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

Literally nobody cares, but this week I rewired a bunch of the interior/comms/accessory stuff and reconfigured a few things over on Jim's side of the car. Also added power outlets for the various tracking systems ARA has us running at various rallies. Yay. Literally nothing interesting to talk about. The car could rally tomorrow if I wanted to, it's fully ready to go. 

So anyhow, here's some current photos of things looking nice and clean and orderly, since I have nothing else worth taking photos of...

Looks like you did a nice job on the placement of the extinguisher sprayers.  And cleaning up wiring doesn't make for good photos, but it sure is satisfying when it's all done!

95maxrider said:

Looks like you did a nice job on the placement of the extinguisher sprayers.  And cleaning up wiring doesn't make for good photos, but it sure is satisfying when it's all done!

hah, I think you're just happy I keep adding more and more weight lol. The fire system tank is removable, but I know me well enough to know I'm just gonna leave it in there for rallycross, because I'm lazy and I'm annoyed that I had to install it in the first place and don't want to touch it again :D

After seeing Downey do the same, I finally got around to building a passenger-side motor mount arm. This is a weak point on swapped e30s and stock e36s, the arm just isn't strong enough to support the engine weight under heavy abuse. There are a couple VERY expensive options on the market in Europe, but not trying to spend $200 for a motor mount arm. 

So, out comes the scrap metal. Specifically some 8mm bar and some heavy plate. 

One of the other things to do here is to make the mount plate to the block go to SIX bolt points rather than the original four. The block has two more empty mount points aligned with the other two, which is convenient. So first I took some plate (two 6x6 pieces, one of them already cut up a bit) and welded them together to get a roughly 6x9 piece.

Then took some bar to use as the "ear" to mount to the motor mount. I doubled up some of the bar stock to make what should be a very strong flat piece. Then bolted the bar into place on the motor mount and the plate onto the block and cut a couple arms to attach them together.

One that was tacked up I took it off the engine and welded it up on the bench. Halfway through I ran out of welding gas so had to switch to flux-core, which makes everything less pretty....

Meanwhile, walked outside to do something and forgot my phone so turned around quick and promply smashed my nose into the garage door, which I hadn't opened all the way. After 5 minutes of being dizzy and blood flowing down my nose, got that all patched up. Good thing I wear a mask when out and about, which will cover this lovely band-aid

Anyhow, then I triangulated the piece and made an upper brace bar and some other braces here and there. 

And here's what it looks like vs. the stock piece.

test fit

then painted it up and installed fully

So, hopefully that will be sufficiently strong. I thought about boxing it all with some thinner plate, but that would have made it difficult to access all six bolts to the block. Anyhow, I think this will be ok as-is, if not terribly pretty.

AFTER finishing, I recalled that I bought a plasma cutter a couple months ago which would have made this easier (and better looking). Oh well, next time...

irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:

After seeing Downey do the same, I finally got around to building a passenger-side motor mount arm. This is a weak point on swapped e30s and stock e36s, the arm just isn't strong enough to support the engine weight under heavy abuse. There are a couple VERY expensive options on the market in Europe, but not trying to spend $200 for a motor mount arm. 

So, out comes the scrap metal. Specifically some 8mm bar and some heavy plate. 

One of the other things to do here is to make the mount plate to the block go to SIX bolt points rather than the original four. The block has two more empty mount points aligned with the other two, which is convenient. So first I took some plate (two 6x6 pieces, one of them already cut up a bit) and welded them together to get a roughly 6x9 piece.

Then took some bar to use as the "ear" to mount to the motor mount. I doubled up some of the bar stock to make what should be a very strong flat piece. Then bolted the bar into place on the motor mount and the plate onto the block and cut a couple arms to attach them together.

One that was tacked up I took it off the engine and welded it up on the bench. Halfway through I ran out of welding gas so had to switch to flux-core, which makes everything less pretty....

Meanwhile, walked outside to do something and forgot my phone so turned around quick and promply smashed my nose into the garage door, which I hadn't opened all the way. After 5 minutes of being dizzy and blood flowing down my nose, got that all patched up. Good thing I wear a mask when out and about, which will cover this lovely band-aid

Anyhow, then I triangulated the piece and made an upper brace bar and some other braces here and there. 

And here's what it looks like vs. the stock piece.

test fit

then painted it up and installed fully

So, hopefully that will be sufficiently strong. I thought about boxing it all with some thinner plate, but that would have made it difficult to access all six bolts to the block. Anyhow, I think this will be ok as-is, if not terribly pretty.

