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

[irish44j]

So the rear end is all back together, and my wife was nice enough to assist in bleeding the braking system with fresh fluid. Threw the wheels on and went for a drive and....wow. The back of the car feels about 1000 times better now. No slop, no toe changes on accel/decel. Feels better than it did even when I first built the car using stock bushings. With the Condor UHMW subframe and diff bushings I expected some additional NVH, but to be perfectly honest I don't notice any at all. I only took the car up to about 50-55 on local roads, so maybe some diff whine or something will come through at higher highway speeds, but this car is so loud in the first place it's not like it will make much difference if that's the case.

In any case, IDK why I didn't do the Condor rear bushings long ago, because it's well worth it.

Then I took some time and put together a master "to do" list in the garage. Thinking in the abstract it doesn't seem like I have all that much to do other than the cage, but once I write it all down, it's quite a daunting list. Hope I have the time (and money) to get all this done before Waste Management Winter Rally on February 20th, my planned debut for the car (and my slow driving in the snow).



For Thanksgiving we took a couple days to go down to my parents' place - they own a marina down on the Chesapeake and it's always a nice place to visit. Also dropped off my Christmas present request list to the parents, which consists of two 10B:C fire extinguishers and a spill kit, lol....very exciting :)

My dad's garage/workshop is slightly more impressive than mine...



And took the girls out on the boat for a while, since it wasn't too cold.



Worked today, but when I got home I had a package in the mail. Preface this by saying that for the last three years my motor mount setup has been with the Condor UHMW mounts (sometimes both, sometimes just one on the passenger side to increase throttle response with a stock on the driver's side for some vibration dampening). The M42 is a buzzy motor - not nearly as smooth as an M20 or M50, and one of the fellow e30 rallycrossers' broken motor mount tabs on the subframe pushed me to rethink what I'm using here. Though my subframe mounts are reinforced with the AKG kit, I'm stil pretty concerned about the M42 vibrations and the higher forces in stage rally breaking motor mount mount points and/or arms. So while I like the Condor solid mounts for road/rallycross/tarmac (and elsewhere ont he car), I decided to go with a softer material in the motor mounts for rally to try to mitigate my worries (valid or not).

Not wanting to go with the stock M42 mounts which simply don't hold up - other option being e28 535i mounts. That used to be a great option when they were dirt-cheap, but they've gone up in price substantially so not really a budget upgrade any more. So I went ahead and got some 80A poly mounts. I think they'll do fine and they're not too much stiffer than stock so should take some of the force off the subframe mounts, hopefully. Installed, the engine feels more like it did with stock mounts - e.g. much less vibration, obviously, since this is a fairly soft Poly (not their track or solid ones, which are stiffer).

Anyhow, they're motor mounts. Install was unremarkable and the motor sits on them. But pics since I take pics of everything, right....







The plan for tomorrow is to do the other sill pinch weld rail on the driver's side if I get a chance, and maybe make some templates for the underbody protection.

[irish44j]

So got the driver's side sill done, so cross one thing off the list. And yes, those are a few rivets used to located the piece while I welded it.



Then went ahead and pulled the passenger seat and the roll bar. The seat sliders will be sold to raise some cash, and the rollbar as well will be in Josh Sennett's rallycross e30 to help offset the cost of the cage.



Then of course a problem showed up that I KNEW would be a problem 4 years ago but I half-assed it due to not having welding stuff...The passenger rear floor had some rust and I just fiberglassed it and said "good enough" back then. Well, not good enough any more. It's even rustier now and time to replace the middle of the floor, especially the big "drain plug" area, since this part of the car sits low and takes a lot of hits from underneath.



With the roll bar out now there's space to do it the right way, so will weld in a patch panel this week at some point, as well as work on building some crossbars to mount the seats directly to (since sliders aren't allowed in stage rally).



tearing apart...

