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

[FunfGan]

Nice work fabbing up the skid plate!

This^

Looks good!

[irish44j]

made some modifications to the skid today:

- shortened up the front end to not come up as high, so as not to block the lower radiator opening.
- added some 14ga reinforcing pieces. it's still fairly light-duty, but these add some longitudinal stiffness at least.
- figured out my hardware (for the most part, need a few things from fastenal tomorrow)
- killed several drill bits and jigsaw blades in the process.
- cut out some clearance notches for the steering inner tie rods, just to be safe (though probably not needed)
- partial install/test fit. Much better than the original version, but still a few minor details to work out



the hardware. You may recognize those spacers as coming from e30 seatbelt bolts, lol


test-fit

[kts]

Damn man that's a really nice skidplate you've made. Impressive work.

[irish44j]

finished up a bit of my protection today..

First, the skidplate is now complete. Got all the right hardware (mostly stainless, but some grade 10.9) and bolted it up. A few points:
1. The rear bolts have spacers for clearance
2. The front bolts are to the back lip of the radiator support. It's not the strongest area, but I think it will be sufficient. I used some steel backing plates to distribute the load so the bolts won't pull through on small hits. Also since there is a gap where the bolts go (the plate abuts the lower radiator support beam farther up), I used some cut fuel injection hose pieces to act as large "shock absorbing" spacers. IDK if it would actually work, but what the hell, lol.
3. And of course had a bit of fun with paint, just because.

So that's one project down.

installed


front mount bolts


clearance to the pan


some lipstick






Next little project was to address something that I've been thinking about a while. The secondary fuel pump and associated equipment is just kind of "out there" just in front of the back wheel. I really would rather this stuff not get totally covered with mud and get hit with flying gravel, so a little bit of basic protection. I cut up an old cover for a rubbermaid heavy-duty storage bin. This is pretty beefy plastic with some flex to it. And with a built-in lip it worked perfectly for what I wanted to do. That area of the rocker is the one rusty plate (and has some bondo)....I'm guessing it got bend/crushed by a jack at one point and a p/o tried to fix it. I can't use it for jacking so hit it with some POR-15 and covered it up. I'll use the double-bracket rear subframe tie-in as a jacking point in the future.









Also have a line on some used Yokohama A035 rally tires (off of an actual rally car) in my size for cheap, and not too far away. So the plan will be to pick those up and use them instead of the snow tires. Peace of mind to have some beefy sidewalls.

out in tha sun..

[irish44j]

So to my wife's chagrin I just spent most of the evening reading the build thread about the Vorshlag $2010-2011 challenge e30 on this months GrassrootsMotorsports cover. My eyes are super-tired, and now I am super-inspired to work on the car. Or at least to take even more pictures of things I do, and try to do more interesting things!

Unfortunately, this week has been busy with trying to re-fi the house and messing around with my car budget trying to squeeze in the cost of the WDCR rallycross season package, some front camber plates for the WRX, some used rally tires, and a couple other little projects on the e30 (including water pump and getting this muffler installed since I have no welding stuff).

So, no updates of note today for the three of you still following this thread.. Maybe this weekend, now that the weather has warmed up some!

[shEck3lls0]

I have a welder... I can do it for yah. And stuart will be meeting you tomorrow. I will send you his phone number so you two can get in contact.

[FunfGan]

We still need cool stickers for Spencers car.

[irish44j]

ok, so I lied about not doing anything. Got off my arse and did a few things tonight.

First order of business was inspecting belts and pullies, as I've been getting a chirping/squeaking sound up there. To make inspection easier, I decided to go ahead and pull the stock clutch-driven cooling fan (which I will go buy an electric to replace it with tomorrow). Been meaning to do that for a while.

Fan takes a 32mm open-ended wrench.

IDK where this came from, but I happened to see it in the back of a drawer in the tool box. Whadya know....32mm :)



with the fan and shroud removed, there's alot of room in there. My plan is to get a fan with an outside housing diameter of about 17", and bolt it to the stock shroud, which attaches nicely to the radiator. We'll see what I can find tomorrow at the junkyard or at the parts store.

