Project Armo "330i" M-tech 1

[bmwtool]

Fantastic build.

[Clearprop]

This is one crazy build... You're pretty much rebuilding a BMW from scratch!

[Skarpa]

Happy birthday, project Armo! Four years ago I started taking the car apart. There's not that much recent progress, though. Except that I went on a mad shopping spree for parts and packets are starting to arrive. More on that later.

[Skarpa]

I got the brackets for oil separator and plenum from the laser cutter.



I still need to weld a nut in the oil separator bracket and make some fine adjustment for it's position. Otherwise I'm happy. Although time will tell if anything needs to be changed when everything is attached to the block.

At the garage I fabricated the other sway bar bracket.


Then I took apart the rear axle and swapped the typ. 168 with the shell of typ. 188 and E36 rear cover. I lifted the rear subframe back and supported it in roughly correct orientation.




Next time I'll check the orientation with laser and make the brackets for the rear cover.

[Skarpa]

Sway bar bracket:

[Skarpa]

I got the powdercoated parts in my hand and they are like candy. I compared a powdercoated and a painted part side by side to see if there's any difference in color. They are very close to each other. Good to know even though it's not very important in this case.


Now that I have the valve cover at hand again I wanted to see if I can actually run the breather hose as I was planning. It's incredibly tight fit between the TPS, throttle linkage, vanos solenoid, vanos hose and the coolant pipe but manages to actually clear everything.






Breather will sit something like this. I made a cardboard template for the bracket and ordered it laser cut along with the plenum brackets. The upper hose work very nicely when flipped front to back.


While switching valve covers I had a look at the valve train. Nothing out of ordinary there


Then I welded shut all the holes I drilled when removing the crosswise frame beam. I've been avoiding that because it sucks. I did replace my spot weld drill so if I was doing the same job now I could avoid drilling through everything. Oh well.


Next time I think I'll do the brackets for the sway bar and the differential.

[Skarpa]

10/10 would spend another 2 hours reading start to now. I'm doing a lot of rust repair on my own car and it's good to see other people saving theirs. Never heard of KeyParts/Klokkerholm before reading your thread but I def plan on getting a set of rocker panels from them now!

Glad to be of help :up:

[Click]

10/10 would spend another 2 hours reading start to now. I'm doing a lot of rust repair on my own car and it's good to see other people saving theirs. Never heard of KeyParts/Klokkerholm before reading your thread but I def plan on getting a set of rocker panels from them now!

[Skarpa]

GS6-37DZ transmission has a shorter clutch shaft because the pilot bearing is located at the flywheel in those engines. Also it has a finer bore of 26x29-22N. I will most likely fabricate extension for the clutch shaft so before I parted with the 5-speed ZF I made measurements of the pilot bearing shaft location.





I realized only later that I could also have measured the total length of the transmission from bell housing flange to output shaft flange to know exactly how much I need to shorten the drive shaft but I'm sure I'll find that information somewhere or just test-fit and measure it when I have the new tranny.

Today I took similar measurements from the 6-speed box. The clutch shaft is about 20mm shorter than in the 5-speed box. Distance from the bell housing flange to clutch shaft end is 26mm when it is 5,5 mm in the 5-speed. Earlier I planned on doing a temperature fit extension to clutch shaft that would grip on the original surface for the pilot bearing. It seems that it's not quite as simple as I thought. The length difference is so small that I wouldn't be able to keep the dimensions of the extension the same is in the original clutch shaft. In the original shaft the narrow part for the pilot bearing is 28mm long but the width of the bearing is only 10 mm I think. I would have to measure exactly where the bearing sits and then make the extension as necessary and still I might need to shorten the original shaft.

Then I started thinking about making the extension in the end of the crankshaft instead of the clutch shaft. I could make an extension that would be temperature fit on the original pilot bearing housing and would bring the pilot bearing 20 mm outwards. Pros: no need to do any irreversible changes to clutch shaft, easier to remove with a gear puller or a slide hammer without damaging the transmission bearings. Cons: There is more vibration in the crankshaft than in the clutch shaft so the risk of the extension vibrating itself loose is greater. I think I've seen commercial pilot bearing adapters like this somewhere but I don't remember where anymore.

[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.

[Skarpa]

Duplicate, can be removed

[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]

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]

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

[JeLani]

pics are broken mate :/