[irish44j]

yay, floor welding. There is no limit to how much I hate dealing with floors and 35 years of clay, dirt, and undercoating that have to be cleaned off or have constant little mini-fires....

Plus trying to do it with .035 flux core because I'm too lazy to change the wire....yeah, should have just changed the wire and made my life easier. Welding thin stuff.....still low on my list of things I'm any good at.

[irish44j]

So working on stuff....

First off, patching up the swiss cheese that I made in the floorpans with the various seats and harnesses and such I've had in this car over the years (plus some holes/damage from the previous owner and/or rallycross). One of my least favorite things to do is to weld holes up.



With that done, decided to just go ahead and pull the dash so I can sort out some of the mess of wiring back there. ok, it's not all that bad since I've removed so much of the OEM wiring. But some of my routing over the years has been questionable at best, so trying to get the wiring more.....organized. Plus I need to add a few things and modify a few things for Rally America/NRS regs. More on that later.





Also replaced my ghetto-fab Hella bumper mounts with some that are slightly less ghetto-fab, and don't stick out quite as far or get in the way of the front tow hooks like the old ones kind of did.



So....all that done, time to get down to some seat mounts. I was going to just use some U-channel running across the floor but two things: First, the only place locally that seems to carry it will only sell it to me in 20-foot pieces, which I can't get home easily - or charge me $15 per cut for them to make some cuts. Screw that.

Also I wanted a bit more adjustability in my mount locations than bars may provide. So decided to re-modify the 370Z baseplate that I modified for the sliders last year. This time ran some 1/4" flat bar under it, welded it to the baseplate, and fitted the setup directly to the OEM flat mount areas that are the strongest metal in that area of the chassis. I ran the flat stock to the rocker inner edges and the trans tunnel with small backing plates as well. I'm about 90% done with the passenger side and it seems to be working out well. Plus it lowers the seat as far as possible for headroom.

I also moved the seats inboard as far as they would go to clearance the roll cage bar doors as much as I could. The other upside to using the plates is that it allows me to keep the inboard seatbelt mounts, since I plan to keep the OEM belts in the car for street driving in addition to harnesses for racing.



weld-nuts on the bottom of the baseplate to bolt the seats side-mounts to. All of this took a lot of measuring and re-measuring and test-fitting multiple times, but it all seems to fit exactly as planned.

[irish44j]

More progress in the last few days. Finished up the passenger seat mount and built the driver's mount as well (though it's not installed yet, maybe this week).







Jim (my co-driver for rally and the owner of the Chump e30 I drive with, for those who forgot), came over for the morning and we got quite a bit accomplished, including removal of the front and rear windshields (to make cage construction easier), the sunroof delete panel, removal of various other little things that it's time to take out (sun visors, grab handles), and Jim spent some time cutting out the breakaway bolts on the upper steering column and replacing them with regular bolts (so we can adjust the angle of the steering column once everything is in place).







Josh S. came by to pick up my old roll bar for his rallycross e30 (also sold my Red46 skid plate, which is still in great shape after 4 seasons of beating, but I will be adding something more extensive for rally). Also a local high school student who had contacted me via email came over and we helped him out with a few minor issues he was having on his nice e21. All in all we had three generations of 3-series at my house today :)



Meanwhile, Ozgur says the cage bending is coming along nicely so hopefully we'll get that thing in here in the next month or so. In the meantime trying to take care of everything else so I can get the car logbooked as soon as the cage is done.

--

In other news rallycross-related....SCCA this year has created a new level, with three national championship regional events (East, West, and Central), which slot in just below "the" national championship that is held every year out in the midwest, and above the divisional national challenge series. Apparently the SCCA main office will run the three championships just like they run nationals, so there will be more organization, promotion, press, etc. So that's pretty cool.

And as luck would have it, the first East Coast Championship will be held at our home venue in Frostburg. So that is pretty sweet indeed - though it remains to be seen if this car will still be highly competitive in rallycross with all the extra weight that it's getting with the cage, bigger skids, etc. I plan to run a full rallycross season again this year as well as a couple of stage rallies (depending on finances, basically).

