The Ralle30: Why go down when the only way is up?

[LounsRacingInc]

Hi all,

It is about time i got to making a build thread for this, it has been a few months in the making now and i have several months to go. Ill get you all up to speed real quick. But first, a little about myself and e30's, my first e30 was a 1988 Zinno 4 door, i did not want to buy it at first, but the deal was just to good.... $600 bought me my first e30, 100% complete. One quick motor swap later and she was ready to roll. Well four weeks after i put it on the road, a dipstick in a new Chevy didn't see my car stopped at a red light and wailed into the back of it. It didn't cause too much damage (bent the tailight panel and just slightly tweaked the driver side rear frame rails/trunk support), but the good ole insurance company totaled it anyhow, no matter how hard i fought. I was so pissed because I had just began to fall in love with the car..... and so began my lust to find another one (which actually became 3 more cars lol).

Here is the Zinno car:



And the stupid tiny amount of damage that totaled out the car:



Well enough with that old sappy stuff and onto the car that this build thread is gonna make famous (not). The car was purchased from a R3v forum member that i have met through e30 culture. Its a 1987 Luxor 4 door, she has almost no rust, needed some interior work. But as soon as i heard it was for sale, we struck a deal and went and picked it up. Here she is right after i got it loaded on the trailer and started heading home:



(don't mind my high school sweet heart and the ratchet strap holding her hood on lol)

And here is how she sat when i unloaded her at the farm

[LounsRacingInc]

Here are some pictures of the zinno car and what built my interest, passion and great group of friends for these cars. This is my Zinno car when we were resurrecting her along side my buddy's 91 vert that was also being resurrected. Both these cars were WNY barn finds and were in amazing shape for what they were.






On to chapter two of the Ralle30.
The car sat next to my garage for a few weeks and then eventually was moved inside to sit all summer. At the time i was living and working about 2 hours away and didn't have time to come get going on the luxor car. But i did hav etime to purchase two other e30's. A 86 325e coupe and a 86 325es:





They were mostly for parts although i did drive the 325e for a month or two before i dissected it for a different project.
Well as fall came around, I bought a e46 325xi that i really liked:



But it just wasn't a e30. I sold it after 3 weeks of owning it to fund the revival of the luxor car. This is where the build began.

[LounsRacingInc]

In the fall i decided to go back to school at SUNY Alfred State for Automotive Tech and Motorsports Technology (its not atvs and dirt bikes like many think, its fabrication and automotive motorsports) In which they make you have a project car, so i figured i may as well get credit while I do all the basic maintenance stuff for the luxor car.



On the way to school for the first time



Sorting out why the B27 wasn't firing



And this is the first picture i have of the car running. No exhaust in the shop made for a ear full. This was Circa Oct. 2015

[LounsRacingInc]

So before i go further i need to let you guys in on a little secret. I was born and raised on horse farm in WNY. That is where I am living now and where this car is being built. With the Zinno car, i was living in a city and i was all about coilover setups and the h&r/bilstein sport combo, etc. But where I am from, that stuff doesn't fly.

So right about the time i got the car running i had to make a decision, up or down? This car is my daily at the time i'm writing this all down, and since i could not go any lower than stock without becoming a master of swapping oil pans. I decided that i would stand out from the crowd and go up. Thus ushering in the nickname ralle30. This decision also brought me to the DMV a few days later to let the old girl lose on the open road.
Here is the first time it was (legally) driven around the roads at my farm:





Well as any over excited gentleman would....a few nights later i took her out to the paved roads to see how that 29 year old suspension held up. Which it did, but a found a few things that needed attention. The diff was howling, there was a clunk in the rear end under hard accel or decel and it had a gnarly misfire sometimes..... and here is the part that could have been avoided had I gave the motor more time to get worked back in from sitting. I came rippin up my hill on this dirt road, really pitching her sideways and just having an absolute blast. As i pulled into the barn to let her rest for the night, i noticed a lot of vapor from the exhaust and that it was starting to idle rougher than usual. I feared the worst and found that i blew the headgasket internally and as checked the engine bay it was also leaking down the side of the motor between cyl 1,2, and 3.

Shit.

[LounsRacingInc]

Now i had to decide what needed to be done.... 24v swap? m30 swap? b25 swap? Well as it turned out, a friend of mine was getting out of e30's and was parting out his 325is, which works great for me because I just put the car on the road, i want to drive it, and the b25 was a swap i had done 4-5 times before and could easily be done in a day. Unfortunately i skipped a few pictures but here is when the motor was out:





And here is the b25 after we got it settled in on its mounts



And here is how we did all the under car stuff, i have a electric equiupment hoist that runs on a 22" I beam along the top of my barn, we hooked it to the tow hooks and up she went. I know this is always a touchy subject on build threads... but hindsight 20/20, that was not exactly a great idea, and i probably won't ever do it again now that we have a 2 post lift, but it did work and we supported it with two other 8" i-beams while it was up in the air, just in case OSHA came along ;)



The next day i tidied up all the wiring and got everything all hooked up, although at this point i was still running just the front section of an e exhaust and had to extend the 02 pigtail to make it work.

