Duncan Millar auto repair, bmw, e30, power steering, power steering delete, steering rack, z3 steering rack

Rolling Blockout – A “Proper” Tutorial on the Deletion of an M42 Power Steering System (Part Two)

Blockages are bad if you have high cholesterol or are the case-du-jour in an episode of House. M.D. Our blockage is good though because it means the RYE30 team, doctors’ Cameron, Thirteen, and Cuddy can move onto the next scene and remove the rest of the power steering system.

After shamelessly promoting our blog to the usual Facebook haunts we received some surprisingly constructive criticism on the installation of the PS block. Some suggested that it will be more trouble than it’s worth because of the reduced ability to respond to poor steering decisions or unforeseen road hazards. Another user suggested removing valving from the steering rack to free up the internals and make it almost as easy to wrestle as when it had power steering. But the weather has taken a turn for the worse (or at least that’s our excuse) and we won’t be effecting re-installations or modifications until the spring when we’d rather be racing than fixin’. So for now, we give you Part Two of the removal of the power steering system.

Step 1: Work Smart, not Dumb

Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar

If you’re as forward thinking as us, you still have the splash guard installed. But if you’re as masochistic as us, leave it installed while you try to remove these components. Since ours is basically ziptied into place, it would have been just as simple as removing it from the enslavement of the few 10mm nuts in the wheel wells that you still hopefully have.

Step 2: There’s Seems to be a Disconnect

  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar
  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar

Most of your fluid would have drained out when you disconnected the lines from the rack, but there will undoubtedly be some left in the pump when you disconnect the banjo fitting on the bottom (no need to disconnect the one you’ll see on the side of the pump). Give it a good crank with your 22mm and be ready with your drip pan. Once that’s free, you can noodle the reservoir out through the top of the engine bay.

Step 3: No Daddy, not the Belt

  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar
  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar
  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar
  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar

Next, you’ll de-tension the belt two ways. The likelihood is that your power steering system, like ours, has never been serviced. So even if you do start off by loosening the tensioner, it might need some persuasion before the pump swings loose of the belt. Loosen the nut and bolt that allow the pump to pivot on the upper oil pan to give it a little freedom. Then loosen both the locknut and the tensioner nut on the tensioner bracket since they are all going to be removed anyway. Use a prybar or a hammer to convince the pump to dislodge. Ideally, it won’t crash down onto your face like when you’re watching hentai late at night on your cell phone in your bed, but hold it in place with a free hand anyway. Pull the belt away from the crankshaft pulley and wiggle the pump out.

Step 4: Practice Safe Splashing

  • Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar

Reinstall the splashguard, but only after you notice that if you’d removed the pump first, you might have had a lot more space to install the power steering block and not need to part the rack from the subframe. Wipe up your frustrated tears with the same rag you use to soak up the power steering fluid dripping down from the steering rack and go have a cream soda.

Duncan Millar bmw, e30, m20, m42, motorsports, power steering, power steering delete, racing, road racing, z3 steering rack

Rolling Blockout – A Proper Tutorial on the Deletion of an M42 Power Steering System (Part One)

Losing weight can be hard. Dieting. Exercising. Gastricly bypass your power steering system to shed pounds by installing a steering rack block and chucking the remaining components. Trust us. We’re MDs. Which of course stands for “Mostly Dumb.”

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

Our power steering delete block comes from a California manufacturer and retailer of BMW performance parts. The Denny’s coupons we asked for in quid pro quo of a felicitous name-drop are as yet mysteriously missing from our racecar budget coffers, so you’ll have to hit your favorite search engine to find out who it’s from.

It’s design is so simple that you’ll undoubtedly something like “Pshshsh. I coulda made this.” But that doesn’t betray it’s cleverness as a product likely, largely capitalized on by the manufacturer. The bleeder is a simple hex-keyed set screw instead of a more expensive traditional bleeder screw. A single passageway that intersects the banjo bolt holes to allow flow means one long straight through pass in lieu of other more complicated methods of facilitating a bleed. If it’s CNC’d from a pile of bandsaw cut lengths of mid-grade aluminum then there’s little waste lost to that process and the process of rounding the corners and running the through-holes.

