Project Barbatos build thread v2.0

So, yesterday I had hoped to get the engine and transmission bolted together and dropped into the car. First, I had to wrap up installation of the throttle body adapter. The instructions say to drill and tap the manifold, but our M6 tap was a little ugly, so instead we happened to have a Heli-coil kit sitting around in the right size, so the manifold got Heli-coiled instead.

The big blow was when I yanked the clutch and flywheel off the engine and discovered that my pilot bearing was no good. Half the revolution was nice and smooth and then the lower half was notchy. What's curious is that I replaced it 20k miles ago, so no clue why it went bad already. Also, the flywheel has some glazing. Although it didn't slip or act funny behind the 1.6L, I'm more than doubling the horsepower at the crank, so it should be resurfaced. Federated Auto Parts hooked me up with a pilot bearing, should be here tomorrow morning. And my favorite machine shop is going to take care of my flywheel.

So, instead I went and spent a small fortune on aviation-style hose clamps and went about banishing all the stupid spring clamps from my engine bay. I also reengineered my coolant reroute a little. As it comes, it wants you to make a 90-degree bend with a straight hose with a spring in it. I didn't like it, it seemed ugly and messy. So instead, I took my old silicone upper radiator hose, whacked the molded 90-degree bend out of it, then grabbed a brass 1 1/4" coupler and clamped that in place and then will shorten my new upper radiator hose accordingly.

Also, photo of my favorite sticker on the car. My Hoonigan #AintCare sticker. There's a subtle irony to it being affixed above the broken corner of my windshield cowl panel.

Loaded up my flywheel to have it resurfaced

And ran over to my favorite machine shop, Blockhead Enterprises. They always hook me up.

Also cut my core support for intercooler clearance, per Track Dog instructions. Used a unibit for the first time to make the radii in the corners. Those things are SWEET!

And riveted in the supplied unibody reinforcements

In the meantime, gratuitous photo dump

With a half lowered headlights and the red tow strap it almost looks like a Smurf dog with its tongue hanging out

In reply to Dusterbd13 :

Ever since I put that tow strap on I get more "Hey there's something hanging off the front of your car" comments from random passerbys. I KNOW, I PUT  IT THERE. Also had some "Hey your wheels are falling off!" from people in traffic, due to my aggressive alignment (-3 degrees of camber in front and -2.5 degrees in there rear)

So, getting the flywheel machined turned into a slight debacle. Dropped it off Monday and told the guy who owns the shop that I just needed it by this weekend. He says it should be done Thursday, but to give him a call before coming over just to check. Okay.

Thursday comes and I give him a ring and he informs me that they've been busy but he'll have it done Friday. Okay, fair enough.

Friday I call and he says that he was getting ready to resurface it but he had a few questions before he went any further. He went to pull the dowels and apparently on the FM flywheel they are made of a powdered-metal, and the dowe fractured. He says he wants to cut them off, and that once you line up everything with bolts and the clutch alignment tool it shouldn't matter. Okay, you're the professional. Go ahead. He says he'll do it that evening and I can come over Saturday and pick it up. Honestly, kind of grateful, because we got slammed with a storm Friday and I didn't feel like driving over there.

Saturday morning I had to do brakes on my parents' car for them. Wrap that up, eat lunch and try to call to make sure it's done. Phone rings and rings, no answer. Continue to try and call from noon to 5, every half hour. Same thing. So I'm resigned to the fact that I'm not getting any work done that weekend and am in a grouchy mood all weekend.

Call him yesterday and he apologizes and informs me that the storm knocked out his phone line on Friday and it was out all weekend. Well, that makes things better. Then he asks me if I'm planning on replacing the clutch disk and pressure plate while I'm in there. Uhhhhhh, I wasn't. According to him, the flywheel was really badly warped and it "would be a really good idea to replace those while I'm in there." E36 M3. Cue me searching all over the internet trying to work out a clutch solution. I liked my FM clutch and it was rated to 300lb-ft, but they only have UPS Ground shipping, which means waiting a week and a half, and losing another weekend of not getting any work done. Finally settle on an ACT from Good-Win Racing that is rated to 240lb-ft, and then shell out $90 to get it here before the weekend. Then I woke up at 2am having a panic attack thinking that I bought the 200ft-lb clutch, which is not going to hold up. Wake up, frantically check e-mail for receipt and see that I did indeed order the 240lb-ft johnnie. Cue waiting.

