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Thread: Laminar's M3 5.0 swap: Fünf-Null

  1. #351
    Join Date
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    1997 M3 / 5.3
    Nice work...and sweet video! Intermediate might give you more clean laps, but less satisfaction on passing folks! Pretty impressive that you had no issues considering all the work you did prior. I like to get in a few days of daily driving at least before the big day - you live life on the edge...or quite the accomplished mechanic...:-)

  2. #352
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    Des Moines, IA
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tim Mc View Post
    Nice work...and sweet video! Intermediate might give you more clean laps, but less satisfaction on passing folks!
    Totally! I'd love to get some actual instructed time too, I can't get any better if I just keep doing what I'm doing.

  3. #353
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    I meant to say the it is quite a compliment when they pull you off the course because you are too fast...wish we all had that problem!

  4. #354
    Join Date
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    I decided to address two issues with the car - first, it's loud. Long tubes into a 2-in 2-out Thrush muffler are loud. I'm sure we're all reeling with surprise. Also, when I build the headers and header-back, I didn't do a very good job of keeping everything tucked up close to the car and once it was back on the ground, my flex pipes ended up being the lowest point on the car and scraped over every bump. I pulled the header-back out, cut off the ends, put the resonators in, and redid the header connections to raise the low point up 1/2" to 1" or so. Now the lowest part is the bottom of the header flange which is still iffy, but better than the flex pipe.





    Resonators in, mocking up the passenger side:



    I ended up redoing the driver's side, too, I raised that resonator up a bit from where it's sitting in that picture.





    Haven't started it up yet to see how must the resonators have tamed it. Still need to fix the leaky clutch master before Sunday's race.

  5. #355
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    Mass
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    e36v8, w123 300tdt, aw11
    Nice to see that x-brace fits with a ford swap, i will have to look into getting one of those. You think of anything for the strut towers ?

  6. #356
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    The X-brace I actually made myself.





    At the same time I made a strut tower brace.




  7. #357
    Join Date
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    So Friday I pulled the clutch pedal and master apart and replaced the plunger...again.





    I have a Wilwood master in place of the stock E36 master and I had to make the plunger pushrod really short. It's lined up pretty well but apparently it's still sideloading the plunger and wearing it prematurely. The new pedal set will fix that, but for the sake of the weekend, I pulled the plunger out of one of my new MCs and put it in place.

    I also addressed one more little thing - if you look reeeally closely at the top inside of each kidney, you can see a little scoop.



    On a stock M3, this provides cool air to the alternator.



    In my case it was just stealing air from the front of the radiator and bleeding it behind the radiator, reducing the radiator's effectiveness. I went ahead and trimmed the scoop out and made a little piece of sheet metal that I riveted in place to block the hole.

    With that, the car was ready to race but I had an entire extra day until race day, so I started a new project.





    Still working on how to attach it to the car - I want to make it easily removable because I jack the car up from the front, and I currently have -0.125" of clearance between the front bumper and the low profile jack, so taking another 0.5" out for the splitter is a no-go. I have no foglights, so I'm working on a setup that will let me reach into the foglight hole and pull some pins. We'll see.

    Sunday was race day.



    Some good and not so good. The good - the engine never got above 196 degrees, even after a run. It'd start the run at about 185 and end at 194ish and was very happy the whole time. Driving home, it sat at 185 on the highway. I think it's safe to say my cooling issues are solved.

    The not so good - the car's suspension setup needs work. I battled a mid-corner understeer issue that hurt me on the sweepers, and there were three good sweepers in the course. The front really liked to wash out dramatically and that hurt me if I didn't get it just right. The suspension is adjustable and I haven't touched it since installing, so I can work on dialing that in. The splitter may also help a bit with front end grip, though I don't know how effective it really will be at typical autocross speeds.

    My final raw time put me at 23/89 cars and 2nd in class, but I was 2.5 seconds behind 1st in class. He's running real (new) 245 A7s and I'm on fake (used) 225 A7s but 2.5 seconds is a huuuuuuuuuge difference and a lot of street tire cars were beating me, which doesn't look good for me. The next event is a two day airport event in September, so I'll have time to finish the splitter and do the pedal swap before then, and the runs there should allow me to do a good bit of dialing on the suspension.

