I finished a rally! My goals this year were, in order: I probably didn’t do as much car prep as I could or should have, but I did repair the damage from last year. Replaced all the broken suspension on the front left corner, replaced a bunch of a sheet metal and the busted driveshaft support bearing. I spent a bunch of time installing the RallySafe bits, doing general maintenance and making sure I’d accounted for all the rule changes. I had various ideas for improvements/upgrades, and basically none of that happened. Mostly because I couldn’t shake the image of…
I took off work a few hours early to go buy paint. As far as I can tell, there are two places to buy automotive paint in Colorado Springs: Sherwin Williams or English Color. I went to English Color even though they spelled their name wrong. Brian used Valspar TB550 Urethane, and I have all the magic numbers needed to recreate the appropriate colors, but no one in town sells Valspar TB550. The English Color in Denver sells it, but I’d have to drive up there. They’re not open on weekends and I’ve got work to do during the week.…
Finally, I managed to start fixing things faster than I was breaking them this weekend. First up, the alternator. The internet let me know that some E30s refuse to charge the alternator if the charge light wasn’t working. There’s some disagreement about what year that change was made, or if it was universal. My charge light wasn’t working, but I was pretty sure that it’s never worked. But not certain. I verified that with the ignition powered, I got 12V field/excitor voltage to the D+ terminal which is the thing that gets interrupted with a busted charge light. With that in…
The machine shop called to say that three valves were bent, and they were having trouble locating replacements. I quickly browsed all the German car part sites, and most of them didn’t have any intake valves in stock, but ECS tuning did. That should have been a warning sign, but I just ordered them with overnight shipping and figured it’d be fine. They called shortly after delivery to let me know that the exhaust valve was correct, but the intake valve was the wrong size. After much searching, it turns out that the 6mm intake valves on the M42 were…
The timing covers on the front were leaking profusely from both engines. As others have mentioned, “they do that.” That’s disappointing and annoying, but I’m not here to solve age-old BMW problems. The engine my car came with managed to completely coat the inside of my skidpan with about 5 miles of driving so, hopefully I can do better than that? The way these timing covers seal with a fiddly “profile” gasket in some places and a super thin paper/composite gasket in others is problematic. I’m normally not one to use RTV on gaskets, but it seems like anything might…