95maxrider's Rally-x '88 E28 build- caged, head swap and more

[95maxrider]

Would you be interested in e28 front Control Arm bushings? PM me for details.

For the lower or upper arm? I've already got some Moosehead Engineering UCABs waiting to be installed, but I would be interested in some spherical lower control arms, like those on the E31, just not in aluminum.

Here are the Moosehead units:


And E31 LCAs


If you could come up with a press in solution to stock E28 arms, count me in!

[silence]

We are currently testing front upper and lower CABS. Heres a pic out of the car:
https://instagram.com/p/zyJNgUsbq1/

[95maxrider]

Well I had a productive weekend with the E28!

First off, I installed a Yoshi-rebuilt (shiboujin) 3.73 LSD diff that I bought from Dave (jalopi). Our old 3.73 LSD whined like a spoiled child on the highway. Hell, it made a fair amount of noise cruising at 10 mph, and just got louder from there. Here are the specs from Yoshi on the new diff:

"3 clutch 0.2mm over shimmed 3.73 lsd using bimmer world clutches. The dog ear plates are Porsche."

Dave was extremely generous and basically did the whole install for me in his garage since he has plenty of tools and experience doing diffs. Aside from the hassle of removing my stupid 3" exhaust and swapping diff covers and axle flanges (it came off his E30), everything went smoothly, and I was pleasantly surprised driving home that I no longer had to listen to that constant high-pitched whine....just my obnoxious exhaust....hooray! I haven't tested the lock up characteristics yet, but I'm confidant it will help me put down power a little bit better in the dirt.

The new diff


Getting ready to swap parts


The next day, I went over to Josh's house and he helped me cut my rear E34 springs! I don't have anything to cut with, and he knows suspension stuff, plus he has a garage, so another win. We started with cutting one rear coil, and after reassembling it, that's where we left it. I forgot to measure the ride height before, but it looks like it dropped the rear down about an inch. Using his camber gauge, it looks like we added about -1* of camber to the rear, from about 0* before. So between the increased spring rate from cutting, the lower center of gravity, and the better camber, I'm expecting good things from this.

When we cut the rear springs, we cut from the top, as the upper coils didn't get as close to the coils below as the bottom ones get to the ones above them.

Top:


Bottom:


To answer the question that I kept asking earlier, it looks like the rear springs are not considered "square" as they won't stand up by themselves:


So in my opinion, while not perfectly tangential, they are closer to that than to square, and are safe to cut (to an extent). With only one coil cut, they were under compression with the top mount installed, so no need for tender springs or limit straps. I'm curious to see if I could get away with cutting another coil, but that would require me getting another set of E34 rear springs in case it's too much and they won't stay seated/under compression.



Josh smoothing out the edges:






Sorry, but I don't have any after pics yet, but I will soon.

In related news, I bumped up the stiffness of the FSB from the middle position to the full stiff position, and the front end seems a bit tighter, but I haven't really pushed it hard yet. Still, I'm hopeful this will balance out any additional oversteer I created with the stiffer rear end.

We then decided it would be interesting to do Josh's ghetto car weighing using four bathroom scales placed under each wheel with the other side on wood blocks to even out the ride height. It's not super accurate, but it's good enough for a rough idea. Josh's 318 with an M42 weighed about 2200 pounds when he weighted it, and mine came out to just over 2900, which is where I thought it would be, so that's good enough confirmation for me. Still though, it's not great to know that my car weighs a full 30% more than his car, when I know it doesn't make 30% more power.

Anyways, I'll post up my impressions of all the new stuff when I drive the car a bit more, but I'm feeling pretty good about where the car is right now! Big thanks to Dave and Josh for all of their help. I don't think I could have done all this without them!

[jalopi]

did you guys end up using that spray paint on the bare portion of the spring from where you had cut? because rust is apparently what kills cut springs

[bluej]

ahh, so that's what you guys were working on, on Sunday. At some point, I think we should weigh my car using josh's method for a comparison between the three.

[irish44j]

did you guys end up using that spray paint on the bare portion of the spring from where you had cut? because rust is apparently what kills cut springs

to answer your question on his behalf: yes, it got a good thick coat of rustoleum professional, let dry, and then re-install.

