E30 Zone

Good afternoon all,

Just thought I would throw up some details of a current project, in case anyone is ineterested.

Basically back in late 2010 I picked up an L reg touring from a member on here (apologies if you read this, but I have forgotten your name) that had some rear axle issues.

The car was a bargain, considering the rear axle was slated to be replaced anyway, and the bodywork was in excellent condition, so a decent basis for the project. Will fire some pictures of the car at the weekend.

So, the vehicle was dragged from manchester back to birmingham and was sat there while a friend and I decided what to do to it.

Around the same sort of time, another friend was deciding to sell his Lexus LS400 ( 4.0 V8 ) so it was purchased and the engine, gearbox, running gear, electrics, uprights, brakes etc etc were removed and thrown in to the work shop.

The engine in question: (generic image)



Now, the lexus V8 sounds good but only makes around 300bhp with breathing mods, which is good enough to start with but not enough for the finished article. But that can be addressed later.

The good thing is that this engine was removed from a 1991 H reg, so has the stronger bottom end. Result.

Now, this is where the 1st problem was encountered. Lexus only used this engine with an automatic transmission. No good for the track/drift car that we had in mind. But how hard can it be to bolt a manual box up?? Famous last words........

So, the transmission was removed along with the torque converter and flex plate, and sold on ebay for the princely sum of £12. Bargain.

We then ripped the engine, gear box and prop out of the touring, along with the abs, brake servo and everything else that would be in the way of the V8, in preparation for dropping it in.

Would you believe, it simply slotted in with no bother at all??



So we quickly fabbed up some mounts and ordered some "hockey puk" mounts from a land rover (£7 bargain) and the engine was in and sitting perfectly around 3 inches in front of the bulk head!

To be continued....

Yeah, the 1UZ-FE is a superb engine, but manual box swaps are a pain.

If you are staying with Toyota boxes then you have the choice of the W58 box from the N/A MK4 supra. It's generally alright but if you're a drift slag and there's going to be plenty of clutch kick action etc then it may not be up to the job. The better choice is the R154 box from the MK3 Supra Turbo as they are nigh on indestructable, they do have a lazy long throw to the gear change though.

The main expense comes with flywheel etc.

Worth checking out forums for Soarers like www.soarerworld.com some of the Australian Soarer forums have a fair bit of info about manual swaps as a few have done that.

The world's leading resource for 1UZ-FE tuning etc is www.lextreme.com

Keep the updates & pics coming

3" from the bulkhead? Sort it out.. Have it rubbing the damn thing!

Patience is a virtue gents my typing skill are a little lacking....

Anyway, with the lump in and roughly where it needs to be, we decided to remove it and sort the gearbox issue.

After much digging we concluded that the w58 would be no where near strong enough, so we sourced an R154 from a manual supra turbo.

Big old gearbox, but mega strong and has a removable bell housing.

Prior to fitting the box, a flywheel and clutch assy was needed. A little bit of digging later and a toyota celica gt4 clutch and flywheel was mine for the basement price of £20, with a new friction plate. Mint.

Now, while the centre bore in the flywheel does sit perfectly on the V8 crank, the pcd of the bolt holes is different, 6mm IIRC. So same calls later and a billet steel flywheel with integral ring gear was on its way for £250. Yet another bargain IMO.

So, flywheel on, retained with longer ARP bolts, clutch bolted up and all was right with the world.

The bell housing was then removed from the R154 and it was offered up to the engine.

After a little more digging, I found out that a spacer plate was required to mate the R154 to the auto bell housing (thankfully retained when the auto was sold) and that a very kind chap had quickly knocked one up in CAD.

So the file was given to a friend of mine and the spacer turned up the next day, machined from a billet of 35mm ally. After some tapping, reaming and swearing, we found out that some of the CAD details were a touch wrong, but no biggie, and the plate was given a little love on the milling machine.

So bolt all of those bits together and you have this:



Big and heavy, but no real internal mods needed provided we ONLY want 500bhp lol.

TBC.....

Now that the engine and box were all together, the final hurdle was how to actuate the clutch....

The standard R154 clutch system is a pull clutch with a pivot on the bell housing. Which we arent using. Plus the Celica GT4 clutch we are using is a push item.

So, a little research and one of these weee beasties was winging its way over to us from south africa:



Having done the maths, and knowing that the master cylinder would give us the required throw from the slave, the only problem we needed to over come was the fact that the sleve in the gearbox wasnt really long enough once the CSC was shimmed out to where it needed to be.

