The ups and downs of a 2.7L Turbo

[cleanasse30]

Ok, so I guess its time to sit down and start a project thread. I bought my e30 about a year and a half ago off good ole craigslist with a bad drive shaft, a worn suspension, to my surprise a 2.7:1 z3 steering rack and an annoying raspy exhaust. The car had approx 216k on it and the previous, previous owner supposedly had taken it on a road trip all over the US. This is a picture of the car when I first bought it



I should say that this car isn't my daily driver and I am building it more as a weekend fun car that I take to the track a few times a summer, at least thats the plan for now, I do kind of want to try grassroots drifting. Anyways, I started off by replacing the driveshaft and doing a suspension refresh (LCAs, TrackCABs, poly subframe bushings, poly RTABs, etc.). Drivetrain wobbles eliminated, thank goodness. The car felt much more stable when driving after the suspension overhaul and I was able to really see what the e30 was capable of in stock form. I really started to like the e30 at this point.

Since then, I've replaced the brakes with some reman calipers and porterfield pads, put on gc coils, bought a 2.7L stroker with a blown hg (dumb) and gotten some TRM C1 in 15x8 with some gforce rivals. This is what the car looked like pre-gc coils:



Holy crap this looked terrible lol. I did a track day in this config and the car did really well when I nailed the turn, but punished me with nasty neck breaking body roll when I missed the apex. I found some GCs locally and snagged them, a little stiff to daily but much better than before:



Last weekend I started the tear down for the new stroker swap, turbo, and 3.46 LSD install. Here is how the car sat before the teardown:





Let the tear down begin! Hood and headlights off:







Front bumper and valence removed:



NA exhaust out:



My buddy came up with the idea to make this to get the last manifold bolt off:



Its getting late so I'll finish posting the pictures from this weekend tomorrow.

[Tougerunner01]

A fellow 2.7i build with similar pieces. I'm excited to see the rest of the process.

[HersheySquirts]

Subd

[cleanasse30]

Alrighty lets get the pics from this weekend finished. Here is how the car looked at the beginning of day 2:



So when it came to the A/C I forgot to have a shop remove the R12 before starting the tear down. This lead to a dilemma of do we say fuck it and crack the line or call someone to recover the R12. Turns out the mobile A/C guy in my area wasn't working on memorial day weekend, so after pondering for a while we decided to bust it open. Now i knew the PO took the engine out of the car at some point and the fact that the A/C didn't work left me hopeful that was already empty. Turns out, IT WAS EMPTY!

I was still a bit nervous cracking the line lol:



When I went to remove the rest of the A/C compontents I realized I didn't have the right wrench for the bigger A/C line:



A trip to HF fixed that and I was able to remove the A/C from the engine bay. Next thing on the list was to mock up the turbo parts I've been accumulating for the past year. First we tried to mount the manifold on the head but quickly ran into some problems. The lip of the frame rail interfered with the manifold so it wouldn't line up with the manifold studs. We then hammered down the lip of the frame rail but it still wouldn't line up quite right. We decided to check the fitment of the manifold on the 2.7L head since its out of the engine bay, but the manifold doesn't lineup on the 2.7L head either. This sucks... I still need to find someone who can tig weld to fix the manifold, so this will likely delay progress a week or more. For the sake of getting the intercooler piping and downpipe mocked up we removed enough exhaust studs to bolt the manifold to the head. Here's how it looks:



I'm hopeful once the flanges are fixed this beast will provide a nice quick spool for the AGP S256sx. Let's mount a turbo!

My buddy giving the turbo a nice tape job:



We have turbo!



Then, I wanted to get the intercooler mounted and mocked up so the welder can do the BOV Flange, downpipe and wastegate routing at the same time. This is how it turned out, I'm pretty pleased with it:











Its nice and short, and should provide good throttle response. Here are some pictures of the manifold fitment issues:





This was the end of progress on day 2 of the 3 day weekend. More to come shortly.