[LounsRacingInc]

I have a lot of pics from that day after the b25 swap while i was finishing up the loose ends to show some diagnostic aids i have made for e30's and the general condition of the car at this point. I also swapped out the tan cloth interior for the black vinyl out of my zinno car

















Here is a three ring binder with some useful stuff from R3v, a no start guide, the BMe ETM manual, and a copy of Mitchel and Alldata wiring diagrams for this car

[LounsRacingInc]

With everything back together I took her back down to the paved roads for a spin the next day.



The car was running good, but still had a gnarly intermittent misfire which was driving me insane. At times it was so bad as it would only be firing on 1 or 2 cylinders and would make the whole car kick and buck. What i found is that the o2 was totally non functional (it may have been due to cutting and splicing the harness to make the pigtail longer. But I am 100% positive i had the wires matched correctly and i believe it may just have been coincidence. I also had a mild suspicion that the injectors were almost toast/incorrect. The guy I got the b25 from gave me the motor without injectors installed (it had 19lb inj's with the miller MAF) and gave me a box of "assorted" injectors that he believed contained the original 6. I ran some numbers and found a set that came up on google for a 325i, but it was not a reliable source. I ended up ordering a set of Bosch 17lb pintleless injectors (a little bit bigger than stock to try and correct the e30's notorious issue with maxing out the duty cycle of the stock injectors) along with a new o2 sensor. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures during the injector install but i guess there wasn't anything really crazy special about the external parts of the injector.

Here she was late at night after we had put the inj, o2 sensor, and added a 325e rear section of the exhaust with a monster Magnaflow cannon of a muffler, that actually didn't sound bad at all.





And here is where the "up" portion of this build started. I ordered new winter tires from Tire Rack (See above picture), they were 195/75/r14, which didn't seem much taller than stock, they were just to get me by for the winter... but they ended up being about 1.5" taller than what was on the car when i got it (195/70? i believe) and gave her a much better ride height and "stance" (lol)

[LounsRacingInc]

Story time:

So i was working a real late shift one night, and this girl i work with, who is actually very very attractive (hot AF) sent me this picture:



I don't know how she got my number (this was actually snapchat) and we hadn't really talked at all before. So I was confused as hell, it turns out a guy i work with had my number from a time i towed a car for him when his son moved out of state, and gave this girl my number who apparently had a crush on me. This lead to a few nights out with the pretty lady, but she soon realized that i had a project car and:

A.) She realized I spend my money on my car and not her (DUH)
and
B.) I didn't have enough time to devote to a girl with said race car

[LounsRacingInc]

Anyways,
Back to the build.

I got tired of all the chrome/silver on the car (Spoiler: I have yet to see a bit of chrome on a vehicle that doesn't look better black IMHO)
So i decided i would shadow line the car and paint the wheels to match,
I did the window trim on the car and the wheels and kidneys off. and it turned out alright, but again, hindsight 20/20, i should have pulled the trim, used better paint and spent more time making it good quality. Ehhh, you live and learn



Here she is when it was said and done, and starting to take shape of a rally car (sorta, if you squint real hard)









Here she is dreaming about what could become of her

[doorman]

Great story so far!!!
I love "resurrection" style threads.

[LounsRacingInc]

Thanks Doorman, we are almost caught up to present day, i have been sitting here all morning getting this all on paper and am trying to avoid the "this is my car and whats done to it" method and trying to write it in a "this is why myself and my car are where they are today" style

[LounsRacingInc]

Now we are going to look back at a few posts back when i shadowlined the car.... I said that i wish i would have spent more time on the paint. That was true at that time but now that we are this far ahead on the story i must tell you that it is false. For this reason:



I dragged this Saturn around my yard moving it to the back forty the same day as the couch



And a few weeks later this dodge (i tow something really funny later on in the spring, video and details coming soon)



Its not a show car and never will be, its my companion and it is a very important tool that i use every day. I like her slightly haggard paint and all her scars because they remind me that this car was meant to be driven. There is a place for the absolutely mint cars that we all see on here, they are fantastic, but sometimes the scars tell a better story.

[MattAvino]

hi.
Lounsberry Racing Inc. FTW

[LounsRacingInc]

Here is the next big mod to the car.
No. I don't want to be like a subaru.
No. I don't think that its a lifted 4x4 (Jk, you guys will learn that i do)
No. I didn't do it to be cool.

I was coming home late one wintery night in WNY and for those of you who live in the northeast you know that is something more hazardous to cars then slippery roads, drunk drivers, or runaway trains. That's right ladies and gentleman....



These little pricks right here. Whitetail Deer.
I just about redecorated my front end at 60mph with brown fur and decided that i needed more light so i can see a bit better (and because rally car yo)



I did two led flood pods wired into the factory fog wiring, and one 42" spot/flood combo led straight bar. Here is just low beams:



Low beams and the fog light pods:



Low beams, fog lights, and the light bar:

[LounsRacingInc]

Here are some cool pictures i snagged when we had a ice storm around Feb. 2016. She is beginning to show her true colors. This car rocks in the snow. For anyone trying to find winter tires i would highly recommend Firestone Winterforce's.