E30 Rally Car

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

I put it back together with one.. How misaligned could this get, anyway?

About three heat cycles before the head gasket blows, in my experience.

Head gaskets are kind of amazing, they have to seal while allowing the head to slide around on the block as it expands and contracts at a different rate with temperature, especially with an aluminum head/iron block combo.  That is why the head bolts are so long - longer bolts allows more lateral displacement.

today i learned...

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Hmm.  This only shows a single dowel. Maybe there's only one?  Oh, nevermind, it says qty 2.  Sigh.  I really don't want to pull it apart again...

Okay, here we go:

Both alignment dowels are now in place.  Reused the head gasket, but replaced the head bolts.  Again.

Thanks, Pete.  As annoying as it was, it would have been a lot more annoying to DNF my second rally over a $1.98 piece of metal.

More minor progress today, now that I managed to prep / race / crash / fix the Formula Vee.  My racing habit seems to dominate every available weekend--most of it in the garage.

Managed to remove the pilot bearing with the grease/bolt/hammer trick.  Every other pilot bearing I've dealt with is in the flywheel, which means it's simple to remove.  Didn't think the grease trick was going to work--the key was getting the gorilla tape the right thickness to seal against the inner race and still slide.  A waste of a bunch of Redline CV2, but it's what was in my gun.

BMW seals are no match for drywall screws, and this came out easily.

Ebay clutch kit with new flywheel installed.  It came with new flywheel bolts (and hex heads even, none of this BMW allen nonsense).  Of course my old pressure plate bolts were M8x1.5, and this one wanted M8x1.25, but fortunately I had plenty of those.

Tomorrow I hope the transmission bolts up with minimal drama, and if I can swap the subframe in reasonable time, maybe I'll even get the engine back in.

I did not get the engine back in.  The transmission really happily slid in with about a 1/4" gap and would not wiggle forward.  In my experience, transmissions usually do nothing until the magic angle is acquired then they go *thunk* and seat all the way.  This one refused.  I threaded the bolts in and very gently tightened them and the transmission snugged up happily.  Hopefully I didn't break anything.

So, here's some fun BMW nonsense.  I couldn't figure out why there were 3 ground wires coming from the harness, each with a different sized ring terminal.

Once I'd reinstalled the starter, I remembered that these must be the starter wires.  I'd replaced the starter before, but the absurdity of 3 black wires didn't really register when it was only the starter I was working on.  You'd think that fancy German factory could afford some differently colored wire now and again.

I'm pleased to report that while the Stupidest Starter Bolt isn't easy to install with the engine out of the car, it's a lot easier.  I do have to wonder what anyone was thinking with that design.

I replaced some destroyed bushings:

I could not muster the effort to clean the transmission case.  Which is fine, because I spent all remaining effort for the day on the front subframe.  First I needed to get the car off the trailer and into the garage since it spent the winter outside.  That took awhile, and the very slight incline leading up to my garage was a bit of pain, but I'm going to pretend I'm confident that the car will leave the garage under its own power.

No pictures left from the rest of my day...

First, I removed the control arms.  Everything went fine until the driver's side ball joint simply refused to come out, even after a few minutes of pounding on it with my rivet gun.  Fortunately, I remembered that I did acquire a ball joint separator tool kit.  I managed to get one of them in a reasonable orientation and somewhere around a few million feet-ton of torque, the ball joint popped with quite an explosion.  Completely destroyed the threads on the ball joint, which was a bit sad since I was planning to keep those as spares.  No big loss once I realized RockAuto has replacements for $12/each.  I guess BMW people really do change these things with every oil change.  I noticed because while I acquired replacement control arms, I didn't acquire control arm bushings, and my old ones are in rough shape and good and well fused to the control arms.

The subframe itself was pretty simply to remove.  I'd purchased a fancy reinforced replacement which appeared to be in great shape, unfortunately I think my car is somewhat bent.  It's clear from the skid plate and subframe reinforcement that the bottom of the subframe has taken at least one huge whack in the last 20 years of being of a rally car, which I think (a) flattened the subframe a big, (b) spread the frame a bit, (c) destroyed the flanges the motor mount bolts to (which is why I'm replacing the subframe).  This meant the new subframe really didn't want to go on.  I finally managed to get it by loosely attaching one side, then getting threads on the side started with some serious prying effort.  The bolts threaded in, I hope not cross-threaded, and appeared to actually bolt things in place correctly.  The bolts torqued up correctly, so I'm hoping I didn't cross-thread them or otherwise destroy things.  I'm not removing it to find out.

