Vorshlag $2010 GRM Challenge car - BMW E30 V8

[Burnera]

i'm really curious about the E36 non-M bumper cover. Does it bolt up to the stock e30 mounting points at all, or is it just kinda jury-rigged on there?

[lonestar22]

if u need any assistance with getting a perfect wheel alignment or needing tires mounted let me know.. PM me

we do alot of spec-miata alignments at my shop

[Fair!]

i'm really curious about the E36 non-M bumper cover. Does it bolt up to the stock e30 mounting points at all, or is it just kinda jury-rigged on there?

Its just rigged on there for now. We'll document how we attach it for the finished product after we do the flares and get to the front and rear bumper covers.

[Fair!]

Updates from April 8, 2010: We worked on a bunch of little stuff last Thursday. First off was a mock-up of the new LSD equipped E30 diff we scrounged for the car, but we wanted to put it in with an E36 rear diff cover for added strength.



We got a dual eared E36 rear diff cover for almost nothing and cleaned it up. The plan was to slap this onto the E30 diff and make new mounts in the chassis and reinforce the trunk floor to hold the added torque from the V8. The single-ear E30 diff mount is prone to ripping a big hole in the trunk when high grip/hp is applied to the rear subframe. We're hoping to have lots of both, so....



Well, the dual eared mount E36 rear diff cover doesn't quite just "bolt onto an E30 diff housing" as we've been told, of course. The reluctor wheel for the speedometer sticks out of the E30 case farther than in an E36 housing. This wheel hits the speed sensor and deeper dished E36 cover, so we'll be cutting those down to make the E36 rear cover fit.

Our Kirk Racing 4-point roll bar is here, which we want to have to mount harnesses to and for just more on-track safety (for UTCC), so we removed the front and rear seats to prepare for the install. None of those seats are going back in, and here's why: The rear seat becomes useless when you add a 4-point roll bar, and it weighs close to 30 pounds. The front seats don't look like they'll be good enough for track use, and replacing them with aluminum seats (used or homemade) will lower the weight even further. The goal is to lose 60 pounds in the front/rear seats, which is what the 4-point bar weighs. We hope to offset the weight of the roll bar completely.



We're also trying something different - just to see if it works. The Z3 rear 5-lug hubs stick out 1" wider than the 4-lug E30 hubs (see pic above, left), which is moving our wheel package outboard WAY too much. When we're dealing with a 15x10 and 18x11 wheel packages, this is critical. One of our team members (Chris) had an old E36 non-M rear 5-lug hub, rotor, and half-shaft, and we took some measurements - wow. Using this hub and rotor moves the hub/rotor face inboard .45", for a reduction in track width from the Z3 hubs of almost three inches overall. All of the other hub dimensions are the same, and it can work with the existing E30 rear hub bearings and E30 half-shafts (the E36 half-shafts are about 1" longer).



We slapped in one of the E36 non-M rear hubs onto the E30 trailing arm and it looks good. REALLY good for our big honkin wheels. This not only moves the wheel face inboard, but moves the rotor inboard by the same amount, so we'd need to make custom brackets to fit the calipers to the trailing arms to the E36 non-M rear rotors (we mocked all of this up but didn't take pics). This is still a work in progress so... "don't try this at home". It might be more trouble than its worth, but we're going to try it. We need to reduce track width badly, and this might work.

Speaking of reducing... we need to reduce the purchase price of the car within our GRM budget, so here's some stuff for sale! All of these parts came in this 1986 BMW 325e when we bought it, so we can reduce our purchase price by the amount each piece is sold for (up to the total price of the car). Once we have the car price down to $0, we're good.

FOR SALE



Front Seats, brackets and sliders - brand new! = $150 + shipping.



Stock Rear E30 Seat, upper and lower, good condition = $75 + shipping.



Stock E30 4-lug bottle cap wheels and tires = $85 + shipping. Re-painted gloss black this week. Murdered out! :D Tires are all the same size (195/60/14) and condition (crap) but from 3 different tire brands.

I really don't want to ship this stuff, but if a buyer insists I will. Shipping charged would be straight UPS Ground costs, no discounts or "bundled prices". We have to account for every penny on all bought/sold transaction on this project, guys. Send me an email with your address and what part(s) you want to buy to fair (at) vorshlag (dot) com and I can get you UPS Ground shipping quotes on any of these items. And no, I won't break up the wheel sets, seats, etc.



