Kurt66

Chapter 52: Custom Pistons and the road to financial ruin.In this exciting episode we'll be revealing the closely guarded secrets of how to f*ck up acustom piston order, quickly followed with a "how to" guide on using a kitchen bread knifeto remove a kidney with a view to selling it on ebay.But, before we get to that, it's probably best we deal with question of why we wanted custompistons in the first place. Below is a picture of a Mahle standard piston for the S14 M3 engine.If you should happen to wander in to your local dealer with a pot of gold large enough,four of these little carefully machined slugs of aluminium can be obtained........... So, why didn't I use these? Three main reasons really, increase the valve relief's,changing the engine's compression ratio, and reducing piston weight, and of course not forgetting the mostimportant of all, my seemingly unavoidable irritating habit of complicating everything. Valve relief's.Due to the design of the S14 engine, the valves come in quite close proximityto the top of the pistons while the engine is running and as such the top of thepiston has 4 little valve relief notches cut out of it to avoid any disastrous contactbetween the two.......... When running standard diameter valves and standard lift camshafts all this worksas it was designed too. However, when (like I am) you change to oversize valves andhigher lift camshafts, these relief's cut in to the top of the standard pistons are usuallyinsufficient to offer the proper clearance any more. The Schrick 284 degree inlet and 276 degreecams being used in this build can be considered relatively mild in the large scope of whats availableout there for this engine, and as such seem to be right on the border of being usable with standardvalve relief's.As a guide Schrick recommend a minimum of 1.5mm clearance between valve and piston at theirtightest point. I'm not 100% sure that you'd run into trouble if you were just running the higher lift camsmentioned with standard diameter valves. Some folk report no issues with running them,while others report problems when the valve to piston clearance is measured upon assembly.What is probably clear from that is you should at least take the time to measure the clearance when assembling,as the "f*ck it, it'll be grand" approach could end up being expensive down the line should the pistons andvalves take a notion that they'd both like to occupy the same space at the same time. I had no such worries however as when you add in the larger valves I'm running I was pretty confident thatthe end result would be mass suicide should I have tried to use the standard pistons.So, reason number 1 for custom pistons = larger valve relief's. Raising the compression ratio.In the last section we touched briefly on the subject of compressionratio when we balanced the volumes of the combustion chambers in the cylinder head.The piston, or more precisely, the top of the piston, has a dish in it (coloured red below).With a custom piston you can alter the volume of this dish and as such change the compressionratio of the engine............ I find myself ideally suited to offer a simple explanation of what compression ratio is,as I haven't half a f*cking clue myself. But, since that small fact hasn't seemed to stop meanywhere else in this thread I shall now continue the fine tradition.Static Compression Ratio, at it's simplest, is the ratio of all the volume in the chamberwhen the piston is at the bottom of it's stroke (all the area you see as green below)......... compared to the volume of what it all gets squashed into when the pistoncomes to the top of it's stroke........ If the volume of the green area in the top picture were 300 cubic centimetres (cc) and the volumeof the area it all gets squashed into in the second picture was 30cc, then you'd have acompression ratio of 300 : 30 or simplified down, 10 : 1.As a very general rule of thumb, the tighter you pack that volume when the piston squashes it,the bigger the bang you'll get, thus, the higher the compression ratio the better the power outputfrom the engine. Everything thing else being equal, an engine with 11 : 1 compression ratio willnormally produce more power than an engine with 10 : 1 and so on. So, just wack up the compression ratio and we're good to go? Well, unfortunately it's not quitethat simple. When you reduce the space that the piston squeezes all the mixture into, the fuel/airmixture obviously now gets compressed a lot more. The side effect of this is the more you compressthe mixture the hotter it gets. If you go too high with the compression ratio, and compress the mixture toomuch, the temperature in here gets so high it can spontaneously explode before the spark plug evenhas a chance to light the fire.At this stage your into the wonderful world of detonation (also known as "knock"), the results of which,if severe enough, can destroy engines in seconds.So, the trick seems to be, raise the compression ratio as high as you can to reap the rewards of biggerhorse power, while trying not to go too high where the dreaded detonation becomes an issue. If you look at the (fantastically detailed) diagram below you can see the area the mixture gets squashed into is made up of the combustion chamber in the cylinder head, some of the head gasket volume(the brown bit)and then the dish in the piston makes up the final piece of space....... By making the dish in the piston smaller we can reduce the space the mixture gets squashed into, and, as such, compress it a little tighter which will raise the compression ratio.But before we could start figuring out what volume dish we wanted in our new pistonswe first had a few decisions to make. This engine is being built to power a day to day road car as opposed to a "balls to the wall" all out race motor.And as such I've decided to shoot for a compression ratio of 11 : 1, which should be well enough inside the"safe zone" that detonation won't become an issue, but still provide a little bump in hp over the 10.5 :1 compressionratio the engine originally left the factory with. So with the target set at 11 : 1 the first thing we needed to do was find out what compression ratio the standardpistons would give us, and then hopefully from this we could figure out what modifications to make to the new pistonsto arrive at 11 : 1.To do this we first need to know the volume of that dish on top of the standard piston, so the piston is assembled onto a conrod and instead of fitting a piston ring we use some rubber o-rings to seal the piston in the bore.......... then the piston and rod are fitted into the cylinder and bolted up to the crank....... As we're going to be using fluid to measure the volume of the dish in the piston crownthe next step is the same as what was done on the cylinder head earlier. Get it all 100% level......... with everything level the next step was to drop the piston down the bore a knownamount. To do this we set up a dial gauge and zero it on the deck surface of theblock........... Then move the needle onto the raised circumference of the piston (not in the dish),and rotate the crank till the piston drops down 3.00mm from the surface of the deck......... From our bore measurements taken earlier we know that the diameter of the bore isexactly 3.6950" or 93.85mm, so now we can figure out the exact volume of the spacebetween the top of the piston and the surface of the deck (the red area below).......... using the formula for the volume of a cylinder, pi x radius squared x height, the volumeof the red area in the diagram above comes out at 20.7cc.So what the hell did we do all that crap for?Well when we fill up the hole with fluid in a minute, we now know that it takes exactly20.7cc to fill up the red area and anything over this must be the volume of the dish inthe piston.......... So, with the nail rig in place to indicate when the holes full, the burette is again filledand the tap opened........ When the fluid reached the tip of the nail, the tap was shut and we read off how muchfluid it took to fill the hole. Which was 29.3 cc. So subtracting the 20.7cc (red area) from earlierthe 8.6cc we're left with is the volume of the dish in the piston. With this info and a few more little measurements we could now figure out what the compressionratio would be with these standard pistons fitted. I'm not going to get into the formula's andcalculations end of working out the compression ratio here, as, well, it's boring. And with porn onlyever a click of a mouse away I reckon there'd be an echo in here after a short while.What I will say before we move on though is I came across a great bit of software to helpwith the calculations if you ever find yourself doing something similar. Its by a crowd calledPerformance Trends and is downloadable here http://performancetrends.com/download.htm#crc After doing all the calculations we found that, if fitted, the standard pistons would have given thisengine a compression ratio of 10.5 : 1 , and after flogging the last few remaining brain cells I have towithing an inch of their life, I then managed to figure out that the new pistons would require a dish ofof just 7.5cc to raise the compression ratio to 11.0 : 1 . By this stage we'd finalised all the dimensionsfor the new pistons, and were ready to place the order. We had decided to go with JE Pistons and insteadof going straight to JE themselves with the order we were going to use one of their agents as the price wasgoing to work out much the same and it gave us the opportunity to have a second set of eye's, as it were,to look over the spec's and make sure they'd result in what we wanted. So just to recap, standard pistons look like this.......... new pistons would look fairly similar as the only adjustments being made were thevalve cut outs being deepened and enlarged a little and the dish in the piston beingmade a little shallower. So, the order was placed and we waited for the pistons toarrive so the build could continue.Eventually the package arrived, and just like a little kid does at christmas the box was rippedasunder to get a first look at those four little expensive aluminium pots of goodness........ The essence of the moment can be neatly summed up in one short word,BOLLOCKS. Jesus H f*cking Christ, what the hell are these? There's a f*cking pyramid inthe middle of me new pistons. The valve relief's were deep enough to housea small family of elephants, with weight disorders. In short, the pistons weretotally useless to me........ I'm not going to go into details here of what happened as the outcome is still ongoing,all I will say is that there was a monumental cock up and it wasn't at my end.The end result of all this at the time was I was severely out of pocketand severely pissed off with the whole build. I closed the door on the garage that evening and didn't return to it for quite a while.

(Bilder leider nicht vorhanden) The cylinder head. All things being equal down below, it's generally up here where power is gained or lost. As with everything else on an engine build, close attention to detail can ensure that your raging horses don't end up clapped out nags. This part of the process started for me a long time ago, back when the engine was first stripped and the block was sent out for machine work at the beginning of the build, attention was turned to cleaning up and inspecting the cylinder head........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_0594.jpg Unfortunately what we found at the time wasn't pretty. After cleaning up the combustion chambers we found some cracks between the exhaust valve seats.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_0601.jpg The cracks were small and the engine had shown no signs of pressurising the coolant system before coming asunder, which it would do if the crack had spread to the water gallery and was allowing combustion pressure to leak into the cooling system. Also the engine was compression tested shortly before it came asunder and while the figures weren't great they weren't bad enough to suggest compression was being lost on a large scale. So from all that we surmised that the crack was probably local and most likely didn't extend all that far. However when you placed a flat edge across the crack you could see that the surrounding aluminium had started to shift........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_0600.jpg This was the nail in the coffin for this particular head, as the valve seats which are press fitted into the head either side of the crack rely on everything in this area staying nice and solid to stay put. With the aluminium starting to shift, however little, there was a real possibility one of the valve seats could start to work it's way loose, should that happen while the engine was running the resulting damage would be very, very, expensive. There are repair options for this type of crack but they'd require both valve seats either side of the crack to be cut out, the crack welded up and then the whole lot machined again to refit new seats. But, this head was proudly displaying 3 cracks in total, all in the same places, between the exhaust valve seats, in three different chambers, which meant this head was beyond economical repair. The other surprising discovery made on dismantling the head was the condition of the valves and valve seats, they were in poor poor shape and can't have been sealing the combustion chamber that well. This was most likely the reason behind the poor compression figures tested earlier on. Actually it was a little surprising this engine drove as well as it did before coming asunder........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_0603.jpg So after deciding that replacing the head would be the best option for the rebuild, the search began. As this engine and car was built in 1986, that made this a 200hp version of the S14 engine (195hp when fitted with a catalytic converter). And a little later in it's life (around '89 I think) the S14 engine was available in an uprated form producing 215hp. Along with other changes one of the main differences in the 215hp engine was larger inlet ports on the cylinder head. If I was going shopping for a cylinder head I decided I might as well try and track down this larger port head, which would help in the search for a little more horse power from this engine. A quick call to the main dealer for prices on both the 195hp and 215hp heads let me know where I stood, should I happen to win the lottery, twice! 195hp head pt. no. 11121309891 = €1220 -10% discount + 22% Irish Vat = €1340 215hp head pt. no. 11121312785 = €3035 -10% discount + 22% Irish Vat = €3330 So, the search began for a good second hand head. And after a while ringing around and trawling the interweb we came up lucky. A 215hp head overhauled and ready to go and the iceing on the cake, the head came with uprated Schrick inlet and exhaust valves, springs and titanium retainers, and all for a good bit less than the price of a bare 215hp head from the dealer. Excellent......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/head%208.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/head%2010.jpg Although not blindingly clear here in the photos, when the two heads are parked beside each other (195hp and 215hp) the difference in inlet port size is quite obvious....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/head%202.jpg From what I've read on the interweb it seems the diameter of the 195hp head inlet port is 25.8mm and the 215hp ports are closer to 28mm. Below is a sectioned picture of a 195hp head showing the port diameter........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/cylinder%20head%20port.jpg (picture courtesy of Uwe on S14.net, thanks Uwe) So with the head issues dealt with, the cylinder head was tucked away safely at the time and concentration returned to stripping the rest of the car. Finally, a few months ago, the head came back out of hibernation along with the rest of the engine hardware to start this preping for assembly. First job was to strip the head down and give it the once over to make sure it was as "good to go" as was advertised. Valves, springs and retainers were pulled so we could get a good look at the valve seats and check their condition. What we found looked good, all the seats looked to be freshly cut and their respective valves had been lapped in.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3284.jpg right up until we got to inlet valve seat number 6.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3282.jpg F.U.C.K.!! The seat was very badly damaged. In the pic below you can just about see the nice 3 angle cut on the surrounding seats, while the seat in the centre of the picture looks as if the valve had tried to "jack hammer" it's way clean out through the roof of the cylinder head.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3285.jpg This little "discovery" meant I was going to have to find some more cash to spend on this head before it was ready to bolt on. After chatting things over with the Samaratins I decided the best course of action would be to send the head away and have the damaged valve seat cut out and replaced. The thinking behind this was as follows. As you might have seen in the previous pictures the valve seats have 3 angles cut into them as shown in the diagram below.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/valve%20seat%20angle%20diagram.jpg The middle angle is for the valve to seal against when it's shut, while the ones either side of it are to smooth out the path for the incoming air as it rushes in when the valve starts to open. The damage on my valve seat meant that if I tried to have these 3 angles recut into it, the valve would end up sunk fairly deep into the head. This would almost certainly have a negative effect on the airflow entering the chamber by this valve. So, a new seat with freshly cut angles was the only real option. Before the head could be sent off to have this done however, we needed to check everything else to make sure this was the only work the head needed done. First check was the valve guides...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3631.jpg These are the little bronze guides that are pressed into the head. Their purpose, as their name suggests, is to guide the valves as the camshaft pushes them open and springs pull them closed....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3632.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/images.jpeg Over time these can get worn, so they need to be checked. To check them the valve is placed down into it's guide just far enough so that the tip of the valve stem is level with the top of the guide, and then a dial gauge is set up as shown below resting against the head of the valve......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3291.jpg The valve is then "rocked" over and back in the guide whilst you check how much movement it registers on the dial gauge......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3290.jpg Maximum movement for the intake guides is 0.65mm and the exhausts is 0.80mm After that the head had it's surface checked for flatness. Exact same test as was done earlier on the block face. Engineers straight edge, feeler blade, blah, blah, blah. Any unevenness or pitting from corrosion and the head will need skimming to return it to a silky smooth flat surface. Finally, moving onto the final check, pressure testing the head. For this test all the water ports are blocked off on the head....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3297.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3298.jpg leaving one small port open....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3299.jpg the head then has a large rubber block strapped over the remaining open water ports on the face of the head and the whole lot is submerged in an 80degree tub of warm water. Pressurised air is fed in the one remaining open port shown in the pic above and then you check for bubbles. With the water galleries all blocked off the appearance of any bubbles is usually bad news as it normally means the head has cracked somewhere. The reason warm water is used is sometimes small cracks don't open up till the head is at operating temperature. Thankfully this head passed all these checks, so all that needed doing to return it to active duty was that valve seat. But, as is the nature of these things, I can't leave well enough alone, so I was also going to have some mild port work done and change the 38mm oversized Shrick inlet valves for some 38.5mm Supertech valves. To have the work completed the head was going to have to go on a wee journey by courier. We've had a few poor experiences in the past with cylinder heads getting damaged in transit and this led to the construction of "the coffin"...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3308.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3309.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2844%29/m3_3310.jpg designed to withstand a stray ballistic missile strike. Ab hier wieder Bilder vorhanden :) The head was dispatched to have the work done and we waited for it to return. And waited. And waited. 2 months later the head returned, thankfully the quality of the work was a lot better than the customer service........ With the head now back we could continue playing with it, and next up on the fun and games list was balancing the combustion chambers. Who, what, where, when, why??? Simply put, the combustion chamber is the dish you see in the pic below..... It's the area the piston squashes all the fuel and air mixture up into as it rises to the top of the cylinder. When all the mixture is fully squashed in here the spark plug gives it's little spark and starts the explosion, the resulting expanding gas pushes the piston down. (I know, this is pure Stephen Hawking quality shit here, ground breaking, but bare with me.) Depending on how tight you pack the mixture in here effects how much of an explosion you get. Simply put, the tighter the squeeze the bigger the bang. What we're doing next is measuring the 4 combustion chambers in the cylinder head to make sure they're all the same size. The reason we want them all the same size is, if one is a little smaller than it's neighbour, then the mixture squashed into that chamber is going to give a slightly bigger bang than the cylinder next door. What we want is a nice balanced smooth engine with all four cylinders "banging" identical to each other. (It's probably worth mentioning at this stage that unless your building a highly strung, high compression ratio engine, which I am not, the following process isn't 100 percent necessary. But since I hadn't a pot to piss in at this stage thanks to the amount of money I'd blown on engine parts, it seamed like a good way to pass the time till the money trees sprouted some more branches.) So, aim of the game is to measure the volume of the compression chambers and then make them all the same. First up we gotta reassemble some valves back into the bare head and for this we'll be using "test" springs as opposed to the real valve springs........ reason being it's a lot quicker and handier to assemble the valve gear with the test springs as you can squash them with your hand whilst fitting the collets, whereas with the much stronger real valve springs you need to clamp each one with a valve spring compressor to get the collets in. So, 2 inlet and 2 exhaust valves were fitted with the test springs to keep them shut tight against their seats........ next up was to screw 3 long bolts into the top face of the cylinder head (red arrow M10 x 100mm, purple arrows M6 x 100mm).......... and then flip the head over, screwing the bolts in or out of the head to get it perfectly level end to end....... and across..... With the head perfectly level we pull out the burette....... Those of you who took science classes in school and haven't killed your brain since then with drugs and alcohol will know what this is. For rest of us, it's a graduated perspex tube with a little tap on the end of it......... We filled this burette with paraffin/kerosene........ next item required is this highly expensive precision tool. It's a piece of a large exhaust clap with a sharpened 6 inch nail rigged into it (them money tree's were taking there time)........ this "rig" is placed on a flat piece of the head and when we were happy that it sat perfectly flat and didn't rock, the nail is adjusted down till it just touches the head surface.......... then, it's placed over the combustion chamber and the tap on the burette is opened to allow the fluid to start filling the chamber. The idea is that the nail acts as a guide, when the fluid reaches it, the chamber is full. You watch the fluid slowly filling up and watch the reflection of the nail in the fluid getting closer to the actual nail, giving you a guide of when to get ready to shut the tap........ and then, just as the fluid touches the very tip of the nail, the tap is shut.......... the chamber is now exactly full of fluid........ and when we checked the graduations on the burette we could see exactly how much fluid it took to fill the chamber. And hey presto, you now have the volume of one combustion chamber. (Now that was some fancy shit wasn't it? While I'd love to take the credit for thinking up this stuff myself, I have to thank Jake over on S14.net for that method. The way I used to do it took a lot longer and was a lot messier.) One little thing to be careful of before we go on is about reading the burette. When you fill it up originally the fluid doesn't lie flat in the tube, but rather curves up at the edges. You need to be sure your reading the level either from the top of the "curve" or the bottom when you fill it and the same again when checking how much has come out afterwards......... the test is done 3 times on each chamber and then an average reading taken for each for each to avoid fu*k ups, sorry, "inaccuracies", making sure the chamber is totally dried out between each test.......... One other thing thats worth keeping an eye on while doing this is the fact that you shouldn't see any fluid leaking past the valves and out the ports during any of this. If you do, you need to check your valve's and their seats, as, if they just been freshly cut and lapped in, then they should be sealing against any fluid leaking past...... With all the combustion chambers checked, the average figures came out at: cylinder 1 - 42.7cc cylinder 2 - 43.0cc cylinder 3 - 43.0cc cylinder 4 - 42.8cc Only a difference of 0.3cc between chambers. Now a normal person would be happy with this as most cylinder head tech articles advise balancing to within 0.5cc. But, if you've been reading this thread long enough you already know whats coming next. The "drip" beside the 1 euro coin below is an example of what 0.3cc volume looks like, this is roughly what I'd to remove from two of the chambers to get all three balanced to 43.0cc....... head surface gets masked up with some heavy foil tape to protect it from any c*ck-eyed blows from the Dremel grinder........... some old valves are loosely fitted to protect the freshly cut valve seats from damage and the areas to be "buffed" get shaded a nice shade of blue....... head is set up at a comfortable angle to work the Dremel...... and then the blue areas are lightly ground with a 120 grit disc..... before being finished with 400grit....... a few hours grinding and remeasuring had all four chambers reading 43.0cc..... theres a good chance, even if you lead a long life, that'll you'll never witness a better example of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I'll do well to finish this build without ending up with a nervous twitch.......... And, thats about all for tonight. Next on the menu is custom pistons and why I chose to abandon the money tree's and go straight to printing my own counterfeit money. Till then..............

