SiF said:irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:Ran into Dan Fouquette at a wedding last weekend and he reminded me I hadn't updated this thread in a big (didn't know you were reading it, Dan).
I'm everywhere and nowhere and prefer it that way.
Good seeing you and I hope I don't see you at NEFR.
hopefully at the after-party this time. Since we missed it last time cuz we were still sitting out on stage broken lol.
In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :
Don't be a hero on day 2. Slow is Fast.
Decided to try to finish up the fuel tank hose stuff yesterday. My initial plan was to weld some new tubing into place just like the stock stuff, but frankly I don't have anything around the garage or shed that will do, and local places don't sell the right size and I just don't want to deal with ordering steel for such a small/dumb thing. So what do we have here? Some old PVC pipe with 1.50 ID. Slides nicely over the 1.25ish OD pipe stub on the tank. But it needs a little bend. So add some head and pull a bit...
Run the hoses though it, and it seems to fit fine. This pipe seems to be mostly to prevent some beefy rear seat passenger from pinching the fuel overflow/vapor hoses and this seems like it will do the trick fine to get that stuff into the trunk (where it's hidden behind the trunk panels anyhow.
And all the fuel stuff hooked up for good
Yeah, it's janky, but nobody will ever see it again once the rear seat is in. See?
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Also took out the rear parcel shelf cover and speakers. They are the OEM "ITT" speakers from the car and they're surprisingly really nice quality with very large magnets - nothing like the paper-cone garbage that I've found in other old cars I've redone. After some research it seems the ITT speakers are pretty popular and known to put out good sound with an updated head unit, so I'll likely go that route and see if that's true. Back to the parcel shelf. I've found evidence of broken glass a few places in the car (mostly the trunk) and there was a ton of it under the rear deck cover soundproofing. Whoever replaced the smashed rear windshield clearly didn't put much effort into cleaning stuff up lol.
In any case, the "carpet" on the deck cover practically disintegrated when I touched it so I stripped it all off and will recover it with something more fun (for those of you who followed my Raider build, I'm gonna go in that direction for some interior pieces)
I did have to repair the surrounds for the "vents" on the rear edge, since they're basically 40-year-old press board and several were broken. Some wood glue does the trick
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Sticking with interior stuff. As this won't be a race car, and I removed all the substantial (and rusty/soggy) OEM rubber soundproofing, time to put some back in before I do carpet (I have some color samples on the way). All of this is a lot easier with the dash out, so figured I'd tackle it first thing. I want to "insulate" the whole floor area mostly for NVH since the OEM floor profiles kept them a bit more rigid than my replacement-Raider-hood panels and they have a more hollow sound to them. Also the firewall since the OEM soundproofing in the engine bay is gone and not going to be replaced since that crap just causes rust....
For most of this, I like to use a 50-mil stuff like Dynamat (or similar). But this being a budget build, we'll go the budget direction:
This is just another brand of "peel and seal" which is basically the same makeup as original Dynamat. It's 60 mil thickness, so similar to what most "car audio" guys use, in general. It's formable, seals up any holes in the panels (though I shouldn't have any at this point), and has an aluminum coating. It sticks really well at all. And it's $13 for a 6"x 25-foot roll. So I picked up a couple of them and did the entire firewall inside (so easy to get to with no dash, incidentally, as I've had to work on the rally car in that area recently with the dash there, and that sucks). I also did the front passenger floor and kick area and the entire transmisison tunnel. I'll do the driver's floor later, since I have to weld a few things under it for fuel line brackets and don't enjoy the smell of burning rubber/tar stuff.
This was about 1 1/4 rolls of the stuff, just for perspective. I'll also add some self-stick 1/2" thickness duct insulation stuff over the transmission tunnel and on the passenger side inner floor since the exhaust runs under that. It doesn't do well with sound deadening but does pretty well at heat insulation in my experience. That's later.
Great work as usual! That thing should be nice and quiet after all that. Even after all these years I'm still amazed at how quickly you get so many things accomplished.
Since I rarely play video games and don't have the patience to watch movies in the evening, I seem to have plenty of free time lol.
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Like, today. While the kids and wife spent their day out in the neighbor's yard around the pool, getting a tan, I am not much for sitting around reading books in the 90+ degree sun. Luckily, my garage is in the shade.
