1985 BMW 318 Stage Rally Build - 1988 Porsche 924S Street Build - Sequoia Build

And so it begins.

Figured I'd pull the front suspension tonight. And as usual, everything went fine until that damn lower balljoint. Curses upon BMW for that design...

Eventually using the balljoint separator, heat, hammer, and jack got them to pop. Managed to mangle up the threads of one a bit....nothing that can't be fixed with a file or die, no biggie. Also looks like one of my tie rod end boots is pretty shot, not surprisingly. Luckily, RockAuto has Moog tie rod ends on sale for $13 right now, so ordered up a couple of them.

Also got my Condor Speed Shop 2015 calendar. Just call me "Mr.July" lol

before the suspension gets here, luckily the last part for other projects arrived:

water temp sensor in the thread to replace the stock one with no adaptors. Nice little easy project, right? Nope. Not on an M42. The sensor is directly under the middle of the IM, and it's impossible to get any tool in there. I ended up having to remove the upper IM, airbox, and some other stuff to get the old one out (spilling some coolant in the process) and put the new one in. A couple bloody knuckles later and having improv'd with most variants of 19mm wrenches I have, it is installed. Hopefully in there tight enough (the stock one was REALLY loose, surprised it hasn't been leaking).

Yeah, that's it way in the back there :P

Won't get to test it out for a while, but I don't see any reason it shouldn't work as intended..

Thanks....so let me pose a question to those who are following this thread....

Now that I'm putting the IE setup with the 2.5" springs on, it looks like my bilstein dust boots most likely aren't going to fit inside the springs. So the options are:

1. go without and count on the cap and the shock tube seals to do the job.
2. find something that will fit inside and somehow rig it up
3. go with an exterior dustboot (e.g. outside of the spring) like some baja guys do.

Thoughts?

irish44j wrote: before the suspension gets here, luckily the last part for other projects arrived: water temp sensor in the thread to replace the stock one with no adaptors. Nice little easy project, right? Nope. Not on an M42. The sensor is directly under the middle of the IM, and it's impossible to get any tool in there. I ended up having to remove the upper IM, airbox, and some other stuff to get the old one out (spilling some coolant in the process) and put the new one in. A couple bloody knuckles later and having improv'd with most variants of 19mm wrenches I have, it is installed. Hopefully in there tight enough (the stock one was REALLY loose, surprised it hasn't been leaking). Yeah, that's it way in the back there :P Won't get to test it out for a while, but I don't see any reason it shouldn't work as intended..

Is there a parts store connector for those sensors? I have to put one in the RX7 and can't figure it out.

Nah, it's a screw-top, so I just used a circular fitting (for some reason, I forget what those are called lol).

Ok well let's get this on. Suspension arrived today, as well as some nuts and bolts and stuff I ordered from McMaster.

First thing was to take apart the old suspension. Everything still in good shape after 2 seasons of beating, amazingly.

As you can see, there was quite a bit of crud on everything:

more interestingly, a lot of stuff had gotten under the dust boots, which again supports my thought that I'll just do without from here on out, and make sure to clean the shock shaft after events.

The offset top hats once cleaned up were pristine, though a lot of dust and stuff had gotten into the bearing. I spent some time cleaning the bearing, got the action nice and smooth, dried it all out, and regreased. Looks like new now.

For this setup, since I'm not lowering the car I'll just re-use the stock perch to mount the lower threaded section. I don't need the whole perch (and it makes adjusting more cumbersome) so out with the grinder and off with it!

And then some assembly. These fronts are 8" 250lb springs with tender springs so they stay aligned under fool droop. Also got fixed camber plates. With the car going up, I want to maintain the 2.5* or so I'm running right now with the offset top hats at the lower height.

Before installation, I used a die to chase the threads on the balljoint and the one tie-rod end I'm going to re-use, and put on new locknuts (note that the tie-rod ends use a 1.0 pitch thread - so can't really get these at the local auto parts store). I just ordered bags of a few sizes that I use on the suspension, because you can never have too many of "the right size" nuts and bolts

So, bolted it all up, no problemo.

Here's the camber plate and installed...

blingy for now

So granted the car hasn't been driven so it will settle, but after bouncing up and down on the bumper for a while, the height with the adjusters near the bottom is about the height I was at before, if not 1/2" higher. I'll do measurements after driving the car and letting things settle. But that's good news, since the old height was as low as I'll ever want to go, while now I have the ability to go up a few inches if I want to do some trail-running, or a rough course, or go with larger tires. Time will tell. Bouncing on the car it certainly feels more firm than the old setup, but not "stiff" and definitely not as stiff as the WRX (on 330# springs).

So that's it for now. More once I do the rears and get it back on the road I guess...