This should gain me a couple horsepower by losing some parasitic drag on the engine anyhow....and a couple of horsepower means alot when you've got a wimpy M10~!



old fans.....heavy and sucky



upon removal, I immediately noticed something that might have caused squeaking or other issues: 2 of the 4 bolts that hold the water pump pulley onto its hub were missing. And the 2 were next to each other, so it was basically only bolted to the hub on one side. Had a couple M6's sitting around, and replaced...



Issue #2, I had noticed that the alternator belt was a bit loose. Looked to be adjusted as tight as possible, but when I took it off (to check the smoothness/action) I saw that the original "ladder" adjuster bar was stripped at the top. Brilliant.

Just so happens I had been WONDERING why the p/o had a brand-new adjuster bar in the big box 'o spare parts. He never got around to installing it. So I did. After all back together, the belt deflects less and the alternator sits more solid. Excellent.

old and new


car does have a virtually new alternator, so that's a plus


next order of business may be to do the water pump. It seems to be working fine and doesn't make any noise, but it looks pretty old. Project for later this spring I think, or maybe sooner. ALl the coolant hoses are pretty mushy and old-looking, so I think I'll replace them soon as well.

[irish44j]

I have a welder... I can do it for yah. And stuart will be meeting you tomorrow. I will send you his phone number so you two can get in contact.

sounds good on tomorrow. I didn't hear from the guy today, but I'm assuming it's still on.

I make take you up on the welder, we'll see. That would mean a long haul up to b-more in the e30, which doesn't sound like that much fun at the moment, lol. But we'll see :)

We still need cool stickers for Spencers car.

truth. I'll see if I can find some random ones tomorrow to give you. Probably all ski and snowboard-related, lol.....but they're stickers! I think I have some pelicanparts ones sitting around too, lol.

[FunfGan]

truth. I'll see if I can find some random ones tomorrow to give you. Probably all ski and snowboard-related, lol.....but they're stickers! I think I have some pelicanparts ones sitting around too, lol.

Odd. Was just thinking my board needed some more stickers for this weekend

Then again, maybe I shouldn't sticker a limited run Forum...

[irish44j]

today was a travel day.....250 miles round trip in heavy traffic and rain. Yay. But did manage to kill 2 birds with 1 stone:

First, sold my bottlecaps with the snow tires to Spencer and Stuart for their rallycross e30, for some cash and trade for one of their sets of bottlecaps with old tires on them.

Second, met up with Kevin Turner, a local rally guy, to buy one of his used sets of 185/14 Yoko A035 rally tires (medium compound), which have alot of life left on them. Also picked up a second set for Shawn (moxnix on GRM) for his RX7 rallycrosser.

I got up to Baltimore early, so made a quick stop at the big pick-n-pull yard (Crazy Ray's) there. It was raining, I didn't really come prepared to dig around the yard so only had a fleece on and a few tools with me, lol.

Didn't see any e30s there, but there were a ton of e36s, and I pulled the aux fan off of one of them. It has more blades (and curved for higher cfm) than the stock e30 fan, and I may mount it as either a pusher or puller. We'll see how much cleareance I have on the backside of the radiator. It'll be tight, but there is more room on an M10 car than on the sixes, at least. If not, I'll order a Spal.

Anyhow, some pics as usual

beautiful older 5-series I saw on the way out of town


loaded up


e36 fan

[irish44j]

in other "small victories".....as I was about to order a new water pump, something in the back of my mind told me to go look at past orders. I haven't seen a water pump in my garage in the last few months, so figured I must have forgotten to order it previously. Not the case. Old order form said I had received one (and a 71-degree thermostat). Hmm..

Dug through all my parts boxes...nothing. Not in the car. Finally looked in my big cabinet where all my GT6 parts are. Whadya know, its a Graf water pump and a thermostat, still in the shipping box, shipped back in September. I probably posted about it in this thread back then......

This is what happens when doing too many things at once, and almost cost me an extra $60.

