I have been trying to get up to date with a running build thread on r3vlimited, the only e30 bmw forum left, and it's a little sleepy over there these days. As I find myself spending more time on GRM than really any other BB these days I figured the thread should live on here. Since this is going to initially be kind of a cut and paste from r3v, please excuse the e30-centric format and give me a few days to get caught up. It could take a little while to make sure all the image content jives properly with the text.
I've always sort of lamented about my lack of drive to ever put together a proper build thread for any of my cars- for both the sake of my own record-keeping and the hope of perpetuating forum-based car content. Facebook has gotten ever increasingly annoying and the content just isn't the same when it comes to car projects and documenting them in any kind of organized way. I grew as a human and car enthusiast using forums on a daily basis- my first e30 (early model eta) sported an e30sport.net sticker around 2002 or so, a great forum that eventually went defunct as e30tech sort of took over. I used bimmerforums.com very regularly as I had e36s occasionally and the odd e21, 2002, etc...but the model specific forums were always better from the standpoint of focused information.
Anyway. Those were the days. Forums are dying because less and less people interact with them. This is my shot as an attempt to help, and I'll try to do better with involvement via this thread and everywhere else on r3v just like we always used to.
So....this is roughly 7 years too late and the car is already doing the things it was meant to do- so, this will be a sort of cliff notes from the beginning until now and I'll try as hard as I can to properly document future progress from here on out.
Here is the car we're dealing with, that started as a yuppie's front range Colorado daily driver (presumably), slowly moved it's way down what I'd casually call the "e30 ownership landslide of doom", and eventually ended up in the hands of one of my oldest friends as a DD, and then myself. It then sort of moved along the line- going from dirtbag boater/ski/mountain bike utensil, to more of a dedicated rallycross car, did some track days and the odd autox or two, picked up a turbo somewhere along the line, and eventually found it's new life as a caged stage rally/hill climb car.
Here are a few pictures as a start. I'll go through all my media over the years and attempt to piece together some sort of timeline for the car and try to keep the thread going for a bit just to get caught up with where it's currently at.
These are humble beginnings as a Central CO dirtbag "sport activity vehicle" as should be intended, instead of some goofy crossover SUV....
Did a bunch of Rallycross with my pal Seth, starting around 2015 (I think?) Pretty successful, nearly won our first season in Stock class, then moved our way up to Prepared and eventually Mod.
Just to get us up to speed with where the car is in the fall of 2022, I'll work on all the stuff in the middle in the meantime
Here is a quick video my pal made of our last season running with Colorado Hill Climb Association
This post is mostly a photo dump of random stuff through out the years
This was the very first rallyx setup for stock class, probably 2015-16? Snow tires, stock springs/shocks, etc... I think I had it in my head that it need more ride height too, so I believe I had some spring spacers/pads in the rear to jack it up. Later learned this is really unnecessary....
I know people are like "rallyx really isn't that hard on the cars! You can bring your DD!" I would mostly disagree with this. Lots of broken E36 M3 over the years...
Fleet of 80s garbage at my shop as usual...
Somewhere along the line it seemed like a good idea to work on a pretty typical hx35 setup...I'll try to line out the details in another post.
The turbo setup evolved slowly, generally was running 8 psi or so for a while as I was milking the stock clutch. Eventually addressed that and run 12 or so most of the time. The eBay "gripforce" clutch I was recommended still didn't cut it after some time and abuse. That's finally getting fixed for good this winter.
The car was still really great to go on casual drives and the occasional track/autox/rallyx day
Thirsty little devil
If there was ever any question about how silly Holsets are, stick one next to the stock k26 from a 944 turbo....
Sometime last summer (2021). (ha! two summers ago now...) I decided I hadn't yet made the car annoying enough to drive on the street so started pulling it apart to give to my cage builder friend. Somewhere along the line I had done a gripforce clutch, bigger injectors, messed with the tune a lot, messed with the suspension a lot...it was running pretty well.
It took me a while to figure out the oil cooler arrangement....
Broke some more E36 M3 rallycrossing.... When people are like "ix's are fragile, don't do anything fun with them!!" they're mostly wrong, however the front diffs are definitely to be treated with care...