BMW E30 2.7L motor + 5-spd trans + DME = $300 (we will not ship this). We've had some interest from our CraigsList ad, and almost had it sold last Friday, but the guy cannot get it all back to Lubbock. Anyone making a trip from North Dallas to Lubbock sometime soon willing to help transport this drivetrain and help this guy out, please let me know! I'll get you in touch with him and yall can work out a price/logistics. Or if you want to buy it, its still for sale. Engine, accessories, trans, harness, DME = all for a package price.

One more thing... I looked at a Vorshlag/AST customer's E30 M3 at a BMWCCA Club Race last weekend that had the "right parts" (according to the experts) for a proper E36 front suspension swap: E36 struts (4200s), Vorshlag E30 camber plates, '96-99 M3 LCAs, '95 M3 offset LCA bushings, and '95-99 M3 spindles/brakes. Beautiful car, and fast. Anyway, the wheel is still not centered enough for my liking, and it has +10° of caster - which is enough to make for some weird weight jacking at high steering angles (seen in auto-x), we think. We already know we cannot fit the E36 M3 12.5" diameter brakes inside out 15" wheels, so this E36 M3 spindle swap is not going to happen in our project. We are going to make custom tubular LCAs instead - its cheaper and it can fix the wheel centering issue "more". We'll lose some of the caster with our custom fixed top mount we're going to whittle out of some scrap steel.



Next up: This week we start work on the sunroof delete (lowering weight, adding headroom, adding strength, and the old headliner was trashed). Team member DaveB has a method of re-using the old outer sunroof skin that I've never seen before, and it more than covers the hole in the roof while preserving the dual curves of the roof line. He did it to his E36 last week for $0, and it looks perfect. Never seen one look this clean and cost so little. We'll around play more with the rear hubs/brakes, and start tinkering with the custom front LCAs we know we're gonna need. The roll bar goes in after the sunroof delete is complete, too.

Anyone that has a line on some used aluminum 1-piece fixed back racing seats, please send me a PM. We might have found one for $50, but it would be nice to have 2.

Thanks!

[Schnell 318]

Great project, been following it for a while.

Sent you an email on those seats.

[e30guydownunder]

Love where this is going! My sunroof delete involved the rear half of an e30 roof, alot of hammering, some welding and then a bunch of liquid metal....stronger and lighter than the dual layered sunroof siliconed in the hole.

I'm still waiting for info on this mystery T5 gearbox!

edit** another thing. Whats wrong with some custom Lollipops? A few people have done them now using a big rod end

[Fair!]

Update for April 15, 2010: The crew showed up last night and we got a lot of work done. The best part - everyone got to plasma!

We had a special guest - JeffD from corner carvers forum was in town from Chicago and joined the team for a long night of destruction on the E30. Jeff had some great insight on E30s, as well as products from ZF/Sachs/Lemforder, for which he is a rep. He even had some suggestions for a clutch for my DSP E46. Thanks for the help, Jeff!


Jeff was kind enough to stop by and lend a hand - and do the nastiest of the plasma cutting inside the car!

Costas spent the night in obscurity, running the numbers for pilot bushing engagement with our "never before attempted" trans to motor adaptation. Once he had the setup of parts that had enough pilot bearing/input shaft support he bolted the pressure plate, clutch and bushing onto the block. McCall is getting us one little fitting we need today to hook up the hydraulic throwout bearing that came with the T5 we're using. No pictures of this work performed, as it would give too much away...



Meanwhile the rest of the Thursday night crew attached the sunroof and trunk, cutting away a lot of dead weight. We had originally tried to emulate the pretty and proper Sunroof cassette/frame removal tips from some online sources, but that was, like, hard. Instead, we went straight for the plasma cutter. Everyone loves sparks!


I spent some time with the cutoff wheel trying to do the sunroof structure removal "the right way". Screw that noise.


Looks like about 35 pounds of crap associated with the sunroof.

We'll skin the sunroof, flatten the lip/edge, trim it to fit the hole, and weld it in place this weekend.