For a minute I considered putting the engine in today, but there are still a few things I want to do that will be easier with no engine in the way, and there's really no point in putting it in at the moment since it'll be a while before I round up all the other stuff I need to actually get it running. I wanted to take the Porsche for a spin this morning so that was a good opportunity to go browse around the big fabric store 20 minutes from my house after crusing around waiting for the place to open at 10am. So spent about half an hour in there with no idea what I was looking for, getting odd looks from the two older ladies who were working there on a Sunday morning...
In any case, I settled on 2 yards of a plaid fabric with a few shades of tan/khaki and red in it, since that should work with my planned color scheme for this car's interior and exterior. Even better, it was 40% off stuff so it cost me a grand total of 16 bucks (plus a few bucks for a can of spray adhesive).
Note: this is fairly cheap outdoor material that doesn't stretch very well - which was probably a mistake on my part since it makes working around curved surfaces more difficult than using a material that has some stretch to it. Anyhow....
First piece was the rear deck beind the seats. which was relatively easy since it's pretty much flat. Here it is
incidentally, here's the speakers I was talking about in my previous post. Pretty fancy for a base-model 1984 318 with hand-crank windows lol
Anyhow, after that I decided to do the upper front visor panel, since the original vinyl was all peeling off and had a rip in it. This was more difficult since it has a good bit of curves and surface level changes, but it came out ok. Looks kind of silly up there perhaps, but what the hell...just re-doing the panel in black vinyl would have been boring.
-- break --
Took a few minutes to straighten out the big dent in the back of the trunk that has annoyed me for some time. A while with a couple ball-peen hammers, a few wooden dowels, and a couple short 2x3s and it's back to more or less flat, at least enough that bondo can disguise it when the time comes
here's an exciting picture of......not much
--break--
ok, now for the tough "upholstery". The OEM center console rear section vinyl was peeling as well, so I ripped all that off and wrapped it up with the fabric. This was pretty tough as there are a LOT of different angles to deal with and it's certainly nowhere near perfect. However, what it is, is GOOD ENOUGH. Then I did the shifter surround area of the main center console as well - trying my best to match up the patterns between the two pieces. The rest of that center console panel will be flocked, but I didn't want to do that in the area where my arm/hand is on alot - I've found that a lot of direct contact on flocked stuff eventually wears it off, which has happened to the center console on the Porsche to some degree.
Anyhow, here's the finished product. Looks really weird without carpet below it, but you get the idea. I will get a new shift boot for it. FYI, the carpet will be some shade of tan/beige that matches the OEM door panels, so it shoudl match up with the tan in the plaid fabric farily well. Guess we'll see.
Great work on the interior, looks great! I have found "boat fabric" to be handy and very durable but you won't find it in the pattern like your fabric.
Looks slick! I did the same peel and seal on my trans am a decade or so ago and holy hell what a difference it made.
I'm seriously digging on the plaid. Nicely Done.
iansane said:Looks slick! I did the same peel and seal on my trans am a decade or so ago and holy hell what a difference it made.
yeah, it's amazing people will pay 5x more for "name brand" stuff that's essentially the same.
TED_fiestaHP said:Great work on the interior, looks great! I have found "boat fabric" to be handy and very durable but you won't find it in the pattern like your fabric.
good call. My parents own a marina so I'm quite familar with it. But yeah, it doesn't come in much selection pattern-wise
Took the kids ot the zoo today and got home around 5pm with nothing to do. So I did this, in spite of what I posted last night....because i'm impulsive and impatient.
Forgot how easy it is to put a 4-clyinder M42 into an e30 solo. Took all of 20 minutes, even with my hoist needing to be bled. Nowhere close to getting it running, but at least it's off the garage floor and out of the way now.
I went to hook up the shifter, but found that my linkage is too short.....so....hmm. I guess I have an M20 shifter linkage that I was using for the M50+G240? I honestly don't remember at this point. So now I either need to scrouge up an M42 linkage and carrier (not exactly easy to find since they were only in the e30 for two years and don't cross over to other engines/models. Or I need to get a tunnel-mounted shifter and fab up a DSSR, which I'm leaning toward since I like the one in the rally car. We'll see what pops up for a good deal and go from there. no rush.
Looking good!