Pulled the interior and glass to send it to cage guy- it was great time to clean up some rust under the carpet and just give it a fresh start from a decade of dirt and abuse
Et voila! ARA legal cage, seats and harnesses, dash back in, other random rally goodies
Ok a lot happened between the last post and this one, I'll try to pick up where I left off...
Spring of '22 the car was ready for it's first CHCA season, not a ton of mechanical stuff done since its rallycross days other than cage/seats/safety stuff. Passed tech, and we were off and running. While totally outgunned in the catch-all Rally AWD class by built to the hilt Evos and STi's we had pretty consistent finishes and the car held up amazingly well for an entire season's worth of hillclimbs. We made every single practice and competition run of the season save for one where I lost fuel pressure halfway up a run at Land's End. I had cut a ditch too hard a few corners before and unseated the fuel pump relay from it's socket. Lesson learned, more zipties....
So we did manage to sneak out a 4th in points finish for the '22 CHCA Hillclimb season, which was way more than I could have asked for considering the cobbled together and inappropriate car for the class and a rookie driver/co-driver team...
The car held up really well but there were a lot of things that needed to be addressed over the winter, mostly little stuff that had been nagging me over the last few years of beating on the car.
-The rear upper spring seats were really looking bad, I had used a standard track setup coilover spring and adjuster for a long time and repeatedly bottoming the whole assembly out had started to collapse all the sheet metal in that area- the car had lost an inch or so of ride height on one side over just the last year of rallying it. It wasn't going to last another season. I don't think I have good pictures of the area before I started to dig into it but you can get the idea...pretty standard e30 problems.
I'm not any kind of sheet metal expert but got into a fairly good rhythm of spot welding the new pieces in and finishing with liberal application of weld through primer and seam sealer...
I had the standard rot in the battery tray, hacked out a bunch of that and sealed it back up as well as my skills could allow....
The trailing arms had also succumbed to the beatings of the last few years, I added a bunch of plate to them to reinforce the collapsing spring seats and to the underneath where they were starting to feel pretty thing from constant sandblasting. The plate on the bottom was probably a little overkill and just added a bunch of weight but oh well. Nevermind my ultra fancy toolbench that looks like a BBQ grill...
That was sort of the final chore of cleaning up the rear end stuff. Once the sheet metal and trailing arm reinforcement was all dialed it was finally time to reassemble the subframe and get it ready to go back in the car...
The implement paint from ACE is tougher than E36 M3 and comes in fun tractor colors...like John Deere green and International blue. I wanted a little more compliance for dirt use so went with standard Condor UHMW everywhere but the trailing arms where I used stock OEM rubber bushings.
At this point I still had the trans/driveline, fuel tank, and subframe out of the car. One of my goals while I had access was to run the rear brake lines and fuel lines inside the car for safety's sake and reinforce the fuel tank so I could do away with the old bedliner skid pans I had been using. They worked well for protection but collected a ton of dirt and rocks and were really kind of a pain in the ass to remove and reinstall.
My old fuel tank looked like a smashed beer can, I spent about 5 minutes considering cleaning it up then bought a fresh one from Rockauto....
A few of the other rally guys were using kevlar to reinforce stuff, like fuel tanks and skidplates. It looked like something I could figure out, so with a few tips from the collective and an order from US Composites, I gave it a shot. For a first run it turned out really well. I used 4 full layers of 5 oz Kevlar and a couple straps wrapping around the top of the tank to really secure it all, though those were probably unnecessary considering how the epoxy resin sets up.
Running the fuel lines inside the cabin was pretty straightforward, though the little things like making this little bulkhead box to get the lines from the pump into AN lines/fittings is the sort of thing that should take a half hour but takes me all day....the box goes to 90* AN fittings, lines through the cabin, then bulkhead fittings at the firewall. I moved the fuel filter to the charcoal can bracket (charcoal can and evap stuff finally removed) and the plumbing is nice and clean to the fuel rail and from the return. I'm still using the stock fuel rail and feed/return lines as they seem to be just fine for the power numbers the care makes.
In these pictures you can also see the line for the rear brakes running in the same area, yes I should have used a bulkhead fitting where it goes through the sheet metal there but ran the line through a grommet instead. I used an off the shelf ChaseBays rear line kit for the sake of not fabbing it all myself and easy replacement in the future. Adding a bulkhead there would've complicated things a lot. You can also see in the first pic that there is still carpet in the car- I tried to retain that for as long as possible for noise (I still have this dumb idea of taking it out to cars and coffee once in a while or something, but it's pretty miserable to drive on the street)....I finally gave up and the carpet is gone. Still have a stereo though....