AFTER finishing, I recalled that I bought a plasma cutter a couple months ago which would have made this easier (and better looking). Oh well, next time...

My dad drilled in the philosophy into me from a young age, when you are building something, it is worth overbuilding it.

StripesSA1 said:

irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:

After seeing Downey do the same, I finally got around to building a passenger-side motor mount arm. This is a weak point on swapped e30s and stock e36s, the arm just isn't strong enough to support the engine weight under heavy abuse. There are a couple VERY expensive options on the market in Europe, but not trying to spend $200 for a motor mount arm. 

So, out comes the scrap metal. Specifically some 8mm bar and some heavy plate. 

One of the other things to do here is to make the mount plate to the block go to SIX bolt points rather than the original four. The block has two more empty mount points aligned with the other two, which is convenient. So first I took some plate (two 6x6 pieces, one of them already cut up a bit) and welded them together to get a roughly 6x9 piece.

Then took some bar to use as the "ear" to mount to the motor mount. I doubled up some of the bar stock to make what should be a very strong flat piece. Then bolted the bar into place on the motor mount and the plate onto the block and cut a couple arms to attach them together.

One that was tacked up I took it off the engine and welded it up on the bench. Halfway through I ran out of welding gas so had to switch to flux-core, which makes everything less pretty....

Meanwhile, walked outside to do something and forgot my phone so turned around quick and promply smashed my nose into the garage door, which I hadn't opened all the way. After 5 minutes of being dizzy and blood flowing down my nose, got that all patched up. Good thing I wear a mask when out and about, which will cover this lovely band-aid

Anyhow, then I triangulated the piece and made an upper brace bar and some other braces here and there. 

And here's what it looks like vs. the stock piece.

test fit

then painted it up and installed fully

So, hopefully that will be sufficiently strong. I thought about boxing it all with some thinner plate, but that would have made it difficult to access all six bolts to the block. Anyhow, I think this will be ok as-is, if not terribly pretty.

AFTER finishing, I recalled that I bought a plasma cutter a couple months ago which would have made this easier (and better looking). Oh well, next time...

My dad drilled in the philosophy into me from a young age, when you are building something, it is worth overbuilding it.

Totally agree. And since it's not like we are competing for a WRC championship, an extra pound or two on the car isn't going to hurt anything. Hopefully this thing is plenty over built!

Only a couple weeks before the first DC RallyCross event!

Then the weekend after that, a new rallysprint at Rausch Creek (where I go offroading in the Raider sometimes), which is an SCCA event (meaning LOOOOOW entry cost). Looking forward to checking it out. Plus, we made the cover photo :)

Figured I might as well do some work on the rally car today, but first had to deal with the Porsche. For a couple weeks it's been really hard to start, usually taking repeated attempts and pretty much will never start on a cold morning until the day warms up. Once started it will sputter and hesitate for several minutes and even backfire into the intake boot - and then run perfectly once warm.This (hopefully) is textbook DME temperature sensor issue, since that changes the fuel trim and if it's not working, the engine thinks it's warm and leans out everything, thus not starting when cold. I replaced this sensor when I did the build so it doesn't have many miles on it, so I'm wondering if it's the 1980s wiring someplace causing the issue. In any case, I'll do some testing and see which is the case, and fix that and hopefully that takes care of it. 

For the rally car, up until 2019  I always ran Hawk HPS pads and they did fine. In 2019 I swapped to HP+ primarily for the heavy braking and downhills at STPR where I wanted better heat capacity. They work great on stage, but I did find that at rallycross the first few turns of any run were pretty lacking of braking bite - especially early and late season cold events. I got around this to some degree by dragging the brakes from grid to start, but if I forgot I had to take it a bit easy initially. This year I'm putting a fresh set of HPS on (with a fresh set of the usual $15 Centric rotors from Rockauto), and will run those until the first warm-weather stage rally (probably Ohio, in June) and then swap the HP+ stuff back on.

Also, I spent a couple hours cutting stickarz for Nonack's BRZ rally car. 

Took the rally car out to bed the brakes in and it ran well, engine feels good, etc. 

The 3-clutch LSD with the thicker bellville washers it still fairly chattery in any kind of slow-speed/tight turns, even after about 150 miles of break-in, so we'll see if that breaks in more. I may add a bit more friction modifier and see if I can strike the right balance. 

