My Forever Car: '89 325i Touring

[-J-]

Awesome build man. Contemplating my purchase of a touring myself.

Do it. The practicality is nice and all but the long roof line is what really keeps me smiling every time I walk up to it.

oh man oh man. Do you have any idea what the spring rates on those kw's are?

Not yet, but I'm going to measure them with a scale pad and my shop press. I believe they're progressive though.

[wworm]

oh man oh man. Do you have any idea what the spring rates on those kw's are?

[paynemw]

Awesome build man. Contemplating my purchase of a touring myself.

[-J-]

So I got married.



I went with a titanium/carbon combo because I'm a basic bitch car guy.

Planning and making decorations was a lot of work (and took away a lot of car time), but it was 100% worth it. The day was perfect and I couldn't ask for a better time.

Now that the wedding has come and gone, back to E30 work. I finally got around to installing LED headlight bulbs into smoked Depo's I've had lying around for close to five years.

I used the R4 bulbs from the Shadowline Motorsports group buy. The bulbs, while quite bright, are too long to fit with the H1 style E30 headlight housing. You can run them with the caps off, but that's jank and leaves the headlight interior exposed to the elements. I opted to drill the caps and use the included gaskets to seal them up.



The full bulb. It clearly wasn't going to fit.


Drilled and notched to allow wire connections to come out.


Gasket trimmed and installed.


The connectors here are pure chinesium. They'll be replaced with Deutsch connectors shortly.


Bulbs installed and secured. When the Deutsch connectors go in the wiring will be cleaned up further.


The result. LED bulbs aren't perfect for E30 projectors, as evidenced by the scattering above the cut line. I'll have to have someone ride in front of me and tell me whether or not I'm blinding on coming traffic.


And the aesthetic effect. The camera picks up more blue than in person, but I'm happy with the color.

[-J-]

Cool to see some form and function!

Subscribed!

Great build!

Thanks dudes!

Christmas in July continues:



Looks like I've been working with GM performance cars (who's rear tires are routinely 305 and up) a little too long when I think a ten inch rear wheel is appropriate for an E30, haha.

[Poorhouse]

Great build!

[moatilliatta]

Cool to see some form and function!

Subscribed!

[-J-]

Nice Touring! Been a long time since I heard the name Grattan. As a kid, used to go with dad to Porsche club events there, and caught a number of bass in the pond next to the main straight. It's a small track, but a lot of elevation changes make it trickier than one might expect. Good Memories!

Thanks! Grattan is hands down the best track in Michigan, and second only to Pitt Race as my favorite in the area (Pitt Race is basically just a faster, longer Grattan).

Very nice. In the early '90s I had a RHD '76 2002. It was really weird shifting with my left hand but getting in & out on the curb side was nice.

Shifting with the left hand (and working all radio/climate controls for that matter) is definitely weird at first. But after daily-ing this car for the past four months as a manual I find myself becoming more and more ambidextrous every day. It's kinda neat.

As a small update, the parts hoarding continues:




I also pulled the trigger on a set of Apex ARC-8's and Kamotors flares so I can have big fat tires and everything.

[parkerbink]

Very nice. In the early '90s I had a RHD '76 2002. It was really weird shifting with my left hand but getting in & out on the curb side was nice.

[Johnnyboy101]

Nice Touring! Been a long time since I heard the name Grattan. As a kid, used to go with dad to Porsche club events there, and caught a number of bass in the pond next to the main straight. It's a small track, but a lot of elevation changes make it trickier than one might expect. Good Memories!

[-J-]

Turns out weddings and wedding planning takes up a ton of time. Who knew? Regardless, I have been able to make some progress on the Touring.

These first two I actually did in the winter/spring transition, but forgot to post up. First was ditching the disco stereo with an inop CD player for something that looks like it belongs (and had Bluetooth). Enter the Continental/VDO TR7412UB-OR. I'm not the first person to install this into an E30, but I will say that this thing suits E30s really well. The orange backlight is a damn good match for the E30 interior lights, and I've been beyond happy to finally have my own music coming through the speakers.

Old and busted:


New hotness:


Next to go in were a pair of good condition black sport seats. I disassembled the sliders, cleaned and greased, and installed. They'll need a re-cover and new gas springs in the future, but for now I'm glad to be able to take a corner and not brace myself on the trans tunnel. I didn't grab any pictures, but I think we all know what the OK-ist of sport seats look like in an E30.

Also since the last update: track day, bro! I got the car out to two tracks so far, one being Gingerman Raceway in South Haven, MI, and the other Grattan Raceway in Belding, MI. I have Spec Miata experience at both tracks so I wasn't worried about potentially wrecking the car.

The Gingerman event was through the SCCA Track Night in America program, which I had yet to do (they specifically ban racecars, so SM testing was never an option). I have to say, I'm impressed with how well it was run and would highly recommend it to anyone thinking about getting on track. Three sessions for a hundred bucks? Yeah, I'm in.

The only prep I did was to change the rotors out, swap to PFC 08 pads, and bleed the system.


The work went smoothly minus the right rear bleeder screw, which was snapped off, but I knew this going in so I was prepared. I tried left hand drill bits to minor success but settled on re-tapping the caliper. A new bleed screw later and I was in business. I bled the system but found clean fluid so I bled just the calipers, assuming the previous owner had bled the brakes. This was a mistake.

