Barn Built Turbo M42 drift car

[varg]

I broke my manifold at some point (this is actually the second time, the dude with the lsx turbo e30 Dirk fixed it for me once already) but it cracked along the welds to the flange and the larger piece itself used to angle the flange. I ended up welding it the second time before another event when I found these cracks. After this past weekend is is cracked AGAIN. I've tried resolving this with poly engine mounts, two flex pipes in the exhaust more exhaust hanger, ect. I think having the turbo so far forward just acts like a lever causing the manifold a lot of stress.

I welded some steel rods from flange to flange on my crappy M42 manifold to take some of the stress off of it after it cracked below the turbo flange the first time and it never cracked again. I suggest doing this.

I like how they look on the purple car above, but I'm not sure how it'll look with just rear over fenders and no fronts. Think it'll look funny? Should I think about getting fronts too since my control arms are already 50mm extended?

:giggle: Your car already looks funny with the wide-track front and camber, missing trim, mismatched wheels and exposed IC piping. You should definitely go for front and rear if you don't want it to look any funnier.

[ccsdo5]

I never update this. I modded my subframe but lifting the inner tab up 1/2" to get the car to 0* camber and added eccentric bolts to it for fine adjustment. It currently has 0 camber and about 1/8" toe in for more grip. It's sorta fast in drift now and has wayyyy better tire wear.







I still crack my manifold so I added a gusset to the top flange but now it just cracks lower on the runners. Tubular manifolds just suck especially on BMW's being so high up. I want to try and do a cast M50 manifold with a bottom mount and maybe that'll work better so I don't need to pull my manifold off every 2-3 events. Even made a new downpipe with another flex pipe in it





I bought a Z3M radiator and made a custom shroud so I can keep the M42 clutch fan and run a pusher fan as well with it compared to the stock M42 radiator and clutch + electric puller fan. I have found my car was cooler with the M42 radiator electric puller fan and clutch fan (180*) than the Z3M radiator clutch fan and pusher fan(190*). So I put the puller fan on the Z3M radiator with the clutch fan and I still run around 180* just like the stock M42 radiator and electric fan setup. I would really like my car to run around 160-170* so when I do runs it'll heat up to like 190-210* I think I may need a bigger electric fan since I would want to pull more fresh air in through the thicker core of the Z3M rad. That's how heat transfer works right? Also maybe I should add slots on the aluminum part of the shroud thing I made.







I hate working on my car but I still drive it a lot so here's some pictures.


DSC_1192 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

DSC_1193 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

DSC_1198 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

DSC_0599 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

DSC_0600 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

DSC_0602 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

DSC_1948 by Justin Brisebois, on Flickr

IMG_5546 by Scott Hastings, on Flickr

Got a cool body kit from cliqtuning because my car already looks dumb so why not. I honestly think it looks sorta cool, it makes my car look lower when it isn't really that low..



















I also ended up getting the gruppe bavarian x ODP over fenders for my car so I can be dumb and maybe make big stupid three piece wheels out of style 42's and run a 235 40 r17 in the back of my car.

[econti]

Can't say I've ever seen a subframe be modded like that, but if it works then mint

Have you thought of making a brace for the turbo and mounting it onto the engine?

[ccsdo5]

Can't say I've ever seen a subframe be modded like that, but if it works then mint

It works but technically it allows the trailing arm to bind slightly. But it isn't noticeable to me while driving so it works for me. Also it's wayyyy cheaper than doing the DTM style modifications with the heim joints. This keeps the arm stock so if one ever bends or breaks I can swap it out with another 318TI one.

Have you thought of making a brace for the turbo and mounting it onto the engine?

Yes I have thought of that too but I think ultimately just having the turbo up so high makes a giant lever arm so even with that it'll stress the manifold out. I'm just surprised it breaks my manifold on the welds before it breaks my shitty welds on my exhaust pipe itself. I still think low mount with a cast manifold it the strongest solution if I can get it to work.

[varg]

I don't have it in front of me but I recall welding a steel rods from the turbo flange to the head flange on my chopped up Ebay M50 manifold and it didn't crack again in a spot that hinted at it being from the stress of the turbo bouncing around at the top. After that it cracked on the collector between runners. You've seen pics of it before that but I don't think there are any in my thread of it with the rods welded on it.