    On my final run of the day, I totally missed the 1-2 shift at the start and then blew the end of the slalom in the first 1/4 of the course so I commented to my passenger that the run was garbage, and I proceeded to just get overaggressive on the rest of the course. I ended up knocking 0.007 off of my previous fastest run of the day, making me wonder what time I could have run had I not messed up so much at the beginning.

    Overall, I'm pumped that the car is working well, not overheating, and is in a place where I can start tinkering with the little things again as needed.
    Last edited by Laminar; 08-20-2018 at 03:21 PM.

  8. #358
    Join Date
    Jul 2012
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    Herndon, VA
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    98 M3/4/5, RIP 528e
    Good progress! At least your cooling issues are resolved. What sort of power do you think you're making?

  9. #359
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    I need to hit up a dyno to get some real numbers. Here's a similar setup, the guy has the same heads, same ported lower intake, a similar cam, similar headers, but with an auto trans.



    He did 304hp/327tq to the wheels. That's probably about 370-380hp/400-410tq at the crank assuming 20% drivetrain loss.

    Similar 302 builds with aluminum heads and identical intake/porting through a manual trans typically put down about 320whp.

    It's 2 hours each way to the nearest 1/4 mile track but I'd still like to get there this year and see what it does now.

  10. #360
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    edit: double post.
    Last edited by Laminar; 08-20-2018 at 03:36 PM.

  11. #361
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    A couple of pics from yesterday:





    That last one was after my spin - I went into the last section really hard and the rear end came out, I thought I could save it and stayed in it...I could not save it.

  12. #362
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
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    94
    have you not figured out exactly why the clutch master is always failing? you've got me worried my wilwood is gonna be failing left and right haha. i already know my alignment on it isnt perfect.
    Last edited by bdkawey; 08-31-2018 at 10:13 AM.
    Aaron Wey
    07' Subaru legacy gt spec b (1/442): daily
    85' 535i: 302 swap/drift project
    86' 528e: scrapped and gone
    aaron by Jeremy King, on Flickr

  13. #363
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    I wish I would have checked the orientation of the plunger when I pulled it out so I could figure out which direction it was being pushed, but I didn't, so I don't know. After this last go-around, I thought the alignment was pretty good, but I guess not.

    Started back in on the splitter - got it cut out and mocked up. I'll need to clearance a couple of spots and do a tiny bit of reshaping, but otherwise it should be good to install.







    Also addressed the wobbly front suspension. I knew at the end of last season that I had a noisy front right wheel bearing, so I replaced it this spring. Unfortunately, the 250ft-lb torque wrench I borrowed from Autozone was broken and didn't click and I didn't realize it until the thing was probably way overtorqued. I had a friend over last week and we took a look at the front suspension and realized that not only was the hub bad, but the inner and outer tie rod on the passenger side and both sides' lower ball joints were loose as well, so it was off to Amazon to spend $260 on suspension stuff. I got it all thrown on in about 90 minutes one night this week. Since I'd done it all before sometime in the last three years everything popped apart pretty easily.






  14. #364
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    $260 is actually pretty reasonable. Guess I'm used to E39 suspension pricing, haha.
    Nate J.

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  15. #365
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    Well, the OEM control arms were $300+ each, so I figure if the ACDelco ones get me three years at $55 each, it'll be 18 years before I start losing money on them. I went with Moog on the tie rod and hub.

  16. #366
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    Hitting the drag strip up on Friday. I need to tighten up the rear swaybar and adjust rear damping, hope to quell some of the famous E36 wheelhop. Last year on the bone stock Explorer engine I ran a 14.0, I'm hoping adding 100hp gets me a better time.

  17. #367
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    Made it to the drag strip - Friday Night Test N Tune and the closest 1/4 mile strip, which was about 2.5 hours away. I took the afternoon off of work to finalize the alignment and get everything loaded up and ready to go. Hooked the car up and headed out around 4, got there around 7 due to a quick detour to pick up some motorcycle parts from a guy I bought a bike from last month and some unexpected road closures.





