The Weedspeed Mark II: E46 330Xi

[mateo m3]

Looks great guys

[Fatandre]

Where is the shot of the rear suspension for me?

[Peterjakan]

Where is the shot of the rear suspension for me?

Right! Sorry about that I forgot, I'll try and remember it for tomorrows garage session

[Peterjakan]

OK so I got some pictures for ya Fatandre







As you can see, with the way the setup works at the moment adjusting the spring for height is a bitch, because of little room and harder to reach etc.

I don't think there are any real performance differences between this setup and the "proper" coilover setup, assuming that you get it right pretty early on.

If you don't get it right early on and you need to keep readjusting then it'll be alot more time consuming than a proper coilover setup.

[daniels635turbo]

How is the beasty coming along?

[Peterjakan]

Decently! We've got a couple of items left on our list to cross off, but we're getting there.

The one thing that became apparent when we started the car was that the turbo isn't 100% healthy, we're pretty sure last years oil pumpshaft failure rubbed off on the turbo.

Basicly, we're having a little axial gap, so we picked the turbo apart and of course the glidebearings aren't too healthy due to high RPM without oil for lubrication messes them up.

We think the turboaxle is OK, maybe not 100% balanced, but not bad enough that we can't save it. So we're gonna see if we can put the turbo back together with new bearings and a balanced axle and see if it works. If it does we are probably going to sell the turbo since we've ordered a PT6466BB instead

Also we put the car on the ground and had a mini-photoshoot with a real camera instead of a smartphone so hopefully I'll have some pics for you soon

[Peterjakan]

A couple of pics for ya

[daniels635turbo]

Mean lean and green. Great work guys! The specs for that turbo are pretty crazy. Will hold 900 horsepower!

[MusclesGlasses]

Car looks fantastic guys! About the rear spring adjustment I'm not sure what coilovers you guys are running but every set I've had the spring perch sat on top of the spring for easy adjustment.

[96bmftw]

I can't wait to see videos of it in action!!!!

[mateo m3]

Totally awesome build ! !!!!

[Peterjakan]

Another 2 pics, these are from the smartphone though.

[Compactive]

Wow, quite impressive, congrats on [near] completion!

[jakermac]

There are several references to the fate of the 1st car should you care to read the thread.

[daniels635turbo]

How's the green machine coming along?

[Luminossi]

love the forged m systems, as well as the rest of the car!

[Sam Son]

are those m systems 17x9 all around?

[Peterjakan]

are those m systems 17x9 all around?

Yes, that's correct.

How's the green machine coming along?

Decently

We've added some heatshielding to the hood, hopefully it will be enough but we are thinking that we might need to add a vent in the hood to ventilate the heat from the turbo. Time will tell.



We've also made a container for the crankcase ventilation.





We've also mounted and connected our accusump. Hopefully it won't screw with the airflow for the cooler too much.





Painted black to fit the colorscheme a little better, aswell as added some toned film to the headlights.



Connected to a T-section on the oilcooler lines.





We've also recieved our new PT6466BB Turbo and welded some pressurepiping.





We've also test-started the engine once and let it run warm for a little while it's looking good so far

Next on the list is tidying a couple of minor stuff up, playing a little bit with the electrical system to kill all the annoying warnings on the dash.

As soon as PPF gets their new AWD Dyno we will go there and get the car fuelmapped and then it's go-time

[///M3Augy]

Holy carps. Impressive work on that front splitter/rear spoiler combination.

[daniels635turbo]

Wow great work guys.

[mateo m3]

💗

[daniels635turbo]

Um..... Have you not posted because you ran it into a horse this time?

[Peterjakan]

Right so...there's this field nearby the garage with a broken fence, and there are cows in there who have taken a liking to escaping! So here we are, cruising along at 180 km/h when all of a sudden...





I kid I kid...

It's not that bad, but it is sort of a one step forward two steps back kinda situation these last weeks.

To start off with we took the car for a test drive to see if everything holds together, about 30 minutes into the test drive we notice the coolant temperature has gone from a smooth 85C to 105C right after we had tested some boost @1.4 bars.

We got out and popped the hood, sure enough coolant has sprayed pretty much everywhere, and the coolant hoses are really hard. Compression is leaking into the coolantsystem. Great. Let the car cool off, refill with some water that we brought along and back to the garage we go.

Next day we re-torque the headstuds, in case they have gotten stretched and try again. Same problem, once again.
Very disheartening considering the engine is pretty much new, or at least newly assembled and we are pretty damn certain that we haven't missed anything obvious during assembly.

We decide to pull the tune that we got from MaxxECU when we dynoed the car last year and send it to a friend of ours who are more familiar with the software tuning aspects than we are.

Apparently the ECU is barely tuned. About 7 induvidual values in total across the entire fuelmap. And none of the VANOS settings are enabled. And we are running 10-15 (depending on boost) degrees of ignition in EXCESS!

What. The. Fuck.

The car keeps within reasonable lambda-values, but since the ignition is set extremely high the engine has been knocking every time we aren't flooring it and thus reaching max boost at early RPMs.
This is obviously extremely bad for the engine, and even if it wasn't knocking we'd still have extremely high cylinderpreassure due to the ignition.

Obviously we reach out for a 2nd opinion, and a third, and a forth, and a fifth from people we know are very familiar with tuning. They all confirm what we've been told. Tune is shit, pure and simple.