With the crank main bearings all done and dusted, all that remained was to select the conrod bearings. First up was to check the conrods themselves. These take a fair pounding in the engine and it's not unusual to find wear here, so, it's out with the bore gauge again and both the big ends and the small ends get checked for roundness and wear...... The big ends on my rods came up just about ok, but, unfortunately the small ends were showings signs of a lot of wear. Below you can see a closer picture of the small end........ What you can see above is that the small end bore actually has a bronze bush inserted into it to increase it's wear resistance. But, theres only so much a bush can do, twenty years of constantly trying to hold on to a piston takes it's toll. A quick look up of the tolerance manual tells us this bush should have a diameter of 0.8669" to 0.8671". Before even measuring mine I could tell they were fairly worn. If you placed a gudgeon pin into any of the rods you could actually feel it rock a little in the bushing......... And this was backed up by the measurements, all four small end bushes were well over the 0.8671" size, with the worst coming in at 0.8682". So, options? Well, you can have the bushes replaced by a good machine shop, but, it's a pricey exercise around here and who ever does it really needs to know what they're at as it's fairly easy to make a balls of it. Plus one of the rods big ends was also just on the border of being "out of round". Option number two was carry out an armed robbery on the local main dealer to get some new rods, not a great option really, the rods have a 5 day delivery time and there was a good chance a member of staff would press the panic button while we all waited for the rods to arrive. Which brought us to option number 3, aftermarket rods......... The new rods are forged in a "H" beam design, and they've also been shot peened, crack tested and balanced end to end, all of which means they should be a good bit stronger than the originals. Which in turn means you should be able to raise the rev limit of the engine without the fear of one of them popping out through the block to say hello. With the state of tune this engine is being built to I won't need to raise the rev limit much to achieve the engine's maximum horse power, so all they need to be for this build is equally as strong as the originals and not require you to sell a kidney to obtain them, like the originals would. Another nice benefit of the new rods is that they're lighter than the originals, to the tune of 51 gram's per rod.......... Which helps with the other objective of this build, and thats where ever possible to lower the weight of the rotating mass of the engine. Simply put, trying to make anything that moves in the engine lighter with objective of having an engine thats quicker to rev. As with most after market rods these ones also came with ARP rod bolts, which are stronger than the originals. I would have been perfectly happy to use a new set of original bolts, as to the best of my knowledge they are a good design rod bolt to begin with, but the new rods are tapped out for the threads on the ARP bolts, which is different to the original bolts so thats what we'll be using........ Like the original bolts the ARP one's are also stretch bolts. Basically when you tighten them down the bolts stretches a little and it's this stretch which keeps the bolt tight over time. When a stretch bolt is undone sometimes it returns to it's original length and in this case it's usually good to go again. However sometimes it's doesn't, it stays a little stretched when loosened and when this happens the bolt can't be guaranteed to stay tight if it's reused again. For this reason standard rod bolts are always changed when doing a rebuild because you've no way of telling whether they've returned to their original lengths when removed. However, with the ARP bolts you can measure the exact length of a new bolt using the proper tool and if you record this length and the bolts fitted position you can now tell if it's fit to be reused next time around.......... The down side is the extra effort required to do all this is a pain in the arse if you are inherantly lazy. New rods get the once over with the bore gauge to make sure they're exactly what was paid for....... After which we move on to sizing the conrod bearings. Now unlike the main bearings where you had the choice of a red or blue size bearing to fine tune the oil clearance gap, with the conrod bearings BMW have decided to make the choice a lot simpler. You can have yellow, yellow or yellow. Yep, theres only one thickness conrod bearing available from the main dealer and thats yellow. If the conrod journals on your crank have been machined down to 1st, 2nd or 3rd undersize to correct wear then you still have a choice of 1st, 2nd or 3rd oversize bearings to match this, but thats as far as the decision making needs to go. That doesn't however mean that you'd don't need to check the clearance, that'd be far to simple. So, pair of yellow bearings in and the conrod cap torqued down, out with the bore gauge and measure the diameter.............. Diameter measured at 1.8913", quick check of the notes to see what the matching conrod journal on the crank was, and it shows as 1.8893". Take one from the other 1.8913"-1.8893" and your left with a conrod big end oil gap of 0.0020". Tolerance manual says between 0.0008" and 0.0022" is good to go. As usual, each individual rod is measured to figure out it's clearance and then later verifyed with the Plastigauge. Just a quick one on the bearing colors before we leave it, if you've never seen a BMW bearing before the colours (blue and red for the mains and yellow for the conrods) are actually marked on the edge of the bearing shell. You can just about see the little yellow smear on the conrod top bearing below at the 12 o'clock position........... And that takes care of all the prep work for the bottom end for now, next up we'll be moving on to the cylinder head. Using match sticks to keep your eyes open yet?

(Leider keine Bilder Vorhanden) Once happy with the crank we could move on to sizing and ordering the correct bearings. First up was a quick check that all the bearing journals in the block were straight and fit for purpose. Just like checking the top face of the block for flatness this check is much the same. Block is upturned on the stand......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3400.jpg and the flat edge is placed across the journals, and again check to see if you can squeeze a 1 thou feeler blade between the flat edge and any of the journals which would show they are out of line. It's unusual to find these out of line and if they are it's usually because the block has taken a fairly extreme overheating causing the block to warp or the engine is being rebuilt due to a "catastrophic engine failure"...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3386.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3385.jpg Once this check is done each of the main bearing cap's are bolted down and torqued, one at a time.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3387.jpg where upon the bore gauge is used again to measure the internal size of the block journal. It's measured at a couple of different angles to make sure the journal is perfectly round........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3388.jpg Once the above check is complete and none of the journals show an ovality (out of round) of more than 0.0004" we're ready to start figuring out what size bearings we're going to need to house the crankshaft when fitted back into the block....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3408.jpg Now for the next bit I've gone a bit mad with the crayons again, and as usual with these diagrams your going to have to use a fair dose of your own imagination to make any sense out of this, but we'll give it a try. Below is a picture of that block main journal and cap that we just measured. The green bits just inside it are the bearings we're going to be fitting in a minute, and the grey circle in the middle is the crankshaft when it's fitted........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3388b.jpg What we're interested in is the red bit. Thats the space between the crankshaft and the crankshaft bearings. Its into this "gap" that the engine oil pump pumps oil while the engine is running. The reason it pumps oil in here is that we don't actually want the spinning crank to touch the bearings while the engine is running, we want a nice protective barrier of oil between the crank and the bearings. And if we pump in just the right amount of oil, under the right pressure and choose the right sized bearings so that the gap the oil has to fill is just right, the crankshaft should spin perfectly inside it's little thin "cushion" of oil and never actually touch the bearings. The reason we need that gap (oil clearance) just right, is, if the oil cushion should happen to break down and the spinning crank should happen to make dry contact with the surface of the bearing then things can turn nasty very, very, quickly. Bearings can get chewed up in the blink of an eye......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/worn%20bearings.jpeg and the nice smooth crank journals they were protecting usually don't escape either.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/worn%20crank.jpeg (both pictures courtesy of Google) So by this stage you've probably got the idea, that gap between the crank journal and the bearings known as the "oil clearance" has got to be just the right thickness. To get this gap correct we choose the exact right sized bearings. Now we already know from measuring the crank journals earlier that the crank hasn't been ground down, so, this get's us in the ball park with bearing selection. We need standard sized bearings, however we're not finished yet. All 4 size's of crank bearing (standard, 1st, 2nd and 3rd oversize) come in two flavours, red or blue. A red bearing is very, very slightly thicker than a blue bearing and it's the choice of these two slightly different sized bearings that lets us fine tune the oil clearance gap. So, how do we do this? Is this going to take long? I've got stuff to do can we speed this along please? Patience, we're nearly there. We're going to take number 4 crank bearing journal as an example. Earlier we measured this journals diameter at 2.1650". By searching through the Tolerance manual we find that the tolerance for the oil clearance gap is 0.0008" to 0.0027". I'm shooting for a gap of 0.0020" on this build, so if we take the crank journal diameter of 2.1650" and add the target oil clearance gap of 0.0020" to that, we get 2.1670". So, when we fit a pair of bearings to the block, like shown below, we want to measure the hole at 2.1670"......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3399.jpg We start off by fitting two red bearings and measuring the gap with the bore gauge. What we find is a vertical measurement of 2.1668" which would give us an oil clearance of 0.0018" (2.1668" minus journal diameter of 2.1650"). It's close to the target of 0.0020", but, not close enough. So, we fit two blue bearings and again measure the diameter of the hole. This time we get 2.1674", which would give us an oil clearance of 0.0024". Again close but just a little to big. So the final attempt, we fit one red bearing and one blue bearing, and again, stick the bore gauge in to measure the hole. What we got was 2.1671". Bingo! An oil clearance of 0.0021" which is more or less bang on the target of 0.0020". We now know that number 4 crank journal needs 1 blue and 1 red bearing for the correct clearance. Unfortunately, this whole procedure has to be repeated for each of the remaining 4 journals to obtain the right sized bearings for each one. And there's another down side, the surface of the bearings have a very fragile surface coating known as the "babbitt" surface. And a negative side effect of using the bore gauge to measure the bearing diameters is that the tips of the gauge damages this coating.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3397.jpg For this reason, we use a set of bearings just for measuring purposes...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3418.jpg When all the measuring was finished and the quantity of blue and red bearings needed were known the order was placed..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3490.jpg With the new bearings shells in hand we could complete the final checks and measurments. Of the 5 pairs of main bearings bought, 4 are identical in shape, however 1 pair are slightly different than the rest and these are fitted to journal number 3....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3491.jpg The difference with this pair is the bearing shells have "shoulders" on them for want of a better description. As you can see below, along with the main bearing surface in the valley to support the crank, these also have an extra bearing surface around the sides as well....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3411.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3409.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3410.jpg The reason for this is these pair of bearings known as the thrust bearings do two jobs. The first is just like the other bearings and thats to support the spinning crank, but the second job is to limit the crank from moving left and right in the block. And they do this by pushing against the "thrust faces" machined into the crank either side of number 3 journal.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3412.jpg when the crank is sitting in place these "shoulders" on the bearing keep the crank snugly located. As you may expect when the crank is in place these shoulders don't rub up tight against the crank, as if they did, after a short while spinning at a couple of thousand revs the crank would have them worn down. Instead the Tolerance manual gives us a minimum and maximum the gap should be between the bearing side face (thrust face) and the crank(arrowed red below).......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3413.jpg To measure this gap the bearing cap and it's thrust bearing are fitted along with the thrust bearing below it in the block...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3414.jpg Before the cap bolts are torqued down the crank is given a few soft taps left and right to get the two thrust bearings perfectly in line with each other........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3417.jpg and then a dial gauge is strapped to the end of the block with the needle resting against the crank....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3415.jpg then a flat screw driver is used to GENTLY prise the crank left and right in the block and the dial gauge at the end will show how much the crank is allowed to move....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3416.jpg The figure it's allowed to move is know as "Crankshaft End Float" and the Tolerance Manual states that it's got to be between 0.0033" and 0.0068". Mine was 0.0041" so we're good to go. For the next test the crank is again removed and all but the outer two of the bearings in the block are removed too....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3491b.jpg (for all these tests where the crank is fitted with the bearings you should give a little smear of oil to the bearings by the way, never a good idea to lie a crank in dry on top of bearings. Just a little dab of oil will do, your not looking to recreate the Exxon Valdez disaster ) the crank is then sat back in resting on these two remaining bearings....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3401.jpg and a dial gauge is set up so that the needle is resting on number 3 bearing journal smack bang in the middle of the crank like so.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3404.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3405.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3406.jpg What we're checking for here, is to see if the crank is perfectly straight, or, if it has any "wobble" in it, know as "run out". The crank is rotated and a close eye kept on the dial gauge to see if the centre journal is moving up or down showing that the crank isn't perfectly straight. The factory tolerance for Run Out is a maximum of 0.0040", I'd prefere to see less than 0.0020" personally, but either way, mine had no perceptible movement at all, which either means the crank is perfectly straight or I fu*ked up the test. I choose to believe the former. And then finally on to the last test, and it's a check just to confirm the oil clearance we worked out a while ago between each bearing and the crank. For this test all the bearings are assembled into the block and caps, ensuring all the red and blue sized bearings go where they're supposed to go........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3492.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3495.jpg and then we take out the plasitgauge....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3522.jpg Plastigauge is basically little thin strips of plasticine. You can see the little strips above (red arrow). You cut off a little piece of these strips place it between the bearing and the crank, torque the bearing cap down and then remove the cap again. What should be left behind is the little strip of plasticine, which has now been crushed flat. And thanks to the precise nature of this stuff you can use the guide card shown above (green arrow) to measure how squashed flat the plasticine has become to figure out how much of a gap you have. The bigger the gap the less it will have been crushed, the smaller the gap the flatter it will be. I make it sound complicated. It's easier just to show you. Cut a little piece of the Plastigauge........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3527.jpg Place it onto each of the crank bearings........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3524.jpg bolt down all the bearing caps and torque them up........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3506.jpg and then remove each cap to reveal the squashed Plastigauge........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3525.jpg and then finally using the little measuring card you can match up how squashed the Plastigauge is to the correct marker on the card, which will tell you how much oil clearance you had when the cap was bolted down. If you remember earlier the target was 0.0020", and you can see below that the card reads exactly 2.0, which is 0.0020". http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2843%29/m3_3526.jpg tickety fu*king boo. More as the week goes on, if this hasn't already made you loose the will to live......