Just a quick update....my cheap carpet came in
So of course I'm doing a test fit. Seems fine, molded carpeting on an e30 is always a hassle since these cars have literally NOTHING flat inside, so it's going to take some time. I also have more work to do on the underside of the driver's floow (welding) so won't actually install it on that side. But here's a look at the color. Nothing exciting...
Not much progress as I've been doing a few other projects recently and starting to get the rally car ready for New England Forest Rally. But I was doing some welding today on the trailer (see my other thread) and figured I'd finally do a little reinforcement of the core support on this thing (which was a bit weak-looking) since the skidplate has to bolt to it (not doing the heavy-duty U-bar brace on this like I did on the rally car because.....this isn't a rally car and doesn't need it).
So just found some scrap angle iron that I had cut off a trailer accessory, so just welded that under the core support. It's not gonna be crazy strong, but it will beef up the mount holes for the skidplate, specifically. The skid itself is stainless thick stuff so provides some strength of its own anyhow. In any case some pics of nothing exciting
So you can see the angle iron turn up there. Just enough room to put the backing nuts in (which I'll replace with weldnuts at some point, so no idea why I painted it)....
Here's the skidplate test-fitted. Fits great. Note the hole for the oil drain....this skidplate was made for the M10 originally in the car, the M42 drain is not on that side of the pan, so I'll probably close that hole up when I get a chance.
Pretty pleased at the clearance with the M42 pan, which is not the same shape/size as the M10 but apparently it's just fine. It actually will go up about 1/2" since it's just sitting on the rear steering rack bolts right now, not actually bolted in.
So that's it for now. The rally car thread (which includes my Porsche, Sequoia, and trailer mods as well) seems to be where most of my activity is recently, so check that out if you don't already follow it.
Got a bit of motivation today and got around to kinda finishing up the last outstanding metal replacement - the driver's side lower quarter panel just behind the wheel. This side was totally gone (P/o redid it badly in fiberglass) so basically had to redo the whole thing. So, back to the last scraps of sheet metal from the front fenders, and made a three-piece "box" to replace it.
Here's the inner "frame" - keep in mind this stuff is 1) only tacked in place, I have more welding to do and 2) totally unseen by anyone so making it look good isn't a priority (and let's be real, my welding never looks good anyhow).
And the outer skin, including the wheel well lip
for comparison's sake, here's the same spot on the rally car. As you can see, it's mostly hidden by the bumper "spats"
The last month or so has been tied up with prepping the rally car for New England Forest rally, towing there, competing, and fixing the small stuff we broke on that car
Back to this one now. For NEFR I actually "stole back" the front struts and rear shocks from this car for my rally spares bin (where they came from), so first order of business was to put those back on the car, which didn't take too long. I actually sold the old bottlecaps and shot tires that this car came from and wanted it back on the ground so I could move it outside for the day to do some garage cleaning. So bolted on my Euroweaves, which the rally car almost never wears any more.
Other than some general cleaning / washing of the car and getting all the junk off the roof rack, didn't do any real work on the car - but made some notes about what I'm going to get working on next on it, so hopefully will make some progress soon. Here's some pics with the euroweaves and swee 4x4 stance :)
While I'm between mechanical projects, working on addressing some sanding, dent filling, etc.
The body is actually pretty good in terms of dents, but there's one in the driver's door, and some areas that I did rust repair, and a few other random smaller areas.
So there's the door. in progress.. I'm not very good with Bondo, so I'm sure I'll have to do these areas multiple times lol...
The dented area on the trunk that I banged back mostly to shape, but some small areas to fill...
The area on the rear driver's fender that I replaced the metal on that was all rusted out. Came out pretty decent.
The front fenders I got from Neil and Eric's rally car are in surprisingly great shape, apart from the wheel arch lip being bent up due to their oversized tires (I bent it back). After wet-sanding I'd say they're damn near perfect, actually...
I'm also experimenting with some paint colors to make sure what I had in mind is going to look ok. This is my current plan: Satin khaki color above the "waist" (i.e. door bumper trim) and black below that. This is basically the color that Toyota Tacomas come with if you get that matte "sand" color or whatever they call it.
