My 91 325i track car

[iwantspeed]

It's kinda weird for your 325i to have a 2.93 diff.

Since its out of the car you can rotate the driveshaft and count the rotations of the output shaft. And figure out if it really rotates almost 3 full turns. Or if it almost rotates 4 full turns.

Don't trust just that diff tag.

[kts]

Thanks for the input everyone. The 3.73 was the way I was leaning, it's also the diff used for Spec E30 so makes the most sense for the track.

Throw the boring diff back in the car so the car is drive able until you get a proper diff sourced and resealed.

Fortunately it's not my daily so it can be up on jack stands for a while. A local guy parts out a lot of E30s so getting my hands on a 3.73 LSD shouldn't be too bad.

[iwantspeed]

Throw the boring diff back in the car so the car is drive able until you get a proper diff sourced and resealed.

[AwakenNoMore]

Having driven 3.73 vs 2.93 back to back its a huge difference. Get a 4.10 if you want retarded levels of giggle and no top end.

[Reub_e30]

3.73 do it

[kts]

How I spent my Sunday night:

Step 1, remove a perfectly good stock bushing out of the Z3M diff cover



Step 2, remove the rear diff.



Step 2.5, mutter expletives as the rear half of the driveshaft comes along for the ride.

Step 3, put on work table and figure out how to separate the DS from the diff since it's frozen.



Step 4, look at the tab and discover you have a 2.93 LSD vs the 3.73 LSD you thought you had.



Step 5, ponder the meaning of life and if you want to reseal this 2.93 LSD and keep using it or look for a 3.73 LSD

Step 5.5, wish you knew more about diff ratios and what the best options for a track car would be.

Step 5.75, think that acquiring a 3.73 is probably the better way to go vs the 2.93 but you're not sure

Step 6, drink a beer

Step 7, post about it on the internet.

So yea this all happened. Time to figure out what's next.

[kts]

how does the car ride with bilstein black touring and the HR race?

Car is on yellow Bilstein sports. The black part you see is a dust cover for the rear shocks.

On the Bilstein sports + HR race I think the car rides great. I came from the Subaru world where I had a limited Subaru spec suspension a Japanese only model (Spec-C Type-RA) which was SUPER stiff (Called the kidney buster by some friends) and then a set of ASTs on my next Subaru which rode a ton better but IMHO the Bilstein sports + HR Races ride a lot better for driving around the terrible roads in DC and for weekend fun.

[5Toes]

how does the car ride with bilstein black touring and the HR race?

[kts]

So I moved to a new place last year, after unpacking and some other changes I was finally able to park the E30 back in the garage.



I fixed the horn. When I bought it it set up for a Momo wheel with a one wire horn button. That was a little iffy on if it would work so I added a ground wire and wired up the two wire horn that came with the Sparco wheel. Works great now.



I had a set of Ground Control rear shock mounts leftover from my E36 that I never installed that I put on the E30. The E36 mounts come with reinforcements that are too wide for the E30 but some work with my grinder solved that problem.





While jacking the rear up to do the RSMs I noticed the diff was leaking. A lot. Time to drop it and clean it!

[kts]

Time for my yearly update on this thing.

When I last posted I had a few post "remove and reinstall all the things" issues to fix. I got those fixed, popped was some improperly torqued bolts, the stereo/clock thing were a blown fuse, I hacked up a polyurethane pot holder to be a new and improved steering grommet, and the steering wheel is fixed.

For Christmas my sister in law got me a nice set of Condor's door handles.


(Funny enough they actually weigh more than the old ones that I removed, but I like the look.)

I got a new kick ass impact to remove the rusted on bumper bolts on my car, along with a William T55 non-impact socket that was a billion times better that the Lisle impact sockets I broke (multiple times) trying to remove them before.


So long you stupid bolts!


Removing the bumper I discovered some "interesting" fixed to the bumper carrier/beam behind it with fiber glass. It already had a DOT-R sticker on it so a previous owner or 2 seemed to have a thing for hitting things with the passenger side.