Next up was the crankshaft. After it was fully cleaned and crack tested like the block we could move on to measuring the bearing journals. The crank has 9 bearing journals in total. 5 main journals which the crank spins on in the block (blue arrows) and 4 conrod journals which the conrods spin on funnily enough (yellow arrows)....... First up is a visual inspection, any pitting, scratches or scoring on these journals and they are going to have to be ground down to the next size. These need to be as smooth as a new born baby's ass. Thankfully the old bearing shells and the journals were in amazingly good condition upon strip down considering the mileage this engine had on it. She must have had fairly frequent oil and filter changes during her life........ Happy that there were no obvious signs of wear the next step was to measure each journal carefully to make absolutely sure there was no machine work needed. For this we used the next tool in the inventory, a set of micrometers....... Again these read down to 0.0001" and thats the scale you'll need if your going to pick up a set to do similar checks. First check is for "out of round" or "ovality" as it's sometimes called. Again it's fairly similar to what we done in the cylinder bores, a measurement is taken across the journal like so........ and then another measurement is taken at 90 degrees to this like shown in the diagram below. What your looking for is the two measurements to be the same indicating that the journal is round like the circle on the left, and not worn oval like the circle on the right....... Again just like in the bore measurements previously there is a tolerance your allowed. For journal ovality I'm working to a max tolerance of 0.0004" between the A and B readings shown above. The next set of measurements are for "taper". Three measurements are taken across the journal at the same angle and your comparing the centre measurement to the ones either side of it. If the journal is "straight" then the centre will be the same as both the outside measurments (D = C and E on the left in the diagram below). However if the outside measurements are less than the middle one, like on the right of the diagram below, then wear has caused the journal to become tapered. Again there's a tolerance for how far things can go before they require machine works, and again I'm using a tolerance of 0.0004". Thankfully this crank measured up ok, and all reading from both the 5 main journals and the 4 conrod journals were within tolerances, so there was no needed to have any of the journals reground. The other thing which we could now tell by looking at all the measurements just taken was that this crank had never been reground before. How can we tell this? Well by looking up the tolerance manual we could see the various sizes for each step original main bearing size from factory = 2.1649" to 2.1644" 1st undersize (reground by 0.010") = 2.1551" to 2.1544" 2nd undersize (reground by 0.020") = 2.1453" to 2.1445" 3rd undersize (reground by 0.030") = 2.1354" to 2.1347" As all my main journals came in around 2.1649" we could surmise that they were still original an had never been ground down to have wear repaired. And it was the same case with the conrod journals........ original conrod journal sizes from the factory = 1.8894" to 1.8888" 1st undersize (reground by 0.010") = 1.8796" to 1.8789" 2nd undersize (reground by 0.020") = 1.8697" to 1.8691" 3rd undersize (reground by 0.030") = 1.8599" to 1.8592" All my conrod journals came in around 1.8894" so again using the figures above we could tell they hadn't been touched. So, why the hell do I need to know all this crap? Well, in a little while we're going to get into choosing bearings for each of these journals, and, just like the the journals can be ground to 3 smaller sizes to repair wear, the bearings can be purchased in three undersizes aswell as standard to match the size of the journals. Your going to need to know the size of the journals so you can buy the right bearings. As you've seen above none of the journals on this crank required grinding down to correct them, however, she did still pay a visit to the machine shop and that was to have each journal micro-polished to get the journals as absolutely smooth as they can be gotten. Not an essential step but it helps keep the O.C.D. at bay. The only other thing worth mentioning before moving on, is if your crank should happen to be outside any of the wear tolerances or is showing signs of pitting or scratching etc. then your machine shop should be aware of these undersizes and will choose what size to grind it to, to return it to a smooth surface and still ensure that you can buy bearings that will fit the new size. But, one word of warning, upon return of your crank from the machine shop YOU'VE got to measure it to verify the sizes. The more you rely on other people to take important measurements the greater the risk of a fuck up, which YOU will most likely end up footing the bill for. Next item to address on the crank was the surface that the rear oil seal runs on. Strange as it may sound, after 170 odd thousand miles the lip of the oil seal has actually worn a deep ridge into the hardened metal of the crankshaft......... A worn ridge like this is actually fairly common on a high mileage crank and while we can't repair it, it doesn't pose to big a problem, we'll simply ensure on reassembly that the rear crank oil seal is refitted a few mm either side of this ridge so it can seal against a fresh non worn piece of the surface. With that in mind, the rest of the surface could do with a little clean up. A few strips of wet and dry sand paper starting off at 600 grit and working up to 1000grit with the aid of some light oil soon polishes up the rest of the surface..... Switching to the front end of the crank next, and it's the crankshaft timing chain gear's turn for some attention. Below you can see a pic of the gear. There's three rows of teeth cut into the gear, the front two to drive the timing chain and the rear one to drive the oil pump chain....... With the mileage on this engine almost all the timing chain parts are showing signs of age and while this bottom gear isn't actually too badly worn, new timing chains have a nasty habit of sounding noisy when fitted onto old gears. So stretching the mastercard to levels of debit normally associated with third world countries run by shady dictators, we're going to change all the timing chain components on this build. With that in mind the gear needs to be removed....... she was a tight bugger, but, with the help of a hydraulic pullers and some foul language she didn't stand a chance...... With the gear off you could get a better look at the wear on it. I say "could" because if you were standing here holding it in your hand you "could" see it perfectly, but, with this poxy Fisher Price camera you'd be lucky to tell if all the teeth were still intact....... but, fear not, using the cutting edge technology of the "Microsoft Paint Microscope" we can zoom in to "never before seen" levels of detail....... What you s******ing at? This shit here cost mucho dollar. What your looking at above is how a timing gear typically gets worn. The valley between the two teeth gets worn down over time (red shaded area) and the tips of the teeth become "hooked" as a result (red arrows). All this leads to a harder life for the chain, as the nice round link on the chain now has a sloppy valley to ride in which allows it to move around more, wearing the link and the valley more as it does so. The only slight upside though, is that almost always, the increasingly loud noise a worn chain and gears will make give you some sort of advance warning that all is not well, as opposed to a timing belt which just makes expensive noises right after it breaks. Anyway with the gear removed the shaft gets a lick of fine emery paper to clean it up before the new gear is refitted........ The new gear is an interference fit onto the shaft (thats a fancy way for saying you need to hammer the shit out of it to get it on). To help in this process the gear is first heated up, the correct temperature is reached when you pick up the gear, smell burning, and then pass out with the pain....... real men mange to fit the gear before passing out........ Final item up for attention on the crank is the spigot bearing fitted into the rear of the shaft........ Borrowing a picture from long, long, ago you may remember the input shaft on the gearbox shown below. Well as you can see this shaft is supported on one end by a bearing in the gearbox casing, it also needs to be supported the other end (red arrow) and this is taken care of by the spigot bearing in the end of the crank....... Since every other bearing has been changed during this rebuild, Murphys Law states that should I choose to reuse this one, it will most likely fail as soon as I drive out the garage door and result in the car exploding, or something. So, how to remove it? Well, you could use an appropriate sized internal pullers to get the little bugger out, or, you could use the tight arse method. A socket large enough for the bearing to fit inside, a couple of washers, a long m6 bolt, two m6 nuts, an m6 Rawl bolt and a partridge in a pear tree....... assembled as follows, bolt, one nut, washers to prevent bolt passing into socket and socket itself....... another nut the opposite side of the socket.......... and finally the Rawl bolt......... the deal is we're going to pop the end of the Rawl bolt through the centre of the spigot bearing and tighten down the first nut onto it, to spread the legs of the bolt behind it like so........ then with the socket placed firmly up against the crank the second nut is tightened down against the washers which pulls the bolt outwards along with the Rawl plug....... and hopefully the spigot bearing to....... if it doesn't, then go out and buy the proper tool and stop being a tight arse. With the bearing out, the hole where it came from is given a quick clean...... before a new bearing is refitted...... using a socket thats the same size as the bearing outer race and will drive it down into the hole all the way home....... a wee dab of grease goes in to keep the bearing happy....... and then finally the rest of the washers and stuff follow the bearing into the hole in the order shown below to complete the job...... With the crank good to go, next up will be the task of choosing the correct sized bearings. Which we'll get to later this week, till then..................

Well, how are ya? Good? Excellent! It's been a while since we last talkedand I've a pile of shite here to bore you with. Believe it or not I still haven'tmanaged to bolt together this bloody engine. However, I have just finishedall the prep work and need to empty all this crap out of the camera beforeit bursts at the seams. So...... how the hell have I managed to spend the lastsix months at this and still not built a simple engine? Well, it would appear Ipossess a rare talent, the ability to drag out each and every task to its absolutemaximum length, however, in my defence, as this story unfolds you'll seethis river hasn't run smoothly..... If you can remember all the way back to the time when Jesus was a young boy and I startedthe bodywork on this restoration, you may remember that the preparation phase of thebodywork took a lot longer than the actual spraying part, well, engine building is muchthe same. While you could probably assemble an engine in a fairly short space of timeif you have all the parts in front of you, checking, measuring, cleaning and preping the partsbeforehand takes a great deal longer. But, just like the bodywork, if you don't spendthe time on the prep work the end result will almost always suffer. One small point before we go any further, I'm not going to go into the minute details ofengine building in this thread for two simple reasons.....a) theres a wealth of knowledge and fantasticly detailed build threads out there of howto choose the right cams, pistons, valves etc. for your specific engine build and I'm far too dumbto try and add to that knowledge.b) what does seem to be scarce out there is some explanations of the simplerstuff for people who may never have built an engine before,like what to check to see if parts like the block, crankshafts, conrods etc are fitto be reused again. If you've built your share of engines in the past then it's unlikelyyou'll pick up anything useful here, however, if you've never built an engine beforethen hopefully........ you'll fail to realise that most of whats to follow is,as usual,probably wrong! First up, a quick word on measuring. When your looking up spec's for wear tolerancesor shopping for measuring tools then you'll most likley come across the two differentunits of measurement common in the trade. Metric and Imperial.Things usually tend to be a little less confusing if you choose one type and stick to itfor all your measuring. In this regard the various overhaul manuals from BMW for ourcars are well laid out and almost always give all important measurements andtolerances in both millimetres and thousands of an inch. Below you can see a little diagram of how each of the units of measure relate to each other.The large blue circle on the left represents 1 thousandth of an Inch (1 thou) or 0.001" as you'llusually see it written. To try and give some perspective to this measurement, the average humanhair is 2 thou thick. For most of the tighter tolerances in this engine build we'll be measuringdown to ten thousandths of an inch, 0.0001", thats 20 times smaller than that hair you just pluckedand it's represented below by the smaller of the two blue circles......... The other two red circles above represent the similar metric sizes, a hundredthof a mm and a thousandth of a millimetre. In the following waffle I tend to favour Imperial measurements using Thou andTen Thousandths of an inch, however, it would appear I also switch over tomillimetres at times as well, because, just between you and me, my brain ismush.The reason I'm telling you this, is if your going to be using any of this info tocheck your own engine parts (very brave) then you need to be careful ofwhat units are being used.The following link is to an online converter to change between thou andmm and can be quite handy to have....http://www.alcula.com/conversion/length/thou-to-millimeter/ One other final link before we get started and thats to BMW'sTolerance and Torque manual, all the data you'll need for figuring outworking clearances and so on can be found here.....http://www.bmwtechinfo.com/repair/main/941en/index.htmClick "Contents" then "engine" and then choose your weapon of choice. Right, all that shite done with, it's on to the actual engine bits, starting withthe block. After the engine was stripped, the block was "hot tanked" andsteam cleaned in every orifice to remove all the gunk that had built up overthe previous 20 odd years........ next up was to check the flatness of the deck face. This is the surface theheadgasket has to seal against when it's sandwiched between the block and thecylinderhead, and as such it needs to be perfectly flat and smooth.To check this we use an engineers straight edge which is basically a very straightpiece of tool steel. This is placed across the deck and you check to see if a 1 thoufeeler blade will fit in anywhere underneath indicating that the surface isn't quite flat enough....... The block needs to be checked in all the following directions...... As you can see above my deck face looks suspiciously clean and flat andthats because when disassembled at the very start of this restoration thesurface was found to be a bit uneven and as a result I had the local machine shopsurface grind the deck 0.002" to flatten it out. Unfortunately this was so long agothat cameras weren't invented and I don't have any before pictures to show you. Another job that was carried out at the machine shop was the block was "crack tested".Basically this involves the use of a strong electro magnet, some coloured metal dust and anultraviolet light. This process should show up any stress cracks in the block andstop you spending any more money on preping it because it's most likely justbeen relegated to boat anchor status. If your curious to see how the process workslook up "Magnaflux" on youtube. Next up is the cylinders, the holes in which the pistons are to travel in. As could probably beexpected the bores on my block were fairly well worn from over a hundredand seventy thousand miles of one careful owner and five wanabe Arton Senna's.Usually on a high mileage rebuild like this the block will needto be "re-bored", the reason being the bores are so worn that to refit thesame size pistons again would leave them wobbling around like a stick in awelly boot. There are oversize piston sizes available from the main dealer to deal withthis situation standard size is = 93.355mm/3.675" first oversize is = 93.555mm/3.683"second oversize is = 93.755mm/3.691" Your job is to decide which piston will you need. Common logic dictates that you should onlygo as large as you need and therefore try and leave one more oversize piston to "bore to"down the line should the block need another rebore at a future rebuild. However, you may nothave the luxury of this choice if your cylinders are badly worn. A good machine shop should be ableto advise which size the block needs to be bored to, to remove all traces of wear and return thecylinder to a factory fresh finish ready for new pistons. As mentioned previously, I had my block at themachine shop a long time ago (in an effort to speed up the rebuild, seems funny now looking back)and the resulting wear meant that I had to get my block bored out quite heavily to return it to a usable state.However, there is one slight difference with my specific build, and that is I am intending touse custom pistons. These would be made to my own stated sizes and so all I had to ask ofthe machine shop was to rebore all 4 cylinders to a common size of there choice.In an ideal world you would collect your block from the machine shop and take his word as to what thenew cylinder size was, however past experiences has taught me never to accept someone else's wordon important things like this. You've got to measure for yourself ! So, next step was to measure the cylinder bore so I could start to calculate what size pistons would be needed,and also to check the quality of the rebore. In the pic below you can see the two axis that measurments were taken,X and Y, and these pair of measurements were also taken at 3 different depths in each cylinder.Depth A = about half an inch down from the topDepth B = halfway down the cylinderDepth C = about half an inch up from the bottom of the cylinder To take these measurements we use whats called a bore gauge, which looks likethis......... The gauge above comes with a range of different attachments to allow it to beused in measuring a large range of different hole sizes. This specific one reads in0.0001" increments and is fairly accurate. When it comes to buying tools for measuringengine parts it really makes sense to try and buy the best you can afford, this is one itemwhere buying cheaply usually ends up costing you more money down the line as yourengine shits itself due to bad measurements made by cheap tools. (the down side is ifyou have decent tools you've less things to blame it on when it all go's pear shaped.) So, how does it work? have a look at the picture of the gauge shown below. At the business end of the tool youcan see theres two ends (arrowed). Whats a little harder to see is that each of these ends hasa ball tip on it. The end marked purple is rigid and doesn't move. The end marked red doesmove however, and as it is pushed inwards the needle on the dial gauge reads how much it'sretracting.......... The gauge on top has only a very small range of movement, this specific one only reads50 thou from fully out to fully retracted, so you've got to choose the rightattachment (anvil) to put you in the ball park for the hole your measuring.The cylinders on my block were all bored to 3.6950", so the correct anvil ischosen and a micrometer is set up in the bench vise with a gap of 3.6950"like so....... and then the tips of the bore gauge is placed between the jawsof the micrometer and the dial gauge is moved up or down in the toolto get the needle zero'd on this measurment........ there's more appropriate setting block's out there to make it easier toset the bore gauge up to a certain measurement and it's on the long listof things to buy, right after a better f**king camera (don't hold your breath).So, with the bore gauge zero'd on 3.6950" it's placed into the bore and rockedleft and right like so......... Basically, you keep an eye on the needle and read off the lowest number itshows while your rocking it at that point. The lowest number will be when thegauge is straight and perpendicular in the bore, and thats the measurement of thebore at that point. If the gauge read's 0, then the bore is bang on 3.6950", if itwill only drop as low as +05 then the bore is 3.6955" (3.6950"+ 0.0005") or if theneedle drops to the other side of zero, like -05 then your bore at that point is3.6945" (3.6950" - 0.0005").I know, I know, clear as mud isn't it? The only thing I'll say is when you have the toolin your hand it's a damn sight easier to understand than what you've just read. When your done you should have 6 measurements for each cylinder (3 X's and 3 Y's)giving you a total of 24 measurements for the block, which should look a little somethinglike this...... So what the hell do I now do what all this crap you may ask?Well I'm glad you did ask, because I just spent the last 30 minutes fighting this bloody computerto get that Excel graph small enough so you don't have to be an orbiting astronaut to read it.The answer is your now going to check these figures for cylinder bore "out of round" and "taper". When you start to assemble your nice clean engine your going to fit anice round piston into each cylinder, and that piston will need to have a clearance between itand the cylinder walls, too tight and when the aluminium piston starts to expand with heat it'llscuff the bore or worse seize, too loose and the rings will struggle to seal against the walls of thebore and you end up loosing compression and with it, power.In an ideal world, you'd leave your block in and have it bored to 3.6950" and no matter whereyou measured it you'd get 3.6950". Well, take a look at that list of measurements up there and you'llrealise thats not how the real world works. So, your given tolerances and if your figures falls within these tolerances then everything should workout ok. The first tolerance is for "out of round". Basically this is how oval your bore can be at any givenheight and still be acceptable.So, remember those X and Y measurements we took....... If the cylinder was perfectly round both X and Y would be the same, howeverthe max "out of round" tolerance figure I'm using for this engine build is 0.0004".That means the biggest difference between any of the 12 X and Y readings listedabove can only be 0.0004". I've a couple that are right on that limit of 0.0004"but none over it, so I'm good to go. Next up "taper". What we're after here is that the walls of the cylinder are "straight"and not tapered like in the diagram below........ Again I'm using a maximum tolerance of 0.0004", so any of the X measurementsor Y measurements in the same cylinder can't have a difference of greater then 0.0004".Again looking at the figures I'm good to go, the largest taper figure I have is in cylinder 4on the Y measurements, Top Y = 3.6950" Bottom Y = 3.6953" a taper of 0.0003". There was one other thing I wanted to check at this stage and that was the viabilityof a "torque plate". In the picture below you can see the ten bolt holes that thehead bolts screw down into to secure the cylinder head to the block. These headbolts take a fairly good squeeze to fully tighten them and what can happen on someengines is that the metal around these bolt holes in the block can distort a little.Depending on how close those bolt holes are to the cylinder bores this can sometimeslead to the cylinders getting a little distorted. After you've just seen the tolerances we'vemeasured the bores to, you can see how this could be a problem...... so, how to check, well it mightn't be the most accurate way but it'll do for me.Old head gasket fitted....... Old cylinder head fitted and torqued down to the right torque........ and then flip the block over stick the bore gauge back in again to see if it mademuch difference to the figures taken earlier........ The answer is I couldn't measure a big enough change in the figures taken earlierto justify the cost of a torque plate. A torque plate by the way is a big slab ofaluminium that bolts down onto the block just like the cylinder head. Its job is todistort the block just like the cylinder head might, the only difference being that thetorque plate has four big round holes in it allowing you to bore out the block whileit's fitted....... typing finger sore, more to follow as the week goes on..........