This was before I addressed the dents in the trunk rear lip, by the way....
h
Took care of this last little rusted-out spot on the front corner of the driver's door this weekend. Basically just chopped it off and replaced the metal. All in all a pretty easy job with the front fender taken off.
Also did a good bit of sanding and bondo work to fix up a few little dents and stuff, including smoothing out the repaired door corner and the rocker panel I patched up months ago.
I also picked up about 4-5 cans of rattle can to try out some colors. Initially I liked the Khaki color I showed earlier, but after seeing it in sunlight I don't like it as much. But I think I've settled on this color from the (new?) Glidden spray-paint line, which incidentally has a very nice spray pattern on their cans compared to rustoleum or krylon. This is a matte color called "chocolate pretzel" lol, so I think I'm going with this from the "beltline" and up (and will do black bedliner below the door bumpers.
This color hides imperfections pretty well and the matte doesn't require any post-paint cutting, polishing, etc - all things I hate and am terrible at. So, we'll see how it turns out, I guess. I test-painted one fender and part of the door to see it on a large area. This area will get 2 more coats and some matte clearcoat before it's all done. This was just to see it....
With rallycross posponed this weekend due to weather, figured I'd do some work on this thing. As usual, just jumping around to various things since I apparently have no attention span at all.
Spent a couple hours with a ballpeen hammer, wire wheels, and sandpaper and straightened out the heavily-dented front lower valence so it looks reasonably not-E36 M3ty and then hit it with some black paint (which helps to hide even more)
I also temporarily fitted the radiator and A/C condenser, though I need to get one replacement line for the AC system since one of them I have appearntly had an interaction with something sharp - not surprising if you recall the A/C compressor was sitting ON the skidplate when I bought this car. AC will be one of the last things I do so not a big deal. Also took apart the AC fan and cleaned it up and installed it.
Ran out yesterday to get a few minor interior parts from a local guy, who showed up in a mint e30 vert...
He brought me the inner door sill finishers (totally crfacked and broken on this car) and a glove box (totally broken on this car). Unexpectedly he also included ALL of the (unbroken) clips for the door sill pieces, which is good since most of mine are broken/missing
Meanwhile, painted the door sills so I can be done with that area on the driver's side.
As you've noticed, I'm painting this car sections at a time now I that I have the method/color/clearcoat process more or less determined. I have most of the driver's side semi-finished, including the bedliner area "below the belt" Not going to be a show car, and this car will get its share of scratches and dents so the paint just has to be good from 10 feet. I'm using multi-coat matte with a gloss clearcoat, which I like the look of...
Took a quick break to make a new bracket for the fuel/brake lines under the car out of a little piece of old Raider sheet metal. Very fancy.
Also, took out the rusty/broken rear license plate lights...and wire wheeled the whole area, which needed it...I'll figure out what to do about the lights at some point....
washed a bunch of underbody and exterior stuff, because it was all muddy from the P/O rallycrossing...
aaand....more or less finished installing the cheap carpeting, which looks pretty "meh" but will look better with seats in it and stuff....I may also get a steamer and try to flatten it out....or not, we'll see. I hate carpeting and unlike the black in the Porsche (which hides the imperfections), the tan shows everything.
bolted a seat in just because
Incidentally, these seats will need a LOT of love. The mechanism on at least on of them is broken and has the "sudden fallback release" going on. So when I recover them, I'll take them apart and do some fixes to the mechanism so they work well. Seems like a good winter project, TBD.
A few things came in from FCP today. By the way, forgot to put prices on the past few things, so I'll go back and tall that stuff up when I get a chance. Expense for this post was $76 (enough to get free shipping, so I ordered a few extra small things to get over the number lol). This was mostly stuff that I wasn't going to be able to find on the used or local market and/or things I wanted new.
I've been blacking out the chrome trim stuff for the past week or so, using high-quality black vinyl (I have a ton of vinyl here for the rally car and other projects), and one thing ALL e30s have is disintegrating window outer seals. Luckily, FCP had the coupe driver's side seal on clearance for some reason (half the price of a sedan one), so grabbed that for cheap.
I mean, it's a weatherstrip, but it's nince and not brittle/broken like most e30s. The passenger one on this car is actually ok so I may or may not replace it. The driver's one was totally broken. So here it is with some of the newly blacked-out trim
Also got a handful of the OEM clips for the door side mouldings, since all the ones I have are either broken or probably will break if I re-use them.
