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 mind, I turned to the spare alternator from the second engine, but it subjectively looked worse than mine.  It’s also filthy.  But mostly I reasoned that it was very likely that the failure was the voltage regulator, and I didn’t want to condemn an entire alternator if the problem was just the voltage regulator.  Here’s the Bosch regulator that was on the unknown alternator:

The one in the car was not Bosch and the lettering was impossible to make out.  I swapped this one in, and the alternator worked just fine.  The charge light never comes on.  Not sure if it’s burned out or bypassed in some way.  The aforementioned joys of a car with an unknown history.

I wanted to replace the 20 year old seats with modern containment seats.  Irish44j’s photos make me think it’s maybe possible to fit an HTE-R XL in there, but it’s not certain.  My codriver is quite a bit smaller than me, and he claims he fits comfortably in an HTE-R 400.  In fact, he had one that he’d purchased for a Pike’s Peak car that didn’t run this year, so he gave it to me to install it.  So I set about installing this seat, and it gave me fits.

First, it’s about an inch narrower than the seat I had.  I’m unclear about the wisdom of mounting a seat with spacers and longer bolts (seems maybe bad), so I flipped around one of the seat brackets which took up right about the right amount of space.  I still had a heck of a time getting it in there, I think the brackets are *slightly* too tight now, but I did, eventually, get it.  For reasons that make no sense at all, the seat is now farther forward.  This is apparently due to the new seat just sitting farther forward of the mounting points than the old one did, but looking at them doesn’t look that way.

I really need to move the seat brackets after about 2 inches, but given that I was running out of time, I think this will work fine.  I needed to move the fire extinguisher forward a bit, and Jack has less leg room now, but I could fit in there and he’s shorter than me.

My harnesses went out of date in 2022, so I installed new Sabelt ones.  I really like Crow harnesses because the material is soft and easily adjustable, but the SFI-only certification is a bit frustrating.  And while you used to be able to send them back quite a few times for re-webbing for like $60, they will now only reweb them a single time.  Which means only 4 years out of a set.

I’m loving the adjust-at-the-buckle 2″ lap belts these have.  Super easy to get the lap belt much tighter than with the standard pull-up 3″ belts.  The shoulder belts are pretty hard to adjust because they’re so stiff, though.

I put the old co-driver seat in place of mine, because the cover on mine is torn and it made tech upset last time.  If I and the car make it through this event, I’ll figure out how to get a proper containment seat on my side, too.

I got the ugly new graphics badly installed.  I worked really hard on the last decals, and I’m annoyed at having to replace them with uglier ones so I spent less time on it this time.  Trimming the windshield banner carefully is hard, and the black hides mistakes way better than the white.  Oh well.

I’ve driven about 60 miles and it seems good.  I cranked the idle up too high (about 1,200rpm) to keep the oil pressure high enough at idle to not flip the fuel pump shutoff relay.  This would be bad for a street car, but I think it’s fine here.  My impression is that the car is slower than it was with the old engine, but that could just be in my head.  The new clutch is way stiffer than the old one, but it’s also fine.  My $30 ebay short shifter is working great and makes it easier to get it into 1-3-5 while belted in.  I should probably get one of the tall ones and bend it a bit, but this is fine for now.

The rear lights (which they actually checked at tech last year) like to stop working.  Removing and reinstalling the bulb fixes it for a little while.  I decided to pull them all and spray them with contact cleaner hoping that they’d at least work long enough to get through tech this year.  Of course, one of the tail lights disintegrated on removal.  Drove to the auto parts store to acquire a replacement.

I also plugged the new inspection port on my transmission with a rubber plug.

Went ahead and loaded it on the trailer!