Derek and Chris gutting the trunk lid. Me at far right, holding a beer in one hand and heat gun in the other.

Derek and Chris attacked the underside of the trunk lid, with plasma, heat gun, and putty knife. They got the bulk of the structure out, and the hinges, dropping another 7-8 pounds off the back end. The paint still looks OK and the trunk is still strong enough to support aero loads and such. Next up - the hood, where 50+ pounds awaits to be gutted away.



More work this Saturday - the April work push has begun.

[Fair!]

I have some updates to make later today, but I wanted to first share some video of an AST racer's E30 that I thought you guys might like:

Bob Ederer's LS1 powered E30. 2300 pounds, 411 whp, AST equipped, race car


Bob Ederer's LS1 e30 Racecar on the dyno - made 411 whp


In-car video from Hallett - Comma GT Feature Race - April 25, 2010

E30 LS1.... that's a neat idea! :)

His car has the target weight we're shooting for, and similar wheel/tire/flare package we are going for, but it has a tick more power than we'll have in July at UTCC.

Bob is an awesome cage maker in Oklahoma City, so if you have a BMW that needs some bars, he's the man.

Good stuff!!!

[z31maniac]

Excellent update! And Bob is the man. He was an important person in my swap. Lending not only knowledge, but gave me a couple of outrageous deals on parts that really helped out.

[Jean]

Great updates. And I don't care what anybody says about keeping bmws with bmw engines, LSx swaps are f-ing awesome.

[Fair!]

Update for April 24, 2010: Couldn't get any takers for last Thursday night but Jason popped by to help me a bit on Saturday, after we went to Ft Worth to look at this heap of crap he wanted to weigh and possibly buy... [insert 3 hour distraction]



Mazda 323 GTX, AWD turbo rally car built in 1989. 1.6 Mazda motor with a turbo, intercooler, cockpit selectable center diff, tiny little thing. Seems GREAT on paper and it looked classed very well for SCCA Solo, so he wanted to see what it weighed. We heard 2600 but its so small (95" wheelbase, 63" outer track) so how could that be? We had bench raced it to 2400 pounds in our minds... but reality was worse than we had feared. 2703 pounds for this little PoS?! Uhh... this is NOT the car to oust the Civics in ST. Back to the shop we went.



So that burned up most of Saturday morning. We got back and started cutting up the trunk floor. I found some 2" x 2" scrap tubing on the steel rack that looked perfect for the rear diff mount. We just needed to get the old structure out of the way first. Jason started with the plasma cutter and I was on "fire duty", dousing the flames caused by the burning undercoating. That crap is super flammable! I can see why racers go to such lengths to get it off the bottom of the old street car chassis...


Left: The stock trunk floor. Right: Time to cut all that up!


Left: Stock rear diff mount structure coming out. Right: Its gone

He had to bail after a bit of this nasty, smelly work so I kept at it, stopping to put out the flames every few seconds. 3 dirty, smoky, flaming hours later I managed to cut this out:


Left: What was removed. Right: Rear E30 trailing arm beefed up

Got the rear trailing arms beefed up (see above), and we'll be painting those Thursday night, and pressing in the E36 rear hubs and old bearings soon. The remnants of the sunroof structure are all gone now, too. The handful spot welds came out easily (Thanks Sean!) and the rest of it just fell out. Not much weight was left, just looked ugly. Now its pretty and clean in the roof. Dave has the sunroof panel and is doing his surgery now.



We also worked the previous Saturday, with Chris and McCall (is that right? I can't remember that far back) pitching in a lot of work. We test fit 3 different struts and even the E30 spindles and struts again, checking droop, bump travel, ride height, and strut lengths. What we learned after selveral hours of testing was - we really need E36 front struts that are 1" shorter than stock E36 lengths, so if anyone has any used E36 Bilstein SPORT front struts for sale cheap please PM me.


Left: E36 ASTs and E30 stock struts at full droop. E36 AST struts are probably too short for an E30. Right: E36 AST at full bump

Some of the inner fender structure was cut/clearanced to clear the 275mm tires at full lock up front. Yea, the wheel is not perfectly centered - to hell with that for now. We've got to get it going and we don't have time (or budget) to totally re-engineer the front suspension to center the wheel. We can make the flares look right and everything clear the 275mm tires.



