

I just noticed, and especially like the painted/colourmatched headlight covers in the engine bay!

[zoona]

It was good progress, until I hit a problem that turned out to not be problem.

I have just copied exaclty what Spanner Rash has done bascially, but less well executed...

Front
The fronts are e36 knuckles (second hand) and e36 brakes (new) with the SRS lollipop reaplcement things.
All fitted up well.
I also replaced the lower arm as some of the ball joints were a bit tired. Wasn't very eexpensive, and thought it was a good "while you are there" job.

The only thing that currently doesn't want to play nicely is the ARB drop link. It doesn't fit with the new position, and so I am thinking that I will either get some adjustable drop links, or use the e36 brackets that came ont he coilovers (that i removed...)
Need to do a bt more thinking on that.

In terms geometry, this is just a daily road car - not going any where near a track, so as long as it isn't terrible, i'll get by. But i think the SRS parts are supposed to correct the main issues?

Rear
The rears is where I made the error.
They are e90 hubs with SRS brake caliper brackets - so i can use e46 rear brakes. This is all fine.

When I pressed the new hubs into the new bearings, i thoguht all was fine until i had got it all back together and wrestled the rear assembly back into the car and noticed a huge amount of wobble in the hubs.
Cue panicing and googling, and my conlusion was that i hadn;t supported the bearing properly when pressing the hubs in.

So I ordered new bearings, and new brake shields as I had mangled them getting the hub back off. I was then on holiday for a bit, and USPS lost some parts, then I was just busy.
So yesterday I put the hubs in to the new bearings, and noticed a lot of wobble again.

Then I found this page: https://www.r3vlimited.com/board/for...-still-wobbles

That tells me that is normal. Which is incredibly annoying as I wasted a lot time time, money and effort replacing them.


I am currently putting the parking brakes back in, then I'll get the diff back in and I should be ready to bleed the brakes and test it all out.

I also took the opportunity to clean everything up and POR15 the rear beam and trailing arms. Looks a lot nicer:

The problem is that this 'just tidy this bit up' is growing, and now I've cleaned up and painted the diff, cleaned up the half shafts, and the list goes on.

Wheels
I've also bought some new centre caps for the wheels. They are aluminium and 3d printed plastic parts. The 3d printed bits needed a bit of effort to get ready for paint, but I think they look good. The paint is not a perfect match, but the camera makes it look worse than it is.

On the headlight covers - e30s are new to me, so i didn;t realise that wasn;t normal until i started looking around.
They've done some OK cosmetic jobs on various bits, but there are some horrors as well.

I'm replacing everything I see that is wrong. My main worry is the electrics. It all works, but ther is way more electrical tape than I woudl like to see. Somethign for later down the line...

[zoona]

At the end of september, I put all this together and it was super low... way too low for me. I was a bit stumped as I was hoping that HSD coilovers would raise it up a bit from the shitty raceland things that were on it. But if anything it was lower.
I rasied it as much as I could and that meant leaving 60mm thread engagement between the body of the damper and the cup.
It looked like this:


It was rubbing just moving about on the drive.

So i umm'd are ah'd and moved on to other projects and looked at my car sat in the gargae doing nothing.
I tried to do some research but couldn;t find much.
I also spoke with the very nice peopel at Driftworks, and they said that the 60mm thread engagement is overkill, and i could go as low as 20mm.
So i finally got round to doing it, and I think it might work ok:



I know it is a bit high, but i am trying to make a dialy and want it to cope with the roads here. I think it will settle a bit, so going to leave it like this for the moment. Still more to do ebfore getting it on the road - power steering is sounding very sick. SO need to investigate that/

I also uncovered some more dubious work on the car - the battery posittive terminal could make conact with the body of the car, so they just shoved a bit of 1/4' ply between the two... battery not fixe in place either.
I think i may be completely rebuilding the car at this rate.

[Panici]

Then I found this page: https://www.r3vlimited.com/board/for...-still-wobbles
That tells me that is normal. Which is incredibly annoying as I wasted a lot time time, money and effort replacing them.

It's too bad you found the thread afterwards, but proof positive how valuable the info on the forum can be!


How do the HSD coils ride?
Have you been in a stock E30 by chance to make a comparison?

[zoona]

It's too bad you found the thread afterwards, but proof positive how valuable the info on the forum can be!


