The understatedness of this thing is almost overstated. This is success. That said, in case you want to cover those meats or get bigger ones in a stealthy way, for safety's sake or modesty or something like that, might I suggest the following approach to purposeful damage:
I had a good weekend with the truck, I put over 150 miles on it this weekend with no issues. It cruises pretty nicely on the highway at 75 turning 2200rpm.
I loaded it up with a bunch of scrap wood that has been in the backyard since we bought this house over a year ago. It's awesome to have a truck for this sorta stuff.
Ran into town one night to get dinner with the wife and came out to this perspective.
Dog approves of the ridiculous little truck. I took a couple buddies for quick rips in the truck this weekend, both of them deemed this thing to be "Sufficiently Bat E36 M3" I also had my first experience of having to explain the truck to a random stranger at a gas station. I love this stupid little truck.
I do want to get the front sway bar installed soon too tighten up the front end. Wipers and a parking brake would both be nice to have. I need to get to the junkyard and do some searching for a parking brake handle that I can install on the floor by the driver's door. I am going to pick back up on the top loader shifter project pretty soon. What I have works but when I have my hands at 9 and 3 on the steering wheel and I'm in 2nd gear my elbow and arm hit the shift lever. I'm just nitpicking little things at this point but I just want to keep making it better.
In reply to rustomatic :
I have thought about doing some thing of that nature, I kinda like the stance it has now with the little bit of tire poking out. There's a set of flares I have seen other guys put on these truck before and I really like that look. I also want to take another stab at 3D Scanning the whole truck. I have better software, workflow and understanding for that sorta thing now.
Amazing. That is all.
Way cool! Corvette wheels look great and hint at what's underneath but still understated. Must be a riot to drive.
In reply to RacetruckRon :
Porsche 944s have the parking brake lever by the drivers door. Haven't been into them enough to know if they'd fit your needs, but they do mount onthat side.
In reply to AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) :
Good info, thanks for jogging my memory! My buddy has a 924 Turbo, similar parking brake placement.
C4 has parking brake by door, too . . .
rustomatic said:C4 has parking brake by door, too . . .
Oh boy. This seems almost too easy now.
It wasn't that easy, but it was easy. It took one piece of 1/8" plate bent-up kinda weird, but it did make use of the original cables and everything. This is in my Falcon.
rustomatic said:C4 has parking brake by door, too . . .
yep, should be the easy button here.
Would I be able to talk to you about some things you did RacetruckRon? I just got a 88 Ram 50 and have bought a 1uz-fe vvti to shove into it and would like to ask some questions.
In reply to dwogger :
yeah shoot me a PM on here or I'm on the Instagram machine at the same name. I quite like those 1UZ engines, I'd be happy to help anyway I can.
Ooh, I'm totally following you on Insta now. I check this thread constantly just for another glimpse of this thing doing truck things.
I've been wanting to get the front sway bar installed since I first started driving the truck, time to make that happen. I hope this stiffens up the front end enough. I have noticed quite a lot of body roll when I try and toss the truck into a corner. Time to try and sharpen the handling of the truck now that the clutch is mostly broken in and the powertrain has proven itself.
Stock endlinks needed a little bit of adjusting. I'm done TIGing stuff on this truck, shameless over use of the flux core below. Let's not forget the key to good welds is thick paint.
Finished it up a little late tonight, so no test drive.
We'll see how it does tomorrow, I need to haul some lumber down to my parents to use my dad's tablesaw. I also noticed that my fuel pressure is sitting at 72psi when running instead of the 58psi that the ECU is expecting. I upped the fuel pressure in the tune to reflect what the Corvette filter/regulator is actually supplying to the fuel rail so we'll see how that affects the tune. I anticipate that it will take a little bit to relearn but should improve the VE values.
More 3d printed over-engineered goodness for this E36 M3box. Time to finally hookup the tach and speedometer I bought a couple weeks ago.
I designed a blank of the stock gauge cluster and modified that model to hold the TerminatorX screen, speedo and tach. The gas gauge is going to go in the vent behind the signal stalk but that's later's problem. I had to split this cluster up into two pieces to fit it on the Ender3s. 49hours of cumulative print time and almost 600grams of ABS later we have this.
A couple of M6 bolts with the heads chopped off for dowels, ABS glue, acetone and some clamps.
Hit it with some primer to cover up the ugly acetone goop and some stripper dust paint to give it a little more razzle dazzle.
Needs wiring still but it looks killer. I big time need to either hook the NSS switch up in series with the starter relay or to get a parking brake installed. I bumped the starter button putting the bezel on and almost put a dent in my garage door. Big derp.
Oh berkeley yeah, that last picture is gold!
Loveing it! Also sounds awesome.
In reply to Professor_Brap (Forum Supporter) :
It chops nicely at idle. I'm going to try and get a video of some pulls this weekend. It sounds bananas at 7000rpm.
RacetruckRon said:In reply to Professor_Brap (Forum Supporter) :
It chops nicely at idle. I'm going to try and get a video of some pulls this weekend. It sounds bananas at 7000rpm.
Please do, I'm excited. I need to take some pull videos this weekend if weather holds out.
RacetruckRon said:
That's awesome!
I'm glad you posted about the high fuel pressure. I'm using the same Corvette filter regulator. Will need to watch that.
TVR Scott (Forum Supporter) said:I'm glad you posted about the high fuel pressure. I'm using the same Corvette filter regulator. Will need to watch that.
From what I've read on the C5 forums it seems like a known issue. I believe Rustomatic tried to steer me away from the C5 filter/reg in the past, if it ever fails I will probably replace it with a China adjustable regulator but it was easy enough to adjust for that in the Holley software it's not really an issue. The truck has been running better and better since I made that change, it seems to help the Holley's learn strategy quite a bit.
Big time skreet car stuff. Gauges wired up and functioning properly, for the most part, and two 12v sockets wired up to the "Accessory" switch. Speedometer is hooked up to a GPS sending unit I got off of Speedway a while back. It puts out 16k ppm and the speedometer was pre-calibrated for that same pulses per mile, I checked it with my phone and it's right on the money.
I wired in a couple junkyard 12v sockets for the radar detector and phone charger. The radar detector inspires more confidence bad decision making.
I have a functioning odometer now. The back lights and the switch lights are pretty bright at night, I want to see if I can put a dimmer in for those.
I almost modeled the entire black vent and shutter assembly and then I remembered that I already had a model to fit the starter button into the vent. Just extrude a bigger hole and add a couple blends. A couple hours on the printer and boom.
This stupid thing was working when I had it wired up before I tucked it into the vent. Now it just reads way too full for how much I have driven it on this tank. I think the wiring might be snagged somewhere and the sensor is grounding out.
My buddy Nate dug up an old GoPro Hero2 from the Baja days. Slapped it to the truck to do some rips and watch how the suspension is cycling. I'll try and cut it down and post up a short video, the audio is about as good as GoPro audio can be without an external mic. This thing breaks necks so bad driving around. I love it.
I've never heard of Marshall gauges. They look great.
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