The brake master cylinder on this car had been slowly leaking internally for as long as I can remember and, as with most things bespoke to the iX model, an oem replacement is ridiculously expensive. So obviously when you can upgrade for the same price as OEM replacement it's time to upgrade. I used a dual MC from CompBrakes in the UK, this is a bolt in replacement for e30s and doesn't get much easier. I did have custom length lines made as it was simpler than bending and flaring a bunch of copper line and made having replacement lines in my spares box very simple. So the entire braking system is softlines now, there are arguments for and against doing it this way but so far so good.
The CompBrakes setup is boosterless and runs a standard balance bar arrangement with a remote bias adjuster I mounted under the dash.
Keeping with the theme of "iX OEM parts are really expensive sometimes", the steering rack had been on it's last legs for far too long and is another bespoke iX part and unrealistically expensive to replace. Also it's the worst ratio of any e30 rack, which is really saying something. Since the iX subframe and rack arrangement is completely different than standard rwd e30s, none of the typical rack upgrades are an option. Luckily an outfit called Bavarian Allrad is sort of local to me and basically the only option for a short ratio iX steering rack. He modifies the subframe to accept an e83 (?) X3 rack and the rack itself to clear the oil pan and uses a combination of x3 and e36 tie rods for a bolt in remedy for the terrible stock ratio. It went in without drama, other than necessitating adding an 1/8" spacer to my motor mounts to create a little clearance between the rack and oilpan.
Here you can see the fancy steering link included that does away with the crummy rag joint and oem u joint arrangement, sorry for the terrible photo:
And old crusty rack and subframe compared to fresh new parts. If you look closely you can see a fist size chunk missing out of the front of the old subframe....been like that for years, still not sure exactly how that happened...
docwyte
UltimaDork
10/31/23 9:38 a.m.
iX's are cool and I like the '88's most of all since they come loaded with the sports seats etc. I've kicked around the idea of getting one for a winter DD here, I'm in Colorado too. But then reality of how much garage space I have kicks in. Still, if a decent one popped up, I'd be tempted...
I love this. Because I have way too many e30s and because it's another build thread. I'm terrible at updating all of mine. I even tried to cheat and make one thread with everything and I still can't update it. Cool to see the progression.
docwyte said:
iX's are cool and I like the '88's most of all since they come loaded with the sports seats etc. I've kicked around the idea of getting one for a winter DD here, I'm in Colorado too. But then reality of how much garage space I have kicks in. Still, if a decent one popped up, I'd be tempted...
Yeah they make for great daily drivers, pretty well unstoppable in the snow with a good set of tires. Naturally they've succombed to the e30 tax that only gets worse with time but mostly the iX can become slightly infuriating to maintain if you need to replace any of the AWD specific parts. Last I checked new OEM front axles are in the order of $1600 and $2k depending which side you need, control arms are specific and hard to find/expensive, same with steering rack, brake parts, blah blah blah... An iX enthusiast kind of has to want it these days... The e46 and e90 AWD models are really affordable comparatively and parts are available, but...the t case arrangement isn't nearly as good as the e30 (IMO) and of course they just lack the soul of an e30...
iansane said:
I love this. Because I have way too many e30s and because it's another build thread. I'm terrible at updating all of mine. I even tried to cheat and make one thread with everything and I still can't update it. Cool to see the progression.
Boy do I hear you- I have a fleet of E36 M3boxes that are always being maintained and/or modified, some of it could potentially be interesting to those who are, uh...interested but I barely have it in me to keep messing with them, much less document all of it.
Just for reference, the current fleet looks something like:
'88 e30 iX rally car
'85 e30 track/rallyx/canyon run car, accumulating parts for fresh m20 build to be swapped this winter
'85.5 Porsche 944, currently mid engine swap
'83 AE71 Corolla, about to starting building a 4age for swap
'89 Toyota pickup, 3.4 swapped a million years ago
'78 F150 Shop truck and designated firewood/dump runner
'06 Tundra, camp rig and race car hauler
'03 GX470, wife rig