[95maxrider]

The E28 got to race twice last weekend due to me tearing an axle seal on my I30 late Friday afternoon, and somehow couldn't find one locally, so it wasn't going to be able to race on Saturday with the local BMW club. Their first event was in Waldorf, which has a good, but not great parking lot. The course had a few very tight turns that didn't really suit the E28, but overall the car felt pretty damn good!

I could really feel an improvement from the cut rear springs, and I think between that and the stiffer setting on the FSB, the car handles better than it possibly ever has. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, I'm an idiot, and I had not properly secured the battery like I should have after both terminals popped off at the last rally-x. Naturally, they started popping off again, but I caught it earlier, and solved the problem of the battery shifting forward and back so much by stuffing the 3" in front of it with some cheap carpet stuff we use to cover the reflective sound deadening. The battery hasn't moved since!

I did however feel the effects of low power steering fluid after my runs when I got some weird shaking feedback through the steering wheel when I turned it. This went away in the 5 minutes or so between runs, but I felt it after every run. I went home and topped off the reservoir and hoped that would solve the issue. Since I couldn't find a shop capable of giving my I30 a proper alignment on Saturday, I had to use the E28 again Sunday for the first Solo event of the year.



With no power steering overheating, a relatively secure battery, and the faster/bigger course at FedEx field, the car felt great! I ever beat some cars....just not very many. The car running in front of me is a 5.0 swapped E36, and its other driver put down the fastest time in my unlimited class over all the Cobras, which is hugely impressive!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7j70Dm-bhk&feature=youtu.be

And here is an awesome short little clip from someone recording from the side. My car goes by at 13:30. Granted, I'm not going that fast, but the car doesn't look like it's leaning very much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZqIkt-2qsw&feature=player_detailpage#t=810

I would REALLY like to get the car 'painted' before the next event, but we'll see about that....

[bluej]

sandy top ftw? ;)

[95maxrider]

sandy top ftw? ;)

Que?

[95maxrider]

Last weekend Bobby finally came over and we did a couple small things that I've been meaning to do for quite some time. First up was replacing the throttle cable. Even with it fully tightened/adjusted, there was still a fair amount of slack in the cable, so I wanted something new. I figured it got stretched or something when the motor mounts failed a year ago. I picked up a new one for like $25 and got to work. Turns out it wasn't necessarily stretched, but rather a little oval metal piece was missing, and it was installed on the wrong bracket for the TB. We moved it to the upper mount location, and viola! A nice tight throttle cable.



We spent the rest of the day doing dumb stuff, like blacking out most of the chrome trim on the car and painting the rear bumper black. It looks good enough from 10', which is all I care about. In fact, I think it all looks fantastic now!









Ahh yes, that's the stuff.

[irish44j]

Nice, but you didn't paint the roof? lol.

I'll bring your "new" go-fast parts tomorrow. 6am at the usual meet-up spot in G-town. Looks like we're running on grass tomorrow, not gravel. Adam's trying out a new section of the giant venue :D

[95maxrider]

Nice, but you didn't paint the roof? lol.

I'll bring your "new" go-fast parts tomorrow. 6am at the usual meet-up spot in G-town. Looks like we're running on grass tomorrow, not gravel. Adam's trying out a new section of the giant venue :D

Nope, it was a little too cold and they were calling for rain, so the roof was a no go.

Where on our venue is there grass? I thought the entire place was gravel?

[irish44j]

The gravel area is only like 20% of the actual property. Looks like the area rumored to be used is on the other side of that little "ridge" that everyone goes over to take a piss, lol. The gravel was laid there by the government for trailer parking. The rest of the property is probably old farmland or something. Should be interesting.

Guess we'll see when we get there.

I suspect Adam is trying out options for areas to use for the NEDiv National Challenge event.

[95maxrider]

Rally-x Event #2 5/3/15

With all the recent work done to the car, I was eager to get it back to its natural habitat and see what it could do in the dirt. Thankfully, my impressions of the car from the last auto-x didn't lie; the car was excellent!

To recap, I "secured" the battery, added more power steering fluid, increased the stiffness of the FSB from medium to full stiff, cut a coil from the rear springs, and swapped in a rebuilt 3.73 LSD diff. Upon loading up the car, I noticed how the rear rally tires are almost bald, but I have some spares that are slightly less bald.

