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So on Sunday I went a little off-roading at the event on accident. I got there a little late 12pm and stayed til the end 4pm. I really should have showed up at 10 for more seat time, but i worked the night before and was running on 3hrs of sleep. This event was a partial section of the LVMS inner road course. The tire wear wasn't as bad as last time because the surface is much smoother than the outside grid, but it was so slippery initiations were pretty simple, almost felt like ice, and for some reason the car wanted to scrub W-I-D-E. I really f***ing love the hand brake setup. It took some time getting used to it, but it's seriously so nice. If going too wide, a small pull would point you in the right direction. There were some parts of the roadcourse that were pretty tight and i went off track more than I'd like to admit. overall super fun time out there.
After I went off a couple times there was a clunking in my steering.....got super worried something bent, but it turned out to be my sway bar endlinks coming loose, and ultimately being too short (i put shorter turnbuckles on my custom endlinks when i first put the coils on the car and had it adjusted MUCH lower at the time. stupid oversight when raising the car to its current ride height.) Luckily I still had the turnbuckles at home so I swapped them back in yesterday and got rid of the the sway bar preload, which makes me wonder how bad it was affecting the front end handling, usually preload increases understeer and causes binding.
The next day I gave her a hand wash, pretty sure this is the first car wash of 2019.
I went out and bought 5' of aeroquip socketless hose (black) to replace the short sections for both catch can lines, i also bought some brass hose connectors vs the plastic parts i had in there for a cleaner install plus for the heat. Prior to installing hoses I ended up taking off the intake boot and checking that and the throttle body for oil film/residue. good news! both the intake boot and throttle body were oil-film free and catch can had maybe a drop of oil if that. At that point I decided to run most of that new line (probably close to 4.5') from the intake boot to the catch can, so right now i have that short mis-matched section of blue aeroquip hose for now, - doesn't really bother me as much as I'd thought. The aeroquip hoses are rated up to 300 degrees I believe, and the unnecessary dei heat shielding is good to 500, so there should be no problems at all with the hoses collapsing from heat.
After track thoughts: I may put LCA's on permanent hold, e46 arms are already +40mm track, and extended e36 lca's are at +100mm, kamotor standard flares are at 31.75mm front flares and 48.26mm rears, and until I can drive the piss out of the car in its current config, I do not need the extra steering angle for now at the cost to do lca's, flares, and wheels would still be sticking out well past the new 50mm front flares. So instead, I'd rather do a chase bays powersteering kit first. I'm pretty sold on their baffled reservoir. Even with the current powersteering cooler setup I had some fluid boiling over by the end of the day. I've been kind of curious about modifying mine a bit first before dishing out $420 for their kit though. I remember e46 uses banjo bolts with built-in restrictors. I'm wondering if this would help slow the pressure down back to the reservoir on the return line. I already have the 4mm restrictor in that line like OEM, but the line is longer due to adding of the oil cooler. I was thinking of adding a 2nd restrictor higher up in the line along with the banjo bolt and seeing how that works out (i think it would work because that whiteish-clear tube is perforrated throughout and i'm not able to replicate this because i'm not using crimped hose or -AN currently. here are some pics per charlie's thread (sh3rkpark!ng) to help further explain. Both e36 m3/e46 racks use the m14x1.5 banjos.
(I ended up just getting a chase bays reservoir with standard hose fittings since my hoses are all new anyways, just need to fix the boiling over issue for now, and the reservoir will take care of that. I'm still going to mount this on the s52 engine mount arm, and the chasebays reservoir comes with the bracket to fit in stock location at no additional charge, and I figured if I had to drain the system to tryout the banjo's, I should just get this (triple) baffled reservoir instead since it slows down 120psi to 12psi and it has a baffled cap to block fluid from spilling (main issue here). Everything else works perfect power steering wise.
Also, I think I'm going to remove the locking nut on the AKG fcab's next time i go in for an alignment. There's gotta be almost an inch of thread adjustment to be had without that giant nut.
and here's a shit video of me driving the other day
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