And now I have a project for this weekend. I still need to get some new hoses though. Hopefully the 2 local auto parts (non-chain) stores will have some hoses that will work for me. I'll pull the beat old stock ones and bring them in and see, I guess.

Also have an ebay bid on a 16" low-profile Spal fan, which will fit in my OEM inside shroud (17" inside diameter) if I win it. If not, will order a new one. Don't want to put the clutch fan back in.

I've now done about 95% of the stuff I wanted to get done on this car before the first rallycross (coming up in about 3 weeks), with most of the other projects not in the "urgent" category.

At this point, my primary remaining concerns, none of which will be addressed before the first event, are:
1. Engine. It runs fine, sounds fine. I'm still paranoid about old engines on long drives, and Summit is about 100 miles from here and 100 miles back after the event. I'll probably do a few hour-long weekend drives locally just to ease my mind.
2. I still have a feeling that perhaps the input shaft bearing on my diff is bad. There seems to be a bit of noise back there, which was unchanged when I swapped the 318 rear suspension/hubs for 325 stuff, so I don't think it is wheel bearing realted or anything. That leaves the diff, or just my imagination. Or maybe that's a normal noise and I"m just hearing it alot since I have new bushings in the entire back end (some poly) and no insulation and no back seats to absorb the sound.

Not something I'm terribly worried about at the moment, but I'll have to turn up the 2-speaker stereo "system" to make me not hear it, and so not worry about it, lol.

[CW325]

Nice find getting all those tires. Did you ever get the strut brace figured out?

[irish44j]

did some maintenance on the Subaru tonight and switched on the summer tires, since this winter has been a bust and I want my performance back...

did get a couple little tiny projects done on the e30.

First: a brand-new junkyard-sourced cargo net from a G35 (including the mounting "nubs") on the rear seatback piece. Just because you can never have too many cargo nets to carry random crap...or reading material



Second, after talking to Shawn last night was thinking about how much of a hassle it will be to use my GoPro suction mount on a super-dirty car (not a problem in autocross, but definitely in rallycross). So went to the box 'o GoPro parts and stuck on a couple perma-mount clips, one on hoot front, and one on the roof. I'll probably put a couple more on, perhaps one on the side (my favorite view), and one on the trunk to look backwards. Why not...

[irish44j]

I've been putting off doing cooling stuff for a while....I hate antifreeze with a passion. But it was time. So after making a huge mess of my driveway (hopefully will not kill any local wildlife, cleaned up as good as possible) with antifreeze, I replaced the water pump (the old one looked ok, but I'm in there so why not. I'll keep the old one as a spare), cleaned up the pulleys, replaced the thermostat with a 71* one, replaced the upper radiator hose (the old one was really soft). The other hoses were newer and in good shape, and no local replacements so I kept them. New clamps everywhere. Also put a new accessory belt on, which got rid of my 3k+ rpm squealing that is a major embarrassment.

Next project is the front brakes. I'm using some secondhand rotors and secondhand OEM-style pads. The braking isn't as good as I'd like, and I get alot of squeaking and squealing. Next week will get the rotors turned and get some Hawk HPS or HP+, since I hear Pep Boys is clearing out HPS at super-low prices. We'll see if they have any e30 pads.

Still looking for a 16" electric fan, but today for 50 miles the car ran well below mid-temperature on the gauge with the new thermostat and 50 degree weather. I may put the 80 degree back in eventually, but this will do for the moment.

pics, as usual
pump and accessories off



the old stuff, pretty grungy





New belt. It was the cheap one at the local parts store ($4.99 vs. 18.99 for the "better" one). It's made in the USA and looks fine. I picked up a 2nd one for a spare, just in case



put back together. DId some corkscrew paint on the water pump pulley, just for fun







SPent some time last night "fixing" my disintegrating Bentley manual. Used a whole roll of packing tape, going page by page to reattach the book back together. It's not pretty, but it works!



Tried to hook up the AccessPort to bump my boost up to 18psi like the Subie runs. Sadly, it didn't work on the e30 :/ haha....