[jeenyus]

are you still using the Condor motor mounts? Maybe you need full aluminum and a brace to prevent the movement with all your awesome thrashing around?

[ccsdo5]

I don't have it in front of me but I recall welding a steel rods from the turbo flange to the head flange on my chopped up Ebay M50 manifold and it didn't crack again in a spot that hinted at it being from the stress of the turbo bouncing around at the top. After that it cracked on the collector between runners. You've seen pics of it before that but I don't think there are any in my thread of it with the rods welded on it.

Yeah I remember you telling me to connect flange to flange before. Problem is with the angle of the engine and how the runners are on this manifold it is hard to get to the head flange without making it impossible to bolt the thing on.

I just think all after market exhaust manifolds crack. This one has been wayyyyy stronger but still has its weak points. If my car was higher, and not as abused I'm sure it would be fine. A cast manifold is probably the strongest thing I can run, but even that could probably crack. I just want my car to always work, and for me to never have to work on it. (super unrealistic )

are you still using the Condor motor mounts? Maybe you need full aluminum and a brace to prevent the movement with all your awesome thrashing around?

I still have the transmission mounts in I switched to poly M5 mounts that I got from Varg when he switched over to the dark side of M20's.

[jeenyus]

Are there cast turbo manifolds? I swear I've seen some. Maybe those could hold up to the abuse?

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[varg]

Cast manifold... Bottom mount, poor flow, still might crack if it isn't a high quality casting. I feel you on the making it impossible to bolt on thing, that's life with turbos. I have a leak somewhere that is preventing me from making full boost and I'm not looking forward to the fight that is getting the manifold off of my M20.

You could try and make some small gussets that won't interfere with bolting the manifold on. Failing that, make a brace like econti suggested. Steel tubing welded up so that it bolts to the turbo outlet flange and connects it to the head either by the valve cover bolts (helicoil the threads and replace the bolts with studs) or over the top of the valve cover and down to the intake manifold to head bracket that bolts to plenum by the #1 runner.

[ccsdo5]

For the sake of updating this thread because I feel like I never do here's a picture of a picture of my car from last summer I found in a photo album my buddy gave me.




In other news I ended up picking up another shell that was crashed from someone local and it turns out the frame on it was pretty tweeked, but it was over all a very very clean car for up here in NY I gave it to another friend who was able to pull it straight and I have to admit the frame rails line up pretty much dead on. You can see how one rail was pointed upwards basically since the car went off the road and jumped from what the previous owner told me. I then gave it to another friend and had them install the prebent cage I bought from a fellow R3V member well over a year ago. It came out pretty good minus my crappy paint smoke gray paint job....















Now I just need to do the fun part of swapping all my stuff from the trashed blue car into this one... Which I'm not very excited to do as I'm lazy and don't really want to work on cars much and just sorta want to drive. But I don't want to pull the engine out of the other chassis just yet because over winter as I finally figured out my idle control valve and was trying to tune it my car decided to stop working and won't turn over anymore. It was having issues at idle of dropping signal and then catching itself again before it shut off which I guess was a sign of a bad cps but it was doing that for a while and still ran fine. Now it just doesn't even attempt to start. I tried to start it with the stock ecu even though the injector size it all wrong and still doesn't do anything might occasionally give a hiccup but that's it. I've confirmed spark and fuel in the test mode on my MS and then took a tooth log of the crank signal.









These four pictures are from one cranking event on my engine and you can see the CPS just drops signal randomly and then picks it back up to then drop it again. I've had this problem before and replaced my crank sensor with a brand new OE BMW sensor like 2-3 years ago. I can't believe it isn't working again :-x I should probably replace my spark plugs just to confirm they aren't fouled or something dumb but at this point I'm like 90% sure it's this sensor and I'm not looking forward to buying another $232 sensor.. A good tooth log should look like this



I don't want to pull the engine from this chassis until I get it to run again because I don't want to be chasing my tail trying to find another issue when I swap it into this 325i car. That's currently my life and I have a lot to do and buy in the next month or so which is when I would like to be driving my car again. I mostly just need to buy some good 5 or 6 point harnesses and maybe a new halo bucket seat for the drivers side. But no point in buying any safety gear unless the car runs again at this point haha!