Ok, got the rest of the suspension on, including new tie rod ends (which were on clearance at RockAuto for $13, in case anyone needs some)

Install was easy, though I inverted the setup from how I've seen it on other cars, with the adjuster on top. First this should keep it from caking up with as much dirt and mud, but more importanly it allowed it to seat better. When mounted to the bottom, it wasn't really clearing the spring well and that setup made me pretty nervous. Doing it the other way seems to work better.

Unsprung comparison with the H&R sports

Here's how it sits at the moment

A few pages back I did some measurements of the H&R setup which were as follows:

Height from hub center to wheel arch LF: 14 1/8" RF: 14 3/8" LR: 13 3/8" RR: 13 1/4"

Static camber LF: -1 3/4 RF: -2 LR: -2 1/8 RR: -2 1/8

Current measurements as I have it set now. Fronts are where I want them. Rears will go down about 1/2" or so I think. I have about 3/4" additional "lowering" on each end I can do (and several inches going up if I want to for some reason)

Height from hub center to wheel arch LF: 14 1/2" RF: 14 1/2" LR: 14 3/8" RR: 14 2/8"

Static camber LF: -2 1/4 RF: -2 1/4 LR: - 1 RR: -1

So I lost about a degree of negative camber in the back by going up one inch in height.

So took it for a quick test drive. Initial impressions:

Car is on winterforces so handling so everything is pretty vague, but it's clearly much flatter in cornering and dive and pitch when braking/accelerating. I didn't notice any significant difference in ride quality over bumps, but that said it's damn near impossible to find a rough dirt road or torn-up road here in Fairfax - I'll have to go farther out and find some rough stuff at some point. Definitely feels good though - as if the rates go well with the Billie HDs. Rear is actually softer than I expected. Front about what I expected.

Also while on test-drive I got to check two other things:

First, the on-wiper sprayers actually work great, even at highway speeds. In fact, they work way better than the OEM setup. So pretty pleased with that improvisation working out!

Second, water temp gauge works well. I was showing 205* water temp after driving around hard for 20 minutes, which is right where it should be considering the weather, etc. So, another mission accomplished.

one other mini-mod. side vent ducting has been deleted, so why not make use of the old vents instead of just having a hole there. I know some guys put a gauge there, but I don't need any more gauge spots. So....take all the vent stuff out of the housing, block off the back end of the vent, and it's a perfect size to stick your iPod, phone, or other small stuff - especially if your car is stripped out and doesn't have a center console or other handy places to stash phone, wallet, cigs, or whatever..

Put a boost gauge there to troll people One of the Detroit guys did that.

Knurled wrote: Put a boost gauge there to troll people One of the Detroit guys did that.

lol....hmm. I do have a non-working Omori boost gauge from the WRX sitting around

I have a question about skid plates for you since I can tell that you put yours to heavy use...

You are using the red46 sump armor, right? It looks like the strongest and the installation looks superior to other options on the market.

Do you recommend it? Any caveats? Still easy enough to change you oil and such? Does it negatively restrict airflow to the sump enough that oil temps go up significantly?

I need something underneath my 325i and value your input. Thanks!

tb wrote: I have a question about skid plates for you since I can tell that you put yours to heavy use... You are using the red46 sump armor, right? It looks like the strongest and the installation looks superior to other options on the market. Do you recommend it? Any caveats? Still easy enough to change you oil and such? Does it negatively restrict airflow to the sump enough that oil temps go up significantly? I need something underneath my 325i and value your input. Thanks!

Yeah, it's a well-built plate IMO. The plate itself is stiff and would be difficult to bend very much (though I did bend the rear unsupported corner of it a bit on a hard hit). It bolts to the back using the steering rack bolts and the front on the core support (with a strip of steel above the "lip"). Would it hold up to a hard hit coming off a jump? Probably not. But for rallycross it's plenty good, and several other local e30s use it as well (much better than some of the other e30 "skidplate" options that are more for style than protection). It's taken a beating and I haven't had any issues with the core support or anything else breaking or bending. For stage I'll build something larger and stronger, with a support bar at the "bend" section. For rallycross and street driving, this is more than sufficient in my opinion. I've even jacked the front end up with it a few times with no noticeable bending, though I wouldn't do that on a regular basis.

Note that I did order mine without the oil filter hole (since I didn't want stuff going up in there). But really it takes about 2 minutes to remove the plate anyhow with normal tools. I replaced the allen-head bolts in the front that it came with - put some stainless hex bolts there instead so I could just use my impact to pop them all off quickly.

Haven't noticed any temperature issues, and as you can see I have plenty of gauges. Car runs with oil temps around 200-210, which is where it should be.