Hallo zusammen, das Video inspiriert mich immer wieder. Da sieht man, was man mit können und einem 318is alles zaubern kann. Grüße Kurt

Edit: hat geklappt

Guckt euch das einfach an EDIT: einbetten möchte nicht klappen. Grüße Kurt

(Leider keine Bilder Vorhanden) With the interior fitted next up was to sling the doors back on. Never a bad idea to run a piece of masking tape on the edge of the door and back edge of the wing to avoid marking the paint work when rehanging a door. They have to get fairly close to each other to engage the hinges........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3034.jpg If you ever need to remove the doors from an e30 theres two ways to go about it. The first is to remove the two m8 nuts seen below on the leaf of the hinge left attached to the door. This leaves the whole hinge attached to the car and has the big downside that you have to go through the whole hassle of re-aligning the door upon refitting before you tighten them nuts again to keep it in the right position. The less stressful way of doing it is to let go of the two little m6 bolts in the centre of the hinges, which leaves half of each hinge attached to the door and the other half attached to the car. This makes reassembly far easier, as all you have to do is drop the door back down into place, refit the m6 bolts and bingo, it's done....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3015.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3017.jpg with the door refitted all this crap needs to be nailed back into each one....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3033.jpg first up being the check strap who's job it is to stop the door from opening too wide. After a quick clean up and some fresh grease............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3038.jpg it bolts up inside the door with the strap part sticking out like below and then the pin and circlip are refitted (arrowed) to lock the strap to the door frame.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3039.jpg next up, the locking mechanism. The main door lock on the lower left and the release pin linkage above it (arrowed)............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3036.jpg the lock mechanism bolts up inside the door by 3 philips head bolts fitted from the outside........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3049.jpg and after its in the door handle mechanism can follow it........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3043.jpg first bit to go in, is the little plate with 2 threaded studs fitted to it, shown above. It slots down into the recess arrowed below.............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3044.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3045.jpg then with that in place the main bit can be bolted onto those studs, making sure that the bits that push against each other line up like below.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3048.jpg which when all in place leaves you with the two little bits protruding through the door skin to screw the handle on to............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3050.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3052.jpg after thats in the bits below can be fitted. The key barrel, the bracket for holding the central locking microswitch and the clip that keeps it all in place........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3053.jpg before fitting it's a good idea to give the key barrel a clean up and apply a little oil into the tumblers to keep them freed up...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3057.jpg The body of the key barrel is shaped so that it'll only fit in the hole in the door one way without the use of a sledgehammer......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3056.jpg and, as the barrel passes through the door skin that little "leg" that sticks out the side of it needs to engage with the lever on the main locking unit arrowed below........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3059.jpg Easy right? Is it f*ck! As the barrel passes through the door it's also got to pass through the bracket for the central locking switch which has to be in the right position so that the barrel triggers the switch as it is turned............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3058.jpg and then, with all that held in place by your fourteen f*cking Smurf size hands you've got to slide in this clip to keep it all held tight to the door skin........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3060.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3061.jpg and after much swearing and consumption of alcohol it's in and this is how it should work. When you rotate the key barrel the back end of the barrel (coloured green below) either pushes the lever on the main locking unit up or down to lock or unlock the door, while a little wedge on the other side of the barrel pushes against the central locking switch to send a signal back to the central locking unit to open or close the other doors............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3067.jpg next up the inner door release lever............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3068.jpg on the back of it theres a little lever with a hole in it............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3069.jpg the long steel rod sticking out of the main door locking unit fits into this hole like so................. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3071.jpg and then the lever can be screwed into place on the door............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3072.jpg And then finally the last piece of the jigsaw, the central locking actuator, the little motor that locks and unlocks your door.............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3073.jpg it hangs from the little link bar from the main locking unit shown below....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3074.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3079.jpg and bolts up to the inner doorskin with two little bolts shown below........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3075.jpg Locking system done, it was on to the window mechanism. Before the electric motor and rail is refitted the rail and the cable that runs in it are cleaned and new grease applied. The two parts that the window connect to are arrowed red below, and when you hook up the two wires that go to the motor to a battery they will either rise or fall depending on which way around you connect the two wires............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3041.jpg and these are raised and lowered a few times to work the new grease into the rails to keep things working smoothly............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3042.jpg With that done the rail and motor is refitted and bolted up to the inside of the door skin. There's a very precise method for slotting the rail back into the door skin, basically you f*ck around with it for 30 minutes trying it every conceivable way before all of a sudden it's in and you've no idea how you done it. Four bolts hold the rail in place (red arrows) and 3 nuts hold the motor in (green)......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3081.jpg before the glass can go in the rubber liner needs to be refitted to the window frame............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3084.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3086.jpg Glass gets a clean, which turns out to be completely pointless as your going to cover it with greasy paw prints anyway while getting it back in......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3083.jpg theres two brackets on the bottom of the glass, this one on the front which the roller on the rail will slide into............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3087.jpg and this one at the rear which the other rail bracket bolts up to............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3088.jpg If, like me, your doing this task before the electrics are reconnected, you can remove this little rubber grommet from the centre of the motor............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3089.jpg and stick an allen key into it to wind the window up and down manually....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3090.jpg The motor is wound up or down to bring the two points the window connects to into line with the gaps on the inner door skin, so you can see what your at as the window in slid down into place. The front window bracket is slid onto the roller on the rail first......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3091.jpg and then the rear is lined up with its bracket so the two retaining bolts can be refitted........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3092.jpg as you can see the slots in the bracket are elongated to allow a little scope for adjustment and getting the window perfectly straight within the frame. To do this you tighten up the two bolts, wind up the window to within 1 inch of the top frame and then get the gap completely parallel by loosening off the two bolts again and raising or lowering the rear of the window............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3093.jpg That done, door loom went in next........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3095.jpg it's all fed in through this hole........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3097.jpg and then plug into the female plug on the door pillar, making sure that the rubber boot is properly fitted over the the holes on either side as this can be a common source of water getting into the car. Another thing thats not a bad idea can be to rub a little smear of grease on the sealing face of the rubber boots just to give a little more resistance to water ingress......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3109.jpg With all the wiring ran to wherever it needs to go and then secured to the door skin with the little clips, it's worth running the window fully up and down just to check that it doesn't snag on any of the electrics. With all that done the final thing to do is seal the inside of the door to stop condensation getting in. You can buy proper sticky plastic stuff from the dealer to do this job, or, just use double sided trim tape and normal polythene like so.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3101.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3102.jpg with that on, the little trim strip that sits up against the window on the inside can clip back into place............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3103.jpg making sure that the little clips face inwards as the door card is going to sit down into these next.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3107.jpg but before the doorcard drops on these little bits go on first........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3108.jpg The 3 white ones are for the the armrest screws to screw into.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3110.jpg and the black one goes on the side of the door as it's the diddy that the door light switch presses up against......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3109b.jpg then the doorcard can drop on. It's fitted by sliding down onto them clips shown earlier on the window strip and once down in place the clips shown below are thumped into their corresponding holes on the door........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3111.jpg and with the doorcard in place this little bit of trim can go back in place around the open lever......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3112.jpg it's pushed in slightly behind the lever and then slid forward to lock it in place.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3113.jpg which leaves it looking like so........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3114.jpg finally these 3 screws are used to refit the door handle.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3115.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3116.jpg Moving up the door a little the final bit of trim to get refitted is this cover that goes on the inside of the door pillar. 3 little dowels on the inside of the trim and 3 little holes on the door pillar.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3104.jpg thump, thump, thump, job done.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3106.jpg and then finally on to the outside of the door. All the shadow trim on the outside of the car was sanded down with 320 grit wet & dry paper and then sprayed with Plasti-kote Satin black.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3100.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3-plastikote.jpg Although it's touch dry after a few hours it's best to try and leave it a few days to fully harden before trying to refit it, as when it's fully hardened and settled it's a lot more resistant to scratching. First bit to go on is the door pillar cover....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3117.jpg as you can see the edges of the cover curls around on the inside........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3118.jpg and it's this curl that "clips" around the door pillar to hold it in place, http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3119.jpg however this isn't enough to hold it for ever and ever on it's own, so a few fat blobs of this stuff is placed between the two....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/tiger%20seal.jpeg It's Upol Tiger Seal and you'll pull the door off the car before you'll pull that trim off once it set's. Next bit of trim's a bit more involved, it's the little bit that goes around the window frame........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3121.jpg There's a clatter of clips that fit to the door first before the trim goes on, I've no idea how many it originally had coming off as most of mine decided to commit suicide during disassembly. I've managed to turn up 16 of them from spares, so each doors gettin eight............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3122.jpg the non-compliant clips........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3123.jpg before Hari Kari......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3124.jpg they slide onto the frame like so............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3125.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3127.jpg and trim, just like the pillar trim is curved over at the edges and this is how it fixes onto the door. The top half sits over the frame and then the bottom half clicks on over the clips............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3129.jpg Last bit of door trim is the straight bit below.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3130.jpg They sit at the bottom of the window........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3131.jpg and just like the similar ones on the inside of the window, these also have a rubber weather strip on the inside of them. The rubber strips on mine had succumbed to the ravages of twenty odd years of weather unfortunately, and any attempt to lower the window to clear off the condensation on a winters morning would simply result in a fancy streaky pattern on the glass. The answer, new rubber strips. Their still available and don't cost a lot from the dealer......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3132.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3133.jpg Rubber strips attach to the trim with a few clips.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3134.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3136.jpg but you gotta measure where exactly it's to clip on.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3137.jpg as the rubber strip is shorter than the trim because it only needs to sit in against the glass.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3138.jpg That done, next thing to go back on is the mirrors........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3140.jpg which are held on by two little bolts on the inside......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3139.jpg Final bit to go on is the rubber seal at the top of the door........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3141.jpg The rubber seal has a groove in it and a hole at either end....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3142.jpg and at the top of the door there is a ridge sticking out (red arrows) that sits into the groove on the rubber seal to hold it on, and a hole at each end that a plastic rivet sits through the seal and into the door to secure it......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3143.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3144.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3145.jpg and thats about where it's at right now. We've progressed to the stage where I can now sit in it and make brum brum noises while twirling the steering wheel. Marvellous entertainment. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3027.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3032.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3023.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2839%29/m3_3148.jpg Till next time.....

(Leider Keine Bilder Vorhanen) Episode 453, Interior design. With the wiring and carpet refitted to the inside it was now time to sort out the internal furniture. A while back I'd managed to pick up a second hand set of Recaro Sr's and although the material was a bit grubby the actual seats were in perfect condition otherwise............. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2851.jpg So these along with all the rest of the interior shown below were sent to a local retrim merchant to give them a new lease of life.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2843.jpg Decided to go with half cow's arse and half material, like so.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2959.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2963.jpg Next up was to get some brackets knocked up to mount the Recaro's on the standard e30 slider rails. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2970.jpg With the brackets trimmed and drilled it was time to bolt them up to the seat base so I could mark them up for bending. There are few things more certain in this life to send you into a rage then spending ages carefully making brackets only to bend them the wrong way. I've the hammer marks on the garage roof to prove it.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2971.jpg bendy, bendy, painty, painty....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2992.jpg before giving the original sliders a clean up............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2988.jpg making sure to apply a little fresh grease to the runners afterwards........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2993.jpg needed a few spacers before the brackets could mount to the runners, so, chopped two 15mm length pieces(or 13mm, can't remember, and it's pissin rain out there so I can't be arsed going out to measure them) off some round bar and drilled them 8mm in the centre............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2989.jpg which sit into the runners like so............ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2990.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2991.jpg and with them in place I could start bolting thing up. The mounts on the front of the runners sit a little more inboard compared to the rears (5mm), so to keep everything straight and true 3 little washers are added between the bracket and runner, like so........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2996.jpg The only thing to watch out for is that the bolt used on the side with the adjuster arm isn't to long, as if it is, it'll get in the way of the arm moving up and down to unlock the seat rail........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3003.jpg Front bolts taken care of, it was on to the rear. The bar arrowed below passes through the runners both sides at the back.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2998.jpg and sticks out through the seat brackets like so......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3000.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2999.jpg and as you can see in the pics the ends of the bar are square sectioned, which is helpful, as this allows the seat belt buckle to be bolted up and held in the correct position.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3001.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3002.jpg The other side gets a few washers to take up the gap before being bolted up aswell. The last little bit to remember is this little link bar that fits from one rail to the other. Its function is to link the catch on one side to the catch on the other, so when you pull the lever to adjust the seat back or forward it opens the catch on the side of the lever and this little link bar unlocks the catch on the other side, allowing the seat to slide.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3005.jpg and that was the front seats ready to go in. But, the rears needed to go in first and before the rears could go in, the rear door cards had to be fitted and before they could be fitted the front seat belts had to be fitted. And if I knew all that before having to find it out the hard way my nextdoor neighbours visiting grandchildren would know a lot less foul language. So, front seat belts were needed first and this presented me with a small problem, after 20 years the retraction reels had gone so limp on them I reckon you'd be a good foot or two through the windscreen before the original belts decided to halt your progress. Alas, some new belts would be required. And if I was going to renew them might as well go for the red variety fitted to the sport evolutions. Unfortunately I couldn't come up with the one million dollars in untraceable bonds that the main dealer wanted for a pair of seat belts so ebay turned up these instead........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2973.jpg They are seat belts made by a crowd called Securon and as the tag below shows they're fully certified and "E" marked........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2974.jpg They can be ordered with 2 different length buckles, 15cm or 30cm. http://www.securon.co.uk/seat_belts_firstframe.htm I ordered the 15cm ones (p/n: 500/15) and of coarse when I went to fit them realised that the 30cm length (p/n: 500/30) would have been more suitable. Gobshite. Thankfully the buckle could be stripped and the original e30 strap fitted to replace the short Securon one............... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2994.jpg Next little mod was to the buckle at the end of the belt. As you can see below it's an eye bolt type and the e30 has the bar type, so...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2975.jpg chop, chop.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2977.jpg with that done it could be fitted. The reel part bolts in just like the original one.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2981.jpg little plastic thingy refitted to keep the belt run neat......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2982.jpg up to the top buckle supplied with the belts that bolts into the B pillar to replace the original one......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2983.jpg and then finally down to the bar at the floor now that the eye bolt type buckle was cut off........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2984.jpg the only downside to the belts is that when fully retracted in the rest position they still don't pull taut. The belts still have about 2 inches slack in them as you can see below. However given that these cost less than a quarter of the ransom Bmw wanted for the genuine one's, it's something I'll not loose any sleep over........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2985.jpg once the belts were in, rear door cards and seats could also go in........... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_2987.jpg to be followed by the fronts.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3031.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3012.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2838%29/m3_3029.jpg and thats all for now. Should have the next part up tomorrow. Till then.....