Still have a lot of work to do on the body, but its coming along. The main rust patch in the firewall is patched and we have two more rust patches to do on the floorpan. We should have the E30 diff with the E36 rear cover mocked up in the car Thursday night so we can figure out where the 2x2" tubing should go, then we'll get to welding that in place and fabbing the rear diff mount brackets. We lack one little clutch fitting to get the motor/trans back into the car for header mock-up and construction, too.

More soon,

[freeride53]

how have i missed this thread.
the new rims look so fucking beastly.

[Fair!]

Update for April 29, 2010: The shop was a buzzing hive of activity last night! We had four people working on the E30 project (Derek, Chris, Sean and me) and we got a lot done in only 4 hours. First up we took a lot of measurements then sketched a design for the Nylon rear trailing arm bushings. Chris first cut several round blanks from a chunk of scrap Derek got for free a while ago. Meanwhile Derek made four steel sleeves (the M12 bolts will slide through these to prevent wear to the Nylon as they pivot) from some 5/8" OD steel tubing I bought last week for another fab project. I whittled down the round blanks into press-in bushing halves, pretty much spending the entire night on the lathe. I didn't quite finish all 8 pieces, but its close...




The 6 steps to making homemade trailing arm bushings - for cheap!

As you can see no exotic machinery was used to make these bushings - just a hole saw on a drill press, our cheap manual lathe, and a band saw were about the extent of it. Some clean up was done with a bench grinder and pneumatic die grinder. Probably 5 hours of work to make them - but time is free. Derek had a box full of Nylon scrap somebody gave him so we're going through the whole car making Nylon bushings to replace anything rubber... the car is slowly morphing into a race car it seems?





Sean spent the evening (his first GRM work night!) cutting the trunk floor to bits. After we laid out some ideas on the horizontal bracing we want to add between the frame rails (2x2" square tubing) and mocked-up the diff to see where everything should be placed, he and Derek cut the spare tire well out of the floor. It was just in the way of where everything needed to be. Dropped over 10 pounds from removing that, but we'll add some of that back when we make the "plug" for this massive hole as well as the structure for the rear bracing (the section of 2x2" tubing was 11 pounds all by itself - but its pretty beefy).





Sean then used a pneumatic air saw to cut a precise slot for the square tubing to protrude up through. It will stick above the trunk floor not even 1/4" - just enough to give us a landing pad for any additional bracing we may want to add (like some tubing between the shock towers and this brace?) The tube can be stitched welded to the trunk floor to add plenty of rigidity, and we'll mimic Bob E's spare tire well reinforcement tricks he shared with us.



That was some LOUD and messy work - the floor is a mess!

Derek and Chris spent the rest of the evening pressing the old floppy rubber subframe bushings out. Wow, those things are nasty! The factory presses in these two steel/rubber/void filled bushings into the subframe housing then uses a pinch press to stake the housing, keeping the bushing from falling out. This makes it a REAL bear to press out the old bushings. It took cutting the centers out with the SawsAll, making a press sleeve to push against the bushing's outer metal sleeve, and it deformed the press sleeve during the press-out process. This now custom shaped press tool made the 2nd bushing press out a LOT faster, though.




Left: Press sleeve we made is now the perfect shape for pressing out stock subframe bushings. Right: Semi-completed trailing arm bushing

We then sketched up the design for the 2 Nylon subframe bushings that we'll replace the flimsy rubber stock units with. Those new bushings plus our dual eared mounting structure/mounts should firm things up quite a bit and stabilize the rear differential and subframe. With the subframe bolted in place at the two stock rubber bushing mounts it takes almost zero force to pivot the rear subframe up and down at the rear. Couple that with a single rubber rear mount and its no wonder these E30's break subframes, rip mounts out of the trunk floor, and have all sorts of slop out back. That would be scary with 350 whp and 275 Hoosiers. Not a problem for long! :)

More work on Saturday, then a 2 week break on the project while I'm in Spain. If you are at the Barcelona F1 race, look for the Vorshlag crew. We'll be sticking Vorshlag decals on everything I can and snapping pics in the paddock. When I get back it will be a mad thrash to get the drivetrain in and running by.... the end of May?

Cheers,

[Fair!]

