E46 M3 - Kumho Championship Race Car Build

[///martin]

proper and perfect work with details

[jibber_monkey]

Martin, apart from an e36, I don't quite know what your car is but I like it! Any links you'd care to share?! :-)

[///martin]

Originally Posted by jibber_monkey

Martin, apart from an e36, I don't quite know what your car is but I like it! Any links you'd care to share?! :-)

I update the threat when have something new to share but the car is not ready.I hope soon will share new updates

[Neil M]

Originally Posted by jibber_monkey

Martin, apart from an e36, I don't quite know what your car is but I like it! Any links you'd care to share?! :-)

Something to be going on with: http://www.cslregister.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10414

[///martin]

Originally Posted by Neil M

Something to be going on with: http://www.cslregister.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10414

[jibber_monkey]

Wow! That's one amazing car Martin! Mad. Utterly, utterly mad. But amazing :-)

[jibber_monkey]

Should have a proper update tomorrow but for now, here's some piccies of the passenger door shaped, fitted and working i.e. it fits in the hole! Shut lines look alright too for our first attempt at a fibreglass door, which is nice.

[jibber_monkey]

OK, first with the good news. We've managed to get all the arms bushed up and fitted



Seriously impossible to fit these bushes without a hydraulic press!

[jibber_monkey]

So that was the good news.

The bad news is we bought a Butler Motorsport endurance engine off a reputable race team to reduce the build time on this project. This is only the second time we've bought an engine off someone, normally we build our own race engines, not least because we can but secondly because...

...the first time we bought an engine was a part built Nissan SR20DET with forged Tomei rods, CP Pistons and all sorts of other loveliness. We finished the build, mapped it up then watched as it ate head gaskets every time we took it out on track. "Why?" we thought "The parts are all genuine. The build is perfect. The machining is all good. Why the hell is it blowing head gaskets?!"

Turns out the numpty we bought the engine off got his calculations wrong when removing the squish from the head. He'd mixed up mm cubed for cm cubed and specified the wrong pistons. Upshot was we were inadvertently running a 14:1 compression ratio turbo engine trying to push 1.2 bar. And we were the numpties for getting all over excited about expensive labels without checking the calculations.

So lesson learned and never again, right?

[jibber_monkey]

So to our "Butler Motorsport" endurance engine.

Now Terry at Butler has a cast iron reputation for building rock solid S54 race engines, he's also a thoroughly decent bloke.

We've also known the race team that sold us the engine as they've been buying batteries off us for a number of years.

So a Butler endurance engine running 288/280 Schricks, ARP bolts, tilton clutch, flywheel, all ancilliaries etc that "just needs dropping in after a precautionary refresh of the shells" for a not inconsiderable premium over a donor S54 engine?

Well. It was going to cost us more than building our own but would cut a week off our build time (and frankly we needed all the help we could get to get this project back on track).

So what could go wrong? Right?