[BUDNUNTA]

Good on you for having the frame fixed, e30s are so soft they pull back nicely

Kind of a shame so many would have been thrown away by now for a little rail damage

Have any videos of the car in action?

[ccsdo5]

Good on you for having the frame fixed, e30s are so soft they pull back nicely

Kind of a shame so many would have been thrown away by now for a little rail damage

Have any videos of the car in action?

Thanks I will admit it isn't 100% straight but it definitely close enough for a 30 year old car with adjustable arms and stuff to correct it. I had some videos on here originally but the embedded youtube URL seems to not work on here anymore.

Here's an old in car my friends father took in 2017 at a parking lot event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QxAfKq5EuA

And here's another from last year, as you can see that car was very tired and needed a new quarter panel so it just made sense to cage a new shell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmpHWR2sRjc&list=FLBJWWIReUuss5c_4KdmZI0Q&index=9

So turns out I just had fouled spark plugs I guess from playing witht he idle control settings and running the car really rich at idle for so long, luckily I didn't need a new CPS. I ended up finally getting everything swapped over into the new shell two weeks ago and drove the car all of 400 feet down the road then decided it was a good idea to drive all the way from NY to englishtown, NJ. Finished putting the car together at 11pm Friday night and decided to drive down at 6am that next morning for east coast bash.

It was a lot harder swapping shells than it looks and I really under estimated the amount of time I needed. Hardest part was these original subframe bushings that were stuck in the chassis.



Also did a lot of other things like put a solid steering coupler in and modified the steering shaft to accept the Z3 steering rack, which I changed from a 95 M3 rack. The M3 rack has more travel and allowed for more angle but it was dumb and caused binding issues at full lock and was progressive vs the linear Z3 rack. Also swapped out my ground controls with BC racing coilovers of similar spring rates. Only real reason for this was I can use my fancy caster plate witht he BC coilovers which didn't work on the ground controls so I can have some normal caster settings with the 5 lug setup. I also switched to a late model expansion tank with the Z3M radiator since this chassis had the mounts for it. and I modified the cold side intercooler pipe so I didn't have to drill a giant hole in the chassis.







Here's the engine outof the old chassis in the air. You can see how nasty it is from dirt drops and trashing the car. I didn't clean it and just dropped it in the new caged car. Also take note of the downpipe and the internal wastegate screamer pipe, NEVER DO THIS! It sounds cool at WOT on track but it makes the car sound like a tractor driving normal and I hate it. I plan on going back to normal downpipe when I get the chance to make a new one that fits better. Legit it took all of 45 minutes to pull and drop the engine between cars, I love how easy it is to do things on the little m42.







Also ended up giving my friend some help wiring up his poor 240. He has thrashed it so much the last couple years he put a tube front on it then switched to a custom chassis harness which was all cut up when he bought it second hand so I helped figure out how to make the car run again and wire the connectors up. He figured out the charging circuit because honestly I forgot about that when we got it to run. Lastly here's a couple pictures of the car from the last event, it ran great other than needed to swap fuel pumps at the track since I forgot to change out to the 255 pump and driving on the highway the car wouldn't rev past 3500 under load but would go straight to redline in neutral, new pump solved that and the car ran great all weekend.

[jeenyus]

Very cool. Slick driving!

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[econti]

dirt drop pic is brutal as fuck

[ccsdo5]

dirt drop pic is brutal as fuck

Yeah that one wasn't even too bad I only dropped one wheel I've had both rear wheels off and can hear the bottom of the car dragging the ground, and I wonder why stuff breaks all the time...

I did more driving though a couple weekends ago.

















Second to last picture is my favorite, because it looks like I'm going pretty fast with that driver side wheel off the ground slightly haha!

I'm considering swapping out diffs since I noticed I run out of wheel speed in second for the full track. I'm only on a 205-45-16 but also have a good amount of toe in in the rear for more forward bite and grip. So I don't know if I should try for a shorter rear end and go for third gear around the entire track or try running a bigger tire on a 17 but it's kinda difficult to fit 17's under the stock arches with 0 camber... The 3.73 in the back of my car now works pretty good for second but doesn't have enough for third so I might try and find a 4.10 but that'll make my 1st gear basically useless...