[irish44j]

As Ozgur continues to bend the cage up in Pennsylvania (we expect to do the install right after new year's if all goes as planned), I'm working out some other things. This week's project was upgraded skidplate.

The first part of the plan is that it will have a DOM tubing U-brace that comes down from the forward frame rails just ahead of the oil pan. This is where the "bend" of the plate will be. That will be installed when we do the cage.

In the meantime, doing the other aspects of it. The rear mount will be on the front subframe (though the skid will extend about a foot past that, and then have HDPE sheeting beyond that over the rear of the transmission. So this is the rear mount. I managed to score up a few pieces of U-profile steel bars that are used for the heavy-duty shelving we put up to the ceiling in the warehouse at work. So it's pretty strong, as these shelves hold thousands and thousands of pounds of stuff. I coudl have gone heavier-duty, but frankly I'd rather have this piece bend/break on a brutal hit than have the subframe itself do so, so I think this is about right (it's about 12-gauge or so).

In any case, I cut the length needed, and put another strip of 16ga down the middle, tacked that down, and then drilled it for weld nuts. I left weld nut lips down below to help with alignment of the plate (and protecting the bolt threads from getting maimed on hard skidplate hits, hopefully).











As to the plate itself, I've been talking with Ben from Red46 Sump Armor, who builds medium-duty (street/rallycross/track) skidplates for various BMWs. I've really liked the plate of his that I've been using for 4 seasons of rallycross - heavy-duty, stainless, and laser-cut. So I sent him some specs and he's going to fab up a larger one-off plate for me when he gets a chance. So that will be pretty awesome.

[irish44j]

So working on some underbody protection. This is HDPE sheet that I got two 24x48" sheets of, which gives me most of the coverage I wanted.

Anyhow, cut and mock-up install. Don't mind the hardware, it's just whatever I had sitting around. The final install will use weld nuts on the body side and low-profile inverted hexes underneath to try to get the minimum amount of ground-down bolt heads. The main key of coverage for me is the fuel lines, brake hardlines, and gas tanks (at least the forward halves of them or more).

So, here's some pics. Still have more fitting to do and more refining of the mount setup, but this is basically what it is...

















Oh, and some highly excellent door pulls (mad custom yo).....since I took off the stock handles and pockets for cage clearance...

[Mark 42]

Once you get all of the underside covered with panels of HDPE. you can take the wheels of and go bobsledding!

[irish44j]

And a little extra. This is at the forward end of the driver's side frame rail, which has fuel and brake lines running on either side. For this one, I took some of my scrap HDPE, cut 15" or so of it, and then put it in a vise and used a torch to heat it so I could bend it to a profile. Notched one end to let a jackstand still sit directly on the frame rail (when needed).



sloppily welded a couple weldnut inserts into the frame rail (one hole was pre-existing)



so with the profile it nicely covers up the hardlines on both sides of the rail for protection. Since it's right behind the lollipop and there for spray protection more than a direct hit by anything, I'm just using normal head bolts without much worry of them getting worn down.

[irish44j]

So quick update:

1. doing a bunch of boring under-dash wiring reorganization while the dash is out. It was a rat's nest under there so my cut-and-splice game is at full throttle to get it all straightened out and organized. I have a few interesting plans for electrical accessories, which I'll show once they're installed :)

2. prepping various areas of the car for the cage and skidplate mounting.

3. Ben has finalized the skidplate design with me, so he'll be making it pretty soon. Already have all my mount setup planned out.

