Pitchblack Motorsports Rally e30 318i (now with M50) - and some Porsche 924S stuff.

[irish44j]

^^ I can only imagine the complete havoc that must ensue when a bunch of Texans go driving in the snow, lol. I was in Dallas once during a rainstorm and it was like nobody there had ever seen rain and drove like it was an ice storm, lol.

Nice XJ by the way. I used to have one myself :)

[irish44j]

Today finally we had a nice day, almost 60 degrees. As I watched the snow melt (thank goodness for a house with an all-day sun exposure!), cleaned up the "regular cars" to get all the salt off, did a couple oil changes, straightened the garage, played with the kids, and a few other things.

My kids love the snow, but I have to admit I'm pretty tired of winter at this point..



Meanwhile, I also decided that it was time for a cosmetic change. With nice weather, it means I can paint stuff again. You guys know I love the spray-cans...

For this season, the "safety blue" is out. I need a faster color, something less safe (lol). So red it is. This worked out well since I had a full can of red spraypaint from some old project sitting around, and I have two large rolls of vinyl here (red and matte white) that I can use in my wife's nice vinyl cutter.

So first played around and made some stickarz....for the local crew.







Then using a combination of paint and vinyl striping I pretty much replaced all the blue on the car with red









Wasn't until I was done that I thought about the fact that I have six blue wheels....which will look pretty funny on the car now. So I washed them off and scuff-sanded them real quick, and I need to decide what color to paint them. White is the easy choice, but I have some strange compunction to paint them bright red just because racekar and I'd never do such a thing on a street car. So we'll see what I end up doing, not sure yet.

Only things left to do before the first event in 3 weeks are to fab up a protective plate for over the fuel lines and stuff (the one I had last 2 years finally got destroyed at some point last season), do a few minor maintenance items, and figure out a new spare-tire mount for the mini-trailer. Other than that, the car should be ready to go. Can't wait.

[Dj Buttchug]

red B caps. do it

[TeXJ]

^^ I can only imagine the complete havoc that must ensue when a bunch of Texans go driving in the snow, lol. I was in Dallas once during a rainstorm and it was like nobody there had ever seen rain and drove like it was an ice storm, lol.

Nice XJ by the way. I used to have one myself :)

Thank you! You had a nice one as well. And yes, the struggle is real here with drivers. I wonder how people are able to get licenses to even drive around here.

[irish44j]

ok, since I have nothing to do but goof around, let's do some wheel ideas and see what turns out.

First I want to try some white wheels with red lettering. So I backcoated the center area in red, and applied some vinyl lettering I made. Then I sprayed over it all in white, trying to do a stencil. In the end, it didn't look good so I'm not going to even post a photo of the finished product. Can't peel off the vinyl stencil without "ripping" the overcoat with automotive paint. Works great doing crafty stuff like my wife does with acrylic paint. Not so much with this stuff.


So back to the drawing board, let's try it the easy way. I had already painted my two spare wheels red to see how they looked. Kind of like the color, so let's see how they look with some lettering I designed.

paint



vinyl



finished product



I actually think it looks pretty sweet, and plan to do them in opposite colors on the white wheels and see how that looks. I'm somewhat suspicious about whether the vinyl will hold up on the wheels (it is high-end outdoor stuff, not cheapie craft store stuff), especially since we run in deep gravel a lot. I hit it with about 3 coats of clearcoat, so hopefully that will help. I guess we'll see. If not, no great loss. Just 50 cents worth of vinyl :)

[irish44j]

So here's the white ones as well. I'll probably do four white and the two spares red. I actually like the red better, but I have 3 cans of white paint here and no more red, and I'm cheap like that......I can always re-do later if I want to :)

[irish44j]

As the days meander toward the first event (2 weeks to go), took a day off of my own stuff to help out Josh S. with his M52 swap, in hopes he can get it all together by the first event (yeah, that sounds pretty counterproductive on my behalf, doesn't it?).

So early Sunday morning headed down to the bowels of Washington DC where he uses space in a buddy's garage (formerly an old stable and old car repair shop).

It's pretty tucked-away..





and has cool art all over it







Anyhow, down to business. He has a lot to do. I helped out where I could while he fabbed up some engine mounts (using the cut-in-half Condor solid mount that originally was one of my mounts, as you may recall from the Ohio Divisional event)



workin workin





Good thing there's cell signal there



Anyhow, we'll see if he can get it done in time. I may head out for another day or two to help out, but it's gonna be tight.

In other news.....got new summer tires for the WRX mounted :)



Also....a new signup for rallycross this year.....in SR class. Epic Win

[TeXJ]

Nice looking FJ in there; fj80?

[irish44j]

Think so, though I'm a bit rusty on my FJs. It belongs to the guy who owns the place.

[stonea]

Well now I want some bottle caps...

[TeXJ]

Think so, though I'm a bit rusty on my FJs. It belongs to the guy who owns the place.