Plus the bearing on the clutch cover plate side of the slave cylinder had a flat face....

So, to kill 2 birds with one stone, I quickly knocked up aspacer on the lathe that would fit over the flat faced bearing. This spacer would have a hardened bull nosed contact patch to the cover plate, so thats 1 problem fixed, plus the extra 20mm depth that this spacer added meant that the slave cylinder sat on to the gearbox input shaft sleve by a further 20mm.

Result.

So, engine box and clutch done, time to throw it all in and see if we have a clutch pedal....



Clutch works lovely, maybe a touch heavier than I would like, but we cant have everything! PS if you look through the hole in the bulk head where the heater usually sits, you can see the gear stick

So with the engine in, attention could be turned to the small problem of manifolds, as the standard tubular units are, well crap basically. Plus they dont fit...

Here is the room we have to work with:



As you can see, the steering rack is also goin to be an issue, but we will come back to that...

good work there mrwhippy.
there looks like there's more room there for the exhaust manifold clearance, than you get with the m60/m62

Nice, id expected to see more room for the rad though, you sure it wont go back a touch more?

Nice project, good luck

Thanks for the comments gents!

Regards the manifold space, I am not at all up to speed on other conversions to E30's as this is the only one I have ever owned, but if this is whats considered a decent amount of space, then I am a little shocked lol.

As for the rad space, with the box and engine in, everything lines up beautifully and as such I am loath to move it rwd, evern if we have the space, as it would mean new gearbox and engine mounts, a move in the gear stick posn and prop length issues....

Right, after taking a bit of a look at manifolds, and sorting the passenger side out, shown below, this was shelved, as the ECU and CDS tubing for the cage arrived.



The ECU in question is a Megasquirt 2.2, of which I have no experience, and its a solder it together yourself job! That is about where we are with the project so far.

To do:

Solder ecu together and make wiring loom/map the thing
Make decent pipe bender
Use decent pipe bender to make cage (ambitious)
Sort fuel system
Sort brake system (sourced remote servos)
Move steering rack
Sort cooling system
Change rear dif for massive lexus one (and shafts)
Finish prop
Do interior
Drive like a lunatic

I shall update when there is progress, but as I mentioned, ECU soldering is all I shall be doing for a while and I can only work on the thing on sundays.

There was a member on here from New Zealand who has done this swap, some of these threads may be useful to you...?

http://www.e30zone.net/modules.php?name ... highlight=

http://www.e30zone.net/modules.php?name ... highlight=

http://www.e30zone.net/modules.php?name ... sc&start=0

You sir, are a legend!

These will help me a great deal, many thanks!

Is the lump against the bulkhead yet...?

i hate tourers but this one could be lots of fun

Quick update,

After seeing the price of a decent cage, we decided to order some CDS and have a go at making our own. Brave I know, but if you dont try then you never know.

The tube spec is a little ott, but safety 1st. OD 41mm ( 1" & 5/8 ) with a wall thickness of 3.3mm

Purchased a clarke pipe bender (a mistake) which included various dies, one of which wasnt too dissimilar to the OD of the tube in question.

1st attempt, tube kinked badly. Which was half expected.

2nd attempt, tube filled with kiln dried sand and compacted, with both tube ends sealed up. This started off very promising, but when we got to roughly 20degrees, the tube burst! Spraying sand everywhere I might add. Unexpected.

So, the clarke job was thrown away and some plans knocked up to make a decent tube former, which would have a static die and a rotating die that would "form" the bend and should prevent kinking etc.

With that in mind, I quickly knocked up a couple of dies in CAD and emailed them to a friend. The next day, this turned up:



Shown next to my htc desire HD for size comparison. Basically its massive lol

The next step was to quickly knock up a frame to mount it in, which would also act as the forming guide. A little cutting drilling and welding later and we have the almost finished article:





Originally we had thought to make a cam and a handle which we could hand crank, however the thickness of the tube and the effort involved led to a quick rethink....

The bottle jack from the original clarke (shite) pipe bender was fitted in to a cradle and to the former, and it was time to try another bend....

Lo and behold:



An awesome result in my opinion.

So, we crack on with the cage on sunday. Fingers crossed...

That doesnt look like CDS mate, looks like a seam in the pics above? It shouldnt burst open like you said.
Top job on the former though!

DanThe wrote:That doesnt look like CDS mate, looks like a seam in the pics above? It shouldnt burst open like you said.
Top job on the former though!

As Dan says.. The whole point of CDS is it doesn't burst..