And eventually we arrive at the final episode of this update. Glass.The original front windscreen at 20 odd years old, looked like it had beenshot at close range with a blunderbus elephant gun. Every square inch wascovered in little chips. So it's being replaced with a new one. The windscreenis aftermarket and is made by a crowd called Pilkington. Which means its a lotcheaper than from Bmw and also as good a quality. There seems to be a few choicesof tint levels and I went with the green with dark green sun strip at the top asthis was identical to what was removed........... No pictures of during the task i'm afraid, but the one little thing tobe careful of though is that the little drain holes at the bottom of thewindscreen surround don't get blocked up with the sealant/adhesive gue. With the front one in, it was on to the rear screen which is slightly more involved.Theres two trim strips that fit around the rear screen and I was sure that thesecould be fitted after the screen was in, however, as usual I was wrong........ on the back side of the trim strips theres a load of little slots........ and this is the reason why. 18 of these little plastic clips below are fittedto the outside edge of the screen (p/n 51318177850 sold in pack of 20).They've a little sticky pad on them to bond to the screen....... The only catch is they've to be stuck in exactly the right place to matchup with the slots in the trim peices. I was a bit lucky in this regard, asthis is the original windscreen that was cut out intact and is good to goback in again. The old clips broke to pieces upon removal but there wasstill marks on the screen where they were fitted, so the new ones just had togo back on to the same place............ With the clips on, the 2 trim pieces could be snapped down onto themand with a fat bead of adhesive on the rear of the screen it was thrown intoplace......... nearly forgot, theres two other little plastic pegs that sit at the bottombetween the glass and the bodywork. They're hexagonal in shape and youcan twist them with a flat screwdriver while the adhesive is still wet to3 different heights to help set the windscreen trim gaps right with thesurrounding bodywork......... Screens in, it was on to the rear side glass........ glass sits into its rubber.......... and then the shadow trim needs to be fitted to the outside of the rubber....... on the inside of the trim theres a raised edge.......... and this edge needs to sit into this groove in the rubber............... to lessen the chances of a hammer being taken to the glass during this jobout of rage, we use some lubricant, in the form of some washing up liquidwatered down a little bit......... Once your not stingey with the washing up liquid its usually fairly simpleto massage the rubber enough to get the trim to slot down into its groove....... last bit to go on is this little strip of rubber which slides up on the frontedge of the trim............. to look like so......... and then on to the small matter of battering the window into place.Both "B" and "C" pillar trims need to be in place inside first.......... and then the rubber needs to be lubed up (no matter what way youtype that it still ends up sounding like a ropey porn film)............. and then we need a length of electrical able, nice and skinny, a singlestrand of speaker cable usually does the job.......... wrap the cable around the rubber so that it sits into the groove that wasjust soaped up......... and then finally plaster the metal edge in the window frame that the rubbersits over with plenty of soap as well............ The next bit is a two man job, it can help if your assistant is smaller thanyou and has a peaceful nature, that way you can bollock him if the jobstarts to go wrong without fear of having your nose broken.The window is held tightly up against the frame making sure that the 2threaded bolts (arrowed below) have entered their holes on the "B" pillar........ and if your assistant has held the window in just tight enough so that therubber is a little squashed against the frame, when you start to pull the speakercable through from inside the car, it'll pop the rubber lip over the frame rail inthe process............. and voilla, the windows fitted. Screw up the 2 nuts on to the frame boltsthat went into the holes on the "B" pillar and thats it. Make sure to thankyour assistant before blaming him for any scratches on the outside bodyworkthat you made months ago.............. With the window in, the external "C" pillar trim can now go on........ First up you gotta attach the shadow trim piece to the painted piecewith the aid of these 5 little thingamajigs.......... they just pop into the 5 little holes on the painted piece........... and then the centre peg is bashed down to spread the underneath pieceso that they don't fall off again while your doing 100 on the motorway....... with these in place the shadow trim piece just snaps down onto them.Then you need 6 of these little dudes (3 for each side of the car)p/n 51131870459......... which fit into the "C" pillar (red arrows) and another little pair of grommets(one for each side) to go in at the blue arrow.......... On the back of the trim piece there's 4 little dowels which pop in tothe grommets above, to hold the trim on to the car. The dowels arefragile and the grommets are tight so you've gotta be real gentle fittingthem............. With all the rear glass in, the rear bootlid could go back on and the rearbumper. Which leaves the car currently looking like this............... And thats about all for now. She's starting to come back togethernow, and the pace is getting a little quicker as the finishing post isin sight (lets face it, it couldn't go any slower). The interior is due back fromretrim in the next week or so and then the doors can be rebuilt and refitted.So it shouldn't be as long till the next update.Maybe. Till then...............

With the car now back on the ground it was time to super glue the side skirts back on. I don't know who back in the day designed these skirts for the M3, but who ever it was certainly took their job seriously. I've seen small bloody aircraft wings that didn't use this many fittings to secure them. First up was these little green grommets below p/n 51711932996. Seven of these are needed both sides, giving a total of 14. As you can see below I bought 18 because, obviously, I can't count.......... and 4 of these little black washers p/n 51711922599. One black one at either end and seven green ones in the holes in between...... Then there's the little white dudes that are going to pop into the green grommets. P/n 51711936517, 7 of these for each side............ these pop onto the top inside lip of the skirts, shown below......... and then theres 4 of these that also go on the skirts, one at each end. (I'm starting to think one of the previous owners of this car must have been a f*ckin mermaid who lived at the bottom of the sea)............. anywho p/n 51711933719.......... these slide into the little slots each end of the skirt.......... and when the skirts are offered up to the car the white clips click into the green grommets and the steel clips are secured at either ends by 4 little plastic nuts....... nuts are filled with a little grease in the naive thought that this might prevent them being such a b*stard to remove in the future.......... each skirt gets 3 little push pegs to secure it as well (obviously to bring them up to full hurricane proof specification) two at the rear of each skirt.......... and 1 above the rear jacking point............. and finally 5 of these little plastic clamps (51711933125) are fitted to the bottom lip of each skirt to secure it........ bit of grease on the face of these should stop them trapping dirt and then dampness up against the bodywork which will eventually lead to rust......... I bought some stainless screws for attaching these instead of the factory screws as I had immense hardship removing the rusted old ones....... Screws screw in from the front of the skirt into the plastic clamp, clamping the bottom of the skirt to the bottom sill. and the end result? a pair of skirts which are well enough secured to survive a direct nuclear strike.............. Should have the final episode of this update up tomorrow, the glass fitting, and some pictures of the rear end which almost looks like a complete car again, if you squint through one eye, and catch it at the right angle, a little, kinda. Till then...............

They're not needed right this minute but the bits and pieces that make up the electric mirror's were at the bottom of the crate I was working out of, so they went together next.......... wiring fits through rubber mirror seal.......... and then through the base of the mirror............ before the individual wires plug into the motor, the connections on the motor are marked for the colour of wires that pop into each hole......... motor gets screwed to the 4 threaded holes on the mirror base........... and then the little loose run of cable seen below.......... gets secured and hidden by this little plastic cover............. last thing to do is pop the mirror glass on. As you can see below, on the rear of the glass theres a circular plastic disc with 4 little cut outs in it (blue arrows). The disc also has a few notches cut into the bottom of it (red arrow), the disc can rotate left or right.......... So you line up the 4 holes on the disc with the 4 lugs on the motor shown below........ and then pop a small flat screw driver in through the hole on the bottom of the mirror to rotate the disc and lock the mirror glass against the motor........ wish all the reassembly was that handy............ For the next bit of work to commence the car needed to be off the axle stands and back down on the ground, and for that to happen some wheels would be required. So I picked up a staggered set of these kindly provided by probably the M3's most reliable refurbished wheels supplier, Markus over on S14.net........... Style 5's in 8x17 and 9x17............

Carpets in, next up was the rear parcel shelf. Below you can see the original parcel shelf complete with the holes cut out for the speakers the previous owner fitted....... And if you cast your mind back a bit you might remember when the bodywork was been finished off I made up some speaker enclosures and welded them into the rear bulkhead........ now, a smart person probably would have measured the hole's in the parcel shelf and welded them enclosures in to match up, so the parcel shelf would be a straight forward refit. However, it would appear I'm not the brightest star in the sky, as when I went to offer the parcel shelf back into place the holes were a mile off...... So, the solution. Remove the sound proofing from under the parcel shelf........ butcher a big hole out of the centre of it and replace with a thin piece of aluminium........... check measurements 15 times before cutting holes in the aluminium....... drill and screw alum down to parcel shelf to hold it tight in place till the adhesive underneath dry's.......... fit in place to check everything lines up.......... While it all fitted up nice and snug now there was still the small problem of bare aluminium not being at the cutting edge of custom car interior design. So, a little material.......... chop, chop...... glue explosion......... sticky fingers, lost scissors....... Bingo....... the M3 having the extended rear windscreen section also has another little add on section of parcel shelf to fill up the gap so this got covered too...... All done, time to bang it back in and fit the speakers and rear seatbelts, and this is how it came out........... more tomorrow. Till then...............

(Leider keine Bilder Vorhanden) With the wiring all in, the next thing to do was get the carpet in on top of it. Despite being 20 odd years old the carpet was in remarkably good condition. A shampoo and steam clean left it looking as good as new....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2679.jpg Only one small problem with it, it was grey, I want it black. So, a gallon of Valeters Pride black carpet dye (e-bay £25)........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2594.jpg an old squirter bottle.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2593.jpg and a soft-ish nail brush......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2595.jpg Spray the stuff on the carpet, gently rub it in with nail brush and leave to dry. Reapply a second coat if needed. It doesn't take a great deal of the dye to do the job, I only got through about one litre to do it all. Tried it out on a spare bit of carpet first, just to check it wasn't going to go arse ways and make a balls of me good carpet. Test went well so on to the real thing......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2596.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2681.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2683.jpg Wasn't sure how the vinyl/plastic bits of the carpet were going to take to the dye but as it turned out they dyed perfectly black too........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2684.jpg With the carpet all dried out (24 hours for full non-smudge dryness) it could go back into the car..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2688.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2689.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2832%29/m3_2691.jpg With the carpet in the dash and centre console could also go back in......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2831%29/m3_2928.jpg pretty straight forward this, only one little mod to do on the clocks unit...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2831%29/m3_2842.jpg it didn't seem right having the odo reading 185,000......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2831%29/m3_2840.jpg For this next part I'll be forever greatfull to DanThe over on E30zone.net, about a year ago I received a pm from him to say he had an unused black non sunroof headcloth for an M3 if I wanted it. Seeing as these are NLA from the main dealer for years now it wasn't a difficult decision.......... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2833%29/m3_2809.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2833%29/m3_2811.jpg No pictures of the job in progress as it was a complete swine to do. However the hardship was worth it as it came out nice in the end........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2833%29/m3_2815.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2833%29/m3_2816.jpg should have the rest of this update up later on this evening. Till then.........

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to the worlds fastestcar restoration. Here's a brief word or two and a couple of pictures of themagnificent progress thats been made since the last update 13 years ago.As you may have seen at the end of the last update, next on the "shit to do"list was the task of firing in the wiring loom and beating it down flatenough so that the carpet doesn't look like it's concealing dead bodiesunderneath it.Back at the start during the disassembly stage the plan wasto carefully remove the loom from the car and pack it away neatly rolled up intoit's individual runs so as to make refitting a straight forward simple task.That plan lasted a good ten minutes, which if i'm honest islonger than most plans tend to last, in the end everything just got tossedinto a large crate........ Studies have shown that if you leaves large bundles of wires together forlong enough they will actually, slowly, when your not looking, tie themselvesinto knots making them a complete bas*ard to unravel again.I believe the same phenomena has been found in christmas tree lightsaswell. Anywho, a couple of hours, a bag of nails and a hammer hadthe loom strung up on the wall like so......... There's basically two main looms in an e30. The chassis loom andthe engine loom. What you see in the pics above is the chassis loom,I'll be waiting till the engine is refitted before tackling the engine loom.One of the largest items in the chassis loom is the fuse board and toget full access to all it's wires you need to undo the two screws andpop the fuse/relay panel upwards, which reveals all this lot below....... Although it looks a bit hectic a lot of the wires are simply passingthrough the fusebox on their way from the engine bay through to theinside of the car or vise versa.The main reason for nailing up the loom like this, apart from trying tountangle it, was to inspect the condition of the various connectors, theinsulation and of coarse the wires themselves. And as with just abouteverything else on this car the loom was also going to need some tenderloving care. Some of the more notable things found were: the ABS over voltage relay looking rather suicidal...... That relay lives on top of the ABS ecu which is right under the dash besidethe steering column, not at the bottom of the deep blue sea, which thosepictures would suggest. I've no idea how it got so corroded. I also found some modifications to the loom which I have a sneaking suspicionmight not have been done at the factory. The use of speaker cable tee'd into thefront indicator circuit to power the front wing indicators....... and an alarm installation which may well have been carried out byStevie Wonder. It was a tough choice to choose which picture wouldtruly sum up the magnificence of this gifted persons work, but in theend there could only be one winner. The red arrow below points outwhere he bared back the blue wire and joined in the black wire bywrapping it around. And then the blue arrow shows where he decidedto add some solder.......... Gifted. The other thing I wanted to do with the loom up on the wall was go through it alland pull out all the unused wiring. I think the main loom comes fitted withall the wiring included for things on the options list, such as heated seats,font fogs and so on, and since I'm not using most of these there seemedlittle point in carrying around all the wiring for them. So the pile belowwas extracted......... The other thing that needed attention was the loom insulation. The stuffin the engine bay by now had the cohesion of wet tissue paper...... and in places had already started to unravel....... So I began the expensive search for the correct matching loom tape off themain dealer. I probably bought enough different rolls of f*cking tape to wrapthe empire state building before learning the correct part number fromConrod over on S14power.com. So, 1 roll of correct tape under part number61136902588 at 30euro a roll......... and then some internet research to find the manufacturerswebsite, "Certoplast" http://www.certoplast.com/frameset_eng.htmand a little more research showed the tape to be "Certoplast 525se".And a quick search on e-bay found a German seller auctioning themfor 3.45euro a roll....... All of which meant the exhilarating job of re wrapping the looms could commence....... Which along with removing the unused wiring tidied up the 20 year oldlooms a great deal......... With all that done the loom could be refitted to the car. The first "loom"to go back in was the battery relocation loom. Which consists of theheavy gauge wire pictured below and another smaller gauge wire thatruns along side it........... Any they run from the battery cradle in the boot.......... through the rear bulkhead and along the inner passenger sill........... before turning up the A pillar and out through a bulkhead grommet....... to arrive at the original battery tray........ Not being able to avoid it any longer, the chassis loom was next up.A little tip for you if your doing this job is to place the loom in a hot pressor beside a radiator for a while before you go to fit it, as the heat will softenup the loom a lot and makes it far easier to thread in to place.Everything in the chassis loom more or less starts or finishes in the fuseboxso thats the first picture.As you can see in the pics below I got a bit carried away with the crayonsagain....... In the pic above you can just about see the 5 different "runs" of wiring thatleave the fuse box. (theres usually 6 but i've done away with the little twin wirerun that comes out and goes to the level sensor on the brake fluid reservoir). Of the 3 "runs" of wire that exit the fuse box from the left in the pic abovethe two shortest ones are the green and purple "runs".The purple one only travels a few inches and ends in the C101 plug. This iswhere the chassis loom and the engine loom join together.The green run only travels about a foot more and supplies power in to thewiper motor under the scuttle panel.And the blue run travels across the bulkhead and connects up to the terminals on theend of the main battery lead fitted earlier (red arrow below). Two decent gauge cables here andthere job is to supply all the power to the fusebox. The other pair of wires in this run(yellow arrow) are to the level sensor on the coolant reservoir........ Next up is the yellow run that exits the fusebox on the right in the main pic.This carries the wires to power up most of the items on the front of thecar. It leaves the fusebox and travels up the inside of the wing, with thefirst branches off for the front left ABS sensor and left wing indicator (out of pic)....... before carrying on down the wing and dumping some more wires off toconnect up the ABS pump and the front left headlight unit....... the other wires it dumps here which can be a little difficult to see are abunch of earth wires which all bolt up to an earth point behind the ABS pump. The other branch off at this point, is the wires and connector for poweringup the electrical cooling fan. This actually runs over under the front grills whenfully installed but I'm changing to an aftermarket fan so have only ran it thisfar to make it easier to get at till the new fan is fitted later on........ the final pair of branches off the run at this point are 2 pairs of wires,one for the front indicator and one for the left horn...... next up was to refit the little metal bar that runs under where the grillswill be............. because the yellow run continues its journey over to the other side ofthe engine bay on the inside of this bar....... where upon it breaks up into its final branches. Again two twin corebranches for indicator and horn....... 3 twins for the headlight unit (high beam, low beam and side light).A pair of twins (green) for windscreen washer pump and level sensor.The connector for the right front ABS sensor and a twin corefor the right front wing indicator(out of pic).......... And the final item is a 3 wire branch for the fan control switch on thethermostat (when it's fitted)............ The final run to leave the fusebox is the red one from underneath the box.... which travels through a large rubber grommet on the bulkhead and intothe inside of the car......... if your a religious type person it's usually at this stage you start to pray,another common option is alcohol....... before we go any further I'd just like to say if your thinking of following thesepics to lay in your loom, then it's probably worth pointing out that this iswhere I "think" the wires went. The important word there being "think".I haven't a fu*king clue where half this stuff originally ran and it mightn't bea bad idea to hang on and see if this car goes up in a puff of smoke thefirst time I turn the key. Two little brackets to connect to the bulkhead first. The one belowwhich supports the loom after it comes through the bulkhead and makesa left tun.......... and this one that holds a load of the connectors and plugs....... (red arrow shows where the loom holder bracket will be fitted)......... From here the various runs make their way down the "A" pillar with a fewbranches off heading into the speaker hole....... the first branch off is for the central locking relay which lives in here....... second is for the door light switch........... third is for the door connector plug which supplies all the wiring tothe door when fitted.......... after getting rid of that load the remaining two runs (green & red) headback the car along the inner sill. Two branch off's just in front of wherethe driver seat goes (green & orange) which we'll come back to in a while....... the main bulk of the loom still continues back along the still....... up on to the rear seat bench where theres another 4 branch off's.Red vertical arrow = wires up to left hand interior lightPurple arrow = bunch of earth wires bolted to shellYellow arrow = rear left ABS connectorOther Red arrow = wires out to external fuel pump after this the two main red runs split up. One runs up the rear bulkheadand pops through a square grommet out into the boot area (blue arrow). Just beforeit does, theres a small branch off (green) with some rear speaker wires that Iadded into the loom earlier......... your going to have to use you imagination here for the next little bit, cause the loomsits up into the panel work, and although I love you all dearly,I'm f*cked if i'm taking them back down again just for pictures.The loom comes through the bulkhead into the boot area(red dots) and then has 3 branch off's (as shown in the pic) before carrying on.Red branch off- to rear light check unit (blue arrow)Yellow branch off- earth wires bolted to chassisGreen branch off- pair of wires that run up inside boot hinge and intoboot lid for boot light switch.......... After which the loom continues on around to deposit it's last wires, which are forthe rear tail light units, the reg plate lights, and the central locking motor for theboot lock....... With that done, we go back to the split in the loom at the rear bulkheadand follow the other run on it's merry way. It travels across the bottomof the rear bulkhead before depositing another 3 branches.Blue- wires for rear boot secondary fuel tank sender unitYellow- wires for right rear ABS senderPurple- wires for main fuel tank internal fuel pump & level sender unit and wires for speedosender unit on differential........ with them dropped it carries on another foot and drops another branchwhich is the 3 little wires for the right hand side interior light...... just like the other side these wires run up the inside of the "B" pillar......... before magically reappearing at the top where the light is fitted........ With that taken care of theres only one wire left in this run of the loomand it joins the main battery cable on it's journey back towards the frontof the car............... But before we follow that single wire to it's home, it's back over againto the other side of the car and them two runs that branched off earlier on(green & orange)........... The green run carries within it the wiring for the electric window switchesamongst other things and you can see where the two plugs end up forthe switches (green arrows). The orange run carries the wiring for thereverse light switch connector (orange arrow) which will connect to thelittle two wire loom on the gearbox when fitted......... While the green run continues on across the floorpan the orange runheads backwards to drop it's final wires........ which are a single wire for the handbrake light switch and a pair of wiresfor the rear ashtray light........... back to the green run, it continues right over to the passenger side sill...... where upon it joins in with the big battery cable and the sole remaining redrun wire on their journey to the front........... and eventually they reach their final destination. In through the speakerhole and the green run provides all the wiring for the door plug and the redsingle wire is for the passenger side interior light door switch........... Thats most of the main loom fitted, theres probably more, but sure if Ishowed it all it would take all the fun out of you fitting your own.Plus it's over two months since I fitted all that crap, and I've beenguessing most of what you've just read.There's quite a few mini looms that plug into the main chassis loom oncefitted such as this one. It has the wiring for the stereo, hazard light switch,electric window circuit breaker switch, glove box light and so on........ the ignition switch...... indicator and wiper stalks......... a quick note on these last two by the way, took me a fu*king eternityto figure this one out. Theres a little bracket welded onto the steeringcolumn coloured red below......... and when the ignition switch loom is plugged into the chassis loomthe plug clicks into this little bracket........... and then when the wiper/indicator plug is reattached....... it slides in and clicks in to place above the ignition plug............ and fu*k it, thats enough wiring, me head is melted.And it's also enough for this update.I promise the next one won't be quite as boring as we tackle the art of removingcarpet dye from bare skin, nailing on a pair of side skirts, modifying a rear parcelshelf and loosing the will to live while fitting a roof cloth.Should have it up in the next few days. Till then...........

