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Man, what a whirlwind the past few weeks have been. By some miracle, hooptie v2 made it to vintage in its newly refined state.
The big mechanical changes were:
-New rubber subframe and trailing arm bushings
-14.5mm E30M3/iX Rear Sway
-GC Street Front Camber Plates
-Suspension Techniques Front Swaybar
-9.4:1 2.7L Stroker M20
-Big bore throttle body using m30 throttle plate
-Rebuilt green top m50 injectors
-full sanden r134 conversion
-S3.46 diff
-Ansa Sport catback
-My old filled/drilled E38 style 5s with 615k+ tires for proper canyon adhesion
The big interior changes were:
-kilmat in almost the whole car
-Nice dash install, snuck some nice a pillar trims in there too
-Houndstooth cards
-Low mile premium sound
-put odometer gears in the cluster finally
Man the car feels like a million bucks. Such an improvement over before. The new 2.7 feels like the engine that all of these cars should've gotten. It just feels like a beefy m20b25, runs perfectly smooth, pulls very strong. My butt dyno guess is 168whp, but my calibration is off from the diff change. The 3.46 is too long of a ratio for canyon driving (3.73 would be perfect), but since the car is a daily now that it's done, i'll leave the 3.46 in so i can stack the miles on it.
The change in camber plates and rubber bushings softened the car up perfectly without losing anything I am concerned about. I kept the front of the car raised up a bit for cruise-ability. Looks goofy in photos but drives incredibly well and I can still get a jack under the front of it.
I had 10 miles on the new engine when I had to leave for NC. My last FCP order showed up the night before I had to leave. Somehow, the car didn't miss a beat. I changed the second round of break in oil out in a parking lot in hot springs. The car got 26-27mpgs almost the whole trip with a mix of highway and canyon driving, with the worst fill up being 23mpgs after some hefty canyon runs.
I stayed with a hell of a crew, and we had nothing short of a blast. Was so great to see everyone. Jake took down bluepty, his turbo'd '89 325i, and Simple_Smith took his beautiful jap MT2 320i that he's not afraid to drive. Corey is also a killer canyon run planner, and led us on some incredible drives.
I took my camera down and got a few shots of the hootpies and the MT2 at the "Devils Courthouse".
This shot was taken a day before I had to leave for the Vintage. With hooptie still unfinished, I had to drive up to Michigan to pick up a parts car from Tyler, who purchased Linda, as it had the rear two E38 wheels on it that I needed to drive Hooptie down to NC. Was good to catch up with him! On my way back, the E30 parts car accidentally started a pop up car meet at a gas station. An E36M3 rolled up, an Evo, a TDI and two sport bikes stopped to chat.

The caravan down was interesting, as we hit over 2hrs of traffic on 75S. Great way to break in a new engine. Only a few of us ended up in the caravan down.

Discussing all things hoopty

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