After Erin Kelly (who I didn’t know) died doing it last weekend, I’ve spent some time considering the risk/reward ratio for rally, and it’s unclear to me that the reward is worth the risk. I’ve spent even more time considering the effort/reward ratio, and the results are more confusing. I don’t want to tally the number of weekends I’ve spent in the garage since I bought this car, but it’s an awfully large number of them. Thanks to sneakattackrally.com, it’s pretty easy to tally the amount of time I’ve spent driving it on stage: slightly more than 2 hours. There’s…
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…