What's going on in my shop currently...

[cakM3]

Love the work that's been going on here Amazing updates!

[Will]

Years ago one of my coworkers at the dealer tried to swap the sensors without draining the oil by going real fast, you can imagine how that turned out lol

LOL!!! Sounds like an instant regret.

[GeorgeH]

As always, awesome updates! I wonder what some of the details are on some future projects.

Hopefully the weather there in Texas isn’t impacting you guys too much!

Soon we'll see a red wagon on here weather has been gnarly, we've gotten by pretty easily, we've been lucky.

Congrats on the trailer, it looks very nice. Many good ZHP parts found at the junk yard, well done.

We will wait for updates on the ZHP/S65 conversion.

*S54, this is Larrys AW Slicktop car.

Love the work that's been going on here Amazing updates!

Thanks.

LOL!!! Sounds like an instant regret.

Instant regret for him, a lifetime fond memory for everyone else.

[johnrando]

Good stuff!

Sent from my SM-G988U using Tapatalk

[GeorgeH]

As usual the shop has been jamming away on really cool projects.

We had an E46 M3 come in so we could address some RACP issues. The car had previously been fitted with plates, but they were not welded and prepped after the fact as we would like and there were some popped spot welds and cracked seams that were not repaired.








We started by stripping all of the old undercoating off, identified what need to be done and finished the welding for the plates. Then we stitch welded the wheelwell seams, trailing arm pockets and upper spring perches. Then seam sealed and painted.




Next moved up top and added bracing from CMP auto engineering.








Then reinstalled the subframe with some upgrades including a very cool 4.10 gear diff from diffsonline.






And lastly added new wheel bearings with Core4 Motorsports press-in studs.




We left off with Eileen on the dyno, the reason for that is she is getting a new heart. I loved that little M54 and it was a seriously good engine that gave me 0 issues but it just didn't make enough beans for these long straight tracks. Now that I've been tracking a bit more I usually run in the advanced or so groups and I just can't keep up with corner speeds alone. Now it's not a race but at CoTA I will get 116/117mph on the back straight but other cars in my group will do 140+. SO, there is only one choice ... S54.

Out with the M54. It's incredible the exhaust didn't fall off, literally half the manifold studs/nuts were loose or missing.








I prepped one of the S54s I had on a stand. Vanos rebuild and a set of rod bearings later its ready to go in.












So I kind of lied a bit, there were other engine choices that made sense for this build, but I have a set of these Kromer Kraft headers I pulled off a customers E36. We installed them on his S54/E36 build but found they just were to hard to work around in the heat of the moment at the track (the car is an endurance racer), so we traded labor and I kept the headers. This car had the most incredible sound and I fell in love with them. So because I had these headers sitting on the shelf that is really the primary reason for this build, that's really it just to run this exhaust. Lol








Next, I've found that with our swaps often times unless someone is a S54 fan they don't realize the car isn't stock so I wanted to do something fun to highlight the swap. Liam provided a file to 3d print an adapter to mount the stock plenum velocity stacks to the ITBs and I decided to give it a try. I know that everyone is going to say the heat soak is real, but I want to play with some different ideas and see what we can come up with. If it truely kills a ton of power we'll swap to a Karbonius V1 plenum I have here.








SMG harness thinned of excess wiring.








Normally I wouldn't pull the front end to swap the engine but I knew the headers were going to be a bit of work so I did it to help facilitate that.








The headers were designed to use the E36 support arms which would work on this setup, but it would also move the engine back. Which normally wouldn't be an issue but I wanted to keep the engine in the stock location to try out a GS6-53 (E9x 6MT) swap kit we are working on. So we had our fab guy make an engine support arm with the E46 pickup points but the E36 form factory and that got it all where it needed to be.










Custom driveshaft for the GS6-53 conversion.




And running albeit with some details left, but at least she moves under her own power again.




While I liked the Harlequin theme it sure made the car stick out, but it was time to be all one color again.






Also, swapped doors with a street car project. The street car had a crunch door and while I don't like Eileen having a beat up door, I'd prefer that car to have the nice one of the two. I should have just painted another door when I was doing the paintwork, but it didn't occur to me until later, lol.




Getting there...




This post is getting pretty long, so I'll wrap it up and continue on at a later date.

[fredo]

Good to see the progress made on Eileen. In for more details.

[fredo]

More updates on George's e46fanatics thread, last one is from 07-Oct-2023.

https://www.e46fanatics.com/threads/...ently.1256645/

[GeorgeH]

https://www.e46fanatics.com/threads/...ently.1256645/

Thanks Alfredo for bumping this, I should spend some time updating this thread.

Side note, I am not getting notifications to threads I am subscribed to even though I have that option turned on, anyone have any ideas on that?

My current "daily" driver, Billy Idol, ZHP engine powered, NB interior swap with silver cube trim. Black headliner conversion in progress and then will likely get a 6MT and 3L suspension plus body work:

[fredo]

That's a great looking AW touring! I like the progress so far.

Two ideas about your notification issue. I receive mine using this setting: "Instantly, using email."

1) Did you check your Spam folder? The sender is: forums@zhpmafia.com
2) Go to Settings then click on Subscriptions. What do you see there? I see a list of threads that I subscribed to:

[GeorgeH]

Alfredo:

1. Nothing in Spam
2. In settings: "Default thread subscription mode: Instantly, using email"
3. Bottom of the thread --