4drPwr's 89 Alpine Project - Back from hiatus

[4drPwr]

Yes, it's just a holder for you to clip the middle seat belt into when not in use.
Great work on the car btw, love these little DIY work bits.

Ahh, and here I've been rolling mine up and tucking it under the seat. I'll try out the receiver and see how it looks. Thanks for the compliment!

[sandlock]

nice work man, you've detailed a few things i have to do on my end thanks for taking pictures. how easily does the rear parcel shelf come out?

[fck]

good stuff, duder.

[4drPwr]

nice work man, you've detailed a few things i have to do on my end thanks for taking pictures. how easily does the rear parcel shelf come out?

Pretty easily. Remove the two parts of the rear seat, unbolt the ends of the seatbelts, pop off the plastic seatbelt covers, slide through hole in shelf. There's one plastic clip in the middle of the shelf holding it to the metal of the body. It's pretty intuitive. Thanks for the compliment.

good stuff, duder.

Thanks!

[4drPwr]

Quick little update here, but hopefully more should roll in as the summer progresses, I make money, and get more stuff done. As such, I've decided that this is the summer of maintenance on my E30, with very few aesthetic/form/non-functional mods, if any. Things like stripping the inside and dynamatting the floor and trunk, replacing all consumable suspension items (bushings, control arms, etc), re-re-restoring my leaking moonroof, and things of that nature.

One thing that had been bothering me for awhile was the remnants of A/C plumbing that I had left when I removed all of my engine bay hardware for that system. On a whim since I had my glovebox area half disassembled already (more on that in a moment) I decided to remove the two lines that come into the cabin. A couple of wrench turns and about 5 minutes total time later:



Very easy stuff, definitely a more intimidating idea than task. Now, the reason I was in the glovebox in the first place is a little bit of a story: About a year and a half ago I bought my friend's alpine headunit with fullspeed iPod capabilities when his car was wrecked. The headunit has (had) a little pigtail with a kind of PS/2-ish connector that would receive the male end of the iPod cable you had to buy (of course, more $$$ for them). The cable costs like $30 or $40 from alpine, and wasn't much cheaper online at the time, so I got an aftermarket Asia-special cable from eBay for about $10 shipped. Over the course of the next year and a half, I was plagued by disconnection errors that I could not determine the cause of. From driving down a bumpy road, to driving down a straight, smooth road, to sitting in a parking lot for 15 minutes and it throwing an error on the 16th minute, I could not determine the specific reason for the disconnects, other than the fact that somehow my aftermarket cable was causing them for some reason, despite the fact that a bundle of wires should be a bundle of wires no matter where in china it's made. Fast forward to this afternoon, and I decided to bite the bullet and go to my nearest Best Buy who stocks the cable. I get home, install it, and within 30 seconds get the "Error-01" on my headunit which means a communication error. All to familiar and maddening. I came to the conclusion that the headunits pigtail was a bit beat up and might be the actual cause. In a fit of "I'm going to fuck this machine and show it who's boss" rage, I removed my headunit, took the old $10 cable, and cut off both of their connectors. I connected them, stripped the casing off the cabling, pulled out my multimeter, and set about figuring out how 14 super thin wires on the cable translated to 11 super thin wires on the headunit. Once my chart was made, I stripped all 25 wires again, this time on the actual headunit and cable, and soldered them together, heatshrinking each individual connection, as well as the entire bundle when done. At this point I was sure that I could not have connected everything properly, since there were 3 extra wires, and I have awful luck. Lo and behold, it works, and all iPod control functions are 100%. It's as if I hadn't turned into a solid-state connection all the way to the dock connector which was a nice surprise in the fact that it worked on the first try. I went for a little drive about an hour or so ago and no "Error-01" so far. Only time will tell, but I've done literally everything I can now, short of buying a new headunit. Fingers crossed.

A picture of the almost complete splice job:



The partially disassembled headunit can be seen on the left, the two trashed connectors are in the upper right, which I used to map out the connections.

[xphiledan]

subscribed, this is a great thread! and you definitely need my rear bench to replace your icky one.

[4drPwr]

subscribed, this is a great thread! and you definitely need my rear bench to replace your icky one.

Thanks for the compliment! PMed re: rear seat.

