Tim's Mystic Blue ZHP Coupe

[Galapolis]

Have you replaced the steering coupler yet? Might help a little. What also helped on my car was torquing down the steering rack.

[t.er]

Have you replaced the steering coupler yet? Might help a little. What also helped on my car was torquing down the steering rack.

Yep the steering coupler only has maybe 20k km on it or so. I'll add the steering rack bolts as another thing to check.

I suspect alignment shops don't run into these issues because they have grease plates, so when they make toe changes there isn't any binding in the tire or any of the rubber in the system.

[ZHPizza]

Yep the steering coupler only has maybe 20k km on it or so. I'll add the steering rack bolts as another thing to check.

I suspect alignment shops don't run into these issues because they have grease plates, so when they make toe changes there isn't any binding in the tire or any of the rubber in the system.

Wait you didn't use grease plates when you were making adjustments? That would definitely explain why you had trouble with the e46 (that has a ton of rubber bits for isolation) and not hondas (rubber bits cost money to produce lol).

There are several ways to DIY grease plates with stuff like salt or...well...you know.....grease...

[t.er]

Wait you didn't use grease plates when you were making adjustments? That would definitely explain why you had trouble with the e46 (that has a ton of rubber bits for isolation) and not hondas (rubber bits cost money to produce lol).

There are several ways to DIY grease plates with stuff like salt or...well...you know.....grease...

Yeah, in all of the online DIYs I've looked at it didn't seem like not having grease plates was a concern, but then again I guess our cars are just that sensitive with all the rubber. Gonna try again early next week, ensuring the steering rack is centred post-guibo, and gonna use wax paper and soap as a cheap grease plate and hopefully that solves my toe issues

[t.er]

Proudly sponsored by Vaseline:





Unfortunately there were still issues, I also made sure to line up the marks on the steering rack. Hoping my car isn't crooked or some shit, but the last time it was on a rack it aligned fine, and that was after both accidents which did not affect the suspension. I have a couple leaky valve stems on my track setup so the shop that mounted my tires is going to have those fixed. Just going to get my car aligned at the same time:

[ZHPizza]

Damn this is frustrating and I have spent 0 hours working on this alignment. Can't imagine how deflated you're feeling right now. Hopefully the shop is able to square it up and you're able to fine tune it down the road.

[t.er]

Damn this is frustrating and I have spent 0 hours working on this alignment. Can't imagine how deflated you're feeling right now. Hopefully the shop is able to square it up and you're able to fine tune it down the road.

Yeah, definitely frustrating. Not sure what it is, probably a multitude of issues including some sort of bushing preload somewhere. I was talking with a bunch of guys on NAM3Forum, they seem to be okay, but some of them spent $$$$$ on their string alignment setups. On my end we seem to be doing everything correctly, yet toe is just wonky. If anyone else here does a DIY string alignment on their car I'd be interested in hearing if similar problems arise.

Took it to the shop today and these were the readings:



Pretty hilarious all things considered, because on Monday we literally guessed toe since strings messed it up. Drive up on ramps, turn the tie rods 1/4 turn, small test drive, assess, then back on ramps and adjust tie rods again. Rinse & repeat 5 or 6 times and somehow we ended up with dead-on 0.10 deg toe out on each side.

Anyways the shop also did a small inspection and found a worn FCAB on the passenger's side. Since toe was not off by much in the rear I decided to wait until I replace the FCABs before re-aligning. Just have to shop around a bit, with Canadian parts markup even standard Meyle HD FCABs are $100 USD and I don't get the warranty from FCP. And unless I go to the stealership Z4M FCABs are out of the question

[sillieidiot]

just get one of us order it and send it to you lol

like 100 each for meyle fcabs? damn that's like the price of the z4m fcab.

[t.er]

just get one of us order it and send it to you lol

like 100 each for meyle fcabs? damn that's like the price of the z4m fcab.

That's very kind of you, I'd be willing to cover shipping cost + a bit extra for the hassles. However I don't think that'd circumvent the shipping costs if I were to order from ECS or FCP and have it shipped to my house. I was looking up some quotes from USPS or Fedex, it just seems that crossing the border adds significant cost for shipping, even if I were to have my items shipped free to a US address, then shipped to me.