4. Possibly the most interesting news is that the Wellsboro/Waste Management Winter Rally on Feb 20th - which is the planned first rally event for this car - is NOT a Rally America event this year. Apparently SCCA worked out a better deal with the rally so it's going to be a RallySprint event. Will use the same courses and same mileage as it has in the past, but with SCCA running the show that has a few plusses: First....I'm already an SCCA member so won't need to buy a $235 yearly Rally America license at the moment. Second....SCCA is lowering the price by about 35% of what RA has charged in the past. So, saving a hundred bucks or two is always a good thing. Otherwise, it appears that the rally will be the same as it always have, just with different sanctioning.

5. Nick came over for my birthday. He finally settled the insurance with the trucking company whose truck totaled the e28 in the fall, and I guess it was a good payoff. He showed up with his new rallycross car: an e36 M3 sedan. Looks like the bar just got raised for rallycross. I still plan to compete for the RallyCross championship again this year (while doing a few stage events), but of course he'll now be faster by a good margin over the e28 (in theory), and I'll be slower due to a lot of added weight. I've already decided that for rallycross I'll likely run the car with a full "stage rally loadout" - e.g. spare tire, toolkit, jack, 2 seats, harnesses, fire extinguishers, etc - since I want to be most familiar with how the car behaves with the weight and loadout. Of course, if I'm losing by a tiny amount I may take all that stuff out in the end, lol. We'll see.

Oh, and finally....for my 40th birthday my wife had a cake made for me. It's pretty excellent:

[shiboujin]

Shit son, you're 40? Gonna die soon. Happy bday old man!

[Nick_S]

Price for a piece of cake shipped to 80212?

[irish44j]

Shit son, you're 40? Gonna die soon. Happy bday old man!

I need to start working out with you so I can get ripped ;)

Price for a piece of cake shipped to 80212?

lol....I do have a few pieces still left :)

[ThatOneEuroE30]

That cake is awesome. I like the little blunttech tag they put on the side haha

[irish44j]

Well, hope you all had a great Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate, or just a couple days off work...). With all the family stuff going on I didn't do too much on the car over the last week, but did do a few little things.

First, finalized the design of the skidplate with Ben, so he said he should have it made next week and then ship it to me to figure out the best way to mount it. So looking forward to that. If it fits well, he has the template to build a nice heavy-duty skid for other e30 people (e.g. some of you).

Meanwhile, it's been in the 60s and 70s here in DC for the last week (winter??), but that gave me a chance to do a bit of painting with not much "real" work left to do until the cage goes in. So I did one of my favorite things cosmetically, with some new "ghost stripes" on the doors....flat black stripes over the original gloss black paint. About half of this will be covered up with number/series panels, but I think it turned out pretty cool. At some point I'd like to do the entire hood like this, but that's a summer project for sure.





For Christmas, got various tools from my wife and family, and a few things for the car. My dad got me two fire extinguishers with heavy-duty metal mounts (required for Rally America), so will need to figure out where/how to best mount them.





The in-laws got me an NRG quick-release for the steering wheel. It's really nice quality and I'm quite impressed with it. I knew that adding it to my momo hub would push the wheel out closer to the driver, but figured it would be ok with the seat back farther. Upon test-fit, though, I think not. To put the seat far enough back to make the wheel in a comfortable position, I do not have the good pedal control/touch that I like. So I just ordered up the NRG "short hub," which will bring it back close to the previous depth.

Also, previously we drilled out the security bolts on the steering column, and I put in some 3/4" spacers there to space the column more horizontal than the stock "school bus" angle. I did it as far as I could go without the u-joint binding or clicking....in the future I may clearance the joint to allow me a bit more drop on the wheel, but this should be fine for now.








Also got my DPDT switch for the dual-circuit on the LED/floodlights. More on that later when it's installed and wired.



Also my harness came in the other day....Jim will bring his own for co-driver duties



And a few Christmas-y pics....I work days in an office, but weekends I work at a ski shop (which pays for this car stuff, mostly)....so Christmas Eve working there we drank Irish Coffee and put on ugly clearance rack sweaters....good times.



Me and the woman who puts up with my obsessive and expensive automotive hobbies.