Project Armo "330i" M-tech 1

[Skarpa]

I put a head on top of a scrap block I have and did some test fitting for the S50 headers.


The previous owner has made a pretty substantial dent in the #6 header to clear the bell housing. I think if he had heated the pipe he would have been able to bend it to clear the tranny and keep it quite a lot nicer. This section will have to go.


Although I may need to do a small ding of my own in the #2. The material thickness in the alu block is greater than in the cast iron block so the pipe touches the hump in the block but I already knew that. If I end up squeezing the tube there it will still bit a lot less than in the pic above.


To get rid of any second guessing about cutting up the headers I took a grinder and cut the #6 pipe in a few pieces.


I have roughly something like this in mind for the pipe routing but before I do anything more about that I will see if I need to modify the orientation of the collectors to clear the subframe and the sway bar. Custom made sway bar is also a possibility.

[Skarpa]

I cleaned the surroundings of the beam with a grinder and wire wheel and made a


Then I primered everything with weld-through primer and fabricated a new beam from RHS


New beam welded in place. I still need to plug the holes.


That was the final major body part I need to replace. I still have quite a few brackets to make and some minor rust repairs left but I'm on the winning side with the body work.

[Skarpa]

The protection pipe for gas tank breather hoses was pretty well rusted through and it's not available from the dealer anymore so I tried to make one. Pipe size is 32x1,0 mm and I happened to have correct size in a scrapped bicycle frame.


However, the pipe bender we have at work is only meant for small pipe sizes and didn't have big enough lasts for the pipe so I had to improvise. I filled the pipe with sand to keep it from collapsing and taped the pipe ends to keep the sand in.




I wasn't quite success though. Lacking suitable tools, I ended up with pretty awful result. It would likely work but I would not be happy with it.


So the next step was to make a drawing of the pipe and have my brother bend it for me with more professional tools.


That worked actually very well. I just need to make new section for the floor where the pipe goes through.


Onto a second thing: When I made brackets for the M52 air filter box I had to cut a corner off the box to have it sit the way I wanted. Then later I bought the S50 Euro itb's and the rest of intake assembly. S50 uses a 3,5" maf that doesn't fit the M52 filter box so I had to cut a matching hole in the M3 filter box and fill both the holes with straight plastic plate. I used some side mirror plastic triangles with broken tabs for raw material.




I also picked up a pair of barely used 252 degree reground cams. I have a ton of stuff to buy so it was nice the get the cams on a budget even though S52 cam would be better for sure.

[TheWipprSnappr]

One of my favorite builds on here. Excellent work from top to bottom.:bow:

[litu]

This is epic builds topic..Awesome details, story ideas, info etc..
:bow::bow:

[Skarpa]

One of my favorite builds on here. Excellent work from top to bottom.:bow:

This is epic builds topic..Awesome details, story ideas, info etc..
:bow::bow:

Thanks a lot!

[PerryJ]

And I thought I had a project car. Dang this is amazing work to follow, and such fantastic well documented work! I love to see project cars with CAD drawings for parts to suite.

[Skarpa]

And I thought I had a project car. Dang this is amazing work to follow, and such fantastic well documented work! I love to see project cars with CAD drawings for parts to suite.

Thanks!

Not much happened during the weekend. More studying and planning than actual progress. M52 breather and oil separator system will not work easily with S50 itb's and plenum so I bought S50 oil separator for practically nothing. Racers often discard them so S50 plenums and accessories are fairly cheap.



Oil separator needed some cleaning.

And don't worry about my dishwasher or the water treatment. This was just the last step to remove any traces of grease from the parts.

Routing of the different hoses in the breather and vacuum system wasn't quite clear to me so I did some studying and drew myself a diagram.

Between the ICV and the vacuum rail there is a T-branch in the hose and a hardline. I think this goes to emission control air pump and the fuel tank breather. I won't be using either so I can discard this line if it does nothing else.

Then I test-mounted the itb's on the block to see how the stuff goes together. The M52 plastic intake manifold has a very thick flange to connect to the head and the stud bolts in the head are too long for my aluminum adapter plate so I unscrewed them and shortened a few to correct length for the itbs.


I need to make a custom support for the plenum. With the adapter plate it's too short and there is nothing in the block where it would attach.


I will also need to make a bracket for the oil separator. It wants to be mounted above the block deck height so I will make an arm that bolts to the block and reaches where the oil separator need to be. Also, I think I need to move it forward quite a lot because I'm using an E34 M50 oil pan where the sump is in the front.

I also check to see that the ITBs fit okay. The nozzles pose no problem but the vanos solenoid, TPS and the breather connection are a different story.