Fiber glass work:


With those hits the spot where the bumper shocks mount to the frame had been a little bashed in, as you can see here. (passenger side on the top vs the un touched driver's side:



While I was in there, time to fix some rust spots with a lot of grinding, some rust converter for good measure, as well as some paint. Also hit the bumper shocks for good measure.


The passenger side mounting point was moved in slighty, so someone used some washers (which got very rusty) to space the passenger side bumper shock back out. It measured close to 3/16" and fortunately I had some scrap 3/16"s so I made a spacer because I'm weird like that.





I spent way too much time grinding this thing, but hey it looks better than a bunch of washers IMHO.

Removed the valance and compared it to the new one.



The bottom photos are from an image I took with a potato, thus the bad quality. It's a little dirty but rust free vs the one I removed (which also has a lot of rust spots on the front too.

Lower front fender liners (#4) http://realoem.com/bmw/showparts.do?...51&fg=75&hl=26 were missing let a lot of water get on that valance over the years.

Some other rust spots to fix too:



I'm putting it all back together now with plans to remove it all a few months down the road to properly fix the rust, replace the hardware with new shiny stuff, as well as properly paint the new-to-the-car valance and bumper. Why not do it now? Well I'm in the middle of selling my house and trying to find a new place to call home so at this point I need to keep the car mobile.

Work has been slow thanks to my little baby girl (she's worth every minute, not trying to complain here, just saying that she's been taking up what used to be garage time) along with work-work, and a billion and a half house showings while trying to sell my house. Now that we're under contract I can get more into the car after my daughter goes to bed and/or on weekends and not worry about having to have the house looking 110% and ready to bail out of the house at a moment's notice for a showing.

[kts]

I got this thing back on the ground after a successful start up and bleeding of the power steering 2 days before my daughter was born. Yay go me! Ended up ordering a new E30 high pressure PS line and it worked perfectly. My old one had some extra hard line that made it hard to move into place, and the E36 one also just looked out of place.



Today I figured I'd drive the car into work, but some loud popping from under the front of the car kept me from doing more than about 15 minutes of driving around my neighborhood trying to ID the sound. I think it's from the front control arms and/or the control arm bushings. Happens mostly on tight hard turns on both sides. I'll take a look at it this weekend. I probably could have still driven the car into work just fine but figured why risk it?

While it was only a short low speed drive through my neighborhood that drive did help remind me how much I love this car.

A few things to fix:

- Popping from under the front of the car
- Stereo and clock are dead. I'm hoping it's a wire or fuse I blew somewhere. Strange since I didn't touch anything near the center console.
- Steering grommet. Popped right out. Stupid thing.
- Steering wheel is now off center. I'll just pull it, align it and bolt it back down.

[kts]

Work on the car got delayed with a few home improvement projects before the baby gets here as well as trying to enjoy some of the amazing weather we had in MD over the weekend.

I did tackle a few of the remaining things last night, only things left at this point are:

- getting a hold of a thin enough wrench for the tie rods (a friend w a ton of bike tools should be helping me out on this) and then bolting up the tie rods.

- finishing up the power steering hoses.

I tried a brand new E36 high pressure hose that people say just to reverse a bit and make a few bends and it's good to go. I couldn't see a good way to go about that with the hose I got:



So I gave it a go with the ole E30 hose:



A very small bend on the curly end that now attaches to the pump and it fit. It seems like some E30s have the HP hose with this curly ends and others don't, and the curly bit makes fitment more of a pain. I'm going to try bending it a tad more since the curly but is almost touching the pump (less than 1mm of clearance) and it also comes close to the PS reservoir -> pump hose and I'd like more clearance. It also sticks out under the body a bit a little too close to the wheel well for my comfort, I'd like it to be tucked up and away from the wheel well more.

Back to the drawing board on this. I'm fighting the urge to just buy a $$$ worth of Earl's fittings and go to town with a custom designed HP hose. I also really want this sucker back on the ground so I can drive it again.

[kts]

So over a year has gone by and this thing is still sitting on jack stands. :(

Between work, work travel, getting married, honeymoon, renovations on my wife's house that we're now renting out, a cold winter that discouraged me from going into the garage, and all the prep work to built a nursery and get ready for a baby that is due any day now I haven't been very motivated to work on the E30 sadly.

