A few small tweaks, really happy with how it turned out. The AEM software makes it pretty easy! (with some help from Photoshop to make the background)
A few small tweaks, really happy with how it turned out. The AEM software makes it pretty easy! (with some help from Photoshop to make the background)
Don't think anyone is reading this but it's pretty cool checking in to see how far the car has come along and with the last update being so long ago that it reminds me how far it has progressed, when I only see the incremental changes.
Time for another photo dump to track what's happened until now so I can come back and compare
I love when this thread pops up. Your fabrication is beautiful and the car is an absolute monster.
Sorry, just pushed your Youtube sub count from 69 to 70 lol
Adam
Some are reading for sure.
RacetruckRon said:I love when this thread pops up. Your fabrication is beautiful and the car is an absolute monster.
Thank you!
adam525i said:Sorry, just pushed your Youtube sub count from 69 to 70 lol
Adam
Awesome, now I just sit back and watch the $ roll in?
TurnerX19 said:Some are reading for sure.
Yeah if you guys still care I'll start updating this thing with more details as I go. Feedback seemed to have waned over the years so I figured it's no longer a GRM crowd cup of tea.
Love the build and your workmanship!
Love the box flares, I think they work so much better with the E30 lines than the ones you had on there. Are you going to do the front too?
Box flairs FTW!!!
Absolutely the style change needed to match the power output.
wawazat said:Love the build and your workmanship!
Thank you!
cmcgregor said:Love the box flares, I think they work so much better with the E30 lines than the ones you had on there. Are you going to do the front too?
I agree, the flares I built originally were just limited by my fabrication ability at the time. I have wanted to redo them for a long time but have had no reason since they were done and did their job keeping me admissible to closed wheel automotive track days :) But during the last test I went off-roading at 280kmh due to a flat tire, and the car decided to shed them on its own so the decision was made for me.
To elaborate, I finally got a clear run to try a personal best at Mosport and kept it pinned to the bridge. There is a dip in the road under the bridge on the left which I know and was ready for. Judging by the knife like cut in the tire, and the splitter being broken in that corner, my detective skills concluded that the car bottomed out in that dip, broke the splitter and with the tires being wider than the splitter, the carbon fence went into the tire. The car started pulling HARD and the steering went rock solid (the splitter broke and tossed the accessory belt). The steering trace looks really fun with me trying to keep the car straight towards the paved runoff. Major brown flag moment but I managed to get it stopped a few feet before the wall.
RE: fronts, yep starting on them tonight.
Samebutdifferent said:Box flairs FTW!!!
Absolutely the style change needed to match the power output.
And the tire size and track width, which grew a lot since I first built the flares. Now I can build them big enough to comfortably clear the meat I run.
the brown flag is a serious flag.
I guess the car was trying to tell you something... Like, "Hey!!! I need box flairs and I'm going to help remove the current flairs".
Glad you and the wall didn't have a closer encounter. That's a brown pants event let alone brown flag!
BigD said:I figured it's no longer a GRM crowd cup of tea.
Who in their right mind wouldn't crave this cup of tea? Keep it up!
Great work! I always forget what car is lurking behind this thread title.
AxeHealey said:BigD said:I figured it's no longer a GRM crowd cup of tea.Who in their right mind wouldn't crave this cup of tea? Keep it up!
+1
I'm not a BMW guy, and I remember thinking "this guy can throw some cash around", but then I saw what you did with it. GRM isn't all about cheap.
This thing is a beast and I love the fab work. That header is a work of art! 
Please keep us updated 
Thanks guys!
Dead_Sled said:AxeHealey said:BigD said:I figured it's no longer a GRM crowd cup of tea.Who in their right mind wouldn't crave this cup of tea? Keep it up!
+1
I'm not a BMW guy, and I remember thinking "this guy can throw some cash around", but then I saw what you did with it. GRM isn't all about cheap.
This thing is a beast and I love the fab work. That header is a work of art!
Please keep us updated
That's part of what I mean, I'm not sure if it's giving off a bought vibe now but nothing's really changed, just progressed. If I was rich I wouldn't be doing bondo and urethane HVLP spraying in my garage in a Dexter murder tarp booth. As satisfying as it is, it's quite torturous. I would at least rent a professional booth but I can't afford it. I've spent money on some components over the years but I've spent so much time and effort trying to get things for a price I could afford that I probably would have been ahead just getting a second job and paying retail.
But the biggest step forward in what I could do to it came with the welding and related fab skills. It's allowed me to be able to build things that I couldn't realistically ever dream of buying or paying someone to build (with the satisfaction that I did it coming as a bonus). The header is a good example. I don't want to know what it would cost to have made but in raw ingredients, it cost me less than my original one that was off a forum group buy, about as cheap as it's possible to get one for. Except this one is made using the Elmer Racing billet collector, and the tubing is 321 and 347 filler rather than the 304 almost all manifolds, including the really expensive ones, are made from, except 304 is a ticking timebomb (crackbomb?) at the temperatures of a turbo manifold, especially in the welds.
Of course, this may sound like I'm saying that if I could afford it, I'd pay someone to build the car for me and that's definitely not the case. The end result is almost beside the point.
And, will do!