Next up, remove the head and inspect the damages. Luckely, none of the cylinderswalls are damaged and neither are the pistons. The head is looking allright aswell, however the cooperings and the gasket are blown.



These cooperings are supposed to be perfectly circular, as you can see, they aren't anymore.





Here's how the head is supposed to look like, picture taken from cylinder #1 at the front where the cooling is the most effective.



Here's how it looks on a couple of other places on the head.





As you can see they have become oval instead of circular and began to wander outwards, good thing the rings failed outwards to the sides and not along the engine, alot easier to machine the head the way it is.

We had the head machined, got a new gasket and new cooperings and assembled it all together again. We got some help from a friend who spent an hour or so going through the software settings so that we could get started with some fuel mapping without the engine disintegrating and then got started on the fuelmap on the road.

A while later we experienced the same problem, boost leaking out into the coolant system.

The next day we torqued the headstuds slightly more than according to the manufacturer, and tried again. This time, as far as we could tell, it kept it all together. Good deal.

We figure the headstuds might have stretched a little further than normal due to the extreme cylinderpreassure from earlier, and thus letting boost leak through, but when torqued abit harder they are able to prevent that from happening.

Since it everything seemed to be working decently, we decided to take the car to the track Mantorp Park and see how it all holds up over there.

Once on the track we were able to push the car much further than you can on the street, and quite soon a couple of problems reared it's ugly head at us.

Cons that needs to be adressed:

1. Brake balance is pretty bad - Rear brakes aren't doing enough of the work
2. Crankhousing ventilation box is leaking oil, probably due to accusump overfilling the oiltray
3. Driveaxle CW-boot #3 broke, throwing lubricant all over in the front-right wheelhousing
4. Valvecover smelted by the heat from the exhaust-housing and downpipe casuing oil leakage onto exhaust manifold and downpipe

Fixes to said problems:

1. Replace the main brakecylinder with a different kind
2. Remove the accusump, see if problems is solved
   
   • If solved - See if oilpreassure is stable during cornering without accusump
   • If not - Rethink why the oil is pushed into the crank housing ventilation box
   
   
3. Replace CW-boot, readjust, try and figure out if it is physically ripped by colliding with something
4. Convert to a bottom-mounted turbo setup

We also had some positive experiences from the track.

Pros

• Coolant temperature remained stable, as did oil temp and intake temperature
• Does not spin inner wheel during cornering as badly as we thought it would
• Reached 243 km/h on the straight even though we are only using 1.4 bars of boost - This is comparable to our previous racecar the 600 WHP M50 Turboed Opel Ascona where we reached speeds of about 225 km/h

So, here's the aftermath from that day



We've started with ordering a new valve cover, and the gasket that comes with it. We've also aquired some ARP headstuds that we will use later on since we don't entirely trust the ones we are currently using, due to suspected over-stretching.

We weren't at all fond of the idea of making an entirely new exhaust manifold for the bottom-mounted turbo setup, so we tried to put it there upside down.

And won't you fucking believe it, it fucking fit perfectly! Hey, gotta be lucky some time right?

All we needed to do was cut the flange loose and flip it around, and weld it into place. And do some more cutting and welding on the exhaust system itself but that was a rather quick ordeal.





Fits perfectly along the firewall



Here's how it looks underneath right now









And with some preassure piping in place.



So that's where we're at right now. We got a list of things that needs to be done, but honestly it's not that long and since we're rather quick about things, or at least I think we are, it shouldn't be too much of a problem to get it all sorted before it's time to race for real in about a month.

[daniels635turbo]

How on earth did you leave the shop that did that initial tune? That's an incomplete tune that damaged your engine! Very suckful indeed!
So you have baffles in the sump? Is there anyway to check for pressurizing the crank case? Why else would the catch an be filling?
All fun and games right? Real glad you didn't have to do a complete teardown and that manifold was a stroke of luck! One thing though........ Get some shielding around the remote oil lines next to the bov. What egt's are you running? Did you think of water/methanol injection?
We are all looking forward to some video for you guys as well.
Great work. But jeez I would be hunting down the jerk that did that initial tune.

[Peterjakan]

Let's just say we won't be going back there for a tune any time soon.

Yes we've got baffles in the oiltray, both welded aluminium plates to "box" in the oil around the pickup, and some rubber one-way-gates that lets oil through but prevents it from escaping the general area of the oilpickup.

We basicly have 2x hoses that connects to the ventilation box, one of them is high up on the oiltray and we suspect that when oil preassure falls when standing still on idle the accusump dumps alot of the oil into the tray which overfills it and some oil might find it's way into that hose which is then pushed through into the ventilation box.

Heat shielding is up next, both in terms of aluminium plate shields that we will cover with heatreflective "carpet" aswell as silicone hoses to shield the connections to the wastegate.
So basicly we're gonna heatshield:

• Engineblock next to exhaust housing
• Oil inflow connection to the turbo
• Wastegate hoses
• Valve cover
• Gearbox maybe?

I am not entirely sure about the exhaust temperature but I believe it's at about 500 degrees celcius during cruising and about 900 degrees celcius during full boost pedal to the metal if I haven't gotten my numbers mixed up.

And yes we were very happy to see that the exhaust manifold could be turned upside down and fit right in there Gotta be lucky some time for once right?