I wonder how many more orders of magnitude of time I've spent wrenching on this thing compared to the ~40 minutes I've spent driving it on stage...

Paging irish44j for some assistance.  I see that you're running an OMP HTE-R 400.  Do you have any idea if the HTE-R XL has a prayer of fitting?  I'm mostly worried about the halo size.  The external width of the halo is 65mm wider on the HTE-R 400.  Worse, it's about 40mm higher on the XL.  I'm thinking there's a likely possibility that I can't close the door with an XL installed.  If you wouldn't mind make a wild guess with a tape measure on yours while it's mounted, that'd be quite helpful!

I'm running into the problem that I don't know that I can find a containment seat that will fit me *and* fit into the E30.  I'm 6'2" and 225lbs.  I have proven that I can mostly fit into the large Racequip FIA Containment seat, and it *might* fit in the car.  It's tighter than I'd like on me, but workable.  I'm working on tracking down the exterior halo dimensions on that one because Racequip only publishes the interior dimension (15 inches).

Berck said:

Paging irish44j for some assistance.  I see that you're running an OMP HTE-R 400.  Do you have any idea if the HTE-R XL has a prayer of fitting?  I'm mostly worried about the halo size.  The external width of the halo is 65mm wider on the HTE-R 400.  Worse, it's about 40mm higher on the XL.  I'm thinking there's a likely possibility that I can't close the door with an XL installed.  If you wouldn't mind make a wild guess with a tape measure on yours while it's mounted, that'd be quite helpful!

I'm running into the problem that I don't know that I can find a containment seat that will fit me *and* fit into the E30.  I'm 6'2" and 225lbs.  I have proven that I can mostly fit into the large Racequip FIA Containment seat, and it *might* fit in the car.  It's tighter than I'd like on me, but workable.  I'm working on tracking down the exterior halo dimensions on that one because Racequip only publishes the interior dimension (15 inches).

Not sure, but my HTR 400 doesn't have much clearance at the main hoop supports that go to the side bar. I guess it depends if yours are curved (mine are straight) and how you mount it. I'll take a few pics tonight.  Sorry for the delay, haven't been online much this week!

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Awesome, thanks.  Since I have an ancient grandfathered SCCA cage, it's got a little mini diagonal that goes from the top piece to the side bar.  It's a a potential issue, but I think I can get the seat in front of the problem area.  But that solves nothing if the halo ears stick out the window:)

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Hmm.  The photos don't load for me--forgot to set sharing permissions on them?

IDK, just standard Imgur upload, same way I always do on my build thre.  Can you see them on my actual imgur page? https://irish44j.imgur.com/all

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Nope.

I thought maybe Imgur or Fastly (their CDN) is mad at Starlink, but it's not working from my phone, either.  Imgur reports all systems operational: https://status.imgur.com/ but I'm not sure how sophisticated that is.

Actually, now my phone is giving a JSON-rendered 500 with the message that "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later." (which *should* be a 429 or something, but whatever.   Browsing random viral images on imgur works fine...  The images in your thread load fine in your thread, but only load in a standalone page for me about half the time. 

The links to the photos on your above post are actually Google, not Imgur though?

Maybe it'll show up eventually:)

hmm...ah ok, forgot I direct-dropped them into the thread, not imgur. They show up for me but guess that doesn't work public. So trying again:

Thanks! So, I need an extra 1.25" on each side, and 1.5" taller than what you've got.  These photos sure make it look like it just might be doable!

I like that you left the stock seatbelt.  Wish my builder had done the same.  Probably great for transits.

Today I got the new control arms and tie rods in.  I'd have thought that would take about 2 hours, but it took so much longer.  Even accounting for the brief break to paint some Formula Vee wheels.  I think the engine goes back in tomorrow.

Photo of new subframe, new tie rods, new control arms.  And a lot of dirt.

The engine is back in.  For reasons that I don't understand, it appears to be sitting a little farther aft than it used to.  I think it's likely only a problem for the shifter location.  I didn't pay a lot of attention to where things were before, but I'm having a heck of a time getting the shift linkage reinstalled--I may have to grind about 1/4" out of the shifter support to get it to go back in, and even then, it'll be sitting at the aft end of the tunnel opening.

Given that I've replaced subframe and motor mounts with new, unbent things, it's possible there was enough slop in the old stuff that it just worked?  I mean, the right side engine mount had been ripped clean from the subframe, so I guess by definition there was a lot of play.  Also, since the transmission is not one that was ever shipped in an E30, who knows?  Given that the shift rod is a clearly home-made, I know things were different, but I'd have expected things to at least bolt back in where they were...