At $40 a pop (when they’re not on sale for $25) they’re likely piling mounds of cash into duffle-bags and shipping them to yours, truly as sponsorship dough as we speak. By the time it gets here, we should be done installing the block and onto the removal of the offending power steering components (which will be covered in Part Two).

Because the weather is officially “fucking awful” here in the Midwest, we pulled out the trusty tent once again to shield us from the light drizzle. “Rolling around on the ground” was brought to you by “Harbor Freight Creeper” which, surprisingly, is not the guy outside the store’s front door trying to sell you coupon books with sticky pages.

Step 1: Just Lemme Squeeze Past Ya There

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

In a previously unreleased episode, we installed a Z3 steering rack so your experience with gaining clearance to the banjo bolts might be different. All of the related components for the power steering system are on the driver’s side of the car. You’ll find the banjo bolts you need to disconnect right below the connection of the steering shaft u-joint and the rack.

Getting these two free can be difficult for two main reasons: The clearance between the smaller, higher, 19mm bolt and the motor mount, and the blockading of the 19mm bolt by the 22mm bolt. The simple solution to the blockage was to remove the 22mm first. You can reach this one with a 1/2″ ratchet and a 22mm socket. Get your catch pan ready, because you’re going to recieve everything in the lines and in the reservoir once you let it loose.

As for the 19mm, our solution was to disconnect the rack from the subframe by the two 15mm bolts and scootch it over enough to get our working man’s 19mm combination wrench into the gap and onto the head to bust it free. Be ready to give it a few concussive blows though to knock it free because your steering rack will no longer be rigidly attached to the subframe. While the remaining goo flows, get your block ready.

Step 2: Clean Practices Will Ensure a Tight Screw

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

Because you’re dealing with an aluminum casted rack housing and a sealing surface, you’ll want to be extra cleanly to avoid stripping when you tighten the banjo bolts and to ensure a tight seal. Wipe any grime away from the rack surface and do your best not to wipe much (but preferably any) icky stuff down into the passageways. Clear the threads of the banjo bolts of any debris with a cloth or a spray like brake cleaner. There’s no need to pre-assemble it as seen above (apart from the loosened bleeder screw), because this is where it gets tricky.

The angle of the rack makes it puzzling to keep the crush washers lined up as you place the assembly. We recommend locating the block on the rack using the 19mm bolt and crush washers, and hand-tightening it in so that’s it’s approximately square. Prep your 22mm bolt by placing one washer on it. Back up the 19mm enough to easily slide the free 22mm washer into the gap between the block and the rack. Lastly, use your 22mm banjo bolt (with installed washer) to fish for the washer as you wiggle everything into place until you’ve hand-tightened the 22mm banjo bolt.

Don’t worry about being able to reach the 19mm. We found during the process of re-installation that there was just enough clearance to tighten the 19mm while the 22mm was in place. Unfortunately, reaching the 19mm with a torque wrench is improbable (impossible in our case) so don’t strip it! Re-secure your steering rack and move onto the next step.

Step Three: All Phasers set to ‘Bleed’

In a cosmically fortuitous turn of comedy, once you have it all screwed, you are now set up to give the courtesy of a reach-around. The official instructions guide you to turn the fully travel the rack back and forth “a couple of times” to “let any excess fluid bleed out”. Once you’re done up top, reach in from around the subframe with your 3/32″ hex key wrench and tighten the bleeder down nice and snug with some manufacturer-recommended thread locker dabbed on the threads (highly recommend by us as well given it’s not-an-actual-bleeder-screw nature).

Check back next Sunday for Part Two where we take perfectly good steering components out and then likely never test drive the car until the spring, where we’ll find that it’s now extremely difficult to wrestle the steering wheel in low speed, short radius turning conditions in the good name of weight reduction.