Update for May 1, 2010: Last day of work on the car for the next 2 weeks, so we made it count. Costas showed up early and we analyzed and brain stormed on the front suspension. He was worried about caster, and he had reason to - we measured it and it was nearly +15°. We put the 15x10 wheel and 275mm tire on the front and compressed the suspension to ride height, then turned the wheel. WOW. Way too much weight jacking when turning - not good. We needed to ditch a lot of caster... so we mocked up a new strut position (all the way forward within the stock tower hole) and got it down to +12°. And improved wheel position within the fender opening by about 1/2", too.



If we notched more room on the top of the strut tower it looks like we'll get the alignment under +10° caster and move the wheel forward even more. Better and better. But to lower caster more and still have negative camber would take a little more work. The goal is to get under +8 or +9° of caster.



We have plenty of room within the stock tower to move the top of the strut forward another full inch and still room inboard to re-gain the negative camber, but this would require complete strut tower top replacement. After cutting most of the top of the strut tower out we could replace it with steel plate, then make a place to bolt the upper spherical bearing to - that's no longer that difficult given the scope creep of this project. Costas was adamant that lowering the caster would be worth the effort, so more fab work is coming. We also managed to keep the LCA level at ride height and still got 4.5" of clearance to the bottom of the K-member on the short 275/35/15 Hoosier. That'll work.



Paul M arrived fairly early as well and I showed him how to run our little lathe. Its a far cry from the "real" lathes he was used to running in the past but he picked it up quickly and spent a few hours finishing the 8 Nylon rear trailing arm bushings I had started on Thursday. He also machined the OD on the steel inserts down so they are a smooth fit within the bushings. Lots better than my first finished piece. He's now officially our new Team Machinist. :D



McCall was there by 10 am and he worked most of the day on the front fender structure. Costas was already deep into one side so Jason took the other. They beat, ground, cut and wire brushed that sheet metal for hours.



We also came up with a plan to add some tubing to this area to help distribute suspension loads to the firewall from the strut tower area. Prepped those areas for plate and tubing also. Most everyone had left by 4 pm, and I worked until 5. Took a break and looked at 2010 Camaros and Mustang GTs with my wife, grabbed some dinner, and met McCall back at the shop at 8 pm and we worked until midnight solely on the trunk area.



I spent most of the day and into the night in the trunk. I was cleaning up the mess that plasma cutting leaves behind, prepping the frame rails for reinforcing plates (1/8" steel plate) that needed to be welded in (to weld the 2x2" steel beam to). Got the gap between the beam and the front of the trunk floor very tight. Spent a long time cleaning up the rear factory frame rails to be able to weld to them, and it was still a fiery mess to weld to them. Ground and brushed a lot of paint and primer away to be able to weld - but there always seems to be some around when the welder fires up. Total PITA to weld to painted, primed or undercoated sheet metal.



As I was cleaning the remaining rear trunk floor section I noticed a lot of rust the deeper I went past the "paint".... some knucklehead had spray painted OVER a lot of old rust. Eventually I cut out most of the rest of the trunk floor, as there was no "metal" left to stitch weld the beam to. I suspect a previous owner had let a leaking trunk seal go for too long and standing water sat in the trunk for months if not years. Nice. Oh well, we'll have room for a fuel cell if we can find room in the budget for a bladder (we'd just make the steel can it resides within). Probably cannot afford even that, though.



I measured a consistent flange around the back trunk floor section and cut out most of the rest of the trunk floor sheet metal. We'll rivet an aluminum sheet in place, as the structure will be more than made up for in our massive 2x2" steel cross beam. McCall cut up the 1/8" plate using the templates I made from cardboard and bent them into 90° sections. Got those suckers welded to the frame rails (with lots of clamps, tack welds, hammer forming the to the very UN-flat frame rail sections) then we fit the 2x2" beam between them. We got it in there with no gap to the front trunk floor, level, and perpendicular and flush to the frame rails. Tacked that in place then called it a night at midnight. Wow... what a long day, but we got a lot done.



That's it for a bit. Hang tight - after McCall and I are back stateside in 2 weeks work will resume on this project.

Adios!

[Be30mer]

cant wait to see the finished project. What do you plan on doing with the car after the challenge? Ill take it off your hands for ya...