JRW'S 91 318is turbo build

[wazzu70]

I drilled and tapped the head to put in NPT block off caps. The rear hole does not have much material FYI! I used 3/4 NPT on that one and I believe 3/8 NPT on the center one.

I kept the plastic pipe in the block for the coolant overflow, although some day I would like to just make a replacement for the one line. I hate having the other ends capped off because Im afraid of a split in the cap. So far no issues though.

It does make the area much cleaner!!

[jrw21]

Made a bit more progress tonight. This is about as far as I am going to go with the engine for awhile as I will be directing more time to the withering chasis that is rusting away as I type this.




this is how it will be sitting for awhile, such a shame as I would like to fire it up!!

[wazzu70]

Looks fantastic though!!

[benz-tech]

Everything looks fantastic. I hope to get back to mine soon as well.

[jrw21]

Back to the chasis: I spent the day cutting out rust spots and welding in new sheet metal. The area directly under the accelerator pedal was almost missing. You can see where the pedal mounts to the floor in the first pic.

[Tgoode318]

Nice weld's! Now i'm scared to look at my chassis... Would expect this from an older bmw or even an e30 but to see this level of rust/degradation on a pretty clean e36

[jrw21]

The under coating is good and bad.. If water gets trapped underneath of the coating it has nowhere to go so it just sits that are rots away the metal. Some of the areas I removed undercoating from looked like brand new primer and metal...others not so much! Whenever I finish repairing the rust and fabbing new brackets etc. I will have the chasis soda blasted and painted with POR-15.

[jrw21]

I really like the look of the stock e30 front and rear bumper. But unfortunately I am forced to go a different route due to a birds nest that was under my battery:






It looks terrible but somehow I managed to make it look better than the birds nest battery box. It will all be hidden by an mtech II bumper so no worries.

[jrw21]

Small update: Made some rear sway bar reinforcement plates

[jrw21]

Back at it after a nice long summer and non existent fall.  Dropped it off this evening at a sandblasting shop. They are going to clean it up with corn husks and fine grain sand.  Won't start til next week so hoping to have it back for the long weekend after thanksgiving.

Here is the chasis all loaded up.

[jrw21]

[jrw21]

[wazzu70]

So envious of your clean shell!! Turned out great!

[Nick_318is]

Wow between your and Norm's builds this is great to see.

[keflaman]

I may have missed where you talked about the roof, but what happened to it? Did you cut out everything to go "slick"?