After that it was on to some light work...... E30's seem to be fairly prone to water leaks around the tail lights, so, the new gaskets were given a light coating of grease on the side that sits against the light.......... and the mating surface that they sit up against on the car was also given a light smear...... before the lights were hammered home........ reg plate lights had decided to tint themselves brown somewhere along the last 20 odd years so I changed them back to clear........... the area around these little lights also seems to like rusting, so, some fresh clips were fitted and suffocated in grease before the lights were screwed back in...... With the rear end done it was on to the front lights, which looked like they'd gone ten rounds with a sand blaster, and lost........ The headlight rims were in a bad condition, so I sent them away to have them rechromed..... and then it was on to stripping the headlights themselves. Theres two different brands of headlights for e30's I think, and these are the Hella variety. Bulb covers twist off first....... and then 3 little screws are undone to remove the reflector..... Then 4 little screws are undone to remove the front glass section from the reflector in the pic above. The glass bit can be cleaned up normally, but, the chrome "bowl" in the pic below needs a bit of caution when cleaning. The chrome is 20 odd years old and and lived in a hot/cold environment for that length of time (headlights on/off), and as such it needs to be treated delicately. Squirt some glass cleaner in here and go at it with a rag and you'll just wipe all the chrome away. So "softly" rub away any dust with some cotton wool....... next up replacing the lenses. Each one is held in place by 3 adjusters (well actually 2 adjusters and 1 pivot lug)........ these are removed first from the headlight surround by twisting them till the little white plastic rectangle lines up with the rectangle on the housing like so...... allowing the two lights to be removed from the frame....... then the adjusters had to be removed from the old lenses and swapped over on to the new ones, making sure the 2 adjusters and 1 pivot lug go in the exact same location on the new headlight, otherwise your going to be dazzling passing airplanes...... adjusters can be a bit of a pig to remove. In the pic below you can see the little plastic "socket" they use to sit into the light frame. All 4 corners of this little socket need to be pushed inwards to allow the socket and adjuster to lift out together...... Then some fresh lenses are added..... adjusters are refitted (making sure they go back into their right holes)....... and then they're popped back into the frame...... and finally the reflectors and bulbs are refitted to leave them looking a whole lot fresher...... Chrome rims for the outside of the lights still haven't returned back from chroming yet, as, amazingly, I seem to have found someone who works even slower than I do. And thats about it for this update. Next up, is the black magic thats required to keep the smoke inside the wiring looms......... Till then................

The last of the engine ancillaries to get a spit and shine was the power steering pump. the front pulley is popped off after it's 3 bolts are undone....... and then after you've made a mental note of which way the carrier bracket sits on, the four main bolts that hold the 2 half's of the pump together are undone....... only really interested in the half on the right in the pic above as thats where all the serviceable items live. First up the little face plate lifts off it's two little locator dowels..... and then the cam ring underneath lifts off. A bit of time is then spent checking the inside wall of the cam ring (red arrows), as this surface needs to be super smooth for the pump to do it's job. Any heavy scoring or scratches on this surface and it's over the shoulder with the old pump and off to the scrap yard for a "new one"....... With the cam ring out of the way the 10 little blades can be removed from the rotor in the centre of the pump......... and finally the little circlip at the centre of the rotor is popped off....... allowing the rotor to be lifted off the splined driveshaft....... once the rotor is removed from the driveshaft, the driveshaft can be slid out of the pump housing........ and with that out of the way the little oil seal at the snout of the housing is popped out...... With everything pulled asunder and before the enthusiasm starts to wear off, all the bits are cleaned for reassembly. Everythings got to be fairly spotless in here as a little bit of dirt or grit won't take long to fu*k up your pump or steering rack........ For nailing it all back together the following service kit was bought from the main dealer under part number 32411 135 880. Which contains the following............ 1. snout oil seal 2. hard, face plate seal 3. soft, face plate seal 4. O ring 5. circlip the other item needed for reassembly is a little bit of power steering oil to rub on the bits as they go back together........ First up is the new oil seal fitted to the housing like so...... and once thats in, the driveshaft can be refitted.......... then the rotor is dropped back down onto the splines on the shaft........ and the new circlip fitted........... cam ring sat back into place....... and next to go in are the little blades. 10 of these in total and you need to be a little careful when dropping them back in. The reason being, one end of these are curved smooth and the other end is flat. If I owned a camera that didn't need a fu*king masters degree in technology to zoom in on something I would have taken a picture of this, however, I don't, so I drew a picture instead....... As above the rounded face goes to the outside, up against that smooth wall of the cam ring, the inside flat face points towards the centre of the rotor. Get them wrong and your pump won't pump for long....... All the bits in the pic's above and below are given a rub of power steering oil as they're dropped in by the way. With that part done the face plate is dropped back onto it's dowels....... and then first the soft seal is dropped into the little recess on top (red arrow), followed by the hard seal (purple arrow)........ a bit hard to see below but the hard seal go's around the outside of the soft seal....... final bit to go in is the big o ring....... and then after giving everything a good smear of power steering oil, the two halfs of the pump get bolted back together making sure that the two little ports marked below (black arrows) face each other...... Once back together everything outside gets a lick of paint........

Apologies for the delay getting this next part up, I had half of this waffle typed up and then the interweb broke, or something, and it all disappeared. It took a little time after that to fetch the computer from the neighbours front garden and reassemble it all again. Anywho, back to the story....... Next to get refitted was the ABS motor, nothing much to do with this. It was removed from the car in the beginning just as you see it below. And all of the pipes that had to be disconnected from the unit on removal had the open ports plugged to stop the fluid draining out of the motor. These can be a bit of a pig sometimes to bleed out upon refittal it she's been allowed to completely empty inside..... Just before fitting it, the little protective cover is popped of the rear end to check the condition of the electrical connections for all the stuff in there. The relays are pulled (red arrows) to check for any corrosion on the pins beneath which may have been caused by dampness getting in. And the pins sticking up (purple arrow) where the main ABS plug will fit on are also checked for corrosion. All clear, she was good to go...... after that the brake servo and master cylinder...... two nuts undone from the servo allows the master cylinder to drop off...... servo was looking a little second hand, so she got a sand and lick of paint..... On to the master cylinder, the little reservoir on top just pulls off (gently)..... then the two rubber grommets pop out, and you can see the little slotted washer in the port of the rear chamber..... washer just lifts out and needs to be remembered upon reassembly. The purpose of this washer is top secret. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. (yep, I haven't a clue either)...... The ABS type master cylinder isn't constructed with overhauling in mind, hence the circlip on the front with no holes to get a circlip pliers into (marked red). And with the main dealer listing no internal parts and the motor factors drawing a blank as well, I decided to leave well enough alone. I've no intention of renewing the cylinder just for the sake of it, they're fairly pricey, and this one is showing no external signs of failing. If she does down the line, then I'll replace it. A mod that seems fairly common out there, is to change the master cylinder with one from a seven series bm, which has a larger internal bore and as such stiffens up the brake pedal a lot. I've driven an e30 with this mod done, and it ain't for me. The brake pedal was uncomfortably hard for everyday driving. I could see why you might do it in a competition car, but a road car, not for me. Each to their own though. The one thing I did change was the little square sectioned O ring on the snout of the cylinder (purple arrow)..... after that cylinder took a clean up..... and everything reassembled. Next up, clutch slave cylinder..... this is such an easy task with the pedal box out of the car as opposed to changing one in place. If you'd like a more realistic experience on how to change a clutch master cylinder in place, then lay crunched up on your back on the floor, and hold the monitor over your head and swear repeatedly at it while reading this...... two mounting bolts and one pivot bolt secure the new cylinder in place...... and with that done the ABS unit, brake pipes and master cylinder could be fitted back in the engine bay...... while the pedal box was rebolted back inside...... Next up, heater motor...... starting up top first with the actual fan motor...... power and earth wire's are disconnected from the motor..... followed by undoing the four tabs on the front of the fan cowls and another four on the rear (softly, softly, 20 odd years of living out under the scuttle panel and they're fairly brittle)...... cowls removed and it's on to pulling the motor out. After 20 minutes of beating chunks out of it I finally figured out the motor retaining clip (coloured blue below) is popped free at the bottom and hinged up...... to allow the motor to lift out..... first up was to check the motor shaft for any play side to side or wibbly wobbly (technical term), if there is, dump the motor and get another, it's not worth the grief trying to change the bearings on these. With that done the only other thing I wanted to check while it was out was the motor brushes, which are under these clips...... Two in total, one each side. Clips just pop off ,and the springs underneath like to head off into the scenery, which turned this particular job into a frustrating fu*king treasure hunt...... with the clips removed you can see the brushes in their little housing..... when slid out they were found to be not even half worn yet, so they're good to go for another long while yet....... Next up was the little resistor pack, which resides just above the water valve on the side of the heater unit...... and sticks out into the incoming air duct area.... it just pulls out...... These can give a bit of trouble now the cars are reaching this age, and a sure sign that ones playing up is when speeds 1, 2 and 3 don't work on the heater anymore but position 4 still works fine. To get a look at the inner bits of the pack the 4 little tabs marked below are bent back...... allowing the metal cover to pop off...... and then you can see the 3 little coils of wire of varying thickness's which make up the 3 resistors...... When you have the heater switched to speed 1, the power leaves the switch and comes to this resistor pack on it's way to the fan motor. When it enter's the pack it passes through all 3 coils of wire (resistors) before going on to the motor. As it has had to push through all 3 resistors the power left when it reaches the motor is small, so the motor only turns slowly. Hence number 1 speed on the fan switch equals soft blow. Number 2 speed power only passes through 2 of these resistors, hence a little more power left when it reaches the motor and as such the motor turns a little faster. Number 3 speed power only passes through the one resistor and the fan motor gets a good wack of juice. And finally number 4 speed doesn't go near the resistor pack at all, it just heads straight to the fan motor and gives her full 12 volt, warp speed. And as such when the resistor pack fails your just left with full speed position 4 or nothing. In the pic below you can see the route the power takes on it's way out of resistor pack. Regardless of which speed it is 1, 2 or 3 they all take this path on the way out. Flowing from the red arrow on the right in the pic, towards the left, through the set of closed contacts (purple arrow) and on down and out the bottom to the wire that brings them to the fan motor. the reason there's a set of contacts is a safety measure. There a fair whack of juice flowing through these resistor coils and as such they can get quite hot, hence the reason this bit pokes out into the incoming air, to help cool it. But, if something happened and they were to get too hot they could become a fire risk, so, in the pic above you can see a tiny bit of metal I've coloured yellow (pointed out by yellow arrow). This metal is bimetallic, meaning that when it reaches a certain temperature it bends. And in this case, if the resistors get too hot, then it bends like in the pic below and seperates the two contacts apart..... now the power can't flow any more on speeds 1, 2 or 3 till the resistors cool down and the little bimetallic strip also cools and flattens out again allowing the contacts to touch again. Unfortunately what happens is these contacts can get dirty over the years until eventually the power can't cross them anymore, where upon the owner/mechanic takes them out fu*ks them away and buys a new set, when 9 out of ten times, popping the cover and using a little piece of sandpaper to clean the contacts up would have left them good to go for another 10 or 20 years. Anywho, next up was the heater radiator and valve. To remove the rad the 3 little screws arrowed below are undone...... however the rad can only slide out so far till the air duct below (red arrow) gets in the way, so by removing the little screw on the side (purple arrow) and popping it's two little retainer clips the vent can be removed.......... allowing the rad to side all the way out...... theres two different types of heater motor's fitted to e30 heater's and as such two different types of radiators to go into them. They are distinguished by the pipes that fit on to them. Below you can see mine has one plastic pipe and one aluminium pipe. So it's the aluminium pipe type. The other type one has two plastic pipes going to it....... Why do i need to know this you may ask? Well, it should help you buy the right type of rad, because the two are non interchangeable, as I proudly display below after buying the wrong one, fu*k...... Must say a quick thanks to the good folk at C3bmw.co.uk, who without quibble took back the wrong rad I had chose and promptly sent me the other one, even though quite a bit of time had elapsed since the original purchace. Good people. As you can see below I now had a perfect match...... The reason this is being changed by the way, is at this age the rad's like to spring a leak and unfortunately the first you'll know about it is when the interior carpet starts to resemble a swamp. The other part thats being changed is the heater valve pipe that bolts up to the rad as these can also fail. Your usually left in no doubt when this fails as when it bursts it can spew out boiling water over your legs. Nice........ new rad comes with a fat and skinny piece of foam..... fat one sticks on around the outside and skinny one around the top like below...... then the new heater valve pipe and the other pipe get bolted back on with some fresh o rings...... after which the rad slides back into place...... and the little 2 pin electrical plug is reattached to the top of the heater valve....... then the motor is popped back into the front section...... and it's retaining clip clipped back down........ wire's reconnected....... and finally the fan shrouds are refitted. The fan shroud have a little groove to sit into. Take a second or two to get this right as if you don't there's a good chance the fan is going to rattle like hell when powered up....... and then she's just about ready to go back in....... last thing to do is fit a pair of foam gaskets. As seems to be par for the course at this stage I ordered the wrong one. I'm still convinced I ordered the right part number, however this is what arrived at the main dealer.... It's the gasket for the other type of heater motor. As you can see though they're pretty much similar, and a quick chop with the stanley knife and they were a lot more similar...... The other gasket was for the inside piece of the heater unit...... After that, the grommet gets popped back in the bulkhead....... and the heater unit gets hammered back in, making sure the 4 mounting bolts pop through their little hole in the scuttle area so you can refit the 4 nuts to them (red arrows), and the two pipes pop through the big grommet in the bulkhead (purple arrow)....... all done..... Hope to get the next final bit of this update up in the next day or two. Till then........... STAY TUNED