Duncan Millar anti-roll bar, antiroll bar, auto repair, autocross, automotive, bmw, e30, epoxy paint, m42, polyurethane, racing, road racing, sway bar, Uncategorized

Spring Steel, Spray Paint, and Salvage: Our Anti-Roll Bar Brackets Get a Makeover

We have a friend named ‘Josue’ that we call ‘Sway’ for short. We can count on him to not let us down, unlike these sway bar brackets have.

Long term viability was not our strong suit in the early days of turning our once daily-driven sex-mobile into an inbred racehorse. Midwestern winter driving and near-SpecE30 suspension mix like Virgos and Scorpios. Which is to say that astrology is all made-up as it goes along and we shouldn’t have been driving this car in the winter. The parts that took the beating in particular were ones with a thin, eBay quality epoxy coating or none at all. In other words, all of them. Since we took the front ST anti-roll bar out with the fingers-crossed promise that we’d refinish the brackets, we took the opportunity to do just that in between some work on one of our significant-other’s work-and-school-mobile.

If you’re familiar enough with stock E30 suspension, you’ll notice the differences immediately. The original bracket leverages into place inside of the front subframe and then bolts into place to semi-permanently secure the bar. Because the replacement performance part is slightly larger in diameter and experiences higher torsional forces (that’s us making it up as we go), it came with a special bracket assembly that helps brace it flatter against the subframe with a large backing plate and a bracket that bolts into the original bolt hole. It also dual-purposes one of the subframe bolts.

Step 1: Safety First, Second, and Fourth (Third is Lunch)

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

As with any operation involving swinging phallic equipment attached to something with too much energy, you’ll want protection. Since we’re using our Harbor Freight bench grinder with included Harbor Freight wire wheel, safety glasses, underneath a face shield, behind ballistic glass would have been the wise decision. But for now, all we have are safety glasses. Gloves are generally not advised for using with rotating equipment, but since the actual bracket portion of the bracket assemblies are awkward to hold, we took the risk. Refinishing the other parts of the bracket was easier because of their straight-forward shapes.

Step 2: Stripping – Taking it all Off to Get Us Through Vocational School

Foreseeing difficulty in attacking these with the bench grinder, we took a whack at them with a nylon wheel and a hammer drill. The nylon wheel had been great at removing the surface rust on our cast iron lathe chuck because it removed it briskly and without damage to the chuck itself, but against the thick rust of our unknown-alloy steel brackets it was almost useless.

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

To the bench grinder we went. For the brackets, we made sure to get to the insides, outsides, and sides. This would seem obvious, but it’s easy to get caught up in this oh, so shiny metal as it appears before your eyes that it’s easy to skip the quality checks before you move onto the next piece. The part wasn’t as difficult as we expected it to be, but it did take some unusual angling to get to all the nooks on the piece. Specifically, on the outside of the bracket where it bends at 90 degrees. A tip for wheeling the smaller components like the washers and the fasteners; place them in a set of locking pliers. For the nuts and bolts, we spun them together with a fair amount of hand-tightness and ran them against the wire wheel without touching the threads. You’ll remove the special coating that accompanies hardened fasteners like these and will make them more difficult to remove the next time you need to (sometimes even with the application of anti-seize materials!).

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

After about 20 minutes of tiny projectiles to the stomach and a podcast we couldn’t hear over the drone of the bench grinder, everything was looking as if it had been freshly cast in a medieval blacksmiths forging facility. Blacksmithery? Correct us in the comments. Someone. Anyone. Please read our blog! Anyway, on to paint they go.

Step 3: Epoxy Paint Me Like One of Your American Anti-Roll Bar Brackets

Previous projects on our Alfa Romeo Spider left us with more than enough black epoxy paint. We double-fisted each pair of components on some bailing wire and coated each one three times. Normally, we wouldn’t coat the threads of a fastener with paint because it can negatively alter those threads capacities to have torque applied to them. In other words, they won’t tighten no good no more. But since we had the nylon nut already covering the only area of thread that it would ultimately be engaging, we went ahead and painted it with the intention of it being a rust preventative maintenance.