Check over on r3vlimited, he usually runs some deals on the plates in the group buy/FS forum. And his shipping is really, really cheap.

A bit of work tonight. Drove the car quite a bit last weekend. The suspension feels good overall, but I noticed on hard turn-ins to parking lots and stuff that there was a bit of a little "crunch" at the rear end (no noise from the front end).

After some inspection, looks like when the spring goes from full droop to full compression, it was making a bit of contact to the very bottom of the threaded collar

Since I will NEVER need it threaded that far down, I took off an inch of so of the threaded section with a hacksaw. Haven't test-driven it yet, but from what I can tell this should eliminate the contact to the thread.

In reply to irish44j:

Thanks for the input; I appreciate it greatly.

I will order one up soon. I should have done it during the last sale but was too lazy at the time... maybe I can find a promotion but really the total price is really very nice regardless. I definitely have seen many others that appear to be much less useful!

My e30 has morphed into a weekend car with only very occasional autox / track days in its future so this should be plenty of protection for me. I have noticed a few scrapes on the sump even being very careful of speed bumps but the massive city potholes around here can be scary!

So I also picked up some AKG engine mount reinforcements. I haven't had any problems without them, but I noticed they were half-price so for $15, why not. I know I could have just made my own but this was just easier.

After much bending and fitting, managed to get them welded in. It's tight working in there without removing the steering rack and on my back, so even by my standards some pretty ugly welds and lots of splatter. But they should be in there well and provide some additional strength anyways.

For the moment I only did the passenger side since that side has the solid mount and takes the most shock/movement anyhow from the engine. The driver's side has a stock mount so it's not taking as much of a shock load (as you recall, we cut up my other mount to fix Josh S.'s car in Ohio).

Also got the new clutch and related stuff for this weekend's job on the WRX - which will be substantially more work than doing an e30 clutch, for sure...

No car updates, but some schedule updates today.

First, WDCR draft schedule is out and it looks pretty good. Starts in late March, and the Divisional Challenge event locally will be in late June it looks like. June is nice up in the mountains.

Second, looks like RX Nationals have been announced as being in someplace called Indianola - which is not in Indiana, but in Iowa. I will grant that it's 3 hours east of Lincoln. But it's still approximately 1,000 miles from here, so once again I can cross that off the list of "things I want to do this year." I'd prefer my seat time in the racecar, not in my tow rig, lol.

That being said, knowing in advance that I'm going to skip nationals means I can budget/schedule to get to a few different Divisional Challenge/National Challenge events this year instead. Because frankly there are several that are much closer, and all in places that I'd rather go than the middle of Iowa.

So tentatively, aside from the DC Divisional Challenge, I'm going to pencil in the NER Challenge up in New York, The Dixie Challenge (if it's not too far south), The Special Stage event at STPR Rally, and maybe one more depending on schedule. Unfortunately the Susquehanna challenge is this coming weekend and I'll be busy doing other stuff, so that's out, which is too bad since I'd have a good chance of winning there.....

This year there is no "one" NE National Challenge. Instead they're having one challenge event in each region, and the way I read it, you can go to multiple events and rack up points and the person with the most is the NEDiv champ (or something like that). I probably won't get to enough events to do that (seeing as the New England guys already had theirs last month while we're off-season), but will be more fun than going 20 hours to Iowa to get a low number of runs.

Tomorrow is our awards banquet from last year. So I'll get yet another snazzy 2nd-place trophy to go with the other 2nd-place trophies, lol.

So my Sunday was spent about 2 hours up north of home at Matt Rhoad's place. Matt is an accomplished stage rallyer (the trophies all over his bookshelf attest to that), but more importantly Matt has a lift, lots of Subaru knowledge, and plenty of experience with WRXs. And I needed a new clutch, with my original one slipping a bit at 107k miles (pretty good for an AWD car putting down 280wtq!).

So we did the long, laborious clutch job. Two people, with lots of automotive experience, a lift, and all the right tools and equipment and it still took close to 7 hours (albeit with some stops for conversation, lunch, etc).

Working on the Subie reminds me that the Japanese build things very well (aside from M6 and M8 bolts, which snap like they're plastic and need to be drilled out and re-tapped), but also reminds me that the Japanese find the absolutely most complex ways to accomplish simple things like exhaust hangers, and wedge everything in so tight that 1mm of misalignment of things results in 30 minutes spent trying to actually get the transmission back on the car once we had it partially on....

Meanwhile, 1980s BMW bolts never seem to break, and those teutonic engineers designed pretty much everything in most straightforward, sensible way possible.