With the baby almost here I'd really like to get this car back on the ground so I've been making a slow push spending a few minutes each night after work and once the wife heads off to bed.

So when I last left off I was struggling with the part of the steering knuckle that mounts to the steering column. That sucker is rusted in place like crazy. So I just moved the whole column with knuckle and removed what was left of the guibo and got the new poly one installed:



Then I was stuck with getting the damn big ass nut on the steering column loose so I could shorten the column to get ready for the E36 steering rack I was going to put in. After almost breaking my work bench trying to undo that nut (which you can't order from BMW, they only sell the whole assembly) I found a spare one on eBay for $26 shipped -- Done. As a bonus the seller already separated everything so it would fit into a smaller box.



Since part of the guibo was still rusted on to the old lower steering column I broke out the dremel to cut off the @#$#@ stuck in place nut off the old column. Eventually it broke free as did the lower column with the guibo that I needed.



With that sorted out I reinstalled the column and got the e36 rack installed roughly in place with spacers so I could sort out the column, knuckle, and how much of the firewall I needed to grind down.



In addition to the rack you can also see the Treehouse racing eyeball arms I bought and installed a while back, I with those to give me options should I want to move to an S5x or M6x later on and need the room for exhaust clearance.

I wish I had taken a before shot of this rack since it was covered in crud. The seals look to be in good shape since there was minimal fluid when I removed the tie rod boots. I would have loved a new rebuilt unit but I got this rack ages ago for a good deal so I'll run it for now. I removed the tie rods it came with since I had no idea of the mileage and the e30 tie rods only had 4k miles on them.



To make install easier I put the lower half of the steering knuckle on the rack and would then only need to line up 2 of the bolts that hold the steering guibo to the guibo itself, with some luck they lined up almost perfectly.



Looks like I need to remove 1/4" - 3/8" of the firewall where the steering column just barely touches the firewall which is a lot less than I thought I'd need to remove. I'll get to that tonight and install the tie rods.

I was hoping to use the e36 steering rack cooler but I see that it won't fit with the oil pan, not sure if I even need to run a cooler, I'll have to see what autox/track folks do which is probably nothing and I'm way overthinking it.

I also removed the front brake dust shields


A while back I found a good deal on a set of caliper mounts for the RX-7 brake upgrade and then found these locally for $40, so at some point I may look into rebuilding them and installing them:



I also fabbed up some reinforcement for where the skid plate mounts to the radiator support on my car. When I originally mounted it out there wasn't much material there and I was worried in a big hit the front bolts would rip out of the support so I added some 16 gauge steel there and welded it in.



Finished and painted



1. About 2 welds in my gas tank was empty. I guess I had a small leak somewhere since I weld about never, as you can tell from the terrible welds and the fact that it took me until I was finished to figure out why my welds looked even more awful than usual.

2. I also suck at painting. My plan of using a newspaper held close by to prevent overspray did not work at all as you can see from the paint covering part of the oil cooler. Whoops.

[kts]

Enjoying the progress! The baffle will actually fit without trimming, there is a certain angle at which it just goes right on. However, it does take some finagling and is certainly easier with the engine out of the car.

I tried and tried but with it untrimmed I couldn't quite get all the holes to line up for the oil pan to block where I could thread all of the bolts in. I kept taking a little off at a time and eventually got it just right. For me it seemed to be hitting in the front so the bolts in the front wouldn't thread but nearly every other bolt was fine. I tried to minimize how much I trimmed off so I don't think I removed that much material, perhaps I just installed the baffle a little too far back for everything to line up completely for me?

With so many test fittings I mastered the art of snaking the oil pan around the oil pick up at least. ;)

EDIT: jealous of your growing tool collection.

Thanks! I've been going a little nuts with tools and tool organization as of late, my wallet has not been happy the past 2 months...

[SkiFree]

Enjoying the progress! The baffle will actually fit without trimming, there is a certain angle at which it just goes right on. However, it does take some finagling and is certainly easier with the engine out of the car.

EDIT: jealous of your growing tool collection.