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

While we let them air dry between each application, it’s important to let them cure for whatever period of time is suggested on the back of the can. Since we won’t be installing them again any time soon, we let them rest on the bench to do the requisite curing, hoping all the while that they spring to life the moment we close the shed door and go on a Toy Store like adventure in the time it takes us to eat, sleep, kiss our loved ones (and pets), and return to the shed for the continued torture of not being inanimate objects that become sentient in the absence of people.

We hope you had a happy holiday season and that you slayed many no matter what belligerent you fought for in the war on Christmas.

Thank you for reading!

Duncan Millar Uncategorized

Exhausting – If It Ain’t Broke, Break It: How to Replace a Broken Exhaust Manifold with an even Broken-er One (Part Two)

Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar

We will never be exhausted in our attempts to exhaust the potential of using derivatives of the word “exhaust” in our wordplay. But we sure are exhausted from working on this exhaust. Plainly put, “Hi Exhausted, I’m Dad.”

We apologize for the cliffhanger in the last post. Years of surprisingly good, serialized television has made us incapable of just wrapping up a story (thanks for nothing Breaking Bad). After a bit of manual machining with our battery-powered drill, set on the low gear and with light and continuous trigger pulls, we opened up the mounting holes on our stainless steel manifold’s baseplate so that it could now freely mount to the head. Poor, or no quality control left us with a manifold that was off by several millimeters so mounting was impossible.

Once it was in place, we go to tightening the nuts and studs. A good practice when re-using hardware (that’s safe to be re-used), is to clean all of the surfaces and use anti-seize or thread-locking materials. If you’re comfortable with the use of a threading tap, find the right one (because if you don’t, you’ll be living a popular South Park meme format), and give each threaded hole a good what-for so that your not fighting any grime, dirt, dust, or chips that may have found their way inside.

With most of the nuts and studs hand-tightened, we ran into accessibility issues particular to this manifold. The bottom nuts on either side of the cylinder-two piping were impossible to screw with our power tools. However, being familiar with the plight of un-powerable (clearly sic) bottoms, we resorted again to the technology of the proletariat, the combination wrench. Not being so foresighted as to have ever obtained a ratcheting 11mm combo wrench, we toiled away at the two small nuts with a fever, knowing that the sooner it was over, the sooner we could get back to talking trash about Breaking Bad’s younger sibling, who won trophies, but could never seem to really make mom proud, Ozark. With the last two snugged, we tightened everything else in a sort-of star pattern to evenly apply pressure across the manifold as best we could.

Photos courtesy of Duncan Millar

If you’re lucky, the old oxygen sensor came out with some gentle persuasion from a rented or purchased oxygen sensor socket and some propane heat around the bung. If you’re even luckier (like us; suckers), you have an uninstalled sensor sitting around in your spare parts bin from a Miata that you should have never sold. Why did you sell it? Because you didn’t have the space? It still drove. You could have parked it at a friend’s house until you had…Don’t worry about that connector that doesn’t match. We happen to have a small case of 2-8 pin male and female connectors for just these occasions. We bought it online a couple years ago because, who’d’ve thunk, splicing wires together with electrical tape in many ways proved to be a sub-standard repair. You can go to any hardware or automotive store and get a kit like ours, or just get a single connector set to replace the ECU and sensor sides respectively. With a new connector and matching thread (most oxygen sensors regardless of application seems to be M18x1.5 pitch thread), we plugged it in at one end and tightened it down in the other. Unless you have more exhaust work to do because the layout changed so drastically, as ours did, cross out the line on your to-do list that says “Fit Stainless Steel Manifold” and then go out and race your E30 (or whatever other peasant-mobile you’ve been working on for ten or more years*).