Porsche is still waiting for a new DME temperature sensor.

Pretty excited for the rallycross season to start in about 10 days, but gotta say I'm even more excited about the Susquehanna rallysprint. They've posted a rough course, and it's about 3 miles long and the surface looks pretty nice (gravel and hard clay, kind of like STPR, it appears). Sounds like there will be minimum 10 passes on the course, so 30 stage miles for $200 not bad at all for a place 3 hours from home!

Also (Chris) SCCA doesn't require fire extinguisher certs, just the gauge showing full, so that's one less thing to deal with at the moment.

Here's the course, it's down in the valley a mile or so from where we go offroading at Rausch Creek. Apparently they've been busy all week installing culverts to drain away remaining water from melting snow, and next couple weeks are looking decently warm for weather, so hopefully it'll be nice and dry (fingers crossed). 

skidplate day!

so two things. First, repeated hard rock hits on the front bend of the big stainless steel skidplate had the effect of actually bending DOWN the front of it (it's counterintuitive until you think of the physics). This is a 1/8" stainless plate so it's not like I can bend it back by hand with any equipment I have here in my garage. 

So, marked a line on the bend and got out the angle grinder and thinned the material at the line all the way across until it was thin enough I could stand on it and use my weight to bend it back up about 15 degrees. Then rand a bead of weld across the cut (small segments, so as not to warp anything) to get it back up to strength.

So that's skidplate v1.

Second part. This 1/8" 3' x 2' plate is heavy, I figure it weighs about 35 lbs but feels a lot heavier than that when trying to put it on solo. Plus, it's right in the nose of the car, the worst place for weight. While I want this kind of large/heavy-duty protection for the stages, it's just extra weight for rallycross, where massive hits are less likely.

So got my hands on a 2' x 2' piece of 3/16" aluminum sheet (5052), which weighs about 12lbs. It doesn't protect quite as far "up" at the front since it's shorter, but should be more than sufficient for rallycross. In any case, it drops about 20lbs off the nose of the car, which is never a bad thing, and I'm fairly limited on ways to lose weight up front where I most need to lose it, so this will help.

Anyhow, I need to get the bend made, since I can't do it the same way as the steel since I have no aluminum welding capability here, so will take it to a machine shop at some point. Probably won't change it before the first rally-x next weekend since the rallysprint is the weekend after, and it being a newly-created course who knows if there will be any big rocks around, so I'd just as well have maximum protection for that.

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Where'd you find the aluminum plate? I'm planning on a skid plate for the miata soon, trying to decide which way to go steel vs aluminum. 

I'm excited to get behind the wheel of this thing soon. Been a while.

It's hard to do a minimal skid plate with an m5x in an e30, there's just so much pan hanging out there. I had been thinking about thinner aluminum like that with flanges. If you're taking it to a shop with a brake, they, should be able to bend up side flanges out of the same piece easily. Let me know if you want cad help.

AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Where'd you find the aluminum plate? I'm planning on a skid plate for the miata soon, trying to decide which way to go steel vs aluminum. 

I bought it at online metals, because I didn't have the patience to search for a used scrap piece, which is harder during COVID times. It was like $80 shipped, which is fine for my purposes. 

bluej (Forum Supporter) said:

I'm excited to get behind the wheel of this thing soon. Been a while.

It's hard to do a minimal skid plate with an m5x in an e30, there's just so much pan hanging out there. I had been thinking about thinner aluminum like that with flanges. If you're taking it to a shop with a brake, they, should be able to bend up side flanges out of the same piece easily. Let me know if you want cad help.

I mean, this is 3/16", so it should have roughly similar strength to 1/8" steel and a lot less weight. I may have them do some edge flanges, we'll see. with the longitudinal center brace I have, the center should already be pretty well-supported. 

So still annoyed that the rebuilt diff is more chattery than I'd like it to be during turns. I cheaped out and got Mobil 1 gear oil (for LSD, supposedly) since I had a coupon, but for the second time using this stuff I'm not very happy with it. So got my butt on Amazon and ordered the proven stuff....

Though the Redline already has LSD additive, got an extra bottle to help break-in. 

In any case, this reminds me why I got rid of the spare tire well. This is so easy with a clear access, no jack needed...

In unrelated news, Coopers (e30 with M5x also) smashed their oil pan and pretty much annihilated their skidplate at the rally in Missouri today, which pretty much reinforces my constant desire to make sure my pan is as well-protected as possible, weight be damned. 