I began work on the second restoration of my moonroof and slider the other day. Not much to show, but I broke it down to its component parts. It was riveted together everywhere, and I had to grind down several to disassemble it. I can see why some areas were riveted out of necessity since areas could only be accessed from one side, but a couple of other places are riveted that could easily be bolted together more firmly. I have a plan in my head that will allow me to replace all rivets on the slider with bolts and nuts for long-term piece of mind. More on that in a later post. Some pictures:

Black plastic top sheet:



Really the most important piece of the entire slider, the metal assembly and plastic shoes that slide back and forth on the track:



Inside it's literally just an OEM panel from the regular sunroof headliner piece. You all have "rare" moonroof privacy sliders sitting right above your heads:



Here's one of the main differences that I could see:



That's on the actual stock sunroof slider panel, and is cut off on the moonroof one.

Today I drove ~400 miles total and spent about 5-6 hours on the road. The trip was into MA to pick up two purchases, one from a R3V member
and one from a member on NewEngE30.

First I picked up these little numbers, courtesy Mossman:





Don't worry if your German is rusty, I'll translate. It says "These here be baller early-style genuine MTech 1 skirts." Roughly.

Second stop was for this random opportunity, courtesy Thehemiman on NewEngE30.com:





Four Thule gutter towers and two beefy load bars for $40, how can you go wrong?

That's all for now.

(P.S. I have a three sheet excel workbook going right now with $1600 in suspension overhaul parts, $1640 in general maintenance items, and $1752 in miscellaneous parts. So much for pocketing any of my pay this summer, but at least I'll be rolling in a fucking tank by the end of it.)

[4drPwr]

I am somewhat in shock at what I just spent. However, I'm exceedingly happy that I am actually accomplishing my goal of doing my suspension this summer.

Went H&R Race and Billy Sports. Decided to replace a few other things while I'm in there. R3V won't let me copy both the Turner and Pelican parts lists, but there's $1600 odd in parts coming my way. Full list is on my thread on E30Tech: http://www.e30tech.com/forum/showthr...76#post1106676

Also: keyless entry should be here Friday from England, very excited for that.

[davey101]

damn, congrats man

[4drPwr]

Like Kenny Powers, I've been to Mexico and fucking back. By Mexico I mean I had account problems for several months that just got sorted out, and by back I mean that my build has become severely outdated. I happen to have a few pictures from here and there that should provide a slight reboot to the thread, and where we're currently at. Enjoy (and by "enjoy" I mean to say that I apologize for shitty berry pics).











About a week ago I was driving on I84, coming back to UConn Storrs after selling some wheels. Strange noises, panic, pulled over. Rear exhaust has rusted out and has been dragging behind me for a quarter mile. OEM black exhaust tips gone. Needed to get home, so I disconnected the two mounting points and tore the resonators from the after-cat piping:



Carrying this in my trunk in case the cops at UConn bother me (they've pulled me over 3 or 4 times in the past when the resonators were actually attached, and it's louder now. I like it better.)



And my favorite picture of my car, taken by a member of the UConn car club at their dyno day:



P.S. Aforementioned trip to dyno day netted this printout, which I'm actually pretty happy with:



I made 142.4 to the wheels, and 155ft-lb peak torque. Not bad for a 180,000mile M20 rated at 170hp/163ft-lbs. I was the lowest hp of the day, but beat a lotus in torque.

Should be updating more in the coming months as warmer weather rears it's head, and summer comes around. I have an appointment with an exhaust shop for an estimate on Thursday, so that should give me an idea of whether I can accomplish what I want. Any questions, feel free to ask away. Obviously I got the suspension done over the summer as well as a bunch of other things and I'm happy to answer questions, but it's more than I feel like typing right now to list everything.

Thanks for reading!

[trackjunkie21]

Awesome looking car, what side skirts are those?

[Thehemiman]

Car's looking good. My buddy who had the 944 now has an 89 Alpine 4 door.

[4drPwr]

Awesome looking car, what side skirts are those?

Thanks! They're MTech I skirts. I heard they're the earlier version/meant for sedans :?: They lack the part that goes up the fender. Driver side needs to be remounted once the weather turns.

Car's looking good. My buddy who had the 944 now has an 89 Alpine 4 door.

Thank you; your friend is a smart person.

[herbie]

What shift knob is that on the interior pic? is that an ACS shift knob?

[4drPwr]

What shift knob is that on the interior pic? is that an ACS shift knob?

Looked through the thread and only saw one shift knob pictured. If you're referring to the one of the inside of the 6er, with wires galore and no dash, I couldn't tell you. It was unmarked and seemed like nothing special; I'm 99% certain it was thrown out. My E30 runs an OEM leather ergonomic shift knob with oval top.