*Note from the Editor (who also happens to be the writer, media liaison, intern, and barista) We’d like to take the blog in a slightly new direction. Focusing on E30 specific content is always going to be the purpose of this blog, but we want just as many people to race their cars as we want every E30 owner to race theirs! Our writing style will change a bit to be inclusive to the learning hobbyist so we’ll probably spend more time on tool use, automotive theory, and safety, and other team members have their own projects that will be guesting on the blog. But it will mostly always be through the lens of our rusty trusty sedan.

Duncan Millar Uncategorized

Mission: Incompetent II – Brilliantrot Bugaloo

If you’re looking for Mission: Incompetent I – Manufactured in West Berlin; don’t bother. The title was just a delivery device for the “Electric Bugaloo” gag. On the other hand, the mission of building this car has always existed and was inspired by the Grassroots Motorsports $2k-and-change Challenge. If we could, we’d try to mainly do two things: take whatever we had lying around and turn it into a repair or a performance modification and use pre-owned or cross-compatibility upgrades before we resorted to brand new tech. Mission objectives are to prove to the MacGuyver fans that we’re on the level and to show that we’re wise and humble purchasers to potential mates. In the process, we’d also try to be smart about durability and not doing any work twice.

We’re not so good at the former. In reading about the $2k Challenge Subaru Impreza Rally knock-off so many years ago, we were struck by the ingenuity of taking an antique refrigerator and re-purposing it as a fuel cell. If we’ll ever have the opportunity to effect something similar, we can only hope, but we’re proud of our handful of patch jobs nonetheless (see the stainless steel hack job in the featured picture). We’re hoping to step that game up over the winter with two large stainless steel panels we found, staged near some local dumpsters, that we plan to use for a few small projects like plugging the sunroof and forming blanks, switch panels, and an instrument cluster panel backing.

The latters, we’re not bad at. Our 4.10 limited-slip differential was a junkyard find from a ’90 318is. If you have an M42 and mostly autocross, stick with a quick ratio differential to squeeze power out of it. TRMotorsport C1s with 4-year old (at the time of purchase) Kumho Ecsta XSs from a friend’s brother. The rims are strong, but lighter than stock rims will be, and the tires were built for autocross with a quick warm-up and low treadwear rating. If you can find a never-used set, grab them, because it seems they’ve been discontinued. The master cylinder was a brand new replacement for an E32 series 750il. It will give you better pedal modulation but not more power. You’ll have to do hardier, more expensive upgrades to most of your brake components for that. We paid $40 for a set of stainless braided brake hoses from the owner of a lifted Miata and M40-powered E30 Estate, and when the time came to install them, were replaced in stride with the front lines. Lines that were rusting in more than a few places and we’re unlikely to survive any further re-positioning, especially after removing the ABS pump from the system. That was done with new nickle-copper line.

The main suspension components were done at hefty (but still heavily coupon’d) sums though. Costs that were unavoidable considering a side-quest for the car was to replicate the SpecE30 suspension since it was known to work well and we didn’t care much for guessing. If we can recall correctly, it was about $400 for the Bilstein B8 shocks, $250 for the ST anti-roll bars, $100 for used H&R Sport springs, and $200 for polyurethane bushings (which ultimately ended up being free because of unintended customer service related consequences). Because our hindsight vision was closer to Mr. Magoo than it was The Terminator in the beginning, things like making sure the adjustable endlinks on the anti-roll bars staying properly greased has yet to be rectified and now parts that would probably last a long time, won’t live to see their children graduate high school.

The pee-ass-day-resistance among all of these modifications however is the Z3 steering rack. If you do nothing else, apart from good tires, rip out the old steering rack (which, given the common mileage on old E30s, is probably ready for hospice care anyway), and put in a fresh Z3 rack. We chose to treat this modification like starting over from a messy divorce by dating someone 10 years younger with a refurbished steering rack from an M44 powered 1.9L Z3 (so non-M from 1996-2002). There’s talk online about different colored tags to help you identify the rack and whether you should get it from an E36 3-series, Z3M, or E46 3-series. We bypassed all of that arguing by simply asking the supplier to physically verify if the rack we were interested in was truly 2.7 turns lock-to-lock and once that was verified, had it shipped. Don’t forget that you’ll need E36 inner and outer tie-rods and. Compliment it with a used steering wheel hub and knock-off Momo steering wheel.