Either way, the car felt PERFECT straight out the gate. Everything is doing exactly what I want it to do, and it's just glorious. Sure, the car could use more power (what car couldn't?), but really, the car is just about perfect. I bet lowering the front an inch or so would make it even better, but I really had zero complaints about the car's behavior.

I started out the AM runs by hitting a cone, but by the third run I had pulled ahead of Josh and I stayed there the rest of the day. The course was pretty wide open with no super tight sections, which certainly is to my advantage. By the end of the AM session I had a 3 second lead and the fastest individual run by about 0.3 second in the MR run group. As the PM session wore on, I slowly put more time between Josh and myself. I hit one more cone, for a total of two, but Josh hit five for the day. Again, I put down the fastest clean time in the MR group in the PM session by about 0.3 second, and ended up about 9 seconds ahead of Josh. I even beat the stock AWD champ by about 4 seconds! Here's a shot of the results for my class:



And a video with my best AM/PM runs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOJtRgAbP4A

And I just had to copy the following description that Josh used in his review of the event:

In any case, I’ve taken to thinking of that line in Top Gun where Goose is like “Mav, that’s Iceman. They call him iceman because that’s how he flies: ice-cold, no mistakes. He wears you down, you do something stupid, he’s got you.”

So Nick is pretty much Iceman (except he doesn’t get as many girls). Because he drives no –mistakes (or at least, very occasional) and if his competitors make a mistake it’s pretty much over because Nick may not always put up the FTD runs, but he always puts down consistently near-fastest runs and never has any major screw-ups to let you back in once you make a mistake. He actually got 2 cones (in 14 runs) which is unusually high for him, but with the lead he just kept on laying down good run and none of them deviated by about more than 1 second from each other, so that’s pretty consistent on a course with constantly-changing conditions. He also laid down the fastest clean run of the MR class at 46.3 seconds on his last run.

Thanks buddy ;)

[95maxrider]

Rally-x #3 5/31/15

I was feeling pretty good about the third event coming into it. The car felt great, and I was eager for a second win against Josh. M52Josh didn't have his swap ready yet, and sat the event out to work on the car. I was excited to pick up a set of new/used rally tires from a guy racing with us for the great price of $180! I haven't been rotating the rally tires front to rear at all, so the rears are pretty much worn down, while the fronts still have a pretty good amount of tread left.

Unfortunately, when I went to start the car for the drive through, it wouldn't start! I naturally checked the battery connectors, as the battery had a tendency to move around quite a bit due to a lack of tie down in the battery box, and the terminals would pop off. It even happened on the drive to the event! Somehow the positive wire worked its way loose, and when I turned on the headlights as we were going up a super steep hill, the car bucked and tried to stall, so I turned them back off real quick and pulled into our normal rest stop location.

Back to the race. We checked a bunch of things but couldn't find the problem. After letting it sit for a while, it started up, hooray! But as I pulled up to the line, the car cut off. It restarted easily, but I knew something was wrong. On my second run, I got about 80% of the way through the course when the car died on course. Apparently it took me about 40 seconds to get moving again, by which point I had basically lost the race for the day, cause there ain't no coming back 40 seconds. Fuck. Thankfully Josh is a good sport and let me co-drive his car AGAIN! I hopped in his car having not driven it since he put on coilovers and disconnected the RSB, and immediately beat his fastest time by half a second, and ended up with the fastest clean time in the morning.

After much poking around in the area where the dash should be, Mike (2.5 RS, crazy FC RX7) found a wire that appeared to be the culprit. By jiggling the wire, he could make the car cut off. I proceeded to wrap the plastic box the wire went into with about half a roll of electrical tape to ensure the bog didn't jiggle around and the wire couldn't move out of place. Half way through the afternoon session I got it running and did the last few races in it. If I hadn't hit a cone on the first run I would have had the fastest time, but Josh's cleanest run was a tenth faster than mine. Josh of course won the event handily, some 34 seconds ahead of me, back in 5th place. That gives Josh two wins to my one. I had some work to do.....

Here's my last run of the day:

http://youtu.be/ZUQnhMb8j8I