I'm thinking that if my clutch doesn't arrive by this weekend, I'm going to drop the engine in solo, so that I can start hooking everything up and installing the supercharger kit, and then slam the transmission in whenever my clutch gets here. I have a target of April 28th, and a lot of work to do. And I have to break in an engine and clutch, street-tune the engine and dyno-tune the engine all before the first autocross on May 6th

Hello, beautiful! Got home last night to discover this had arrived, despite never receiving any confirmation that it had shipped or getting any tracking info. I'm glad because while I have pulled the transmission by itself before, it wasn't enjoyable and I wasn't looking forward to doing it again.

NickD said:

 

 I also reengineered my coolant reroute a little. As it comes, it wants you to make a 90-degree bend with a straight hose with a spring in it. I didn't like it, it seemed ugly and messy. So instead, I took my old silicone upper radiator hose, whacked the molded 90-degree bend out of it, then grabbed a brass 1 1/4" coupler and clamped that in place and then will shorten my new upper radiator hose accordingly.

 

 

So I see now that Blackbird Fabworx has introduced a product that kinda does the same thing, except they replace the whole rubber hose with an aluminum pipe and then use a stock upper radiator hose

Got the new ACT clutch installed to the flywheel

Then, after a lot of fiddling, got the engine and transmission bolted together. Aaaaand, going up!

And, BAM!

Continued wrenching on the car yesterday. Extended my wiring for my cam angle sensor, sorted out the routing for my harnesses, got my alternator mounted and hooked up. While the FM instructions tell me that I have to open up the ringlet on the alternator wiring to work with the '94-'97 alternator, you can also just unbolt the stud from the alternators and swap them. Much easier.

Also discovered that I made an oopsie. When I ordered my 1.8L swap kit from FM, I selected a '99-'00 EGR delete because I have a '99-'00 engine. But I forgot I was using a secondhand '96-'97 header (thanks RedGT!) to make everything work with the exhaust. So I have the EGR delete plug for the manifold...

When I need the '94-'97/'01-'05 EGR delete cap

And of course it's kind of a funky thread pitch, so no hardware catalog lists anything that would work. And FM's is backordered (Seems like everything is backordered from them lately), so I had to order one from Racing Beat.

So I started installing my supercharger mounting bracket and then ran into the problem of, I couldn't go ,much further or it would make dropping the header in impossible. Installed the header, and I can install the EGR cap with the header on the car, but I also have TDR's header blanket. Once I install that, it'd be impossible to get to the EGR cap. So that stupid $15 cap stopped everything in it's tracks.

Still, pretty exciting to see this starting to take shape:

Also, when installing the TDR intercooler (just visible in the lower left of the above photo) I came across this conundrum:

Must have been made on a Monday. Chucked the one on the right up in the drill press and fixed it, and now that one has a speed hole. I mounted that one on the passenger side to help offset my weight.

Also vexing was my discovery that the FM throttle cable adapter bracket does not play nice with the JDM "square top" BP-5A intake manifold. A runner will actually hit the bracket, which resulted in lots of grinding. Hey, I'm adding lightness!

Looking good!

In reply to cmcgregor :

Thanks. It's getting there but I'm running into those stupid little things that set back progress. Might have to bum a ride for the first autocross of the season. Honestly, I'm a little bit intimidated by what this thing is going to be like when it's done.

Forgot to take a picture last time, but, hey, I got an intercooler now.

Also, figured I would post this bit of information here. If you delete the A/C compressor, then you have to put an M8x1.25x45 bolt here otherwise you will get a slow non-pressurized oil leak between the oil pump and the block. There's a lot of mention of this on the internet but very few pictures, so figured I would add that here.

And yes, I plan on relacing that balancer. The timing mark is gone, the rubber looks a bit worrying and I'm afraid that the rust on the grooves will chew up the belts.