In these pics the ITBs still need to go in another 10 mm. The intake manifold stud bolts are too long for the adapter. When in correct position the TPS will fit but the cable will not and there's no room for the breather hose. It seems that I can flip the syncing shaft and the sensor 180 degrees to point the cable upwards. I know that the valve cover is not weldable so I cannot modify the direction of the breather connection. I was thinking of cutting it off and tapping the hole to fit an elbow there. After some googling I noticed that other people have come to same conclusions. I guess the solutions are fairly obvious:

http://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/sh...3#post24564133

I cut off the original hose barb, redrilled the hole into bigger diameter and tapped it with 1/2 inch parallel pipe thread.





Now I just need to come up with hose connector with sharp elbow to clear the throttle position sensor. (the double nipple is just to check the thread)

I think I found a suitable connector. I need to verify it, though when I get the painted valve cover. The connector is a crush-style O-ring fitting but the crush sleeve can also work as a hose barb and is roughly the same diameter as the oil separator inlet. The connector is pretty bulky so I'm questioning if the throttle lever will pass it without problems.

[Skarpa]

A while ago I replaced the frame beam where the rear seat belt brackets are but I didn't do the brackets. The beam was very rusty but the seat belt brackets were actually not too bad so yesterday I hacked them off from the remains of the old beam and gave them a good cleaning.

There are three brackets because earlier I was planning on doing a two-seater M3 rear seat which would require an extra bracket in the center. Then I went with the E36 rear seat way and now I'm contemplating if I should still do the third bracket anyway just in case. However, I've realized that I cannot use same kind of bracket in the middle. It needs to be much slimmer than the other two to clear the diff and the drive shaft so if I was to make one, I'd do it from the scratch.

Then I put the brackets in phosphoric acid bath while drilling holes for them in the body and doing other stuff.

You can see that the body has actually picked up some rust during all this time despite the epoxy primer. It was probably due to too thin layer of paint and the fact that I transported the shell to current garage in winter time when there is road salt. I should have washed and dried the shell immediately after transporting. When I'm finished with the body I need to sand it well before painting.

After a lengthy soak in acid I gave the brackets a good washing, cleaning and three coats of weld-through primer. Same treatment for the body, where they are mounted. Then I tightened the parts in place with screws and plug welded them in.




I feel like doing more brackets so I think I'll do the rest of the rear seat area next. Gas tank brackets will need some attention.

[JeLani]

pics are broken mate :/

[Skarpa]

pics are broken mate :/

Photobucket server seems to be down at the moment. Hope they get it up soon. I wouldn't want to rehost 1500 pictures (well, all of them might not be essential)

EDIT: Fuck Photobucket

[Skarpa]

M52 intake manifold supports were of no use with the S50 plenum so I need to make a custom support. I made a rough template of the support using thin sheet metal.




Then I made a cad drawing of the part and will have it laser cut next week as I'm ordering some laser cuts for my work anyway.

I prefer doing drawings on Solidworks or Creo, especially for bent sheet metal pieces but I have neither program installed on my home laptop so I just downloaded the Dassault Systems DraftSight which is a freeware Autocad copy and did it the old-fashioned way.
It seems I forgot to include the dimension for plate thickness. I was thinking 3 mm stainless steel.

[Skarpa]

I made some slight development on the support. I spied on Supafin's project to see what I need to fit under the plenum:


I don't know what he did differently because it seems he was able to use the S50 original plenum support. When I did a test fit it seemed to be way off. Compared to Supafin's positioning of components I need to do it slightly differently. Oil separator will probably move in front of ICV because I have the sump in front of the engine. I will flip the ICV towards the rear of the car to make space. When looking at this photo i realized that I may have a problem with the ICV hose and the strand connecting the two halves of my support. I divided my support into two pieces and also changed the angle to reduce bending and give myself a bit more space.

[Skarpa]

Duplicate, can be removed

[Skarpa]

So I tackled the gas tank brackets. The front brackets are luckily still available from the dealership. Looking closely you can see small holes in the bottom corners I drilled before removing the bracket to mark the position.




When removing the gas tank I wasn't able to open the rear bolt so I just drilled them off.


One of the rear brackets was still attached to firm steel so I removed just the bracket. The other one was rusted through and needed replacing some sheet metal.


New brackets shaped.


Rusted floor patched


I bolted on the tank to locate the rear brackets correctly.




I also redid the bracket for the brake line junction.


And on to another matter: I just bought a cruise control. It's pretty rare piece of equipment in Finnish E30's. Cars here are expensive but people are cheap so extra options are few and far between.


This is from a facelift model so it has the function of increasing and decreasing the speed in increments of 1 km/h. In prefacelift the actuator is installed on the side wall of the engine bay. In facelifts it's mounted on air filter bracket somewhere here.


I don't have the original air filter or the bracket for it. I think I'll flip the actuator upside down and install it like it is in prefacelift.