Believe me gents, it is CDS and did burst like a balloon! Granted it was a 20 ton bottle jack and I was really leaning on it. Still a surprise when it happened though.

Id be interested to see how it burst, im fitting/modding a cage at the moment and about to order some tube. Spoke to a company today asking for CDS they told me their something or other mechanical tube is rolled, welded then rolled again to remove the weld seam, does this sound right?

CDS stands for Cold Drawn Seamless and is extruded.

The failure in the tube I was bending did not occur down the length, as would be expected from a seamed tube, instead it split circumferentially

You snapped it then

Sounds like they were trying to fob me off with scaffold..
What sort of price did yours work out? Best ive found locally is £10 per metre inc VAT and that is CFS3

It was the same sort of failure mode as a snap but with the edges peeled outwards! I think I still have the piece in question, if so I shall take some snaps.

And £10 per meter seems like the right ball park figure.

Nice pipe bender youve made there,
To get a good kink free bend on clarke type bender the tube needs lubrication
Good luck with the build

Right, well after an early start on Sunday, a decent days work was put in.

Firstly finalised the bottle jack instal on the pipe bender:





Then got to work making the cage....

Fairly self explanatory really:



After the roll hoop, the tubes that run up the a pillar were bent up and tacked in place



Then a cross piece was bent to triangulate the 2 a pillar tubes to the bulk head, cant really see in the above picture but the horizontal bar is bent towards the bay....



Then bent up a piece to run along the top of the screen which is to be welded to the inner roof skin.

The reason everything looks on the piss in the last pic is that I have cut 2 holes in the floor and dropped the roll hoop through, to allow me access to weld around the whole of the tube intersections.

More at the weekend I hope.

Some more action last week, I started off by having to do a repair to one of my dads golf clubs lol, the tool had snapped the carbon shaft!

So I turned a tapered insert, bonded it in with 3M 9323 adhesive, sanded it down, and wrapped the whole shabang in prepreg UD carbon.

Here it is prior to going in to tha clave at work:





So with that all sorted (ended up mint by the by, and mega strong!) it was back to the cage fabrication.



Rear door members tacked in car line to transfer forces from a head on (god forbid) along with front door bars which are somewhat of a compramise due to having to get my fat ass in and out of the car!

Additionally the bars going across the car at the bottom of the roll hoop and between the rear turrets have been tacked in place.

Next we moved on to the plating of the rear turrets to give a solid mount for some triangulation.





May have gone a bit OTT with the welding in the close up lol but you can never be too sure....

And then as luck would have it, the gas ran out for the MIG. Tried to continue using the TIG, but it was a huge pain in the arse, so decided to get the "kart" out and spend the rest of the day acting like a hooligan in the fields lol



Its quite entertaining if the weather is ok, as the power to weight is quite high!



Well thats all for now, more after the weekend no doubt.

Like this a lot! Who are your friends???? I would need weeks and hundred phone calls to get a bending die cut in that size, you get it OVERNIGHT!!

UweM3 wrote:Like this a lot! Who are your friends???? I would need weeks and hundred phone calls to get a bending die cut in that size, you get it OVERNIGHT!!

Cheers, hopefully it will live up to expectations.

As for the dies, its not who you are, its who you know

MrWhippy wrote:

UweM3 wrote:Like this a lot! Who are your friends???? I would need weeks and hundred phone calls to get a bending die cut in that size, you get it OVERNIGHT!!

Cheers, hopefully it will live up to expectations.

As for the dies, its not who you are, its who you know

so true. And to rub it in you are going to tell me next that you don't even have pay for it.....

UweM3 wrote:

MrWhippy wrote:

UweM3 wrote:Like this a lot! Who are your friends???? I would need weeks and hundred phone calls to get a bending die cut in that size, you get it OVERNIGHT!!

Cheers, hopefully it will live up to expectations.

As for the dies, its not who you are, its who you know

so true. And to rub it in you are going to tell me next that you don't even have pay for it.....

Erm, is that not what mates rates is?? lol

Right, spent 6 bloody hours on the motorway saturday doing a total of 120 miles! Traffic sucks balls.

The end result of this nightmare is a pair of lightweight bucket seats that we needed prior to finishing the cage, just to make sure we didnt encroach on the driving position too much.

