Stinky: The New DD: Is now the Weekend Car

[McGyver]

Thanks, JasonWilson48! It really has been a long road since my first e30 around 2007-ish to now.

Yeah, I'm down next to Pennsport in South Philly. The non-negotiable in the house hunt was to buy a garage - Either a house with a garage, a house + a garage somewhere, or a warehouse that we turn into a house. I can't tell you how nice it is to have a clean and organized space to work where I can lock the door and walk away until I have time to wrench again. I used to spend at least 30 minutes setting up / breaking down every time I worked on my car. It was such a hassle to put everything away any time I needed to run to the store for something. Get that door fixed and rekey the locks! Even a small space to store tools and working under an easy-up makes it so much easier. Just having a single 110v outlet on a 15A breaker is plenty to charge some battery powered tools, plug in a shop light or a fan, or power a small air compressor for filling tires or blowing off parts.

I'm excited to see your new e30 once you get the clutch figured out!

[McGyver]

Time for a brief interlude to fix an avoidable problem!

My wife and I took the car out two weeks ago to go to a different part of Philly, but only made it about 4 miles. The intersection of Broad and Girard has a SEPTA track that crosses Broad. It doesn’t look like much in the pictures, but it dips down before coming back up. I hit the brakes but it was too late, we slammed into the track and there was immediate smoke. I pulled over and shut off the car, then watched oil pour out onto the street.





I sent my wife home in an Uber and waited about an hour and half for a tow home, which was plenty of time to order a new oil pan and gasket from RockAuto. All the spare pans I have are fractured, so it’s time to get another TIG so I can start repairing them.



I started pulling the car apart before the parts arrived to make sure I didn’t need anything else. The skid plate was scraped and a little bent, but didn’t look too bad. The welds from CA looked pretty decent. Then I saw the crack. Yeah, that was the issue. I’m actually pretty impressed and plan to hang the pan on the garage wall.





Side note, it’s REALLY nice to have a clean place to lock up the car and tools at night. I love being able to walk away from the project for the night, or a few days, and having everything secure by just closing the garage door. It feels like such a luxury.



The parts from RockAuto arrived on a Wednesday. They only had cork gaskets, so I chose a close-out $5 FEL-PRO, which arrived as a tangled mess. I used it anyway with a light coat of RTV to help it stick to the pan. I only need a few months out of this engine, so it should be good enough. The oil pan is from URO for $174, which is the cheapest I could find online. It looks good enough, but the mating surface has a few spots where the flycut didn’t go deep enough to remove all the casting/machining marks. I figured the RTV was good enough to seal it.




I put a light coat of RTV on the oil pan to help the gasket stick, then a light bead of RTV on top of the new gasket to stick to the block. I scraped the block with a razor blade, then scrubbed it with scotch bright, then wiped it with acetone. The bottom end looked decent, but there was some RTV in the oil pickup and other spots from the last oil pan replacement. I guess I went a little too hard with the RTV that time. Oops.





The last thing was to mess with the exhaust connection to the cat. The tips on the Stromung were rubbing against the passenger side of the cutout on the valence. I tried loosening the connection to realign it, which helped a little, but it still rubs. I’m missing the brace between the cat and the transmission, which is probably allowing it to be off center. This is a problem for another day.



I’ve put about 80 miles on the new oil pan, no leaks! It’s been a little over 300 miles on the new head and it still drives great. No more coolant leaks. I tried putting another 15-45 degrees of torque on the head bolts, but I’m still getting oil weeping out of passenger rear corner. I guess I’ll just live with it.

[McGyver]

The refreshed head has a little over 1,600 miles on it and the car seems healthy, so that’s been great! It still weeps a little oil, but not enough to really care about.

I planned on jumping back into the engine build, but life got in the way, it was time to swap to some old all-season tires, and I really wanted to get all the flammable stuff out of the basement. So I decided to focus on taking advantage of my wall space for storage.

The first project was to hang some tire storage racks. I was really worried about the racks dropping wheels on the car, so I picked some beefy ones (eliminating all the folding rack options). I chose MaxxHaul 50256 racks because they’re less than half the price of the HyLoft 01012, which seems like a legit rack that people like. I hated the yellow color, so I sprayed them black.
I was also worried about the racks pulling off the wall since it’s hollow CMU that isn’t built level, spaced evenly, and the mortar lines aren’t easily visible. I started by lag bolting some D-Rings to the ceiling joists. I got some little shackles to connect the thimbles to the anchors.

Then I made some 1/8 inch wire rope sections as a backup in case the rack started to fall off the wall. I got coated galvanized steel wire so that the wire wouldn’t scratch the wheels. Removed the coating from the end. Looped it around a thimble. Then crimped a ferrule and stop on the end. This was covered in heat shrink to protect wheels as it gets passed through. These were hung up first, then holes drilled for the racks.






It was a crapshoot to line up all the holes to only hit the webbing with sleeve anchors (Hilti HX 3/8 x 1 7/8). I think I ended up getting 3 of the 4 anchors to the torque spec for each rack. The racks seem perfectly sturdy, but I’m glad I have the ropes for safety. The racks were up for a while, but my first pic was on the way back from getting a Christmas tree.





The next little thing was to replace the welder that was stolen in SF several years ago. The landlord didn’t make sure the garage door fully closed, so someone walked in and pushed out my cart with a brand new Everlast 255EXT. I waited until Everlast had their Christmas sale, then bought a 210EXT. I don’t plan on welding super thick stuff, so I figured I could save $500 and put that towards a good cart and other supplies. The welder arrived with the box open and looking really beat up. The only damage was one of the front panels, which I assumed would be easy to replace. Everlast sent me a replacement panel and a roto-head torch for my trouble. The panel was only held on with 4 bolts, but I had to take the whole machine apart to get to them and disconnect the gas and power lines. I took plenty of pictures on the disassembly and was able to get it back together without any issues. I tested all the functions, and although I can barely TIG, everything seemed to work as expected.





With the money I saved, I bought a nice cart and dual flow regulator from PrimeWeld and picked it up from their warehouse in NJ. The cart was about $250 on sale, which is pricy, but was the only cart that I could find that was 1) small to fit in my limited space, 2) could hold 2 different bottles, and 3) had room for my MIG and TIG. The MIG went on top where there is plenty of room to open the door to access the wire spool, and I have room on the bottom for a water cooler if I ever need one. I definitely recommend this cart. The only improvement would be to have locking casters on the front.




The final project was to hang some cabinets. I had all my specialty tools (pressure tester, valve spring compressor, soldering iron, etc.) in my blue cabinet on the floor. I wanted to make room in the blue thing for fluids and paint, so the other stuff needed to go on the wall.

Again, I was worried about finding the webbing in the CMU, so I decided to use a piece of angle iron as a ledger board to support the cabinets, then the cabinet anchors would only need to keep them from rotating off the wall. The ledger was held in place with knockoff brand tapcons (because they were black to match the painted angle iron). I managed to sheer 2 of them, oops! Notice how the ledger is level, but the wall looks crooked. I think this thin row was the top of an old CMU wall that was later extended to make a room that became the garage.



The cabinets were held up using some #10 bolt plastic plug anchors - These seemed to torque nicely. This brings us to how the garage looks today. I think the last mini-project will be to put some hangers on the wall under the heater to hang the folding Chicago Electric welding table I bought. I don’t expect the table to be great, but having something close to flat, conductive, and easy to store will work for this space.




Now I REALLY want to get back to building this engine. Too many side projects!