'88 325is M30 street car-->S54 -->S50 -->M54 Enduro Race car

[kronus]

You should stitch weld the pinch weld you cut above the wheels. We did the same mod for the same reason and the front lost a bunch of rigidity and that seam started pulling apart.

Interesting sleeve. I just put my Lithuanian adapters on and yeah, no idea how the bearing will ever come off them.

[Jb325is]

Interesting, I put a couple little "test" tack welds on there to see how much it was actually flexing. Good to hear that from someone with experience. I'll probably just MIG it when we do the exhaust.

I am excited about the sleeve, taking the prototype home right now to test fit.

[Jb325is]

Test fitting sleeve

2016-10-27_06-06-07 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

I missed a little bit on the fit for the bearing, but I think that has been the case for some of the sleeve kits that are out right now as well. I do not think it's necessary to be hammering races on, and if one came off with the hub every now and then, I think that'd be pretty alright too. Pulling the struts back off the car to be welded this weekend, hopefully. Other than that, I'm going to have the "dust cap step" bore deepened slightly, as I overshot there on purpose because I didn't know where my rotor fitment would be. I need to go about 2.5mm deeper, which will move the sleeve 2.5mm further onto the e30 spindle and align perfectly with my existing caliper bracket for the e46 m3 brakes

[ngampleh]

Seem legit..!!
So, with this weld on sleeve...
Will it still use rotor spacers from Nasieg kit?

[Jb325is]

Yes. Without the spacers you lose some thread/material engagment

[ngampleh]

Here is a picture of the caster issue... Wheel is way forward in the wheelwell and is going to hit everything up there.

20160802_203519 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

Looks have plenty room to CSL brake upgrade (e46m3 std calipers & CSL rotors) :D

[Jb325is]

Got the car scaled and aligned today. We got the numbers looking pretty good, but the car has a lot more rake than I'd like to run. I'm going to try to have the rear spring perches machined, but I need to get the rear about 15mm lower so that's not going to take car of all of it. Hopefully we are able to dial out some of the oversteer from the rake with the dampers but we'll see. Posting my #'s here for record keeping, because I will certainly lose this sheet of paper. Camber is looking good!

2016-11-06_11-09-32 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

2016-11-06_11-15-41 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

2016-11-06_11-10-12 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

Still looking a little rough, but it'll get there. Planning on painting the lower fender black for now, to help the look.

[Jb325is]

Haven't updated this in a while but the car ran pretty well in it's first outing. We basically "finished" the car on Saturday morning at the track and it most of Saturday without issue. Towards the end of day 1, I noticed a driveline vibration under braking and a rubber smell in longer corners which ended up being the guibo beginning to come apart and rubbing on the shift rod... I think this was caused by incorrect trans mounts, turns out e34 mounts are considerably taller, and I don't think guibos like mating non-parallel surfaces together. We kind of ran a couple laps here and there on Sunday but didn't want to risk tossing the driveshaft out of it, so like responsible adults, we packed up early.

Shocks:

We used a baseline shock setup from a friend/damper wizard and it was pretty good out of the box, but don't really have anything to compare it to. We were able to tune out some front end push with some small adjustments, but the car was still a little rigid overall. It's nice to be able to feel 1 click of compression or rebound adjustment. After we got home I realized I never set the canister pressures, which were ~50 PSI too high @ their default setting from MCS, probably the cause of the harshness/rigidity. Pretty excited to run the car again this weekend with "correct" canister pressures.

Brakes:

Brakes were fantastic. We are running e21 Booster, e32 25mm MC, e46 m3 front calipers with e46 m3 (Non-competition package) PFC direct drive rotors and e39 540i rear calipers with e46 325i rotors, Hawk DTC-60 all around, with a Wilwood inline limit valve for the rears. I have the limit valve almost closed, and it has a max pressure reduction of 57%, so a decent amount of front bias. I haven't looked really far into the relation between stock limit valve and this limit valve, and how it relates to our caliper and MC changes, but the brakes feel really nice currently so we'll look into that later on. I don't know if this setup would be as good on a street car, I think the pedal pressure would be too much. However, with lots of brake bite and heat in the brakes, it's pretty great

ABS didn't work when we rolled the car off the trailer. Turns out ABS sensors are side specific because of the diamond shape of the sensor shaft, if the pointed end of the shaft isn't normal to the ABS ring, your gap is too big and ABS goes nuts... Basically ABS comes on when you touch the pedal, sometimes. This happened twice in the paddock, so we just unplugged the ABS and ran like that.

See here for ABS issue: http://www.r3vlimited.com/board/showthread.php?t=398431
I'm surprised no one has mentioned/run into this yet running these 5 lug sleeve setups

Motor:

The car wouldn't really rev over 6k, it wasn't a hard limit, but just kinda didn't want to go up there. Turns out, we had a red label 413 ECU in the car with an m50 chip... OOPS! Good thing we had brand new knock sensors, seems like they worked. A friend at work as an EPROM and we burned a Pre-EWS s50 506 ECU chip, I've only driven the car down the street since installing the new chip, but it does hit the rev-limiter now so that's a start.

Overall, pretty happy with everything for a first outing. It was only my 3rd day on track, so I was pretty far off the pace, but Alex (MX339) was running pretty good times and was probably one of the faster cars there that day. Pretty good all things considered. I'm almost finished prepping the car for Road Atlanta this Friday, so we'll see how things go.

No pictures right now, I sat on the door bar with my phone(S7) in my back pocket and camera lens exploded

[Kershaw]

Use a strip of black electrical tape to continue the rub bar line to the front.

[Jb325is]

Oh the car looks soo much better now, forgot to add that in there. I painted the bottom sections, polished the fenders, and claybar'd/sealed the entire car. I'll try to get some updated pictures.

[Jb325is]

Ran the car at Road Atlanta today. ABS worked, which is crazy. To make it work, I had to machine the ABS sensor shaft to achieve a proper gap between the e36 m3 hub and e30 spindle/sensor. I was pretty skeptical about this but it ended up working. Brakes are awesome

On a side note, a little over halfway through the day, I money-shifted coming out of turn 7, 3rd to 2nd, and the motor is done. I think we've decided to go with an m54 instead of finding another s50. Sucks that it happened, but the m54 is 60 lbs lighter and we can send CAN data to a Motec/AIM dash from the MS43 instead of buying a ton of sensors to run a dash with an s50/s52.

Here is a picture
e30 Rd ATL by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

[LJ851]

Bummer about the S50 engine, wish i could have come out to RA today.

[ngampleh]

Glad to heard you did it ;)

[Jb325is]

e30 s50 2 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

e30 s50 by Jonathan braswell, on Flickr

2nd pic is top of #6 piston through a borescope

Getting close to sealing the deal on an m54, hopefully going with a ZHP if we can sort out the specifics with the ms45.1 to ms43 ecu swap. I'm pretty excited about the prospect of gaining some torque and losing a ton of weight over the front of the car.

[whitebulat22]

That sucks to hear about the S50 but I'm glad you're looking forward to the M54, such a perfect engine for an E30. Only flaw I've seen is protecting the block from high rpm harmonics, do you plan to run a low redline / heavier flywheel / dampener?