Project Chronicle

I am planning on Good Friday being especially good for me, as I will be going to the secret storage location and bringing my E46 BMW home.  I'm pretty excited, as I have a list of things that I am planning on doing to the car during the month of May, and will hopefully have it ready to go for 2022 track days. 

I'll be chronicling the work here, so stay tuned!

Yesterday was awesome, as I was three sessions of Track Night In America at Lime Rock Park.  If you don't know about Lime Rock and you are at all interested in racing, you should really learn.  A couple of reasons Lime Rock is great - You don't have to like racing to enjoy being there.  It's actually a park.  There aren't any grandstands.  Instead, you find a nice grassy spot, preferably under a tree if it's sunny, and just enjoy being outside in a park.  Next, the track is only 1.5 miles, so you can walk all the way around it, and not be pooped.  Try that at the Nurburgring!  After this, and if you are into racing, there are great vantage points for viewing basically everywhere.  Last but not least, the food is awesome, and your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, kid wouldn't be grossed out by the restrooms, so it's a great time for everyone.  Hooray Lime Rock.

OK so on to the track day - The old 330Ci didn't miss a beat.  I was able to load all my stuff, including tools, chairs, whatever I needed, into the car after folding down the seats, and bombing out there, which is about 150 miles.  Racing car for the day, running the A/C, good times.  The weather was perfect; dry air, about 75, track not too hot, looking good.  The car was totally reliable, fast, tires and brakes felt great, and driving the track was a complete thrill.  Lime Rock is challenging in many ways, but one of the most interesting take-aways was the amount of speed you're able to carry there.  I guess I didn't realize that there aren't any 2nd gear turns, and at one point I tried just leaving the car in 4th gear, and this wasn't at all an issue, as I was able to carry a lot of momentum.

The braking you do have to do is heavy at the end of the front straight (as to be expected), and medium at the entry to The Esses, and the entry to the short straight.  I have really figured out how to trail brake the car as necessary, and also steer a bit more with the throttle - Even with my relatively tame modifications the E46 chassis is really great, and the brakes are even better.  Several cars boiled their fluid / had diminished braking, and the 330 never felt odd or missed a beat.  The tires held their own as well, providing great feedback and little understeer.  I never felt out of balance or control.

The track is amazing.  It looks simple to drive but it's not - I'm a broken record here for sure.  Getting a line through Big Bend and The Esses is really tricky but by the end of the event I felt pretty good, and am closer to having the racing line figured out.  The back uphill is pretty interesting as the car would do a tail way each time going up, as you are still coming out of the right-hander at the bottom of the straight, but I found that to be great fun.  The downhill is totally weird and feels unsafe at the outset, and the barrier on the left has some tell-tales for those that didn't work that one out quite right, but I found no issue coming out of that and carrying good speed onto the straight.  I looked more at my tach than speedo, and almost 6K RPM at the end of the straight before braking hard and setting up for the right at Big Bend.  

I had a great night, and I recommend to anyone interested to check out LRP and Track Night in America if possible. 

My over-the-winter projects included installing a new fuel pump along with an M3 baffle, H&R Sport springs, new OEM rear trailing arm bushings (RTABs, without limiters), new front sway bar bushings and endlinks, and 200TW tires.  For safety I also installed new OEM brake lines, and after all of this, had the car aligned at the BMW dealer (!).  

My take-aways:  The car feels awesome for what it is.  I can't believe the difference actually--  Night and day would be an understatement.  With tire pressures set at 34F / 40R there is almost zero understeer, and I can basically toss the car wherever I want on the track with smooth inputs, brakes and throttle.  The car feels light and nimble, and didn't feel at all out of sorts or with any bad habits during weight transfer.  In three 20 minute sessions I was passed by one (1) car, which was a Spec E46 racing car...!  The 2.93 gear, which I thought was a bad thing, is actually great in this car, as I can basically stay in 3rd and 4th gear for most of the track, with 2nd only in the slowest of turns.  

The only downside is that this thing desperately needs a limited slip diff.  This negative factor is really magnified now; it was bad before, but with the increased cornering loads the traction control is basically coming on all over the track.  I held off on the LSD thinking I'd replace with a shorter gear (the LSDs for 3.15 and lower are a different application), but there's really no reason to go away from the 2.93 for what I'm doing.  

The LSD aside, the most surprising aspect now is the ability to smoothly carry momentum through turns and exit with more speed.  I'm sure the guy with the ZL1 Camaro was like "WTF...?". 

I'll add more pictures later, but check out the before / after photos--  Holy brake dust!

So the spring install went off without much of a hitch.  This included installation of front strut tower reinforcement plates and replacement of the upper strut bearings, as well as a replacement of the front sway bar mount bushings while I was in there.  