If you’re on a budget like we are, perpetually, follow our philosophy. After that, sell all of your belongings, and give us the money. By doing so, you’ll pledge your allegiance to us and the Cult of the Malfunctioning Dashboard Cluster. If you don’t have a budget, build the car with all brand new, lightweight, parts and use your imagination for boring things like how much money is in your hedge fund instead of ingenuitive ways to build a unique and well-sorted E30!

P.S.,

If you grew up on the internet at the same time we did, you’re probably a craigslist junkie too. Below is a list of sites to check regularly for deals. Don’t be afraid to check in on your favorite builds or find new ones on forums and in magazines for inspiration! And as always, go out and race your E30 already!

Craigslist.org

  • For Sale> Free
  • For Sale> Auto Parts
  • For Sale> Barter

Searchtempest.com

  • You can use this site to search several craigslist.org regions all at once!

R3vlimited.com

  • A BMW forum with a heavy E30 community and an active classifieds section.

Row52.com

  • A aggregator search site for junkyards that lets you search by year range for a specific model and set up alerts when participating junkyards get the model you’re looking for.

Facebook.com

  • Facebook’s classifieds sections are recently on-par or better than craigslist. We recommend using this as much as you would CL.

Letgo

  • We’re not really familiar with this site but we got a good deal on a PS4 to play GT Sport on so give it a shot.
Duncan Millar auto repair, autocross, automotive, bmw, e30, m42, racing, road racing, Uncategorized

Better on Vinyl – How to Apply a Windshield Banner

We have many fantasies. Most, if not all of them, could be shared with you here, but they would take away from the focus of this article. We’ll save those for our other blog, “What Macaroni Shapes are Best When Bathing in Tubs Full of Classic Italian Pasta Dishes?”

Today’s non-carbohydrate fantasy involves the awakening of something inside our childhood spirits. The dreams of those 11-year-olds, sat in front of standard definition televisions, fighting for their lives on that final Gran Turismo Super License test, have come to life. We are adults now, with wallets and eBay accounts. We now have a vinyl Gran Turismo windshield banner! Life is now the realest driving simulator!

All the “greats” have and had them. The words adorn instantly recognizable cars and events like the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb and the Nissan GTR Nismo GT3. Now, finally, it graces another legend in the motorsport community; our 1991 M42-powered BMW 318i!

  • Courtesy of Topspeed.com contributor Ciprian Florian’s blog
  • Photo courtesy of blaqspeed
Photo courtesy of Duncan Millar

How can you grow up to be like us, you ask? Follow these steps and be prepared for the onslaught of highway thumbs-ups and on-the-spot marriage proposals from women, and men, because you’re going to be swimming in them thereafter once you’ve hit the road.

Not Pictured – Tissues for Wiping Away Tears of Joy

Photo Courtesy of Duncan Millar

Tooling is pretty light on this one. Especially compared to what we needed to install the flux capacitor. We’ll go over the tools you’ll need from left to right and then up top.

1. We had a small felt lined squeegee left over from a long-ago attempt to recreate a Marlboro theme on our hood, but you can just use a credit card. If you don’t have one of those, use your favorite adult video store loyalty rewards card. It will likely work much better because the felt lining wasn’t as aggressive on the bubbles as we’d have liked.

2. We used an old putty scraper to remove a sun-faded car class sticker from an event we ran at the Autobahn Country Club over the summer. This is another tool that could be successfully substituted with your adult video store loyalty rewards card.

3. In your mind’s eye, picture a can of brake cleaner or Goo-Gone next, to help you get all of the left-over sticky residue free of the glass.

4. (Imagination time again) Painter’s tape will help you keep everything in place while you line up the banner.

5. Use a smaller blade like ours if you can because cutting away the excess is going to need a precise hand, unencumbered by something bulky like a carpet cutter.