And in other news, my stupid EGR cap won't show up until Wednesday, and I'm 99% certain that I have to pull my rollbar to change the fuel pump out. Good thing the weather is E36 M3ty though.

Well, this weekend was a E36 M3show. Went into it planning to have to pull the rollbar to swap out the fuel pump. Wasn't really feeling it, so instead I decided to route my fuel hoses in the engine bay.

No photos of my final routing and setup because I'm not very happy with it. It ended up really ugly but functional. Maybe in the future I'll clean it up. Problem is that the hard lines come up into the engine bay and angle towards the rear, but the fuel rail and return line on the BP-4W are on the front of the rail, requiring a big 180 degree loop of hard line. Plus the chassis fuel lines are 3/8", but the pressure line pickup at the rail is 5/16s, requiring an adapter spliced in. I hate it, but I'm short-ish on times and it works.

I also received a new oil drain plug in the mail. Beucase it was a junkyard engine, they had removed that plug and tossed it to drain the engine, and I never really realized it until recently. Start to thread the drain plug in and it wants to start crooked. Hmmm, maybe the threads at the end are goofed up. Fiddle with it and get it to start in nice and straight and it threads in nice and easy. Then go to tighten it up and it comes out with all the threads attached. berkeleying terrific. So now I need to helicoil the oil pan with it on the engine and the engine set in the car. Should be fun.

Thoroughly disgusted, I decided to attempt the fuel pump swap, expecting to have to remove the rollbar. Surprisingly, the fuel pump comes out from under the harness bar. Just barely, but it does. Read the Trac Dog Racing book for my supercharger install and realize that they left out half the directions for modifying the sending unit. Great. So, off to the interwebz to try and figure it out. So, here's how it goes:

See that metal funnel on top of the fuel pump? The new fuel pump is taller than the stock one, so that has to go. Hit it with a hacksaw or a death wheel. Then slide on a section of rubber hose and hose calmp it onto that johnnie.

Also, decided to install my test pipe and wrap up my exhaust. Now, I know that modern catalytic converters don't choke power that much, so let's not get into that discussion. My main reason was I would rather shell out $60 for a test pipe than $250 for a '94-'97 high-flow converter. Also, my Good-Win Racing Roadstersport exhaust has a wideband bung in it's mid-pipe, but it would be pointless if I had a converter because the converter would muck up the readings. And finally, if I want to take advantage of Megasquirt's launch control, I'd rather use spark cut, and I don't want to ka-blammo my catalytic converter.

Screw you Techno Toy Tuning for feeling the need to be cutesy and cut out your logo in the flange and severely compromise the flange and the one bolt hole.

Decided to throw in my Megasquirt, so that I could do my wiring for the wideband, as well as route my vacuum lines. Pulled up the carpet to remove the ECU cover and discovered this. Gack.

Fortunately it looks much worse than it actually is. The ECU cover is pretty crusty, but the floorboards themselves are actually fine. Still, when I peeled back the carpet, I admit to having a heart attack.

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuure

Honestly, if you can't install this thing, you must be some sort of an idiot. Setting it up, wellll, that part I might need some help with.

I then tried to install my boost gauge and wideband, fumbled around in the car a bit and called it a day because I was frustrated.

Big news, we got the oil drain plug drilled, tapped and heli-coiled with the pan on the engine and the engine in the car! Actually, my father did. I believe the conversation went something like this

Dad: I suppose I have to be the one to do this.

Me: Well, yeah, you're the one who's been a machinist for 40 years. This is your forte.

Dad: Well, what if I screw it up?

Me: You won't. You're professional pride won't let you.

To keep chips out of the pan, we held an air nozzle to the dipstick tube and basically kept the pan under mild positive pressure the entire time he was drilling and tapping it. We would have used the thick grease method, but we wanted to Loc-tite the Heli-coil in and were afraid that we wouldn't be able to get the material clean enough for the Loc-Tite to set.

Got the new radiator in, mounted and plumbed. I do find it interesting that the logo got painted on it upside down. Is it worth more? Is my car signaling distress?