    So the strip was having a 32-car bracket event on Saturday that had filled up, so they decided to have another bracket event on Friday as well. Plus when I got there, paid, parked, unpacked, swapped tires, and got to tech, they let me know that they were only running 1/8 mile due to cool temps (high 50s) and it had been windy earlier in the day. That was...disappointing. If I wanted to run 1/8 mile, there were several other closer strips I could have gone to.

    Oh well, fine.



    So, due to frequent track re-prep and the bracket race going on, I ended up only getting four runs in over 2 hours. At 9:24 someone caught the wall when I was second in line to run (once they finally got back to my lanes), so I just gave up and went home. On my last trip here when they were running the full quarter, I got at least 9 runs in over the same time period. Oh well.

    For reference, my best run on the stock Explorer long block:



    And now more recently:



    So this time I was on 245 RE71s at all four corners. Definitely not drag tires. I pulled the passenger seat out to lose another ~75lbs and the aluminum heads should have saved me at least 50lbs off the nose of the car. I tightened up the rear sway bar and upped rear rebound to try and reduce the awful wheelhop.

    My best run was an 8.59@82.4 with 1.98 60ft. Last time on different tires (old, worn Potenzas) I cut a 1.89 60ft, so my launch was a lot worse. No idea if that's tires, surface prep, temperatures, technique, but probably a little bit of all of them. I held RPMs around 4000 and feathered the clutch at the limit of grip. As soon as the clutch fully grabbed the wheels liked to hop at least a couple of times. On one run when I didn't warm the tires, I just spun through first altogether. And because I got so few runs, I really didn't have time to experiment with launch technique, suspension setup, tire pressures, shift points, etc.

    So in the 1/8, after all of the engine work I picked up a little over 3 tenths and about 5mph. Disappointing for sure. My 1/8 ET corresponds to a 1/4 of around 13.4. Getting the launch right and getting rid of the wheelhop would probably dip me into the 12s, which was my goal for the evening.

    Now obviously my engine build and gearing are specifically not optimized for drag racing - a different intake and 3.73s would make a world of difference.

    I'll have to go back again next season when conditions are better

  18. #368
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    Drag strips are hit and miss adventures. Bummer such a long drive for so few runs...but seat time is always good.

    Seems the independent rear is definitely a limiting factor...

    Still an improvement is an improvement.

  19. #369
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    Any updates?
    Also, how much did the tmoss porting cost in total?

  20. #370
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    Haven't really touched the car since the drag strip. I grabbed an old motorcycle to fix up then halfway through that bought a bunch of old computers to play with, I'm really good at not finishing projects. I need to get the injectors cleaned and figure out what tires I'm going to run before next season starts, but I still have 3-4 months. So I might as well wait 3-4 months before starting on it...

    Porting the lower to match my heads ran $225, I also had him blast, clean, and coat it for $45, and porting the upper for a 75mm TB was $50. It cost about $40 each way to ship it, so about $400 even. A Trick Flow Streetburner (the cheapest EFI intake I could find) runs $643 and a ported Explorer will make more power up to 5200rpm. It seemed reasonable to me. tmoss claims it's about $20/hp.

  21. #371
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    Update: Hood vents still functional.


  22. #372
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    Snow! That BMW deserves time in the warm garage...think you may have another project inwork...?

  23. #373
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    Well the Cougar doesn't have windows, so it gets stall #3.


    The motorcycle project buts up next to it.


    And with all of the snow, the other two stalls go to the daily drivers. So the M3 sits outside and gets rustier

  24. #374
    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tim Mc View Post
    Snow! That BMW deserves time in the warm garage...think you may have another project inwork...?
    Yes, snow. It’s made of this stuff called “water” you may have heard of it. It’s the exact same stuff that rains down from the sky called - well, rain. I’m pretty sure Florida isn’t a desert so you should be pretty familiar with it. Or do you hunker down in your bomb shelter every time the sky gets grey?

  25. #375
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    Laminar: That Cougar is a big project! Certainly understand the priorities - I'm right there with you (1969 Nova!) I still find the M3 much more return on investment than my hot rod...

    Liquid: appears you have some winter cabin fever/rage going on. Any consolation - I find myself in snowy Stuttgart for a few years thanks to my families desires. Scraping windows each morning reminds me of the joy of the white stuff.



    Recent shot...have to wait to top out the BMW beater...after I remove the snow tires...

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