Wide Body Street car/Time attack build

[Panici]

Great project! Following for updates.

[NORBY]

Looks good my friend. I've been wrapping my car over the last few weeks (although it's winter here) and it's a huge learning curve. I'd be keen to see how you did your mirrors, its a bit i'm stuck on at the moment!

[s14brent]

car looks great! its been 105+ here and wrapping is absolutely miserable rn so good job getting it done!

[greyis89]

This is killer so far! Keep going!

[meltingmanmedia]

Ah you weren't lying about updates. Wrap/colour choice look great! What brand did you use?

haha there has definitely been a lot of progress, but I've been bad about updating stuff recently. But thank you! I wanted it to be white for a cleaner look but this will definitely get some attention. This is what i get for letting my coworkers vote lol.
Im actually not sure, Inozatek was what i was going to use, but the shop it was ordered through suggested their new brand that is "better", I call BS though lol. It does look great though, just hard to use, just like Inozatek haha.

10/10 will not be wrapping this car ever again lol

[Northern]

Ah you weren't lying about updates. Wrap/colour choice look great! What brand did you use?

[meltingmanmedia]

finished wrapping the car, aside from the front bumper and mirrors! Ill make a more detailed post about why, but I had to push it out of the shop just to get some pics of it in the sun today, this color looks so good!

[meltingmanmedia]

I've been wholeheartedly embracing the misery of wrapping my car in the shop with no A/C, in the 105* TX heat... It's a terrible time, but the car is almost entirely wrapped. I couldn't bring myself to wait until It's done to share it lol. Wish me luck on finishing this, ill need it

[meltingmanmedia]

Part two of the last post:

I welded three of those brackets to each side of the car to support the weight of the aluminum side skirts and then drilled holes through each. Cleco clamps are all i have currently to fix them to the car, but the actual hardware should be on the way soon!


I obviously wanted to see what the car looked like with the current bumper progress altogether, this is the first time I've seen the car with the skirts on like this on both sides so I was super excited about this!



Not a ton of huge tasks are being done, but very important steps to making the car look good, as well as making it street worthy. And in that respect, headlights are kinda important... But I didn't want to just run some OE style lights.
I bought headlight intake ducts from tangent innovations for the high beam lights a while back but If I'm going to only run two lights, id rather them be in the high beam location cosmetically. I also happened to buy some offroad lights that have a white spot light, and a wide amber beam that can be run separately or simultaneously. It wasn't my intent to run them like this, but it just so happened that they fit perfectly inside the intake ducts. This isn't the permanent fix, but I've mounted them in a way i can use them without issue and still adjust the level of the beam. They're super bright and the Ambers have a beam cut-off line so i can run them as my low beam without blinding people in front of me too bad.



I may or may not have also started cutting the lower valence from under the tail lights down off of the car... so that's what you have to look forward to in my next post. Wrap for the car also showed up so making it one color is on the agenda for this week!

I can go into way more detail on all of these things but for the sake of actually taking the time to post i spared all of them. So feel free to ask away!

[meltingmanmedia]

There has been a lot of time between my bursts of progress on the car just due to life and money to spare to throw at it, but this past couple of weeks I've checked quite a bit off the to-do list. This entire month at work we've dedicated all "content creation" to "finishing" my car and my boss's wife K24 swapped car.

A couple of months ago I "finished" the exhaust on my car so I could get some tuning done without the exhaust dumping under the floor. It's nowhere near pretty, but this was my first time welding stainless and one of my first tig welding projects in general. It will have to change very soon (you will see soon).



With the exhaust temporarily out of the way I was able to do some fuel adjustments and have the car run a little better, the O2 sensor I had on the car wasn't reading correctly so I have a new one to wire in from innovate motorsports.

June for my car started with me working on modifying my fiberglass Mtech2 bumper to match the width of the fender flares. The fenders are 4" wider than the bumper was give or take. I used expanding foam to shape the bumper to the width I wanted it to be, but also add a lip to the bumper. Unintentionally it looks a little similar to an E21 group 5 car bumper. I still haven't had a chance to finish it, but of course, I had to start with the most time-consuming thing to try to cram in before a deadline. Still has a lot a way to go before i can get to the point of wrapping it.