I added some bronze caliper bushings and FCABs to my cart at ECS and shipping would be $40 USD, with duties and import taxes another $40 USD. So I think it'd make sense to have my items delivered to a USPS or Fedex store in Niagara NY and pick them up there (like how I did with my brakes when I went to Texas). I also have to replace my fairly new HPS pads because of severe pad taper wear, so I'll have FCP ship them there, swap the pads in the parking lot, then ship the old ones back immediately before going home. Just need to wait for borders to open, and for COVID to blow over.

[t.er]

Next up was OMSC autox, the first event with my new RS4s. Obviously it’s hard to compare as the course is never the same, but based off the times relative to other people I saw last year, I’d estimate I’m ~1 second faster around a 40-ish second track. Not bad!



It was also at this point I realized I had severe pad taper in one of the front calipers. So I finally got around to helicoiling the stripped guide pin holes in the caliper carriers:





I also swapped the pads left/right in the car, and the pedal felt horrible. But given it felt fine before I attributed that to the fact that the caliper wants to push the pad straight, when the pad wants to sit crooked. So that big initial dead spot in the pedal is due to the piston taking up the slack with the taper.

Then I had another track day at TMP again with some friends. Nice and quiet, only 7 cars for the whole track. I for sure thought I’d be faster with the new tires:



Boy oh boy I was wrong, my fastest lap was almost exactly 1 second off from last time. It’s hard to say because it’s not a back to back comparison but braking power felt similar to last time, the only difference being the dead spot in the pedal. Cornering also felt similar, not really quicker or slower cornering speeds than last time. This is sort of reflected in the data, in a time-distance graph, the slope of decel looked comparable, and the valleys for cornering speeds are similar. I let one of my friends (who won his class at Ontario Time Attack) drive, and he set down similar times, though to be fair he only did 3 laps. It was about 10 deg C hotter though, so the heat may have had something to do with it. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed with not setting quicker times with 200tw tires. But at least the tires had no discernable wear, they look a bit scrubbed as expected but still look basically new!

Oh, and Hawk pads doing their thing:



My PS reservoir catch can still hasn’t arrived, so I just found an old sock that had a hole in it, which worked really well:



Towards the end of the day, I’d have a red brake light come on whenever I engaged ABS, and it would stay on a for a few seconds, then go off. I hadn’t seen that before, but thought it could be something that normally happens when you engage ABS a lot. Thought nothing of it until when I was driving around town a few days later, I had the orange DSC light, and red brake light come on. Pulled the following codes:

ABS:
- 5E1A CAM DME/DDE Signal Error
- 5E1F PT-CAN chassis number wrong/ECU not initialized
- 5E16 CAN Timeout instrument cluster
- 5E5D Brake_fluid_level low/Switch faulty

LEW:
- 0B Wrong LWS-ID

Symptoms aside from what I mentioned above: Turned the car off, DSC light went away, but ABS light was still there. ABS still works. Got home and cleared all the codes, did a couple more ABS stops and the red ABS light came on again, but went away after a few seconds. Re-checked and still no codes.

Did some searching but at this point it could be a number of things. I have been taking advantage of ABS pretty heavily throughout my autox'ing and track. Until recently I haven't had any issues, but I'm thinking that with my pad taper and resultant very squishy pedal, the ABS module thinks the brake fluid is low, perhaps the other codes come along with that fault. What's puzzling me is the last code, which is new, not sure how the LWS-ID can randomly change.

At this point I decided to swap back to stock pads in the front, which have tons of MEAT left. Interestingly enough, the HPS pads were now worn flat on both sides, but they were almost down to the bottom of the centre groove.



My brass bushings also arrived, which I had ordered (and paid out of the a$$ for shipping & duties) to fix the pad taper:





As a precaution I also rebled the front two calipers. I may have had one or two microbubbles come out, but the fluid didn’t appear as if it had boiled over. Anyways I have another autox coming up this weekend, so I’ll find out then if my ABS issues have been fixed.