And the glove box I bought didn't have keys for the lock and had been broken into to get it out, so I had to get a latch. A new latch with a key is like $80. I have no need to lock the glovebox on this car, and they're easy to break open anyhow....so I bought the $20 latch without the lock. Works fine. yay.
Working on some other cars at the moment, so the projects on this are whenever I get some motivation in the evenings.
Continuing to make some progress. Today I blacked out the chrome on the door rub rails and reinstalled them with the new clips.
The rear end, where I did all that rust repair, isn't quite a perfect fit and could probably use a bit more work, but for a car like this, good enough lol..I guess I could massage the metal out from the inside,
Then modified the rear "spats" to accommodate the tucked bumper. Luckily already did this on the rally car so knew exactly where to cut.
So put all that on.
I also epoxied my least-broken interior door handle (which just had a small crack in the plastic) in the hopes on not having to spend money on a new one. Seems to work fine initially...
Then I got the kids together and let them FLOCK the dash, which I've been waiting to do, but I'm about ready to put it back in so time to do it. They seemed to enjoy it :)
Looks pretty good I think, and covers up the one crack that I filled in. You may notice that I didn't flock the leading edge where the defrost vents are. ON the rally car, I learned that that area is almost impossible to clean with a vacuum, so I left that bare so I can just wipe it with a rag when it's dusty. And I'm sure this black will show way more dust than the gray flock the rally car has.
Note that it's still wet here, so should be less "splotchy" once it's dry.
also flocked part of the center console, as per my plans
Then I pulled the car out to see what the paint looks like in the sunlight. Also bolted on the rear bumper, though it's going to be black eventually, and also the front bumper and grille (just to get them out of the way). Well, actually mostly in the shade, but whatever...
The passenger side still needs some work. Or more accurately, I need to actually start on it lol. You can see at the rear corner the difference between the "Chocolate Pretzel" color I'm using versus the factory Bronzit (a color I have NEVER liked)
It has been a while since I checked in. Excellent progress. The car is going to look just right.
wheelsmithy (Joe-with-an-L) said:It has been a while since I checked in. Excellent progress. The car is going to look just right.
Thanks, I certainly hope it turns out as I had it in my head :)
With the dash flocked, now I can finally put some of the interior back together. I spent some time checking everything behind the dash before putting the dash back in. Luckily, this is an '84, base-model 318 so it has really basic wiring, even compared to my non-base '85 318 (the rally car). No power windows, power locks, computer, or any other strange stuff (other than the added-on seatbelt warning thing on top of the dash that BMW must have added due to some kind of regulation).
In any case, dash went back in easily, and also put in the center console, and most of the dash accessories:
Pretty much everything is hooked up - the wires coming out of the center are all the radio wires. I'm going to eliminate the factory fader switch so I'll have to figure out which wires go to which speakers, but that's down the road when I get a stereo for the car. I hooked up a battery and seems that everything works that should work on the ACC key switch, including the wipers, lights, etc.
Except:
- the HVAC fan doesn't turn on, so I'll have to investigate that
- a couple of the dash control light bulbs are out, but that's easy enough to fix.
- I have a few mystery plugs under the dash that don't seem to go to anything. I suspect they're for accessories this car never had (cruise control, perhaps, other stuff).
This plug over on the passenger side of the center stack went to the M10 DME wiring. The black is for the tachometer signal, the yellow is for the "economy" gauge on the cluster, and the other one is for the CEL.
To make the M10 cluster's tach work with the M42 DME I have to tap into the M42 wiring. Luckily , I did this a decade ago on the rally car and remember it's the small black wire in the loom you cut and hook up the black one from that plug above to. Now I just need to remember which end I splice to lol. I'll look in the rally car and see what I did there...
I also put the driver's seat in. It's pretty torn up but mechanically seems to be ok (the passenger one needs some structural/mechanical repairs for sure). Even as crappy as it is, the e30 sport seats really are a comfortable design with great support. And love that extendable lumbar,
Lol at how huge the M-tech OEM steering wheel looks. I'm so used to the small wheels on the rally car and the Porsche, this thing looks like a school bus
In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :
If you're actually going to use this one for recce, that huge steering wheel looks like it has plenty of space for corner grades.
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