In reply to BigD :
Labor and skill are what makes the best challenge cars what they are for 2k. Just because you're adding zeros to the price tag doesn't mean it's not grm. You're spending the money on the right hardware for the long term, and saving on the install while learning more in the process.
I assume most challenge builders would happily spend beyond their budget to get their "dream part" vs their "budget part" that they'd ideally swap out post challenge.
You've gone into this build with a different set of requirements. Build what makes sense to you and your budget/goals.
And share it with us, even tho I hate getting excited when "BigD" pops up on my phone.
In reply to BigD :
Fab skills get better and better as you develop the car. That tends to give you the confidence to do more and more. Plus the pleasure and joy of achieving more than most.
Well done
Dead_Sled said:In reply to BigD :
Labor and skill are what makes the best challenge cars what they are for 2k. Just because you're adding zeros to the price tag doesn't mean it's not grm. You're spending the money on the right hardware for the long term, and saving on the install while learning more in the process.
I assume most challenge builders would happily spend beyond their budget to get their "dream part" vs their "budget part" that they'd ideally swap out post challenge.
You've gone into this build with a different set of requirements. Build what makes sense to you and your budget/goals.
And share it with us, even tho I hate getting excited when "BigD" pops up on my phone.
Right, yeah many parts on this car weren't upgraded for a long time until I could switch to a part that wasn't just better but was what I wanted. The ANZE-Penske triples are a good example. There are many notches above my Koni SAs that I had before but performance parts depreciate about as fast as toilet paper upon being used so I tried to wait until I could figure out a way to get the end game. Similar to my recent AEM upgrades. The car currently has no ABS and even a basic E36 system would be a good change but for the past few years I've been holding out for Bosch Motorsport, especially now that they released the M5, where the "full" kit has downforce compensation algorithms.
Haha, true, maybe I should have let my highschool moniker stay in the past.
frenchyd said:In reply to BigD :
Fab skills get better and better as you develop the car. That tends to give you the confidence to do more and more. Plus the pleasure and joy of achieving more than most.
Well done
Thanks! My impostor syndrome is still very strong and maybe it will never go away but while it prevents me from thinking that anything I do would be anything special, after enough practical evidence that I at least won't screw up badly enough where I can't recover and finish, it encourages me to try more and more stuff that I don't really know if I can do it. Kind of like when you're a kid taking stuff apart, then you put it back together and each time you have fewer and fewer spare parts left over until eventually you have none and it actually still works, and you don't catch hell. Or was that just my childhood?
RacetruckRon said:I love when this thread pops up. Your fabrication is beautiful and the car is an absolute monster.
Agreed. I love seeing updates on this car!
BigD said:Yeah if you guys still care I'll start updating this thing with more details as I go. Feedback seemed to have waned over the years so I figured it's no longer a GRM crowd cup of tea.
Just to say it again, I love this thread, and I love learning from the updates. Keep it up, that car just keeps getting better and better!
AWSX1686 said:BigD said:Yeah if you guys still care I'll start updating this thing with more details as I go. Feedback seemed to have waned over the years so I figured it's no longer a GRM crowd cup of tea.
Just to say it again, I love this thread, and I love learning from the updates. Keep it up, that car just keeps getting better and better!
Thank you, will do! I wrote a story here summarizing some of the recent work if anyone's interested:
http://speed.academy/how-aem-performance-electronics-saved-my-900-whp-engine/
All I can say is WOW.
You cover a lot of ground with your breadth of knowledge on many topics and the ability to dig deep into any one of them. Color me impressed. I have no doubt you will crush the track record in short order. Based on your assessment of the last dyno run, it sounds like there's a bit more in the engine. Could it hit 1000 hp with out blowing out the top or bottom end? I'll leave that to you to determine where to stop adding boost. One would surmise the large turbo would have serious lag issues but I didn't see any of that in the short test run you did. Clearly this is the turbo of your dreams and will make the car very drivable with such a smooth boost transition, or so it seemed.
As I see it, adding the awesome box flairs, tweaking the engine management system to really control the turbo, adding the new sensors and finally dialing it all in on the the dyno, no one is going to catch you on the track.
I for one really enjoy reading all the commentary with the great pictures. As was said earlier, GRM is not just about low budget builds. You have provided the readers with a different level of GRM that complements all the other builds. Simply put, it's built, not bought and that's what makes for great reading.
Please carry on.
Thank you for the kind words!
I think the turbo is capable of 1000whp but currently the plan is to try to just sustain about 750 ft lbs of torque, from as early as possible to redline. So that would add up to about 1000 wheel but at a lot less peak torque than before since the 850 ft lb peak before was mainly just stressing the engine but the turbo wouldn't keep flowing at high RPM. The main concern is that the motor is an 87mm block and BMW drag racers tell me that at 900whp, the block eventually cracks (one guy's theory is that the bores fatigue from ballooning). But these guys do hundreds of passes on their cars so I'm proceeding cautiously and I'm having an 84mm block machined that I'll build up as a backup, with 12:1 compression for an added experiment. I'm currently at 9:1 and this was when I was only planning to run pump or racegas but on ethanol, there is no need for such low compression. We always monitor knock and we've always reached MBT without knock. It's weird building a motor hoping to never use it...
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