6. Use the microfiber and towels to clean the surface area that the banner will be affixed to.

Scrape the Pain Away

Cleaning the windshield is likely going to be the easiest part, but arguably the most important. Bubbles can form around debris stuck underneath after a time, even if you manage to completely squeegee them all away initially. It’s the simplest part of the job to get right, and you wouldn’t want your mother to be disappointed in you again, would you? Especially after that stunt you pulled at your high school graduation?

If you have something as dreaded as what was nothing more than a package label stuck to your windshield, scrape as much away as possible with something that won’t scratch the glass beneath it. Use some brake cleaner to apply a fatality to the remaining goo.

Profession: Video Game Livery Editor

Now that you have a flawless windshield, line up your decal as best you can. We used the bottom seal of the windshield as a reference by making a mark at its center (green squares in the picture below) with a permanent marker. We found the center of our banner and matched it with the centerline mark (green) as best we could. Then from either side of the banner (upper yellow marks), we measured from its bottom to the bottom seal of the windshield (lower yellow marks) to make sure there were even distances. Throughout, we used some painter’s tape to temporarily hold the banner in place as we moved it around.

This is the tricky part. With the banner held in place by the painter’s tape, pick a side of the car, and as best you can, with a partner, pull the backing away a few inches and start applying the banner. Once you make the initial contact, start squeegeeing. Squeegee in the same direction as you are applying the banner. Get most of it laid down with this method and then worry about squeegeeing the edges. Don’t push too hard into the corners because you might cut into the vinyl. To make that step easier, cut away the excess, but leave yourself about two inches to grab at. Gently, (petting-a-kitten gently and not lock-the-door-and-mute-the-sound gently) pull that two inches up at a 90 degree angle to the glass as you push the vinyl into the corners with your edge.

Once you feel satisfied you have a fairly bubble-free and cornered banner, grab that small cutter. We recommend that you do this in two or three evolutions. Cut away 90% of the excess in a slow and steady pass. Be careful not to put too much weight on the windshield and bust it because you’re too focused on edging. If you see what we did there, go ahead and pat yourself on the back. In your second or third pass, cut away the excess right at the intersection of the seal and the glass. That should leave you with an aesthetically and nostalgically pleasant vinyl banner!

Go out and race that E30 already!

Duncan Millar auto repair, autocross, automotive, bmw, e30, m42, racing, road racing

The Thermostat Housing Crisis

If you’ve installed your housing without cracking it because the thermostat was in the correct orientation, skip this article and go read about something important like the abuses of workers that mine spiritual healing crystals in Madagascar. Otherwise, you’re in the right place. Quiksteel putty proved to be a good temporary fix for getting the car back and forth, but not for the arguably heavy demands of autocross.

Step 1: Tooling

Prepare your anu…tools. You’ll be removing about 15 fasteners total, depending on the completeness of your 25 year-old E30. Four for the housing, two for the camshaft sensor, four for the cooling fan, and three hose clamps. Substitutionaly, in our case, two zip-ties for the fan shroud.

If you’re an animal, get yourself a 3/8” drive ratchet with a short 10mm socket and short 10mm extension to do most of the work.

If you’re a masochist, leave the fan connected to the fan clutch when you try to remove the housing. Otherwise, grab a 5mm hex wrench (or Allen wrench if you’re the type to buy name-brand cereal) to remove the four fasteners on the fan’s face and the one on the camshaft position sensor. Pay attention to the fan’s orientation.

Step 2: Removal

Start with your magnetic pick-up camshaft position sensor. Remove that with your hex wrench. Take this opportunity to put a new rubber on it if you don’t want your juices to leak out after you reinstall it, and thus, justify the innuendo made here in this blog post. With your 10mm socket (or impact driver with L-bend attachment [for those of us who sip caviar straight from goblets]), and remove the fastener holding the camshaft wire-management bracket to the head. After you’ve disconnected the hose from the passenger-side of the housing and drained the coolant to your favorite municipal water source (mine is Flint, Michigan’s), remove the four holding the thermostat housing in place.