How do the HSD coils ride?
Have you been in a stock E30 by chance to make a comparison?

Absolutely… I built my mx5 with info from forums.

hsd are incredibly hard and bouncy. I still have some setup to do and that is a first drive of about 300m - so not a great way to judge.
I’ve struggled to get them high enough. They are now just about ok I think.
i haven’t been in a stock car, so you are correct that the above may be even more incorrect!

I’m working on power steering at the moment. Once that is sorted (andI get some wheel for my winter tyres) I can actually drive it and see how it is.

[zoona]

I haven't updated this for a while. So here goes...

I fixed the power steering issue - new pump, and 'while i was there' i replaced the reservoir, and all pipes. I used a chase bays one. It's ok, bit a bit shit. Some of the pipes didn't fit very well, possibly down to rack placement but i had to replace one of them.


I had a week or so of blasting around in it, It is a lot of fun, but highighted some real issues. The suspension is riduclously hard. Undrivable on NJ roads. The gearshift was sloppy as fuck. The exhaust is louder than I would like and it makes too many pops and bangs off throttle. Even at like 4 MPH. The throttle is very sticky at low input as well. I think the pedal is veyr loose, so a bit of a refresh is due there.

What have i done?

Coilovers
The coilovers are way too stiff, so my local BMW place is having some made up for me. I have given up experiementing, and decided to thrown some money at people who know what they are doing (Off Camber Autosport in Rockaway). They have been great with the BMW, my miata track car and both of our dailies. So happy to trust them to come up with something...
THey should be arriving in the next week or so.

However... I started another job, which turned into a "while I am there" moment.

Wheel rubbing on chassis rail
I have put some rack limiters on it and hopefully that will solve that one.

Rev counter
Follwong SPANNER RASH latest video i relaised why my revs seemed to be too high. So i have bought a new chip, but not arrived yet


Gearshift
The gearshift was absolutely terrible, the gearstick just wobbled all over the place, the bushings were clearly shot - possibly even something more serious. When I managed to get it all out (I now know why the botch clip is so called...)


The original short shifter was a cheap piece of shite. It has this aluminium collar that was siliconed into the carrier. just terrible. So I ripped that out an replaced with a std setup.



Then the rear bushing was absolutely gone:



So after i replaced it all with good stuff, i got this:


And a gearstick where you have some idea what gear it's going into.

The dssr has been cut and welded and is a bit short for my liking, with a bit of a twist. So i think bushings will wear quickly. Will have to see how it goes.

I also bought a new garagistic gear nob:




Fluids
I had everything to change the engine oil, gearbox oil and diff oil. So i have (almost) done that. No crush washers for the diff, so just waiting for them to turn up.
Engine oil was horrible. There were no shiney bits in the filter, but a lot of gunk. GLad I changed it. I think I might do it again soon.
Gearbox and diff looked like they may have been done recently.

Brake fluid is new as i have completely changed the brakes.

Coolant needs doing, but haven't bought that yet.


Drive shaft
There was a a rattling that i traced to the shield on the centre bearing of the drive shaft. It was driving me mad, so i took it all out and tried to fix it but failed. So i bought new centre bearing, and all the little bits it needs. I found that the plastic insert to the clamping ring on where the two driveshafts meet was missing as well.
So that is getting replaced, but waiting on parts. WHile it was out there was quite a lot or surface rust and it looked like something had rubbed on it at some stage. So i cleaned it all up and painted it.


Exhaust
This really needs repalcing, but want to make sure I have got everything else sorted, so i don;t have to keep taking it on and off. But in the mean time it needed new gaskets and bolts where it joins the headers. They were just full of liquid exhaust
gasket, which is crap.


Carplay
This brings me on to my little project for the car. A stereo and a carplay head unit, using a raspberry pi.
I've got it all working on the bench. But getting it fitted nicely will be a massive job, as will fitting a semi-decent stereo to make it all sound right. I don;t have any experience of car stereos, so a lot of reading needed...
I will update progress on this when I have got a bit further, but in the picute above you can see the start of a bracket to hold it (white section where the vents should be)
I think some people may not like it 'cos purity' but it's my car, and i plan to use it every day.
More to come on this.


PLease excuse the mess, we are completely renovating our house and living in about 3 rooms. I have bene doing a lot of 3d printing to work out how to mount it. Last picture is the pi on the back of the screen.

