Supersporting my Z3

[Dontfeedphil]

Hello all;

I just got a message from the old forum to come over here. So here I am, and I am just gonna import all my info from the last stuff and ctrl c it. I dunno, I'm not good with politics.

so... ctrl v

Hello all,

I've had this car for about 15 years now, it was my college car, my first car I took to an autocross track, then HPDE, and just general tomfoolery around the backroads of Shenandoah mountains in Virginia. I loved everything about it, except one thing, lack of high end power. I fooled around with it made some engineering mods/mistakes along the way, and was able to make it hum around 148 hp.

Well, last year, I got my hands on an e36 m3 diff, and with a *slight* modification, I was able to install it. And boy howdy did it become fun, No more anemic understeer. It only took 11 weeks to make that work! (My e28 race car donated a large case diff that could jive with the rear end). So being an enterprising boy that I am, I decided to take the plunge! Supercharge the b*****d!

This was an endeavor that has cost me several months of pain and suffering. I work in a mechanic shop that primarily works with Mercedes, so I have a lot of cool stuff lying around, some of those were AMG injectors from an E55 kompressor (before, you tell me that will never work, you're wrong I have a tig welder that says otherwise). I blame those injectors for putting the crazy thought in my head

I called some friends in the UK and they directed GKD inc, they make a supercharger kit minus the supercharger, but one can be procured off a mini cooper S with little hassle. SOLD! I was in it to win it. After months of trial and error through shelping through my car's wonderful EWS system and bypassing it for a starter button, Installing a Megasquirt ECU and the programming to run, I finally had it running!

As I sat that night with my feet on my table, watching my children play games and stare at my wife pretty blue eyes, I felt... well not as good as you think I would have. The back of my mind something kept gnawing at me, "you aren't making enough power to make that diff worth it.... pull the head..... Cams, you need some cam work.... add coilovers…. Get the car scaled....port and polish...."

And so I gave into it, I called some guys in Philly (VAC motorsports) and gave them a heap of money. Made a new friend, his name is Calvin, good dude. and now I have a set of high strength springs and retainers, a thicker head gasket and some ARP studs. I will (in the next month or so) order a cat cam set with a very aggressive profile. But, as of now, I will start showing car porn.

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[Dontfeedphil]

Ok,

I'm just adding on to what I did two weeks ago. Here's what I did now:

Today, with my boss's gratuity AKA my dad, the guy who taught me how to fix cars for a living, told me I may work on my Z3, he hates that car, he hates the fact that he sold it to me in college and decided I liked it enough to keep it.

Alright, in order to have a decent high performance engine, I was going to pull that head. A slow day at work allowed me to sit back and tinker, this is actually one of my very big happy places in life. I can sit down with my thoughts and look at the dragon ahead of me and decide it's not as scary as I first thought.

There she is, supercharger and all. this was begging for more breathing room to make use of it. I started by stripping it of it's supercharger. I had just bought it and found it fun but lacking any charm. I wanted to marry this car to her parts, One in body and soul.

As I worked on and on I noticed that the plastic parts were not looking very, uhhmmm, good. With that I made an executive decision to replace them. Some of them were made in 1996 or before, they spent there time in hell; time to let them rest.

After setting the timing so both cylinders 1 and 2 were at half (ish) I started to remove the timing gears and the chain tensioner.

And here is where I got within a half an hour

Now some of you have noticed that exhaust manifold is black. I guarantee that not do to oil leak, I bought an aftermarket system from a now defect company and had the header coated by a ceramic coater in my state (detective coating if you are wondering, they are in Richmond Virginia). But that leads us to another problem. The Exhaust ports are too small to make use of the larger manifold

Here is the close up on our dilemma

I measured with the crappiest equipment possible that the original exhaust port is around 40mm by 20 mm. When the new manifold is around 45mm by 25mm. I'm getting custom dowels to center the bolts and square up everything when it comes time to final build

At any rate, I am now waiting on my new parts to be set by machine shop and I hope I will be cranking a respectable amount of power.