Evenin all, Been a while since the last update, the reason being I appear to have well and truly busted something in my back. I'd love to give you a more accurate diagnosis but unfortunately my doc is a foreign lad and for the life of me I can't tell what he's saying half the time. But judging by the serious look on his face and the size of the horse tranquillizers he's prescribed for me, I'm guessing i'll not be doing cartwheels any time soon. But as they say, every cloud has a silver lining and despite the fact you need a knife and fork to take the pain killers the effects of them are marvellous. I now wear a permanent "stoner" grin all day long and can walk through brick walls without so much as an itch. Anywho, before this post starts to sound more like an bleeding heart letter we'll move on to what I've managed to mess around with on the car this time. First up I need to put my hand up and admit to a co*k up from the last update. For those who can't remember back that far, I had welded in some reinforcement bars on the rear wishbone's like so...... Well not long after posting up the pic's and details on the web I got a heads up from a member on S14.net to say he'd tried the same mod and ran in to some difficulties upon refitting them. The difficulty? When the wishbones are refitted, just above them runs the rubber fuel filler pipe that carries fuel down from the filler flap to the fuel tank under the car, like so...... (modified tube in purple, red arrow is where the fuel will run into the tank, when fitted) Which all looks fine and dandy, until you realise thats with the wishbones in full droop. As soon as you lower the car back onto the ground the wishbones go back up towards the floor plan and squash the rubber filler pipe flat. fu*k. Making it impossible to fill the car with fuel. double fu*k. So i retired to give the matter some serious thought....... And then, when all seemed lost, it hit me, I had a brain wave, a perfect solution to the problem, it was so simple i couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it earlier ..... cut them out, fu*k them away and move on. Next up, the alternator. Or to be more precise, pull it asunder, fiddle about with it and then try and figure out how it goes back together again. Starting at the rear end these bits and bobs came off first..... Number 4, the earth lead. Responsible for earthing the alternator to the chassis via the engine block...... this needs to be in good condition as you can get all manner of strange electrical faults if this lead starts to fail due to corrosion of the terminals or the copper wire inside corroding. As this one was starting to show its age and the outer insulation was badly cracked, a new one was made up to replace it...... Number 3, the suppressor. This little dude just bolts on to the back casing of the alternator and the little wire from it connects to a male spade terminal which sticks out of the casing. It's purpose is to stop electrical interference from the voltage being created inside the alternator from messing with other electrical systems on the car. Like the stereo buzzing up and down as the engine revs rise and fall. Nothing much to be done with it, if it works it works. If it doesn't, get a new one..... Number 2, the wire terminals plastic insulation. There's just two wires that go to the alternator, a big fat one which is main battery power and is connected back to the battery positive terminal via the starter and a little wire which comes from the battery light up on the dash. Both these wires are live and if they manage to touch off the alternator casing, which is earthed, you'll get a nice little fireworks display right before the fire starts. So this little plastic insulator lets the wires bolt on to the two studs sticking out without touching the casing. To remove it, the two nuts that hold the wires in place come off and then another two nuts below this come off to let the insulator slide up and off....... And finally, number 1. The brush pack and regulator. Undo the two little screws and it lifts out of the casing. This thing is the most common reason for alternators failing to charge. An alternator has a shaft rotating inside it (rotor), and for the alternator to do it's thing and produce some voltage you've got to pass a current onto this rotor and then give it a route to get back out again. To do this the shaft has two brass rings on it, which we'll get to later, and two little carbon "brushes" (red arrowed below) are pressed against the brass rings allowing current to pass in through one, do it's job and then pass out back up through the other. The little brushes seen below, have little springs underneath them to keep them rubbing against the rotor all the time as it turns. Eventually the little brushes wear out and can't reach the slip rings any more and the alternator stops charging. The other part of this little unit is the little black thing on the front (blue arrow) which is the voltage regulator, and as the name suggests it's job is to control the voltage coming out of the alternator. To much voltage could damage other electrical systems in the car so it drops the voltage down, to little voltage been produced (headlights, demister, rear window defogger all on) and it raises back up the voltage. All the time it's trying to keep the output at roughly 14 volts. In the pic below you can see that the brushes in my brush pack were on their last legs and hadn't to long left to go when compared to the new brush pack next to it...... If your alternator packs in, this is one of the first things worth checking. A new brush pack is only about 10/15euro from a motor factors. And once you've the alternator off it's just a matter of undoing the two little screws and lifting out the brush pack to check the height of the brushes. There's a few different brush packs fitted to e30 alternators due to the alternators having different power outputs, so if your going to order one use the part numbers on the old brush pack to make sure your new one is a perfect match. One final little piece of advice, if your changing a brush pack, go softly, the little carbon brushes are brittle and don't bend, so be gentle sliding it in to place. Use the force Luke, not the hammer. With all that stuff stripped from the rear end it was time to flip it over and start on the front. The centre of the shaft has a hole to accept an allen key so you can hold the shaft while loosening the front pulley nut. The pic below shows the order in which the collection of washers come off. Whats interesting if you've never stripped one before is the alternator pulley isn't actually a solid pulley, but instead two concave washers squeezed together...... Once that stuffs off next up is the 4 main bolts that hold the casings together. Before splitting the casings it can help to make a little mark or scribe a line on the 3 main bits of the alternator so they can be bolted back in the same orientation...... Its also worth making a mental note that of the four bolts that hold the casings together, two are longer than the others. Reason being when in place these two stick out the back of the alternator casing a little bit and are used to screw clips onto to secure the wires going to the alternator. They need to go back in to the same hole on reassembly...... with them 4 bolts out of the way, next up is the 4 inner ones shown below....... and then with some gentle persuasion (beating and cursing) the front casing "should" just slide off...... next up, the rear casing and stator (middle bit). Sometimes these will slide off easily, but as is always the case with this fu*king car, these were not going to come off without a fight. Shaft gets tightened in the vise (with soft jaws so as not to mark the shaft)....... and this little dome on top of the rear casing which houses the rear bearing gets a little heat from the heat gun to expand it and help it let go of the bearing inside...... and hey presto, off she comes. Once these two pieces were off they separate fairly handy. Rear casing on the left, stator and diode pack on the right..... First item to be changed in here is the diode pack. Old one still attached, new one below it..... Without going to deep into the black magic that happens inside an alternator, the main job of this diode pack is to convert the AC voltage which the alternator makes, into DC voltage which the car needs. There, thats as clear as mud isn't it. AC voltage is the stuff that powers your house, and AC is short for alternating current, which basically means the little volts travel backwards and forwards like mini Duracell bunnies on coke..... and AC voltage is no good for a cars power system which is DC voltage (direct current), where all the little volts march along in the one direction nice and calmly. So the diode pack has a little bunch of diodes in it which are basically one way valves for electricity. They'll let the voltage through but not go back again. And so convert the AC back to DC voltage which the car can use. (If you listen carefully you can actually hear Albert Einstein spinning in his grave after that explanation). In the pic below the main roundy bit (the stator) is where the black magic takes place and the AC voltage is made. And connected to this by four wires is the diode pack in the middle.... I don't think the diode pack has a certain service life really, theres no wearable parts in it like the brush pack has. However over time the diodes can fail and stop the alternator charging and as I'm changing everything else in here Murphys law states that if I reuse the old one, it'll fail down the road just to p i s s me off for not changing it while it was all asunder. So, heat up the solder and pop the wires free.... and then solder the wires back in to the new diode pack. Best to have the soldering gun nice and hot for this, so you can solder each joint quickly. If too much heat soaks into the diode pack it can fu*k it up..... with that done it's on to the rotor, and changing the bearing at either end of it. The one on the left is a straight forward, old one off, new one on affair. While the one on the right, the larger of the two is a little more involved. In front of the bearing theres a fat little shim and behind it there's a little square plate. The little plate is what the 4 little screws removed from the outer casing back in the beginning screw into. And it's purpose is to keep this bearing snug and tight up against the casing and not wandering up and down the shaft...... The other job that needed doing while the bearings were off was to change the brass slip rings. As mentioned earlier the two little brushes in the brush pack rub against these slip rings, and just like the brushes these rings also wear down over time. You can see in the pic below the two grooves that have worn down into them. Usually you'll get through about 2 or 3 sets of brushes before the slips rings need to be changed and by that stage most cars are at the end of their life. However, as this car has 24 years under her belt it's not that unusual that they're this worn...... they're a tricky little fu*ker to change though. In the pic below you can see two wires coming out of the centre of the rotor and going into the slip rings where they are soldered on. So the slip rings are carefully sliced with a small cutting disc on the dremel, on top and bottom like so........ and then popped apart. The wire on the right (purple) is soldered to the inner edge of the inner ring and the wire on the left (green) runs up the inside of the rings before soldering on to the outer edge of the outer ring....... With the old rings removed and the wires cleaned up and the shaft where they sit cleaned up with some emery paper, the new rings are slid on making sure that the green wire in the pic slides up through the middle. With everything back in it's rightful place the wire ends can be soldered back on. The one thing to be careful of is that the wire insulation is in good condition when doing all this, as if either of them 2 wires touch any part of the shaft or rotor because of a break in the insulation then they'll just short out and blow the alternator when it's refitted...... with the slip rings done the new bearing can be pushed on this end...... and then turned around and plate, new bearing and fat shim fitted to the other end..... With all that crap done, it was on to the alternator casing bushes. Pull them out and check their condition.... circlip and washer off...... and then the insert can push out the opposite side...... (Nachfolgende Bilder stehen nicht mehr zu Verfügung) and then you can pop the bushes out. To my surprise it seems a previous owner has fitted polly bushes instead of the original bushes, and they're still in perfect nick...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2391.jpg From reading on various forums it seems this change from original rubber bushes to harder polly bushes is to cure an inherent problem with alternators on the M3's S14 engine. The engine likes to vibrate a lot especially when your driving arse out of it (as all M3's should be). And this makes the alternator with the standard bushes vibrate a lot too, which can snap the adjuster bracket and leave you without a working alternator. So the polly bushes stiffen things up a bit and makes life a little easier for the adjuster bracket. At least thats my understanding of it, no doubt I've probably got it arseways as usual. With all the bushes checked and the casings cleaned up it was time to nail it all back together and hope for once that you don't end up with bits left over. First up the 2 little studs that poke through the back of the casing to attach the power leads to, making sure the little inner plastic insulators are in place so that the studs can't arc off the casing, spark, fire, boom, tears....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2402.jpg pop it into the rear casing...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2403.jpg and pop the outer insulator back on securing it with the two little nuts. Also the little suppressor dude goes back on...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2404.jpg then the stator (outer bit) and rotor (inner bit) sits down into the casing. Rotor may need a little tap to get the small bearing the other end of the shaft back into it's little dome in the casing...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2406.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2408.jpg and then finally the front casing pops on (making sure you've aligned the 3 markings you've made on the casings before stripping). Then the 4 main outer bolts are refitted and tightened to hold the casings together and finally the 4 inner screws that hold that little plate behind the front bearing tight to the casing are refitted. When all thats done the brush pack can be slotted back in (softly, softly)..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2410.jpg and the earth lead reconnected........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2413.jpg followed by all the bits that make up the front pulley section...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2425.jpg and voila!....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2433.jpg After this it was hooked up to our state of the art, mobile, water cooled, alternator test bed to check it was charging........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2434.jpg engine running and everything electrical turned on and bingo 14 volts at the battery. Didn't even need to use the fire extinguisher, how professional is that? http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2824%29/m3_2435.jpg And thats about it for now. Depending on how whacked I get on pain killers this evening I hope to have the next bit up tomorrow. Till then....... Next up the starter....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2414.jpg Two main bits to the starter, the big bit on the bottom is the actual motor that turns the engine over and then the smaller bit on top which is the solenoid. And it's the solenoid thats first to be removed. Three screws at the front are undone..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2414b.jpg and on the back end, the nut shown below is undone and the main power lead to the motor underneath is removed..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2418.jpg Which leaves the solenoid free to be removed (don't lose the little spring left behind its important!)..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2419.jpg next up, the two main bolts that hold the motor to it's nose casing...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2420.jpg which allows the nose casing to be removed and reveal the starter pinion gear (bit with the teeth) and the solenoid linkage...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2421.jpg here's how I "think" it all works. The pic below shows the terminals of the solenoid which sits on top of the motor..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2414c.jpg The starter takes a fair whack of juice to get it to turn over, and as such, it needs a fat wire to carry all that power down to it. It doesn't make sense to run the wire through the ignition switch on it's way to the starter because you'd need a bloody huge ignition switch on the steering column to be able to handle that amount of power. So, The main feed for the starter (big fat black wire direct from the battery positive terminal) runs directly to terminal 1 on the starter solenoid shown above. When you turn the ignition switch to start position, power comes down a smaller black/yellow wire to terminal 3 and travels across inside the solenoid to terminal 4 and earths. While travelling across to terminal 4 it energises a little magnetic coil inside the solenoid, which pulls in a set of contacts, and allows the big power from terminal 1 to flow over to terminal 2 and start the motor turning. So with all that done the starter motor is now turning over, the only problem is the little starter gear (pinion gear) on the front of the starter that engages with the flywheel ring gear to turn over the engine needs to be pushed forward to reach the flywheel. (if it was in contact with the flywheel all the time the starter would sh*t itself as the engine revs started to rise) So, the solenoid on top of the starter has another little job to do. In the pic below the little green metal cylinder on top of the starter is pulled (magnetically) into the solenoid when you turn the key to the start position. And attached to the back of the green cylinder is a little green linkage with a fork on the bottom end. The blue part in the middle is fixed and acts as a hinge point for the green linkage. As the top part is drawn into the solenoid the bottom part (pinion gear) is pushed outwards and into contact with the flywheel ring gear. And now the starter is turning the engine. Thats pretty much what happens when you turn the key, motor starts tuning and the teeth push out and engage with the flywheel and crank up the beast. As soon as you let go the key, the magnetism thats holding the green cylinder in, is lost, and that little spring shown earlier pushes the cylinder back out, which in turn pulls the starter teeth back away from the flywheel. http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2422.jpg Sometimes if your trying to start a car with a flat battery the engine just makes a clicking sound but doesn't turn over. Theres enough power to pull the cylinder into the solenoid and shoot the pinion gear out to the flywheel (which is the little click you hear) but not enough power to travel down the fat wires and turn the engine over. The pic below shows a starter which has been disassembled using the "f*ck, what did I just drop, I wonder was it important" method..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2424.jpg and the one below shows a starter which has been reassembled using the "it'll be a f*cking miracle if this ever works again" method...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2440.jpg last thing to do upon reassembly is bench test it. A set of jump leads, big power to terminal 1 and the earth lead clamped onto the casing. Any finally a little piece of wire to give a dart of power to the smaller terminal 3, which should bring the starter to life. If it doesn't, beat it to death with and hammer, hide it under the bench, and tell anybody who asks, "it was to far gone to repair"..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2825%29/m3_2437.jpg Staying on the theme of motors, next up was the wiper motor and linkage..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2322.jpg plastic cover pops off to reveal the motor..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2323.jpg on the other side is the bolts to disconnect the motor from the linkage. 3 red arrowed bolt release the motor body and the purple arrowed nut releases the linkage from the motor spindle..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2324.jpg strip of water sealing tape removed...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2325.jpg to reveal the two screws that hold the two halfs of the motor together...... (one this side in pic and one directly opposite the other side) http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2326.jpg screws undone and black bit slid off..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2327.jpg all i'm interested in checking in here is the motors brushes. There's 3 of them...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2328.jpg You can check the condition of the brushes with just stripping as far as above, but since I've a mental dysfunction which makes me want to strip everything down to the last nut and bolt, belows a clearer picture of the brushes. Theres 3 of them, only two sticking out of their housings below (red arrows)...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2350.jpg as the third one is the earth brush and is connected to the housing..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2351.jpg all the brushes still had plenty of life in them so everything gets cleaned and jumbled back together...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2360.jpg remembering to put some tape around the top part again so water can creep in and fu*k things up in there..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2361.jpg after that it was on to the linkage....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2362.jpg on top of the linkage spindles are a large nut and two washers which secure the linkage to the scuttle panel on the car, and if yours is out and on the bench these will already have been removed. Just in the centre of this though is a little small circlip...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2363.jpg which when undone allows the spindle shafts to slide out of their housings. Both shaft and housing (purple and red arrows) each side get cleaned up and greased to help prevent against noisy wipers..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2364.jpg after which the joints in the linkage are done. These just pry apart, softly, with a large screwdriver (be careful not to damage the rubber booth)..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2365.jpg when apart they're cleaned and inspected. In one of them the grease had gone hard and the linkage was just starting to wear a groove in the ball. The one on the left below is the good one, and on the right you can see the wear grooves just starting on the ball.... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2366.jpg thankfully the ball wasn't badly grooved yet and it cleaned up nice with some fine sandpaper. When these get badly grooved the wiper linkage starts to get annoyingly noisy and the wiper blades get sloppy on the windscreen. With everything cleaned up, they were all reassembled with plenty of fresh grease and the wiper motor reconnected....... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2830%29/m3_2367.jpg refitting of wiper linkage to car is an interference fit, for this reason it is recommended that special tool part number 959sledgehamer is locked away before undertaking said task. And thats it for tonight. Join us again tomorrow night for more cliff hangers, plot twists and the continuation of the worlds most monotonous thread :wink: Till then......