[cleanasse30]

Didn't get a ton done on day 3. I mainly focused on the differential, which took longer than I expected. The 3.46 LSD i bought had the wrong output flanges in it because its from an e28 so i decided to clean up the spare e30 flanges i had:



Wire wheels and PB blaster work great for removing rust:



The new diff had quite a bit of sludge buildup on the gears so I hit it with some brake clean, compressed air, purple power and a hose in an attempt to clean things up a bit. After washing it out with the hose I dried the internals with compressed air and then re-oiled the gears with diff fluid. I forgot to take a before and after pic of this process, but it did seem to remove a good amount of the buildup. Here is the old open diff I took out, and the 3.46 LSD in the background ready to go in.



This is how I left the car at the end of day 3:



I just ordered a bunch more parts to help get this project moving along so progress should be steady this weekend. Hoping to get the engine removed by the end of this coming weekend.

[econti]

What do you have to do around headlights to fit the cooler piping past them?

[cleanasse30]

What do you have to do around headlights to fit the cooler piping past them?

Surprisingly, nothing. The headlights fit juuuuust above the 90 degree couplers coming off the intercooler. I might notch the lower plastic housing of the high beam to ensure that the headlights don't rub the coupler causing it to rip.

[cleanasse30]

Update from this weekend. Didn't get nearly as much as I would've liked because I was busy with some other chores. The 2.7L block that I bought was painted black by the previous owner. I know this makes it harder to trace oil leaks so I have decided to strip it down to bear metal (as best I can) and paint it a different color. Here is what the block looked like before:



I removed all the accesories and taped of the rest of the block.



After several hours of using wire wheels on the die grinder it looked like this:





After grinding most of the paint off I removed the dirt with brake clean and a compressor and to prep it for paint I wiped it down a with wax and oil remover I got from a body shop store. Then I taped off all the areas I didn't want to paint:



I put down a couple coats of primer and then decided to call it quits for the night:





I also had a chance to clean the oil feed line that came with the engine and assemble the oil drain line I ordered from summit.



Might have some time to do the color coat Thursday, more updates to come later this week.

[ncrmtrsprtsE30]

niceeeee

[HersheySquirts]

What color are you thinking?

[Reichart12]

I recently painted my block too, didn't do as much prep work and taped off larger areas but I just stopped after primer.

[cleanasse30]

What color are you thinking?

I bought 2 cans of VHT Titanium Silver engine paint. Hopefully it looks good when its all said and done. Not sure if I should use a clear coat, anyone have an opinion yes or no?

[cleanasse30]

So another small update as promised. I went over to my parents yesterday after work to paint the engine and take a look at the order I received from ECS Tuning. I laid down a couple coats of the engine paint on the block and it turned out "OK" in my opinion. You can definitely tell where I wasn't able to completely remove the old paint, but I really just wanted the engine to be silver and not black so its all good. Getting ready to paint, didn't have a pair of work jeans with me so this will have to do lol:



Here is the engine after 2 coats of the engine paint:





After painting the engine I opened the box from ECS Tuning, only to find that half the parts I ordered were not in the box and there was no packing slip..... WTF!?!? I tried to call customer service but they were gone by the time I called. I just called this morning and I'm waiting to hear back from them about what they will do to fix this.



Hopefully I'll make some more progress this weekend.

[cleanasse30]

So after calling ECS Tuning about 4 times today trying to get some progress made on the missing parts in my order they agreed to send the missing parts.... via ground shipping.... next wednesday....

Put simply, I'll never be ordering from ECS Tuning again. Their customer service is sub par, slow, and they have terrible contact with their warehouse as I was told they only communicate over email and IM. I would warn anyone making part purchases to choose a different vendor when ordering.

Since their own warehouse messed up the order, I would think the customer service reps would want to reconcile the order as quickly as possible and expedite the shipping to make up for their mistake. But no, that is not their policy apparently. This was quite a frustrating day and will likely set back the progress of the build a couple weeks.

/rant

[TimeMachinE30]

I never liked ECS. Too expensive. Many of their kits use cheap parts. There are far better options offering better prices and service... and supporting folks who support us.