But at least now the car has a new clutch, new timing belt/water pump (which I did a couple months ago), new rear main seal, and a few other refreshes. So figure I'll drive it to 200k and then find something new :)

On a side note, in addition to a few Subarus, Matt has about a half-dozen e30s (mostly IXs) around. So you know he's a boss....

Thanks for the post about the NEDIV stuff. I had completely forgotten to look that stuff up. So we went to the BMR RallyX today and had lots of fun in the snow.

moxnix wrote: Thanks for the post about the NEDIV stuff. I had completely forgotten to look that stuff up. So we went to the BMR RallyX today and had lots of fun in the snow.

Yeah, looked that way. Trust me, I would have rather been doing that than holding heavy things over my head, lol. Especially since I have fresh winterforces on the e30 at the moment.

How'd you do? How's the rest if the RWD field look, since I assume we'll see some of them at some other NEDiv events this season.

I did pretty well. Hard to say how the rest of the RWD field looked since we were the only ones running a full set of snow tires and I was the only one that did not get stuck in the snow bank at least once I think.

There were no MR cars at the event. PR had Katie and myself, a first gen RX-7 and a ford Thunderbird. The first gen was on All season tires and the Thunderbird was on mud tires. Given those advantages it was hard to judge the field.

The event itself had some issues with timing and event ops but overall went pretty good.

Also there is a 5th event now that is part of the NEDIV challenge series that is not on the schedule yet and possibly more to be added.

Sept 19-20 in Weedsport, NY is the new event.

That's not too bad of a haul to Weedsport. Beautiful up there that time of year, too.

Josh, I have a good friend who lives in Avoca who we could almost certainly stay with friday/sunday night of that weekend to break up the travel some. Google says exactly 1.5 hrs. from there to weedsport and he's got plenty of room for trailer parking and people crashing.

moxnix wrote: I did pretty well. Hard to say how the rest of the RWD field looked since we were the only ones running a full set of snow tires and I was the only one that did not get stuck in the snow bank at least once I think. There were no MR cars at the event. PR had Katie and myself, a first gen RX-7 and a ford Thunderbird. The first gen was on All season tires and the Thunderbird was on mud tires. Given those advantages it was hard to judge the field. The event itself had some issues with timing and event ops but overall went pretty good. Also there is a 5th event now that is part of the NEDIV challenge series that is not on the schedule yet and possibly more to be added. Sept 19-20 in Weedsport, NY is the new event.

Could have sworn I saw pics of Bill Petrow or someone he knows out there in a 240SX.

bluej wrote: That's not too bad of a haul to Weedsport. Beautiful up there that time of year, too. Josh, I have a good friend who lives in Avoca who we could almost certainly stay with friday/sunday night of that weekend to break up the travel some. Google says exactly 1.5 hrs. from there to weedsport and he's got plenty of room for trailer parking and people crashing.

Nice, I'll pencil that in. I could go for doing four NEDiv events - ours, the STPR special stage, Susquehanna's, and maybe 1 or 2 of the New York events. All of those put together are barely more distance than Nationals by themselves, so that sounds like a better use of gas money :)

We (you, me, Nick, Shawn&Katie, the Goldens, etc) should try to plan out for a bunch of us from WDCR to hit these events. Not sure if any of the rest of them plan to go to nationals though.

irish44j wrote: Could have sworn I saw pics of Bill Petrow or someone he knows out there in a 240SX.

Yes running SR in the other group. He had 2 snow tires (on the front). His competition was an RX-8 running 2 snow tires (on the rear). I think the RX-8 stayed mostly clean and the 240 ended up stuck a few times so the RX-8 won.

If we ran the 2 stuff rule (get stuck twice and you are done) like the NER region guys suggested we run there would have been a lot of RWD cars that got sent home early.

Katie got stuck twice and was the second fastest RWD car there.
I was the only RWD car in the top half of the overall standings.

moxnix wrote:

irish44j wrote: Could have sworn I saw pics of Bill Petrow or someone he knows out there in a 240SX.

Yes running SR in the other group. He had 2 snow tires (on the front). His competition was an RX-8 running 2 snow tires (on the rear). I think the RX-8 stayed mostly clean and the 240 ended up stuck a few times so the RX-8 won. If we ran the 2 stuff rule (get stuck twice and you are done) like the NER region guys suggested we run there would have been a lot of RWD cars that got sent home early. Katie got stuck twice and was the second fastest RWD car there. I was the only RWD car in the top half of the overall standings.

Katie....off the course? I have a hard time believing that

was it deep, or just slippery? You guys don't have a lot of ground clearance - high centered?

Really annoyed I had to miss this one. Pretty close to home, snow driving fun, and a chance to rack up "easy" national challenge points. Poor planning on my part and the part of my stupid subaru ;)