Die hälfte der Story haben wir durch Gab es bisher Probleme mit den Bildern? Das neue Forums System sammelt nacheinander gepostete Posts in einem Post, was mir eigentlich nicht gefällt. Mann müsste immer paar Minuten warten damit es separat postet. So werden die seiten zu lang. Falls mann das wie früher machen kann, lasst es mich wissen, da ich wie im original Thread jeden post separat bearbeite anstatt alles zusammen zu machen. Es ist ja auch eine Thread-Restauration; Respekt zum original Grüße Kurt

And then there was the front end. One nasty front subframe..... one freshly powder coated front subframe...... done one mod to the subframe back when I first got the car and this was down to the fact it had started to crack across the red line in the pic below (red circle is where the engine mount bolts down to and the reason why this bit started to crack off)....... the subframe was given a fresh weld across the red line both sides and plates fabricated up and welded on underneath to strengthen the whole piece. Only thing to watch out for is to cut a hole in the plate so you can still get a socket through it to tighten the engine mounting bolt..... First thing to go back on the subframe is the front antiroll bar, which is bolted on by these two little lads.... I've yet to remove one of these that wasn't caked in rust on the inside so a little smear of grease should slow down the antiroll bar bushing rubbing the powder coating off the inside so quickly...... And then the only polybushes to get fitted to this whole car. As you've probably seen by now I've replaced more or less every bush with standard rubber ones and the reason is I don't want to feel every pebble on the road. I don't want to involuntarily brace myself every time I see a pothole coming. I had cars when I was younger that the springs and shocks were probably just ornaments on, there was that little movement in the suspension, and although polybushes and stiffer this and that make for a faster car around a track, this car was a bloody good drive on the road when it left the factory on standard bushes according to any press releases from back in the day. I'm probably just gettin old (I'll probably be fuckin geriatric by the time this thread gets finished). Anywho, bushes came with the car when I bought it and there perfectly good to go again..... A heavy smear of grease where the subframe mounts up to the chassis legs should keep the moisture(rust) out..... Rear antiroll bar was back from powder coating to so it got bolted back to the floor pan..... And then the front struts which made the most dramatic transformation of all the powder coated bits..... The front spindle gets a rub of 1200 grit to polish it up..... then the rear dust cap gets popped on..... followed by the backing plate...... and next up is the wheel bearing. As is well documented around the interweb by now the E28 wheel bearings and e30 M3 bearing are the one and the same unit, only difference being different ABS rings and a big difference in price. So, pair of E28 bearings....... pull the Abs rings off..... and then pull the rings off the old M3 bearings....... These were seriously tight and I had to rely on the age old 3 stage method to remove them. Step 1...... Step 2...... Step 3..... bingo..... Rings get a clean up and a little loctite on the inside lip for refitment.... and when securely back in place a lick of silver paint to protect the bare metal..... And then drop the whole lot back on to the spindle. Unlike the rear bearings the front ones aren't usually tight going back on and don't require a press. A few gentle tips with something soft and they should slide down into place..... When there back on, the nut is screwed up and torqued with a size 46mm socket..... after which the little rim on top of the nut is clenched into the cut out on the spindle (which is probably the most long winded way of saying, bend this)............ and then the the front dust caps are fitted with a little smear of grease on the inner rim to help keep them water tight...... Next up the shock absorber. Threads at the top of the strut tube get a little clean.... and then the front insert is dropped in. The shocks by the way are Bilstein gas shocks and I remember reading somewhere that unlike the normal procedure of filling the gap between the shock and the inside of the strut tube with oil, with gas shocks its recommended to leave this space empty. So I just gave it a few squirts of the oil can to keep it from rusting in there....... This little dude screws down on top of the shock into the tube and keeps it secure. I used to have the special tool for screwing these in, but I lent it to a person(bastard) a long time ago, and that person(bastard) forgot to bring it back and I've forgotten who that person(bastard) is. But one day I'll remember who the person(bastard) was and that Bastard is in for a surprise. The little item arrowed below is for securing the shock dust boot and it's very important to remember to fit it before screwing down the shock collar.... F*****************************k........... Next on is the springs which also paid a visit to the powder coater..... Springs by the way are Eibach and are listed by them for the 318is I think. They're practically the same poundage as the original M3 springs but just sit lower and I was happy with the ride and handling before the car came off the road so there didn't seem to be much point in changing them. Before the springs can be fitted they need to be compressed with the aid of spring compressors and a few bits of rubber tube so as not to scratch the powder coating back off again....... on either side of the springs go these rubber seats so they don't squeak as your driving along...... one goes below the spring like so........ and one sits onto the top spring platform like so...... after that the strut top mounts go on. These are offset ones (p/n 31331139484) which as you can see in the pic the hole in the centre is offset to one side a little. And if fitted the right way around they will move the top of the strut in towards the engine a little (half a degree) and give you a little more camber at the front wheels, which should improve road holding. In reality the change (half a degree) is so little any effect they have is going to be small but if your changing the top mounts anyway they aren't a great deal more expensive then the standard ones...... the new mounts don't come with the three little studs needed for fitment..... So, nuts on to protect the threads..... pop them up loosely in the vise..... and batter the living shite out of them...... and now the reason I said they can help "if" fitted the right way. Theres 6 holes on the mounts and you've 3 studs to fit, so which holes to use? On the underside of the mounts 3 of the holes are marked with a + and 3 with a - . As we're trying to subtract camber (add negative camber) the studs are fitted to the 3 minus holes...... with that sorted it's on to actually fitting the mounts to the strut. 5 items in total Strut mount 1) small washer 2) large washer 3) bevelled washer 4) nut on the underside of the mount you can see the strut top bearing which comes pre greased...... the bevelled washer(3) is topped up with a little grease on the inside..... and popped down on top of the bearing..... (Leider fehlen die nachfolgenden Bilder) and then the large flat washer(2) is slid onto the strut followed by the mount...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2129.jpg which is then followed by the small washer(1) and nut(4)...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2130.jpg after the nut is tightened down the spring compressors can be removed and the little dust cap popped back into the centre of the mount..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2131.jpg after which the ABS sensors were refitted.... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2177.jpg and the final bits to go back on the struts are the brakes, a fresh set of disc's...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2179.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2180.jpg and then the calipers bolt back on just like the rears, which leaves them looking like so...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2186.jpg The other bits needed before the struts could be bolted back into the car was wishbones and "lollipop" bushes. These are M3 bushes the differences being over standard e30 bushes the hole in the centre is off to one side and there more solidly packed out with rubber...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2134.jpg theres a little arrow on them to help you press them into the lollipops in the right place...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_lollipop%20bush.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/lollipop.jpg To go with them is a fresh set of Lemforder wishbones.... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/wishbones.jpg and anti roll bar drop links...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2216.jpg After which, everything is rebolted back onto the car and when I could see which bolts were needed to reconnect everything I could order them all in stainless steel to replace all the manky rusted old ones..... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2202.jpg Which leaves her looking like this...... http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2332.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2331.jpg http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2339.jpg One giant leap for man, one small leap forward for this project........ http://www.xworksmotorsport.com/m3%20build%20%2823%29/m3_2256.jpg And that brings this update to a close which is perfect timing as tomorrows Saint Patricks day and I'm away to get very drunk. Till next time........ STAY TUNED

First up gotta assemble them. These "gigantic" bump stops slide on..... followed by the dust boots...... and then a fresh set of top mounts..... followed by a bevelled washer and nut...... The other little bits that were to be fitted was the little plates fitted to Z3 rear shocks, pictured number 9 below...... When the shock is refitted to the shell the top plate on the shock mount does a nice job of spreading out the load when the body is pushing down on them. However when the situation is reversed and the shock is pulling down on the shell all thats spreading the load on top of the turret is two little m8 nuts, which sometimes can lead to stress cracks around the nuts. These 2 little steel plates which were used on the Z3 can be fitted under the nuts to help spread out the load better. Which is all marvellous but I'd forgot to order them from the dealer and was now ready to refit everything and was in no mood to have to wait another few days for them to arrive. So, the tight arse's guide to top mount plates...... Unfortunately the only flat steel I had lying around was 5mm thick and took forever to cut and file to shape, on the bright side should I ever decide to drive off a cliff the rear shock mounts should be well up to it...... and then at long last fire it all back into the shell.....

position the pipe again..... some more oil and mushy, mushy, again...... which usually gives you a nice fat flare on the end of the pipe (apart from the times it goes arseways which I've chosen not to mention)..... then spends hours of enjoyment trying to replicate the original pipes bends and kinks..... before offering it up to the wishbone to see just how much of a balls you've made of it.... when happy with the shape of it (or ran out of patience trying) it's time to mark and cut it for the flare the other end..... it's not possible to accurately describe in words the level of frustration thats felt when you make the final flare on a pipe only to discover you forgot to put the fitting on first. with the fitting on, the second flare can be done... and before final fitment some fresh clips cause the old ones were..... the other thing thats handy to have around at this stage of the build is a little tub of grease. Everything that gets fitted to the exterior of the shell gets a smear of grease first to stop water/dampness collecting between it and the shell down the line and causing rust to reoccur..... with the solid pipes done some stainless braided pipes replaced the standard rubber flexi ones.... before finishing with the flaring tool the rest of the brake pipes were copied..... and fitted..... Pipes done, onto the rear handbrake shoes setup which is made up of all this crap..... the shoes themselves were only fitted a little while before the car came off the road so they're barley used..... a good rub of 60 grit sandpaper brings the linings up like new again..... and then theres this little collection of stuff that likes to fall off the edge of the workbench and never be seen again..... starting with the row of 4 little bits on top in the last picture which make up the manual adjuster for adjusting up the handbrake shoes. This bit screws into that bit..... they then pop into this bit.... and finally this bit slides on over the lot, oh and copper grease everywhere this stuff just lives for the opportunity to seize up ...... Get it? Got it! Good. When fitted in place this little setup sits between the top of the two shoes. When everythings back together and you line up the brake disc so that you can poke a flat screwdriver in though one of the wheel stud holes and adjust the knurled nut (red arrow) to spread the shoes out towards the drum. and at the other end of the shoes is the actual handbrake mechanism, made up of this delightful pile of stuff..... fat pin drops in here..... and that slots in to here..... and the end of the handbrake cable..... connects in here with the aid of the smaller pin.... like so...... so that when your out playing in the winter snow you can pull the handbrake in the direction of the red arrow and spread the two little levers out in the green arrow directions, which pushes the shoes out against the drum, locking the rear wheels and spinning the car around like a pro, right up until you wack the kerb and f*ck up your brand new alloys..... none of which will happen until this stuff moves from the bench onto the wishbone..... again plenty of copper grease..... the other little collection of springs the sit on the brake shoes were fairly rusted, so Bmw sell the whole lot under one part number (p/n 34419064267)....... and they sit on like so...... anti rattle clips screw through the brake shoes and into the back plate..... the return springs can be a little awkward to stretch on in place So, a little bit of twine and a spanner makes it a little easier to pull them into their slots..... followed by brake disc back on and grub screw greased and refitted..... and align the disc to pop the flat screwdriver in to adjust up the shoes..... when thats done the brake caliper anchor bracket went back on..... a set of fresh oe spec Jurid 547 rear pads ..... were fitted.... along with the caliper..... caliper in place, sliding pins go back in. Copper grease on the pins and a dab of locktite on the threads..... with the pins tightened up, the caps go back on the rubber bushes to keep it weather tight..... and finally the anti rattle clips pop on....... The last parts needed to finish off the rear wishbones were the abs sensors. Unfortunately the old sensors had become quite emotionally and physically attached to the wishbones, so attached in fact that it took a large selection of hammers and some colourful language to separate them. Unfortunately the sensors didn't take kindly to this and in revenge bent into shite rendering them scrap...... Not the end of the world however as the wiring on the sensors was well past it's sell by date anyway...... what very nearly did bring about the end of my world, by heart attack, was the price i got quoted for 4 new sensors. Obviously these are also made from moon minerals. Thankfully Colm_Mc came to the rescue with 4 sensors that looked as good as new (thank Colm I owe you one)..... just for the record the rear sensors are interchangeable..... while the fronts are sided left and right as denoted by the little "L" and "R" on them..... a good smear of grease on the sensors before fitting should mean future hammer massages are not necessary for removal down the line..... Which brings us up neatly to the end of the first half of this update, join us tomorrow evening for the concluding episode.......... And now we return to the conclusion of this years update. With the wishbones complete it was on to the rear beam....... As mentioned a little earlier the car used to be fitted with eccentric wishbone bushes to try and dial out some of the excessive camber that comes with lowering the car. However these were a pain in the arse to get right and needed to come in and out 3 times to get them exactly right, which is a lot of ballache. So this time around we're going to try one of the other options, which involves welding these little brackets on..... and using these 5 series eccentric bolts and washers..... I've only got two crappy phone pics of the welding on of the brackets as it was done in work in the day job, and as this beam doesn't look remotely like anything fitted to a double decker bus, I thought it might be better not to draw attention to it by doing a photo shoot . The pair of brackets welded to the outside wishbone pickup point are placed with the original bolt hole smack bang in the middle and the slot in the bracket is placed horizontal. The idea behind these two is to be able to adjust rear toe in/out. As the rear toe isn't to greatly affected you don't generally have to move the wishbone forward or backward a great deal to get the ideal setting..... The inside pick up points are a different story though. The main reason for doing all this is to be able to correct the negative camber gained by lowering the suspension and as such the brackets fitted to the inner pick up point have the slot vertical and place the original bolt hole right at the bottom like shown which gives you maximum scope for raising the inner pickup point and getting rid of some of that excessive negative camber ...... and with everything welded up and the original bolt holes filed out to match the new elongated slots this is roughly how it all should work (red arrows adjusting camber, blue for toe)...... which looked like this after returning from powder coating...... next up, the eccentric bolts that move the wishbone pick up points up or down. The bolts have little indents on the top face of them so as you rotate the bolts you can see how many indents it takes to add/subtract a certain amount of camber/toe....... however when all this lot is fitted back in the car you'd need a neck like a giraffe to see these markings, so, marks are traced out to the edge of the bolt head..... and over the edge where they're enlarged with a hacksaw blade which should make them a little easier to see back on the car..... The other thing that can be helpful is a reference point on the actual beam, so with the aid of the dremel..... a few little groves are etched and filled in with white paint...... all of which should make adjustment down the line a little easier, or, I've just waisted a load of time for nothing, we'll see. Before fitting up the wishbones to the rear beam the inner faces of the bolts and washers are given a coating of grease to help them rotate when adjusting...... a fresh set of beam bushes are fitted and the washers fitted on top with grease everywhere as these bit love to seize.... some fresh anti roll bar links and handbrake cable brackets are fitted to the wishbones...... The other little bits needed at this stage is the spring pads, the two arrowed are for the bottom of the springs and the other two with the bump stops in the middle of them are for the top. The whole lot is built up on a sheet of ply wood so it can be slid under the car when complete and jacked up into place..... before that can happen however the beam mount bolts have got to be refitted to the shell, before they are dropped in they're plastered with anti-seize grease..... and then they're dropped down into place in these holes at the edges of the floorpan under where the rear seat goes..... The other bits needing refitting before the axle can be lifted back up in to place is the rear shocks......