The biggest thing that has bugged me about this whole build has been not having the side skirts mounted. So I finally took the initiative to make some super simple brackets to mount them and welded them to the rocker panel. Right now it's basically just 16ga sheet metal bent to a 120* angle to hold the skirt level. They're stronger than I anticipated, but I will be adding more to this design just to make sure they never come off even if they hit the ground hard enough.


I've got video footage of all of this stuff but I have to use it all for our work youtube channel, but ill compile it all into one video to share here soon.

[meltingmanmedia]

Since my last post I went ahead and ordered a strut brace from Garagistic and got it to line up and pull the strut tower a little closer to where it needs to be. Not at all perfect but a lot better than it was. Ill come back to this issue once its on the ground and moving around.



After welding up the Vband exhaust collector and putting a resonator on, I tried to move the car in and out of the shop and it took about 30 minutes to get it down the ramp and about an hour to get it back up the ramp... the angle of the dangle was WAY off. At the resonator's end, it had maybe an inch and a half max of ground clearance. The side skirts will eventually be that low, but they won't really hang on things the exhaust does. So now for the fix



I ordered up some tight radius pie cuts from Stainlessbros and tried my hand at not burning holes through the metal. I pulled the Y-pipe off and cut the 3" tubing right at the Vband so I could weld the pie cuts to it directly and do all sorts of routing to get the exhaust to go up towards the floor and over towards the driveshaft tunnel. It's not my best work, but for being very fresh into TIG welding, I'm pretty happy with it.



It still hangs a little bit below the frame rail, but still wont be the lowest point of the car. Since this is just a temporary setup with the car not being boosted yet, i don't mind it scraping every now and then. Once the turbo stuff happens it'll be routed way closer to the car. Now that its to this point i can work on getting the exhaust to exit the rear of the car and then were one step closer to having it street-ready until i take it all apart again lol.

[Northern]

Lift the car off the ground and see if that strut bar gets any closer to lining up.
It looks bad in the pics, but the towers move enough that it's common for e30 strut bars to only fit when the suspension is unloaded.
It won't be the magic bullet to line it up, but it would be interesting to see how much it nets you.

[meltingmanmedia]

I've also had issues with wheels sticking out further/more forward on the left side of the car. Changed a lot of shit and it didn't seem to improve.

I'm almost tempted to buy a strut brace of my own and try to pull it some way or another to where it lines up correctly, and if it does ill go through and stitch weld the seams and make sure its all a little stronger than it used to be.

[Northern]

I've also had issues with wheels sticking out further/more forward on the left side of the car. Changed a lot of shit and it didn't seem to improve.

[meltingmanmedia]

Unfortunately, it's been a bit since I've made much progress with the E30. My Grand wagoneer daily has been occupying my time and my sanity. My last update was sorting out why the front of my car end is so goofed up, and I've determined it that i can't determine whether its been wrecked or not lol.

Im going to go ahead and say its very plausible, and some sketchy things will take place to put the passenger side strut tower where it needs to be. My boss has recently bought a K24 swapped 318 and broke it 5 minutes into ownership... But since he's a hoarder and has a giant pile of parts all over the place for the car he can't put back together, I borrowed his new strut brace to "check" how off my car is just for fun.




Strut tower aside, I've busted out the TIG welder that's been collecting dust in my office, and after some impatient practice and deciding I was tired of inhaling the black plumes of smoke the car makes, I've tried to make use of these Ebay long tubes and Xpipe I've had just dumping under the car for a while now.
The long tubes themselves fit, but not very well (to be expected obviously), The xpipe to go to factory-style catbacks was useless to me though. Not a huge fan of how most sound, and I've wanted to attempt to make one for a while now. So i cut the xpipe in half right after the O2 bung (tuning the AFR is much needed) to make an oval-shaped merge instead of splitting apart again. I then ordered a 3" Vband to 3.5" oval pipe adapter pipe from Summit and notched it for the O2 bung so it would slip over the remaining part of the Xpipe and very poorly welded it together. It's not very pretty, but it'll work and hopefully, I can make something a little better for the rest of the exhaust.




Small little update, but I'm trying to get the wheel rolling again! These two things are my biggest holdups at the moment so its good to get some things done to get past them!