Session one was going well; I was enjoying the hilariously squishy, roll-prone, but amazingly neutral stock suspension and learning the limits of the Dunlop DZ102's when I started to notice the brake pedal sinking in the threshold braking zones. I made a mental note and backed up my brake zones. Two more laps of this and I was using 75% of the travel to build decel. Not OK. I pulled in just before the checker and parked it. After cooling for a half hour I drove around the paddock and found that the brakes had returned: classic symptoms of fluid boil. I brought a spare can of TYP200 and went to work bleeding the system (again).

I don't know what fluid was in there before, but it was absolutely NOT track rated. After coming out clean the night before, it was now a muddy dark brown. The heat had absolutely wrecked that fluid. I lost a session bleeding but was now confident I had brakes, so I went out for the third. The car ran flawlessly, and I was able to put down a time roughly ten seconds slower than my Spec Miata. That'll change soon.

For the Grattan event I decided that running on stock suspension, although hilarious, had lost its charm after the two sessions at Gingerman. I had acquired a set of used H&R Sports and Bilstein Sports from Classic Daily and figured it'd be a good intermediate step before going hardcore on the suspension.

It's hilarious to me how tall the stock springs are. I maxed out my spring compressor to get these out.

I thrashed the night before, didn't sleep, and got them in for Grattan. On my 3am test drive the car felt awesome, but the roads I drove were freshly paved...

When I headed out for the track in the morning I noticed some odd behavior from the rear of the car going over the plentiful bumps and cracks in the highway. Some of them were bad enough to require corrective steering. In a word: unsettling. My sleep deprived brain told me that it was a future-me problem and I soldiered on. I was first up on track and immediately noticed a problem: anytime I'd go to full throttle at or near max-lat the inside rear would hop like a motherfucker. I figured that it might just be mismatched damping due to the rear of the car being heavier than a normal E30, but the more I did it the more I was convinced something was wrong. That's when I hit the cone.


Do a track day, they said. It'd be fun, they said.

The genius' running the track day though it'd be a good idea to place brake marker cones and apex cones on the track surface instead of next to it. There's a section of Grattan called "The Jump" where the cars go light (and some go briefly airborne) and it's completely blind. Someone had clipped a cone, knocking it into the driving line after the blind crest, and I was the lucky one to find it first.


It ripped all of the brittle old clips apart immediately, and I ran over the lip-splitter combo.


Amazingly though, this was the only damage to the combo.

I ran the next session sans-lip and noted the hopping again. I started to back off because it was so bad, which was no fun. I heard a clunk from the rear end when I went to get fuel, so I decided to investigate. I suspected that the right rear damper mount was loose from the extreme hop so I pulled the rear interior apart and re-torqued the bolts (FYI, accessing the damper mounts on a Touring is a bitch-and-a-half compared to a normal E30 due to the interior back there). When I climbed out of the back of the hatch I and some coworkers noted that the rear seemed bouncy. One downward shove of the rear all but confirmed that the rear dampers were blown. Balls. My day was done but I still had fun hanging with coworkers and grabbing photos of their cars.

When I got home I epoxied the lip back together, threw some paint on it, installed new clips on snapped it back into place. Good as new. I also swapped the stock Sachs rear dampers back in. Holy hell does it ride better now. The rear is still under-damped but it's at least drivable now. Bonus: the stance is so much better.


4X4 status.


Proper height.

Also, the PFC's dust a lot. A lot a lot.


Up next is major chassis upgrades: swapping to a proper suspension (KW V3's should be on the way), swapping bushings for 80a polyurethane, installing E46 brakes via the Naseig/Elcoy 5-lug kit, and installing a larger wheel/tire combo in 5x120. For what I have in mind I'm thinking a set of Kamotors flares might be in order...

[-J-]

Awesome build thread. Definitely envious as your recipe has always been a winning combination in my head:

Touring for practicality reasons: Kids in the near future/pups in the back.
S54: Best straight 6 ever
6speed: because awesome! and you can run the S3.73 to realllllly make that S54 fly.

Thanks man. That's what I'm going for: practically fast.

Whats next?

Short term, I need to go through the brakes. A bunch of coworkers are heading to Gingerman Raceway for an SCCA Track Night in America and I figured what the hell. I have new rotors and PFC pads that I want to throw on in the next week or so, as well as bleed the brakes. The RR caliper bleed screw is snapped, so I'm going to have to figure that out too.

I'm going to gather some more data with the Aim data acq system from the racecar as well. I want to compare transmissions, tires, and brakes. I'll leave it in for Gingerman for lap times too.

Longer term...



The Nasieg/Elcoy brake-upgrade-with-a-side-of-5-lug kit came in this week, and the rest of the parts should be here next. I'll test fit it to get wheel/tire measurements, then order them up. I'll install the H&R and Bilstien Sports shortly after.

[2mAn]

Damn, I guess I should put some of that in mine...

Whats next?

[earthwormjim]

Glad it worked for you. I was shocked when it worked for my car too, I was ready to put a new transmission in my M3.

[spiDmang]

Awesome build thread. Definitely envious as your recipe has always been a winning combination in my head:

Touring for practicality reasons: Kids in the near future/pups in the back.
S54: Best straight 6 ever
6speed: because awesome! and you can run the S3.73 to realllllly make that S54 fly.