Yeah my yota knowledge is limited as well. Still a nice specimen.

[95maxrider]

Also....a new signup for rallycross this year.....in SR class. Epic Win

I foresee many broken rear shock mounts in his future :p Please tell me it has a V8!

[irish44j]

It's a 525, so I'm gonna go with "no"

[irish44j]

So it's looking like we are going to set a new record for BMWs at a rallycross here (or anywhere?), at the rate we're going:

318i (me)

325i w/M52 (Josh Sennett)

325e (Stephen, Eric, and Chris all driving it)

318is e36 (Mike P.)

325i (Eric Eisele and Neil Cox)

325is (Alp and Ozgur, if they make it)

325ix (Phaedon)

528 e28 (Nick and Bobby)

525 e34 wagon (Jeff Holmes and Jeff Geier, guaranteeing that someone named Jeff will win SR class).

So that's 15 drivers in BMWs, and there may be 1 or 2 others added to that. This should be fun :)


In other news, I changed the oil on the car today, so it is officially ready for the season to start in 10 days. Now I can just slack off.

[irish44j]

EDIT: Made some edits after re-reading my terrible handwriting on my tally sheets, lol.

I've always wondered what this car weighs, but I'm not going to drop a couple hundred bucks to go to a race shop and get on some scales. So I did it the ghetto way today.

I'll preface this by saying that measurements were made with the car in full "race" trim with a full tank of gas. No spare, no jack, no rear seat load panels. Exactly as the car is in competition except with the street wheels on vs. the rally wheels (the rally wheels/tires are 4lbs each heavier than the star specs on the wider euroweaves), so add 16lbs to the top of my meaurements.

I went to Walmart and bought four fairly cheap scales with a metal top. They have a max weight rating of 350lbs each, but the intention was to keep all of them below 200lbs where they're most accurate. To check them I weighed myself on all four and then on my $$ very accurate digital bathroom scale. The cheapos were always within 2-3 lbs of correct, plus or minus depending on where I stood on the scale (I tried different positions - in the middle, on the edge, etc). So that figures out to about a 1.5% margin of error per scale. Figure I'm using four per corner, so my max margin of error is about 6% either way.

I set up the scales in a square with a stiff board across them to distribute the weight, and thin pads in the middle of each one in the "best" position under the boards. I tried to center the tire as much as possible to distribute the weight across all four scales to keep them in the "middle range" where they're most accurate.

I also did each wheel at least 5-6 times with the scales rearranged in different positions, to try to see if the readings were affected greatly. Again, I found that no matter what I did, the readings were never more than about 3% off either direction.

So, did a crapload of measurements (with the car empty) and then did all the same ones with me in the driver's seat (wife reading off the numbers on the scales to me).

Then did a bunch of number crunching, and here's what I came up with:

Empty:
RF: 567 AVG (hi: 587)
LF: 611 AVG (hi: 644)
LR: 520 AVG (hi: 526)
RR: 552 AVG (hi: 564) - note that battery is in right rear corner
TOTAL AVG: 2250
+16 lbs for rally tires, so 2276.

So I'm pretty confident that the car is a good bit under 2300lbs with the rally tires on in full competition trim. Note that this car has bumpers, all lighting, heater core, two seats, both OEM seatbelts, 6-point harness too, OEM dash and gauges, and a Kirk 4-point rollbar. Hood and trunk are not gutted.

So pretty pleased with that weight, since it's in the ballpark I had estimated in my head (well, I expected around 2200). I do find it very strange that the front left is so much heavier than the front right, and I can't really figure out why that is unless the M42 just naturally rests most of its weight on the driver's side.

And here are my avg. measurements with me sitting in the car:
RF: 563
LF: 700
LR: 595
RR: 574
total: 2432

So that's a bit off there since fully dressed with my boots on I'm around 180lbs. But with two of the scales less visible and my wife not interested in getting under the car to read them straight-down, I expected the "me in the car" measurements to be off a bit, perhaps.

Anyhow, not meant to be a "scientific" measurement, but I think it's a pretty good ballpark to say that my car in race trim w/o driver is "right around 2350lbs" but the poor corner balance is somewhat annoying. It could explain why I've always felt the car is more balanced when I have a passenger riding on runs.

I'm not going to do any suspension "tuning" for the time being - I want to run it next weekend first to see how it feels first.

And thinking about how much weight I COULD lose on this car if it didn't need to be street legal......bumpers, lights, 2nd seat, front windows, rear windshield glass, gut hood/trunk, etc.....I think it would certainly be possible to get the car to 2100lbs even if it were bare-bones. I have no plans to do that, though.

Jesse Yuvali just posted up his corner weights for fully stage-rally-prepped M42 car (with all the stage gear...spare tires, tools, etc). That shows 2586 lbs, for comparison.

I don't have a pic of the other two sheets of numbers, but yeah....what a mess lol. This was the "first round" (did two more)





And yes, the car was level all four wheels for every measurements (on blocks)