What didn't go off without much of a hitch was replacement of the rear trailing arm bushings (RTAB).  Yes there are many how-tos out there as to drilling it out, pressing it out with found items, burning it out (yikes!), etc...  I was able to get them out without issue, but no over-the-counter press or homemade tool allowed me to easily get them re-installed.  Because I'm stubborn, and was already told to do so before I even started, I stopped with the install and bought the tool.  

Kids - Always buy the tool.

All in all I think the car looks great, and the ride is only diminished by some additional harshness.  Yes it does hit bumps a bit harder, but the more noticeable thing is the road vibration.  I realize that you have to give up something to get something, so really, the tradeoff seems more than worth it.  

Last weekend I actually had some personal time, and decided it was best used with a wrench in hand and a mask on face.  In my search for suspension upgrades in preparation for reduced body roll without completely sacrificing ride, I decided to try H&R Sport springs with my already-installed Koni struts.  

In researching this route there are numerous opinions, and I realized that none of them held actual value to me, so I decided to just go for it.  Because coil-overs are expensive and because I already had the struts / shocks, my first thought was to install a Ground Control coil-over conversion, which for the E46 is well-documented and seems like a great choice (https://groundcontrolstore.com/collections/e46-coilover-conversion).  I kept thinking about it, and because I would be doing the work myself and my research said that the Ground Control setup would then require constant tinkering to get the ride height, spring rates, corner balance, etc., etc., all sorted, my best route was a conventional lowering spring.  OK great, now what to choose....  Long story short, my friends at Turner Motorsport suggested the H&R Sport spring.  While in there I also replaced the front strut mounts, front sway bar end links, installed strut mount reinforcement plates, and tidied things up. 

I am mostly distrustful of any aftermarket products where ride and safety are potentially compromised, but man, that body lean has to be sorted out, and doing it on a budget is my favorite way.  As advertised, the drop was spot-on between .5" and .75", and my initial impressions are that the ride has not changed for the worse--  It does feel different, but not in a completely detrimental way.  So initial vote for this install is a thumbs-up!

I'll wait to get an alignment until I get a few miles on the springs, check ride height to make sure nothing weird is going on, and make sure I'm good with how it feels--  I still have to drive this thing so I cannot have something terrible in the ride department, and my original springs are good to go back in if necessary. 

Every weekend I'm trying tp pick up some deferred maintenance items in preparation for the world returning to to normal at some unknown point in the future.  Today it was changing the differential fluid.   I used Redline 75W-90 NS, which is fine for the open diff that the E46 has.  I used my trusty old pump and the process is straight-forward.  I do find that I also hate the smell of heavy oils such as these, and that it's impossible to get all the oil out of the pump, so I just wiped it off and plopped it in a ziploc bag.  One pointer that I've read for this style of BMW differential - Make sure the fill plug will break loose before opening the drain plug and draining the fluid.   You do not want to be stuck without the ability to get fluid back into the diff in the event that you cannot get the fill plug broken free.   For me it was an easy breaker bar pull and the plugs were loose, but if you have trouble, don't leave yourself worse off than you were. 

So the E46 got a bit of quarantine maintenance on Saturday that included installation of Stop Tech Sport pads, new caliper slider pins and caliper guides all around, and a bedding-in session.  The pads feel great and stop hard, but the harder to believe element is how grungy they brembo pads that I removed were. The brembo pads have been on the car for just over a year and were not driven in the winter, so the weathering has only been done by car washes and the occasional rain drive.  They are rusty with the backing plates falling off, and I can’t say that I would recommend them at all.

So here is my new project.  The site will be a great place to track what happens with it, but initially I will drive it to replace my aging VW Eurovan, while fixing a bunch of deferred maintenance and neglect.  The guy I bought it off of was nice enough, but he had zero receipts and didn't know a socket from a screwdriver, so I'm going into this one planning on learning a few things.

Right off the bat, there is oil leaking from the valve cover (big surprise) all over the exhaust manifold and making a lot of bad smell, the LF wheel appears to be bent at the outer lip causing a chassis shake, LF front sway bar end link is broken (connected methinks), tires are mis-matched between front and rear (one of my cardinal rules to avoid at all costs, but this does have staggered wheels so I let it slide), and the car is totally filthy.  All of this helped with my negotiating, and this 115k mile ugly ducking is now mine.  On the bright side the car is a nice color combo, doesn't rattle or do anything weird, has no dash lights, seems to run great and is faster than I'd expect, and has a clean CarFax.  It checks all the right boxes for what I was looking for, and will be a good project. 

I'm excited to dig in, and to log the project on the site.