Alpine e30 progress/build thread
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Well I was home about a week ago and I popped the radiator, fortunately I was only backing out of the driveway and the car wasn't even warm yet so no overheating or anything. It is leaking from the middle of the core so I would guess that it was just old and gave out. It is the original radiator so it was really just a ticking time bomb. I will be ordering a new radiator and will be replacing a number of the coolant hoses as well when I return at the end of November
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Will you be doing all of the hoses? I have a brand new overflow for a 6 cyl, I wonder if you can swap to a 6cyl radiator and expansion tank I am not familiar with the 4cyl though.
Sorry! Totally didn't see this, The 4cyl cars have an integral one with the radiator so I doubt they are interchangeable.
Also, due to UPS's pure genius, the car is stuck for another few weeks. My parts from FCP Euro went from Connecticut to Illinois....to Nevada. Their customer service is top notch though, I emailed them (as I had paid for faster shipping) and I got a refund for the shipping within an hour! I will certainly continue to order from there, they are great
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So I am home for about a month so I will be tackling a bunch of jobs on the car all at once:
- Replace the radiator, all coolant lines, and the plastic tube down under the intake manifold
- Replace all the vacuum lines while I am in there
- Clean the throttle body, and upper/lower intake manifold
- Clean the ICV
- Rebuild the injectors
- Replace all the rubber fuel line and fuel filter
- Generally clean everything I can reach while it is apart and make everything pretty
- Potentially replace the valve cover gasket (significant oil in two of the plug wells, it has a new valve cover gakset from the PO but it may have been installed incorrectly)
I have been working on it for a few hours over the last few days and here is where the car is at the moment:
Everything came apart fairly smoothly with the exception of a broken injector tip when I removed the fuel rail, I ordered injector rebuild kits that include the pintle caps so that problem will be taken care of.
Upon removing the lower intake manifold I found some pretty significant deposits on the intake ports in the head:
^ This is probably the worst one but they are all fairly messy. I would assume it doesn't affect the car too much but I would like to clean it out. Is there a good way to go about doing this without dumping a bunch of crap down into the valves?
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^ That's a scary thought about that big of a chunk of plastic falling into the engine haha, fortunately the valves were closed where I broke the cap and I was able to vacuum the pieces out.
As far as the car goes I have made a ton of progress, basically waiting on some parts now (Injector rebuild kits, a few odds and ends for the cooling system)
All rubber fuel lines have been replaced and a new fuel filter is installed. The hose that connects to the feed line above the gas tank was a massive PITA
All the remaining coolant lines, etc. have been removed, old radiator is out and the new one is in with a few of the new hoses installed.
I spent quite a while thinking about how to clean out those intake ports and I ended up making a tool out of some flexible tubing and a shop vac and was able to clean them out quite nicely!
I have decided not to do the "mess under the intake" delete as I do not want to lose the throttle body heater for cold weather. My car also has the secondary thermostat recall and I will be keeping that as I would rather not have the heater core blow up and cook my legs for some clean looking hose routing.
I also notices that two of the spark plug wells are full of oil, I have cleaned them out and I have ordered a valve cover gasket set to fix that as well. The gasket on there was new about four years ago so it was odd to see it leaking
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It's hard to tell from the pics, but the crud in the intake looks similar to what I had (in other words, a lot).
I intend to drive my car in sub-freezing temperatures, and the previous owner had already bought all the hoses, so I kept the throttle body heaters. What a PITA! I put everyting together and took it apart again 3 times before I managed to get everything hooked up properly.
The P.O. also said not to fill the gas above half way because it will leak. Not looking forward to dealing with that...
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M42b18, not sure where interior is on your to do list but I keep on seeing this down in the Chicago CL in case you might be interested for the rear seats
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M42b18, not sure where interior is on your to do list but I keep on seeing this down in the Chicago CL in case you might be interested for the rear seats
Interesting, I had not seen this yet, looks like a pretty nice interior. I wish I had the money for interior stuff but it probably wont be a possibility till the summer...
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Made more progress, while I am waiting on parts to finish the work on the car I have been working on my wheels that have been sitting half done for months.
I finally got the first wheel center down to bare metal and half pf the second one is now stripped:
My original plan was to polish the lips to a shine but there is some decent curb rash and a number of dings in the lip that just aren't coming out right with sanding. My new plan is to sand them to a reasonable surface finish and then paint them the same silver as the centers with the backs of the barrels being black. This should allow me to hide the various imperfections a bit better than a mirror polished lip. They will also be a bit easier to maintain.
I have also wire wheeled all of the bolts and will be painting them a gloss black which should look nice against the silver centers
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Car is back together and done! Cooling system is bled and once the car warms up it sits right below the center line of the temp gauge. With the cleaned and rebuilt injectors, cleaned intake ports, and new fuel filter it starts immediately on the turn of the key and revs much quicker than before. With the cleaned ICV it idles much smoother as well.
With everything cleaned up it looks much nicer under the hood as well, pretty happy with how all this work turned out
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Can't wait to see the wheels finished.
Me too, I've had the dang things for over a year haha. They definitely won't be done until the summer though as I leave again (until May) this weekend...
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Well I'm back in the area for good! Which means no more long breaks between car progress.
I have put about 850 miles on the car in the last week and runs so much better after all the work I did, the idle is smoother and it starts up much quicker from cold. It feels a bit pepier too!
Things that need to happen now: tie rods and tires. The tires I have now are flat spotted and horrible, but I don't want to buy 14" tires so I am trying to refinish my wheels soon unless someone wants to buy them (I want some spec e30 wheels like dforce LTW5's or something like that).
On a fun note, I found a partout of a 318is on craiglist and managed to snag a number of goodies, I'll update soon as I get things installed!
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Picked up a bunch of good stuff the other day!
First job was to finally upgrade my broken hella H4's with some nice new US ellipsoids, I also picked up a nice kidney grille to replace my broken blacked out one:
I also picked up one of the things I've been trying to do for ages, carpets! Installing them wasn't too hard at all, and it turned out extremely nice.
What was left of my nasty old carpet:
New black carpet in:
Its amazing how much less noise I hear coming through the floors, and also how much cooler the interior stays with the windows up. It used to get really hot really fast without all the insulation.
Some other things I picked up: a set of low-mile bilstein sports and vogtland springs, and a sparco style strut bar (not sure if its a sparco since it is black and not red). I also ordered a skid plate from a guy on r3vlimited today to keep my oil pan in once piece once I lower the car
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Installed my new suspension yesterday, Bilstein sports and vogtland springs. I was given e90 drop hats when I bought the suspension and didn't plan on using them but once I set it on the ground the first time I decided I wanted them in so I ripped everything apart again and installed them.
I love the way it sits, I should've taken a before picture for comparison. It handles like it is on rails now too, I was laughing all the way around town. It is super dirty right now so once I get it all cleaned up I will get some good pictures
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