Step 3: Reinstall

Prepare your anu…thermostat housing. Because we don’t support the corporate industrial gasket complex, we voted to make my own. We won the vote because wewaere the only voters. Use your housing as a template to cut out your new gasket. Schmoo a little goo on the housing side to help seal any imperfections in your replacement housing (ours was a junkyard find), but mainly to keep it in place while you reinstall it.

Hypothetically Spewing…

Our hypothesis here at RaceYourE30 Technologies and Silicon Phallis Enthusiasts is that the application of a little anti-seize may prevent the corrosion build-up between the rubber hose and aluminum on the return side of the housing.

Go ahead and reinstall your housing with the original fasteners (and maybe a little blue thread locking material) and don’t forget in the process that discriminatory housing practices are largely responsible for the poor socio-economic conditions in most low-income, urban neighborhoods. Next, find the torque ratings, and fasten everything from your camshaft sensor to fan shroud to specification.

Step 4: Car Cool Good, Car Hot Bad

Once everything else is connected, disconnect the return side hose at your radiator and dump some coolant down its gullet to fill in the air pocket created by dumping it when the housing was removed. Remove the small bleeder screw at the top of the radiator near the expansion tank and dribble a little in their…they’re…there too. Lastly, bleed the system with your choice of procedures available to you on the internet. Ours involves having an Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Rabbi grab a chicken by the neck and swing it above and around the engine bay until dead to pull out all of the bad juju banging around in our four-banger’s coolant system. To add to the realism of the more-work-less-pay Millenial image we mean to portray, we leave the actual bleeding for another day.

Thanks for reading and go race your fucking E30 already!

Duncan Millar auto repair, bmw, e30, m42

Fukentight or Gutentight? Valve Cover Thread Repair for the Torque-Spec Blind

How to Reverse Years of Gradual and Neglectful Thread Damage: When You Should Have Known Better and Bought a Torque Wrench a Long Time Ago

Like any other crap-can enthusiast, you’ve probably removed the valve cover on your weekend car at least once or twice (in order of necessity) to paint it or replace the gaskets. Proper tightening pattern aside, the most important thing to remember is to not strip the threads on what, for the uninitiated, is the cylinder head of your vehicle. This repair can be done to any vehicle, but this will cover the intimate intricacies of the M42 powered E30 BMW 318i.

Step 1: Remove the valve cover an unnecessary amount of times over the 10 years you’ve owned the car, and each time you reinstall it, gently strip one or two threads on your aluminum cylinder head. Make it an artisanal experience by whispering “fuck” into a vintage coffee can full of spare nuts and bolts.

Step 2: Prepare your tools. For this car, we used the remnants of a Helicoil M6x1.0 kit which consisted of a thread tapper, driver, guide, and enough inserts to do all 15 threads. If you’re comfortable with power-tapping, rig up something like what I’ve got in the picture so you can use your drill.

Step 3: Leave the valve cover in place to prevent the intrusion of foreign materials into the valvetrain. Wear your MAGA hat while you work if you like to pretend they’re little brown folks that are trying to jump over an easily scalable wall, but who in reality probably just overstayed their visas. Just go to the next step already.

Step 4: Drill out your hole with your 1/4″ drill. Use a long one to make up for the width.

Step 5: Blow or suck on your hole to get the chips out.

Step 6: Tap your hole.

Step 7: Insert your insert into your hole.

Step 8: Stuff something small into your hole to break the “tang” off of your insert.

Step 9: Test the limits of your hole by torquing the fastener to whatever torque you Googled, because we ain’t taking the blame if you just “send it.”

Step 10: Knock over an open bottle of oil, apply cat litter immediately, clean up at a later date (See image 1). Check this project off of your list!

Edit – 02/14/2017: Thanks for reading and don’t forget to follow us here on the blog, and on Instagram @rye30racing. We’ll be racing plenty over the summer so we can bring you more high quality content like you read above.