So on sunday with a new cylinder of welding gas, we cracked on with the cage:





The nearly vertical members in the above picture are to prevent the cage collapsing in circumstances like this poor guy experienced:







A freak accident with wierd circumstances, but I dont fancy the cage crushing my helmet, so the extra bracing went in! For those interested, the thread covering the destruction of the above audi is here: http://www.motorgeek.com/viewtopic.php? ... &start=225

With the front all braced and a seat thrown in so we could make sure that we can get in/out (just) we moved on to the rear section of the cage, and the bracing for the roll hoop:





And then the cross bracing to add torsional stiffness:





With that all welded up, we decided to do a quick stiffness test. Prior to fitting the cage, we mounted a laser level on the front corner of the car, pointing at a target mounted on the opposite rear corner.
We marked the point at which the pointer was hitting the target, then we jacked the front corner of the car up so that both near side wheels were off the floor and the car was in torsion.
We then marked the changed position of the point, and measured the difference:







We did this again with the finished cage all welded up, and with the exact same test, the difference in position of the laser pointer was less than 1/3rd. Stiff is good!

After all this messing around and the subsequent back patting, it was getting pretty late on, so we decided to just do a quick job to finish off.

As you may be able to tell from the pictures of the engine bay, getting the master cylinder to fit is going to be a nightmare, so we decided to mount the master cylinder, without servo unit, in the passenger footwell, with the intention of running 2 remote servo's in the boot.

With this firmly in mind, we hacked up the mounting bracket, modified some bell cranks and ended up with this:





The horizontal bar running along the bulkhead is the standard BMW jobby, which takes the pedal movement and transfers it to a bell crank that changes it to movement in car line, through the bulk head. Whereas our modified version keeps the movement across the car and our bell crank simply reverses its direction. It was simply a matter of then bracing the master cylinder to resist forces in the appropriate direction.

Works a treat. More next weekend.

Keep away from trees!

Nice job on the MC,

DanThe wrote:Keep away from trees!

Nice job on the MC,

Aye, even though I am fairly sure that accident wouldnt happen here in england, I thought I would rather be safe than sorry...

Not a lot done this weekend as we are waiting for delivery of some bits.

Finished off the mounting of the drivers and passenger seats:



This was a time consuming job, with a lot of in and outing of both seats and tacking/cutting and retacking of brackets etc. Happy with the finished result though!

Next moved on to the harness mouning points, welding some strengthening plates to which the eyelets need to be mounted etc. No pics really, as its straight forward chod.

To finish off I had to turn some fittings for my vacuum pump set up, so I can crack on with some carbon work ive been asked to do, so my partner in crime decided to make us a gearnob lol.



He located a decent block of holly from the wood shed (scheduled to be burnt to keep us warm in the winter!) and proceeded to make a large amount of wood shavings on the wood turning lathe lol.



Which resulted in this:



A bit of TLC and it will do nicely I think! Plus its very light

Anyway, on to more exciting things at the weekened (I hope)

Not really had much chance to do anything this weekend, so not a great deal to say!

Knocked up some exhaust manifold flanges in CAD and had them laser cut from 316 stainless:



Bought a hydro hand brake for the bargain sum of £60, just needs a little TLC:



Hopefully will get a call to say that my schedule 40 316 stainless bends are ready in the next day or so, and will crack on with the exhaust at the weekend.

Right, no sign of the bends so the manifolds have been put on hold for now, although there is still more than enough work to be done...

We started off by soldering the ecu together. We started with this (image shamelessly stolen from the interweb as I didnt take a picture prior to starting the soldering):



and ended up with this (ECU):



and this (Relay Board):



Then we had to make and solder up a cable which would link the ecu to the relay/power board, which ended up looking like this:



With that all done, we mounted the boards in the car just temporarily so that we can test everything when its all wired up:



Then, once we had grown bored of soldering, we decided to remove the rear diff, as it was grumbling and probably wouldnt like V8 power anyway.

So after much swearing and hitting of things with hammers, we ended up with a diff on the bench:





And just to confirm that it was the cause of the grumble, we quickly knocked up a test jig:



Thankfully it was the source of the problem and is in laymans terms FUBAR. But not to worry, as we have some potential replacements, shown here:



At the far end we have the standard 318 touring diff (boooo)

In the middle we have the diff from an LS400, massive (38kg) and no doubt capable of taking the horses, but appears to be a simple open diff (boooo)

The closest diff however seems to be the best choice. It is from a mk3 supra turbo, which coincidentally is the source of the gearbox we are using, and is an LSD. It is equally massive compared to the LS400 diff and just as heavy, but looks like it will fit quite easily and will no doubt take the power.

With a little bit of love, the diff now sits in the rear subframe nice and snug, so more pictures to come after the weekend.