If there is interest I'll do a longer post on exaclty what kit i bought and what software i have used
I have a computer science background, but never messed about with this. So it's all new to me...

[Northern]

I have had two of those ebay shifters and they're utter piles of shit.

They should be secured into the shift carrier with a snap ring on the bottom, but if the installer doesn't understand this, they inevitably do something super jank like what you found to install it.

Honestly that blue cup is where the "good" ends. The shifter doesn't have a ball like the factory stuff. Instead they use that white (plastic?) spherical bearing in your picture, with a snap ring on top. The snap ring and the receiver groove don't seem to machined right or just simply don't work well. On my current shifter, the snap ring came loose and the shifter fell down into the transmission tunnel, and only stopped because it came to rest on the driveshaft lol. My previous one lost half the bottom bushing and developed some wild slop.

I think if they had more resilient bushing/bearing/mounting, it could be decent, but the execution is so bad it's not worth messing with.

[iXBeater]

What a cool friggin' car! Congrats!

[BarlosE30]

Oooooh that Pi idea is something I had in mind too. I currently have an uncracked dash ready to install. But im also taking dimensions and trying to custom make a dash panel. Would be very interesting to see how you go about the CarPlay setup. What screen is that? I’m an M.E. so software is not my biggest forte.

[zoona]

Oooooh that Pi idea is something I had in mind too. I currently have an uncracked dash ready to install. But im also taking dimensions and trying to custom make a dash panel. Would be very interesting to see how you go about the CarPlay setup. What screen is that? I’m an M.E. so software is not my biggest forte.

There is very little software faffing involved (unless you want to...)


I have always been interested in the raspberry pi, but never really found anything i needed to use one for. But this seemed like a possible option after looking into car stereos that could support carplay. The options were:

• a std head unit
  In the e30 that either means a single din screen (useless) or a doubkle din popout thing that both hideous and not very practical
• a cheap stick on chinesium dedicated screen like these . They are too cheap... i dont trust them. I also think the sound output will be shite.
• Build your own... and with some research i found a bunch of people whi had built them with Raspberry pi. It seems to be quite android heavy rahter than apple, but both work.

I am not an expert in this. I just cobbled it together by reading a lot of the internet and watching a lot of youtube...



This is the screen. I wanted something widescreen... You can get more tradtional shape 7" screens that woudl work, but i wanted to keep it a little lower, s went for this one.


It is a pi4 (8GB) - The 5 is obviously newer, but i struggled to find screens that are physically set up for them. will explain later.

You need a carlinkit CPC200-autokit (NOT the CPC200-CCPA. I don't know why, it just doesn't work. I had to buy a second hand one on ebay to find the right one.)

I have added a carpihat, but you don't have to. https://thepihut.com/products/carpih...r-raspberry-pi
This is an extra baord that simply allows you to use the 12v supplies directly from the car (pi works on lower voltages)


This is the screen face down on the desk:


The pi just screws to the back of it, and the screen comes with littel adapters to send the screen output across, and power it and stuff. This is one of the reasons a pi5 wouldn't work without some work. They have moved things around a bit.

You then power it up and the screen displays the pi output.

You can plug in a USB sound card, that includes a microphone port. At the moment I just have it plugged into a cheap external speaker, and I bought a decent mic for the car as well. Both work well.

The carpihat makes life a littel bit easier in that it allows you to plug in 12v, 12v switched, reverse 12v and some other stuff. Then you can write scripts (or just copy stuff form other peopel...) to shut it down gracefully x seconds after turning the ignition off.
I have then added a camera (the white ribbon int he picture above) and written a script that displays that camera feed when the reverse 12v signal is high.

In addition, you can buyt he carpihat with a much better sound board on it. I plan to put in a decent sound system, so i wanted a decent output to it.


One problem is that the more USB devices you plug in to power from the pi, the less it likes it. So i have added a powered USB hub as well so all USB devices are powered separately from the pi. That just leaves the screen being powered, and it is fine.


Cooling is my main worry, so working on that now. You can buy little cooling devices, but I have made it more complicated by adding the carpihat. Need to work on this.


Fitting it is another whole task that i am working on slowly...




Happy to share more details of what I have done if you want.

[zoona]

FInally got my centre caps painted. Tried loads of different paints, and none of them were right. So i found a place that could make up a can and match the wheel colour. Took two goes, and it is still not as close as I woudl like... but it's as close as I am going to get.