Car returns!

I got an email from James Clay @ Bimmerworld earlier in the week teasing me and telling me the car is near completion. He didnt say much more and I suspect it was an attempt to keep the suspense high for me. Super Dave Taylor arrived Sat night and delivered the racecar. Fantastic!

It was dark so I could not see much but I could not goto sleep. I wanted it to be daytime so I could pull it out of the dark trailer and have some sunlight! Sunday comes and it is a perfect and sunny 80 degree day. Below are some pictures of Bimmerworld's completed project. The welds are nice, and there were a few finishing touches that I did not ask for (nice pieces like the dead pedal, etc). The passenger side foot protection extends further inboard to give me added strength from a supported frame structure, there is a nice downtube from the doorbars that give me a jack point (unwelded), and there is a nice horizontal bar below the driver X for more strength and safety. They unverted the stock hood latch so now all I need to do is push it and viola! They also ditched the VAC floor mounts and custom made a seat mount tied into the cage structure. Im very impressed and highly suggested the skilled artisans at Bimmerworld who do cage work!

Next: The car goes back to Givens Collision mentioned earlier in my blog to paint the interior!

Mystic Monster cage update

Cagework progressing on my self-dubbed "Mystic Monster". Not much else to add so far, other than Bimmerworld is working hard. Looking forward to updating with more pictures soon.

Pista Pista

In my old E36 M3 racecar, I used an AIM Pista for datalogging and as a display. Nothing changes for the E46 M3 build. Im familiar with the AIM and the software is easy to use. It is very powerful. The one major change is the E46 M3 uses a CAN-BUS to communicate between all the various sensors and the DME. You can literally hookup the Pista to two wires and get a wealth of inputs!

I wanted to play around, but the E46 M3 racecar is currently at Bimmerworld. Good thing I have a twin street car! I hooked up the Pista to a used cigarette lighter adapter and said CAN BUS wires. Viola! Only weird thing is that it is reading 6V (odd because Pista requires 9-15VDC) so Im not sure if this cig. lighter plug Im using is funky or maybe the ground not being direct is messing with things. Some of the other CAN BUS inputs arent logging anything (values of 0), like brake pressure. I'll have to talk to some other E46 M3 owners who are running a Pista to see if this is even an available input.

AIM E46 M3 CAN-BUS info

A small update

Small update. While the car is getting cage work, it's time for some Epic Tuning. Randy Mueller of Epic-motorsports will do some tweaking to get me some newfound horses to compete with some of the more powerful Porsche GT3s in GTS4. Or maybe Ill find a way to yank power out and run GTS3? Hrmmmmm Clouded in a shroud of mystery.

If your E46 M3 is looking for some more power, look into the Epic Motorsports Software (offered at Bimmerworld). Dyno proven to make more power than typical off the shelf software:

http://store.bimmerworld.com/epic-motorsports-software---e46-m3-and-mz34-s54-engine-p1521.aspx

Car ferry

Wow, diesel has gotten expensive lately. I can't imagine what it will be like once "driving season" starts! So the car has been ferried down to Bimmerworld thanks to The Transporter (aka Dave Taylor).

Hopefully within the next coming weeks, I'll have some more updates for you guys with pretty cage pictures and more. The goal of course is to have the car complete and ready to race for the first NASA Mid-Atlantic event the weekend of Feb 19th!

Pre-cage car prep complete

So this weekend with the help of Seth again and Stephen Dubovsky, we finished installing the rear subframe reinforcement kit, Diffsonline diff, new RTABs, rear calipers and all fluids. My whole body is sore from all the lifting of parts. That rear subframe w/ the diff and axles all attached is NOT for the weak! Not to mention trying to get it perfectly lined up so we could reinstall it!

I wish I took a picture of the whole rear of the car off, but we were crunching for time. Speaking of crunching, I forgot to set the pads and when loading into the trailer, I managed to crash into my cabinets :( Sigh.

Mix and Match ordeal

So everything was coming along together nicely after the last post. The next step was to replace the rod bearings. Everything was still going along very nicely. As pictured, an engine support held the engine up while I dropped the front subframe for access to the oil pan. Once removed, I started to remove the rod bolts. Thinking I was just getting new ones, I did not bother to mark them (more on that later). With new parts in hand, I replaced one of the rod bearings (dont remember if it was #3 or #4 now) and they looked fairly worn. Upon reassembly, the new rod bolts did not fit!!!! The new bolts were M10 which are the updated BMW rod bolts for the connecting rods after the whole recall debacle. Mine were M11, which was odd.

BMW stopped making engines with the M11 somewhere in late 2002 and this car being a 2004, that was SUPER odd. Some further research on a serial # sticker on the side of the block led me to some deciphering PDF designating this motor as a BMW Reman. built in 2002. So at some point in this car's prior life, someone blew the motor and put in a replacement. All done outside of BMW since there is no service history to this. Even more perplexing is the previous owner bought the car around 50k miles which would make it even more odd that the owner before him would have done something outside of warranty. Anyhow, it is what it is.

Now that I know my car has the older M11 bolts, the BMW recall procedure says you can reuse the rod bolts ONLY if you mark them and put them back in their original rod bolt locations. WHOOPS! What now? BMW doesnt make the M11 bolts anymore. So I ended up having to procure some ARP Rod Bolts from our friends at VAC Motorsports in Philly.

The rod bolts have been reinstalled and Im glad I took the opportunity to inspect and replace the rod bearings. See picture for crazy wear, especially on the #2 cylinder (top row, 2nd pair in picture). The connecting rod ride of #2 rod bearing even had a little copper showing, which means it was almost worn through!