Alpine e30 progress/build thread
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Yay updates!
So school is over and finals are done. This past week was the competition for the Formula SAE car my team builds every year. This meant driving over 500 miles from Bethlehem, PA to Brooklyn, MI (Michigan International Speedway) with easily 500 pounds of stuff in the car (full to the brim with all my crap). The day before departure, the fuel line I mentioned above completely let go and the car was stuck in on the street outside the shop we build the race car at. Once we were done for the night, myself and two friends stayed up all night fixing the car:
We were very enthusiastic to be doing this at 4:30am after a hectic 16 hour day
The culprit:
The 2 inch piece of fuel line under the intake manifold was leaking from both ends, tightening it had failed (and it looked ready to turn to dust) so fortunately we had enough fuel injector hose laying around to properly fix it.
With the car fixed and after a day of packing, we set off for Michigan. The enthusiastic pace was a bit much for my car with the extra weight and it started to run a bit hot, so we backed off a bit and it stayed where it should be. Made it there with no other issues (removed the grilles and headlight panels for some extra airflow), really goes to show the reliability of these cars if you look after them.
Who needs lowering springs when you can just fill it with stuff!
After the competition ended I set off for home, no problems at all with a grand total of 1050 miles traveled. Its pretty crazy to think that, of the 3000 miles I have put on the car so far, 1900 of them have been split across 3 drives!
I am making a quick trip to Canada and then once I am back the Bimmer will be going under the knife (And I will finally get to those wheels...) Stay Tuned!
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A few of us on here know the painfully long nights of senior design and that would NOT be fun at all to have a snafu like that. What part of FSAE did you get to work on? I wanted to do FSAE but I knew I wouldn't fit in the car/wouldnt get to drive it, and working with non-car enthusiasts would really irk me for some reason.
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A few of us on here know the painfully long nights of senior design and that would NOT be fun at all to have a snafu like that. What part of FSAE did you get to work on? I wanted to do FSAE but I knew I wouldn't fit in the car/wouldnt get to drive it, and working with non-car enthusiasts would really irk me for some reason.
At my school it is actually a club so you can do it for all four years (I will be a senior next year) but we don't receive any credit or anything, I have been a part of the team since freshman year. We have to do all our own fundraising and everything is on our own time so the team is fairly small but the majority is car enthusiasts which is cool. This past year I designed and made the entire brake system and helped build a majority of the car which was a lot of fun. Brake test for tech inspection (your car must lock up all four wheels to a stop and not stall) was a heart stopper, proud to say we passed on the very first try which many teams fail to do. Next year I am redesigning part of our powertrain (getting the power from the transmission to the wheels), doing some optimizing on the suspension we completely redesigned this past year, and a few other odds and ends
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Well, I was going to dive into a bunch of mechanical things but I got distracted.
I've been sanding wheel lips and stripping wheel faces here and there. Making progress but boy is it slow, one face is almost completely stripped (sooo many layers of paint) and one lip is about halfway sanded since there are many small imperfections I want out, it should be worth it though!
With the car, I got sick and tired of looking at the dull, completely flat paint. I spent a ton of time with a claybar and some nice car wax. The results speak for themselves:
Didn't take a before picture because I forgot again,
In progress:
(I rather like this picture)
And the result!
Before I started, the roof didn't even reflect any light, but boy is it a mirror now!
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Very nice, what clay do you use?
I used the mothers clay bar system, so its a clay bar plus their own spray which seems to work well
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Updates!
So was going to completely tear into the car and do a ton of work but I got hit with a bunch of bills and haven't been paid by my work in quite a while so that didn't happen. I did, however, start doing some of the smaller things that needed to be done:
Brake fluid was leaking from the grommets between the reservoir and master cylinder. They do not sell the Girling master cylinder grommets anymore (hex shape on top) and list the ATE grommets as the replacement part. I was skeptical as the ATE master cylinder is completely different but they do in fact fit properly on the Girling master cylinder.
My brakes are total crap so last summer I ordered a set of rotors and pads but never got around to installing them until this morning
The rotors are blank/coated Balo-Motrex (OE supplier to Audi/VW and much cheaper than brembo's) and I bought OE Bosch pads, I will most likely replace these with a better pad down the road but for my budget they will work perfectly fine. All but one rotor retaining screw came out so I had to drill that one out, I have a replacement on the way. I have a set of braided stainless soft lines waiting to go in, I just need to figure out a good way to do the lines running over the subframe in the rear as I've heard it is a huge pain in the ass.
While I had the brakes apart I noticed that my front sway bar drop links were totally junk, the bushings were ripped and the dust boots were all torn up. I happened to have a set I got for my E36 laying around so I threw those in as well
Old vs. New
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Nice work! The good brakes should improve the driving experience. How did you get the master cylinder bushings installed? I have done it before and it was very difficult so I am wondering if there is a trick to it?
All I did was drain the master cylinder reservoir (a huge pain because there is no good way to do it, I just put a ton of rags underneath and popped it off, brake fluid is water soluble so you can just wash any spills away with water) and then move it to the side so you don't have to disconnect the clutch master feed line. The old ones popped right out and the new ones popped right in, doesn't leak a drop now. Didn't have to bleed anything because I didn't get any air into the master cylinder itself thankfully.
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Instead of getting my work done I decided to post a little update:
got this from andyhundley a month or two ago!
Deep cleaned and conditioned the leather to restore it to its former glory:
It came out really nicely! Looks almost brand new
Made the necessary spacer by cutting a steel sleeve from the hardware store to the exact same dimensions as the one from the car. Installed it and everything works perfectly, unplugged the SRS module as well so the SRS light is disabled and stays off without the airbag
Going to order the colored strip at the bottom at some point too
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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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