Some random stuff today

When it's nice out and I have nothing to do, I try to spend some time on the tow rig, maybe just cleaning up a small area of the seemingly never-ending rust on this thing (yeah, early 2000s Toyota). I did about 90% of the frame last year as you may recall, but did not do the right rear corner because access was difficult thanks to the exhaust and the "second muffler" (more like a big resonator just before the tailpipe, and after the huge main muffler). So decided to kill two birds with one stone today and both delete the second muffler and clean up that area, which is actually pretty nasty since the heat from the exhaust causes much more rust when combined with salt and water, than without the heat. 

First order of business was to cut the muffler off. This thing is heavier than it looks, for some reason. I'd say like 15-20lbs.

I took the ratty-looking exhaust tip off and cleaned it up to re-use. Then just cut a straight pipe to replace it. As luck would have it, I had the right diameter to just slip right over the pipe where I cut it, so that made things easier.  While it was off, I hit the frame with the wire wheel and other abrasives to get off all the old peeling powdercoat/paint that was rusting from beneath. Found a couple small holes, but nothing in a place that seems to have any real structural issue, so didn't bother patching them, just cleaned and painted. The hitch bar and mounts were pretty bad as well. So here's mostly "cleaned up"

Before painting, fitted up the rebuilt exhaust setup.

Then repainted the frame areas (and anything else under there worth painting while I was there) and welded up the new exhaust pipe, along with the old (now painted) finishing tip.

So, that worked out well, dropped about 10lbs off the back of the truck, and got me a little bit more exhaust sound (though not much, this truck was MADE to be quiet).

--

Side note: in case I didn't previously mention, the Porsche got its new DME temperature sensor and now starts and runs perfectly again. So took it for a drive on my "backroads" course yesterday when the weather was nice

And a bit of e30 stuff. I've been meaning to add a small air dam at the front of the car to help with high-speed aero (the car gets some lift at high speeds up front, probably due to the total lack of a front lower air dam combined with the angled-up skidplate). I picked up some self-stick vinyl baseboard (like you'd use in a basement or garage along the bottom of the wall), and doubled it up (having the self-stick on the back made this convenient). Then just bolted it along the front bodywork where the factory valence used to go. So this may or may not do anything. It's stiff enough it won't deflect from wind, but will deflect if things hit it (rocks, etc). Also may help a bit in keeping things cleaner in the engine bay area, but not counting on it. 

I like that idea so much I'm going to steal it.

Nothing notable car-wise, but I did spend the day tearing apart one corner of my garage and reconfiguring it to better fit things (like my welding cart) and make space for a stand-up air compressor that I'd like to get soon to replace the little one I've been using for years. I also plan to finally bit the bullet and install some 220 plugs (and higher-amp 110 as well) in the garage, and also ordered some LED lighting for the ceiling to replace my old flourescent stuff. 

So here's the "new" corner with my steel bench raised by about 18" so I can park the welder under it, as well as the small compressor and the fridge, plus a couple shelves for welding gear and "tape" lol

And afterwards cleaned up the whole garage, which seems really emty with no car project in the second bay, now that the rally trailer has moved into the side yard with the big trailer.

Hmm, time to start saving some jars to store all the hardware I'm slowly accumulating. You'd think I'd be on that already considering that's how my Grandfather did it but I guess I needed a reminder.

Haha.......yeah, though every month or two I break one (or one falls because I didn't screw it in enough), and I'm down to my last spare, with my youngest daughter 9 years old, no more :)

I've actually been moving toward more and more of the Dewalt yellow organizer things (you can see them in the first pic), which makes it a lot easier to take the nuts and bolts and stuff TO the car I'm working on or with me on the trail/to rally events. The jars now are mostly my "overflow" for car hardware that won't fit in the organizer boxes, and SAE stuff and household stuff that I don't need for the cars. 

A few days from the DC season opener. MR is going to be a battle this year.....almost all of these are going to be regulars for the season points chase. Also three stage cars entered (mine, Nonack's, and the Mighty Max - which has a bubble machine in the bed and sends bubbles out behind it on stage).

You guys keep track of points and stuff? 

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

That's a lotta MR cars!

gszczyrbak said:

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

That's a lotta MR cars!

and with rallycross nationals finally within reasonable driving/towing distance this year, good chance more than half of those will be heading out to Ohio for it.