Project Armo "330i" M-tech 1

[Skarpa]

Half shafts and the diff casing received primer


Now that the brackets for the driver's seat are ready, it was time to return the the rear seat. The seat itself is finished but it required some brackets in the body. For the top edge I fabricated hooks that grab the seat pretty much the standard E30 way. I made them scew-on with rivet nuts in the body so they don't mess with fitment of original seat if I ever want to go back to E30 seat.


At the bottom of the seat back I went with welded brackets that hold the seat back in correct orientation. They also have captive nuts for fixing the seat back. To be honest I don't know if they interfere with E30 seat because I no longer have one to check it but I decided I don't care too much about that after all. This is the seat I want to use.



The seat part fits right in the E30 brackets.


The seat turned out very good. (It had better to, with the ridiculous amount of work that has gone into it)


Next I plan to drop the body from the rotisserie and start wiggling the engine in.

[Skarpa]

Why not put the windshield washer bottle in the trunk? That's what I did. Muh weight distribution!

Seems unnucessary hazzle. I'm not aiming for fully shaved engine bay. I just want to clean it up little bit, get rid of unnecessary stuff and make any modifications and installations so well that they look like they belong there. I'm happy with the hacked up reservoir.

Its been said several times in this thread already, but what a rebuild. There literally wont be an inch on the car that you havent gone back over. This car will be like new when its all done. Keep it up!

Thanks, will do!

[2mAn]

Its been said several times in this thread already, but what a rebuild. There literally wont be an inch on the car that you havent gone back over. This car will be like new when its all done. Keep it up!

[varg]

Why not put the windshield washer bottle in the trunk? That's what I did. Muh weight distribution!

[Skarpa]

We have a parts washing machine at work but it's only used very rarely because of the time and energy it takes to heat up. Today we fired it up so I decided to take apart the half shafts and wash them at the same time. The joints felt a bit notchy when turning by hand but the parts didn't really seem all that worn. Mainly the ball cages have slightly worn spots where the balls sit. I'll see what they feel like after new grase.

[Skarpa]

I have pretty long legs. With basic flat seats I still fit E30 comfortably with good driving position. Sport seats, however are shaped differently and with those I'm left with a desire to move the seat further back than possible. To correct this I made brackets out of flat bar that bolt on to standard mounting points and have tapped holes for the seat 5 centimeters back from original location. Now that I'm working on the body I decided to scrap the extra brackets and make mounting points in body where I want them.

I marked a line for the mounting points and measured 5 centimeters back from them and drilled holes for bolts. For the front mounting points I made two captive bolt plates and glued them in place with panel adhesive + pop rivets:


For the rear I used a hole saw to make space for M10 captive nuts.


Then I cut off the original bolts, test fitted the seat, tightened the rear nuts with bolts and tacked them on, removed the seat and welded the nuts securely to floor panel and the reinforcement plates at the bottom.


All that was left was to bolt the seat on once more for the most important task: Sit in and make wroom wroom noises. It was a nice feeling to sit on the driver's seat for change. It's been a while since last time. (Even though it's actually the passenger's seat)

[Skarpa]

Here's something that might be unrelated to project Armo but might still interest someone:

A while ago I bought a set of TRX 390 bottlecaps with an intention to slice them up and see what I could come up with them. I've always liked the design of these wheels. Today I had the valve holes welded shut and roughly cut off the front and rear lips.





The remaining centerpiece fits very well nside an RC090 barrel that I bought a while ago. The spokes line up nicely with the center hole of the barrel and the center piece fits inside the barrel with just 1 or 2 mm gap around it. On the front face the bolt circle sits on flat surface. At the rear there might be a smaal step under the nuts but I'll see when I straighten the rear face at a lathe.





The wheels can be made 2-pieces by using the same structure as in style 5's or 3-piece by buying wheel rings with the right dimensions and using just the inner portion of style 5 barrel. Quite like Pazi88 did in his 3-piece style 5 project. For project Armo these will be oversized and have the wrong pitch but I just wanted to undertake this project for joy of building. I suspect they still might slip under project Armo regardless of opposing evidence.

[Northern]

Apparently I'm going through the same washer tank evolution as you... Can't fit stock because turbo, bought the ebay square one, then found the little e36 one in my shed and said "well that looks better"

[Alpina]

Hillarious job !!!!

[Skarpa]

Great job on everything! I"ll be undergoing a similar chassis harness situation with my 89 coupe here before too long. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's good to know that other people have tackled this with some form of success.

Keep up the great work!

It's not too bad with the harness.It just takes some careful studying of the wiring diagrams and careful work. I really like the shrink sleeves with solder already inside when workin on car wiring. Wonderfully easy to use and provide fully waterproof butt connections.

It's been kinda slow on this front but there has still been some progress. I finished going through the body wiring harness. I replaced the rear light connections with early model ones and repaired any inconsistensies and corroded copper. Then I re-wrapped the harness with original style fabric tape. I didn't do the engine compartment side yet, though. I may still change wire routing there.

I also pressed in the bearings and the bushings in the rear trailing arms and slapped on some more primer on the body.

[car_gal_jenni]

Great job on everything! I"ll be undergoing a similar chassis harness situation with my 89 coupe here before too long. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's good to know that other people have tackled this with some form of success.

Keep up the great work!

[Skarpa]

Hi Skarpa,

Fantastic build, absolute an example build for me.
I'm restoring a 325i convertible, also complete rearpanel ect.

What kind of 2k epoxy primer do you use?

Thanks alot! It's always nice to provide useful information to someone else's project.

I've used a couple of brands: Body 989 and Valspar epoxy primer. The brand of the epoxy primer should not matter too much as long as it's good quality 2-component stuff. My current one is Valspar but the can is running out and I should buy more. I do however have at least 6 liters of Teknos Tecnoplast Primer 5 industrial primer left over from a work project so I'll probably move on to using that unless I find a reason not to. I'll probably go with industrial paint tinted as close to Zinnoberrot as possible in the bottom, trunk, passenger compartment and the engine compartment of the car. Industrial paints are quite a lot cheaper and at least as durable as car paints. However, they do lack in gloss and finish compared to car paints. Industrial paints make sense especially for me because I'll be able to buy them through the company I work for.

The weld-throug zinc primer I use is U-POL Weld #2.

[sparconl]

Hi Skarpa,

Fantastic build, absolute an example build for me.
I'm restoring a 325i convertible, also complete rearpanel ect.

What kind of 2k epoxy primer do you use?

[Skarpa]

I've used a couple of evenings to go through the body main wire loom. It has been tedious because none of the connectors was marked and a big chunk of the loom was unwrapped into loose wires. Now I have most of the connectors marked and I've organized the wires into correct bundles and tied them temporarily with masking tape. I've also got rid of the rear door connectors. Central locking is still causing some head-scratching. This wire loom has had aftermarket remote control installed in it and for some reason the switches for the rear electric windows have been cut off quite brutally. As a result I have a few loose wire ends so I need to go through the wiring diagrams to sort that out. I will have the original remote control for the system and I think I'll install that and the lock motors in the wire loom and connect everything to make sure the central locking works as it should.

As for the check control I've come to conclusion to leave the wires untouched. That gives me the option to run check control in future if I feel like it. Having the check control connector dangle unconnected under the dash should cause no ill effect for the operation of lights or anything else.

[Skarpa]

I ground, cleaned, scuffed, cleaned and primered the bottom rear of the car. I also took time to clean all the previous rust spots. I'll put another coat of primer later to make sure it's well sealed this time. Then there's of course still the trunk side to go. But man there's a lot of work in that. If I had to choose my least favorite part of building a car it's the preparation for paint.