I will admit that their mounting instructions are a tad confusing. You redrill the lower mounts (had to space out one of the bushings on mine, because someone cut and rewelded the bracket 3/8" out of place!), then say to hell with the stock upper mounts and then bolt these little angle brackets to the top tank that attach to the new radiator closeout panel. This drops the radiator down 1/2" and tilts the top back towards the engine to give clearance for the charge pipes.

This is the end result, although, as you can see, there is no charge piping or supercharger on at the moment.

The big holdup right now is that this somehow turned into a minor collision/body repair job now. I was aware that the front of this car got absolutely smashed at some point. And I remember when I swapped out the bumper, I had a hard time getting it lined up satisfactorily. Put the bumper back on the other night and it's way the berkeley out. Passenger side has a 1/4" (at least) gap between it and the headlight cover and sits higher than the fender, plus none of the fender mounting holes line up with the bumper and unibody holes. And the driver's side is butted right up against the headlight cover. Now, I know this isn't a show car but I can't stand that. So now we are trying to fix these quality "repairs"

Not the fender/unibody tabs that aren't lined up, the top hole on the bracket where someone hacked it wide open and the torn front fender hole that is then jammed behind/over the bracket. Thanks.

While on a test drive at work, I turned around at my favorite junkyard and noticed someone unloading a red NA Miata there. I am absolutely going back and raiding that E36 M3. The tombstone, gauge hood and center console are kinda jacked up in my car (thanks previous mechanic who worked on it!). Also, I'd really like to put a set of hood vents on the car, and I don't want to ventilate my stock hood. So if that one's good, I'll grab it, put a set of Singular hood vents in it, have it and my spare headlight covers vinyl wrapped flat black and slap it on.

Got my gauges installed in the A-pillar pod.

It was a real treat to get all the wires and hoses routed. And then after I fumbled under for the dash for a few hours, I hooked up the battery and learned that what I was told was switched power is actually constant battery voltage. So I have to go back under there and fix that. I've been avoiding it for a week now

A little bit of fab work and grinding and hammering and I got the front bumper cover back on the car. Still not perfect but the front of this car is so jacked up I doubt that will ever happen. Did have to make a new fender bracket and rivet that on.

Starting to like how this looks. Need to figure out what I'm going to do with my front plate bracket though. Stock bracket hangs kinda low front and center and blocks my intercooler. Most offset brackets use the stock tow hook bolt holes, but I have my Blackbird tow strap on the passengers side, and mounting it on the right side would block air to the supercharger traction fluid cooler. Ideas?

No photos, but the TDR kit comes with a new undertray that involved slicing up my NIB belly pan and mounting a bunch of plastic panels. Of course, the front of my car is wonky so I had to drill/slot some holes. TDR also forgot to send me some of the bracketry, so fabrication was required. The end result funnels most of the air through the intercooler and radiator, with a side passage for the traction fluid cooler.

The traction fluid cooler mounts in the left front wheel well ahead of the tire. I'm honestly a little concerned about it getting pelted with rocks and stuff, or springing a leak and oiling down my tires, but TDR says its fine, so I'll trust them

Also, heads up, when TDR says that the hoses for the cooler are hard to install on the cooler fittings, they are 100% not berkeleying around. Silicone lube and heat were required, along with a lot of grunt.

Getting awful busy in the engine bay. From left to right: TDR catch can, brake master cylinder, Rotrex traction fluid reservoir and clutch reservoir

Got to installing the supercharger kit again, and finally got the blower mounted. To be honest, between all the setbacks I encountered, lack of progress, looming deadlines and some stuff going on in my personal life, I was starting to get discouraged and lose motivation. Getting the blower mounted on the bracket and starting to visualize things was a big "Ah-ha!" moment

Promptly brought crashing down to reality by the discovery that TDR sent me the wrong bloody belt, that was way too short. Also, their website didn't list the part number they sent me, and none of the belts they listed seemed right.

Put out a call on here for help, and Patrick and Stampie came to my rescue with helping me discover which belt I had and which one I needed and how to decipher Gates belt numbers. Sunday morning I was coming back from Easter brunch at my sister's, and notice that NAPA is open. Hmmmmm. Dash in there, give them the part number and he comes back with one that's close. Go home and have instant success.