E46 Things
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It has been a beautiful week of driving! I even remembered to disconnect the battery tender before I pulled it out of storage and drove off.
I received my Blackstone report today. The big question was if a 3,000 mile OCI is just right, or too late for an engine that makes a lot of revolutions per mile. Also beneficial is establishing a benchmark for future bearing condition estimation.
I have not been fond of the high speed stability. It is stable enough but there isn’t much aligning torque and sometimes it tramlines way too easily on the freeway. Last summer when Big Bear checked the alignment, they set the camber plates at minimum caster since it leaves all of the camber bolts visible. I think they assumed I wanted to be able to adjust the camber easily (my best guess, see pictures below). The toe is fine within stock spec, but caster is less than stock which would explain the excessive tramlining. I’ve had enough and wanted to see how much difference it would make without wasting a trip to Big Bear and finding out something unsavory about running more caster.
At full negative caster the steering is slightly heavier and the excessive tramlining issue is gone! This means I will need to schedule another appointment next time driving season starts up to get the alignment precisely dialed again, this time with an added helping of caster.
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Installed black anodized pedal covers from Turner Motorsports. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the way the rubber blocks on the existing pedal covers feel. Turner owes me a couple pieces of hardware as they were missing from the box but im sure they will have no problem sending what was missing so I will give them a call tomorrow.
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That looks nice
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Fired it up to get it on ramps so I can replace a few things.
-Parking brake shoes
-Stainless clutch line
-Clutch slave cyl.
-Try out some Redline MT LV in the trans per Bimmerworld’s recommendation
-AKG Motorsport trans mounts with the cuppy-thingies
-jack point surface rust removal/POR15
I think that’s all for now. I’ll report back tomorrow once im covered in blood and grease and have made little progress
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Just a FYI on the 420G but also this is a phenomenal build https://www.mye28.com/viewtopic.php?p=1491536#p1491536
someone said:
We determined transmission whine was from the input shaft bearing. Input shaft must have gotten damaged during one of the many removals/installs since it was pulled from the donor car (be careful not to let the weight of the transmission be held by the shaft). 420Gtransmissions are not repairable; neither BMW nor Getrag provide any parts or support. I contacted many 'experts' around the world, including those who convert 420G SMGs to 6-speeds. None could offer any help with the input shaft bearing. Just the cost of having someone TRY would end up being many thousands of doll hairs. I decided to write the old transmission off and source a new one. Yes. New. There are (were) two of them left in the world. It should be here this week.
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That IS a phenomenal build!
The 420g is not one of the great manual transmissions ever crafted, hence my efforts to do a few small things to make sure it has its best chance at living its best life. If I ever needed to swap transmissions I would grab a cheap low mile SMG trans and swap bellhousings. The manual transmission cost and availability is not great and with the SMG you know a computer was shifting it instead of a pretend racecar driver. Which all E46 drivers are, including myself.
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160,712 miles
Parking brake shoes and hardware replaced. The shoes were original (no surprise as they dont wear much) and had plenty of meat on the bones. The weak park brake was more a function of glazing and adjustment.
the drum surface received a good scuff and the adjusters were cleaned and slathered in anti-seize. Once it was back together, the handbrake cable was adjusted to factory spec and now the park brake holds the car on my sloped driveway while in neutral.
Im pretty sure I ordered an FTE clutch slave cylinder (OE) but here I am with a Sachs brand. Notice that the pushrod is a bit longer than the FTE. In this photo the stock slave cylinder binds at the last 1/4” of travel and so part of the length discrepancy can be attributed to that. I am not sure that the sticking affected performance while under pressure but it would not surprise me if the seal was affected and able to pull a minuscule amount of air for a brief moment while moving past that rough spot.
The stainless clutch line did not have the same pregnant section that the stock rubber line does so I trimmed it off and attached it since there exits a decent chance of rubbing and abrasion between the corner of the oil pan and the new line.
Transmission mounts were not replaced as the exhaust was in the way of the passenger side mount. I will save them for a future project when the exhaust is dropped.
The MT-LV is the ticket though. I took a few laps around the neighborhood in the cold weather and between the new clutch hydraulics and the trans oil, there were no grinds on the cold 1-2 shift.
It is now parked and on the battery tender again until hopefully March
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I'm glad to see Stroopwafels!
Your AFR is pretty darn lean also... -
You may want to check out your roof condition if that much snow is entering your garage...
I accidentally left the sunroof open on the garage.
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Pulled the car out of the garage for a rinse and re-installed the spoiler because it is very tricky to get the placement correct. I wasn’t satisfied with my first two attempts but it’s all good now.
I was able to try out the new parkIng brake components and can now finally hold the car on a hill in neutral! A functioning park brake is underrated.
it's a painful ethos because it would be a blast.
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