To Do List

To Do List

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In August of '03 I was able to place 3rd of 9 cars in my class with my '84 318i. This may not sound like much of an achievement, but finishing within spitting distance of the G-Production winner was a new experience for me. This put a bug in my ear for the winter – one of those little bugs that whispers the temptation of speed. Not that I was hard to tempt. After running such a mild season for ‘03, I was ready to come back strong for 2004. After all, how else to answer whether I (and my car) had gotten quick enough to finish regularly in the top half of my class?

There was a lot of stuff I had to do, and a lot of stuff I wanted to do. I drew up a list of projects that was a good 40-odd items long. It included things as pedestrian as replacing all of the fuel lines with new hose to increasing the engine rev limit to solving, once and all, the banging and looseness in my right front strut. I prioritized the items on the list with a simple “must do now”, “should do soon” and “it would be nice…”

First up to solve was the suspension banging. I had to get this resolved before it caused some sort of failure, which would inevitably occur at high-speed, mid-corner. I gave Ireland Engineering, my suspension company, a ring and explained what was going on. Despite swearing that they knew exactly what was going on, they sent me parts that were not matched for my suspension, and didn't have anything to do with solving my problem. By this time, I had completely dis- and re-assembled my front struts about 10 times. It was good practice and I could do it in about an hour. Still, not what I wanted to be spending my time on. I disassembled the struts very carefully, comparing the left (good) and right (bad) struts with each other. I spent several hours looking over every element very closely and fiddling with each bit.

Bingo! I found it: metal shavings at the bottom of strut-top bearing. When I grabbed the strut-top bearing with pliers and worked a screw-driver against the spherical bearing, I found some up and down play. It was only about .5 mm worth, but the slight movement had clearly been destroying the interior of the bearing and it was only going to get worse. Ireland Engineering sent me a new bearing, no questions asked (after all, this one had failed immediately). Once installed the play, and resultant banging were gone. One job to check-off my project list.

Since old is bad and gas is flammable, I replaced the main fuel pump, fuel filter and all of the fuel hose. I didn't use the fancy metal-braided hose – it's darn expensive. Instead, I used the high quality line available OE from BMW. Anywhere it might rub, I glued a 'cover' made of a larger diameter hose over the thinner fuel line. This would keep the fuel line from abrading.

Next, I took a close look at the left rear half-shaft. It was sprayed black grease over the bottom of the car. That's undesirable, messy, and will lead to the constant velocity joint failing (at high-speed, yadd-yadda). I inspected the dust boot, but couldn't find anything wrong with it. I spent a good half an hour under the car playing with the CV joint until I noticed that several of the allen bolts that were holding the half-shaft to the differential output flange were slightly wet. Got it! I whipped out an allen and torqued them down. While I was at it, I checked the others and then cleaned up the grease. I was confident that it was one more problem resolved.

I wanted to install a large, easily readable after-market tachometer. In theory, this would cover the smaller OE tach and speedometer, but leave the gas gauge and water temp gauges still visible. Knowing how fast you're going when racing isn't really that important – there are no speeding tickets. The gauge that I chose also had a built-in shift light. Several times in races, I'd found myself bouncing off the rev-limiter, unable to hear it amongst the roar of other cars. A bright shift light would help avoid that. Installing the tach and light should have been easy. It was just a matter of some simple electrical wiring and… nothing.

The tach lit up, and was clearly getting power, but it wasn't getting a signal from the negative pole on the distributor. I unwired, and rewired it. Same behavior. As a test, I wired it into my ‘87 325i street car and it worked like a charm. Weird. When I called the tech support for the company that makes the tach, they suggested replacing the ignition coil on the premise that the old one was beginning to fail. I did that – and now it worked, erratically. It was hard to find consistency to the problem – sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. When it was working, it measured the RPMs accurately. It was as if the signal would disappear and reappear. I called tech support again, and got lucky. The tech knew exactly what was happening. "On some older cars the 5v square wave generated by the coil fluctuates under 5v. The tach has to read a 5v wave, or it just doesn't work." Uhhhh… okay. He suggested a simple fix – wire an inline 1.5v, AA battery. I did and the tach worked perfectly. Phew. It was nice to check that PITA item off of my list.

In the past, I had had some problems with the home-built electrical wiring in the car. Sitting in pre-grid once or twice, something had shorted and white smoke had oozed out from behind the dash. I’d had to turn the car off, stick my hand in and jiggle the wiring to “fix” the problem. That’s a bit ghetto, so I wanted to sort and neaten all my wiring, and replace the poor quality plastic switches glued to my dash with a switch panel.

To make the switch panel, I cut and bent a piece of sheet metal down to size to fit in the hole where the center console heater vent used to be. I drilled and dremmeled evenly spaced holes for the switches. Spray-painted matte black, it matched the inside of the car. I rewired everything behind the dash using high-quality connectors. Once done, I realized that if I did it again, I could relocated my oil temp and presure gauges to the panel for an even better use of space. That was hardly critical, so it went much further down the list. Regardless, the homemade panel looked great.

My car left a few small puddles under it whenever it was parked in place for more than a few moments. They seemed primarily to come from leaks around the rear of the motor and the differential. In the case of the diff, both the right output seal and main-cover seal were leaking. Output seals are easy – I’d done the job before. Disconnect the half-shaft, pry out the flange, remove the old seal, tap in the new and re-assemble. Easy.

With my new-fangled air tools, the rear cover was also easy. I drained the diff and zipped off the bolts with my air-ratchet, cleaned the mating surface, ran a bead of gasket sealer over it and then torqued it back into place using my sophisticated "that's about right" wrist torque. I refilled the diff with more of the Redline “No Slip” diff oil. Next morning: no tell-tale puddle under the car. One more item to cross-off. The motor leak was minor, and would have to wait for now.

Because I had rebuilt the front suspension, again, I took the car to be corner weighted and have the camber re-set at B&H Motorsports, handily located very close to my house. It was close enough that I just drove the car down there – much better than having to load the car up on my trailer. To corner weight a car, you set each wheel on a scale and adjust the ride-height with the goal of spreading the weight distribution as evenly as possible over all four wheels. My suspension only allowed adjusting the front ride height, but we were able to get the corner weights into the right ballpark.

There were a bunch of jobs that I had hoped to get to, but had not. This included servicing the rear drum brakes, installing an oil cooler, fabricating a front strut brace for the car, a valve adjustment, new spark plugs – and so on.

With the car suspension set up, I was ready to race. Almost. There was one critical task that remained: it was time to paint the car. After 3 years, the fugly gold car was going to get some new clothes!

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