TheDan's Z4R

[nfo]

Silverstone's great isn't it? I will be looking out for a (vaguely) affordable date for next year - I was also there in early November and lucky with the weather.

I am still really pleased with the combination of H+R ARBs with the rear at max and the front at min (only two option on the front) plus the extra camber I mentioned. Tyre wear is really even across the fronts now. Track day photos are also quite useful sometimes - at Bedford in June the photos showed my inside front with daylight underneath it!

[TheDan]

Did a Donington track evening on Thursday as a shake down for the start of the year.

Really impressed with the Quaife LSD on track!! Allows the rear end to steer the car a lot more negating a bunch of the natural understeer built into the car (maxed on front camber currently). Overall, the setup was a lot more neutral edging on the side of understeer still (but barely).

I still want to fit the H&R ARBs which will reduce the camber gain due to body roll. After that I may or may not fit coilovers, but I want to keep it comfortable on the road.

[TheDan]

Posted this on the "What have you done to your car today?" thread, but like to post here to keep the project thread updated

Last weekend I went about updating the VANOS seals using the X8R kit. Ran into a couple of problems along the way.

Firstly, I accidentally rounded the hex bolt/plug that covers the left hand thread bolts on the outside of the VANOS unit. I think it happened because with the limited space I didn't quite have the hex bit fully inserted in the bolt. I tried forcing in a larger Torx bit but that just cut through and turned in the bolt. I started to undo the entire front end (crash bar and front cross brace) as I thought I would have to get a drill on it. Fortunately after I loosened the front end and got a bit more space I hammered the original hex bit back in and managed to crack off the bolt.

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Second issue was when putting everything back together I couldn't find for the life of me one of the nuts for the cylinder head cover. A quick visit to ebay and a few days wait and I had everything back together.

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While I had the engine in pieces I changed the spark plugs for some NGK Iridium ones. Originals didn't look too bad considering they had about 5 track days on them.

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I also swapped over a set of the black backed headlights I bought from a forum member a while ago. I much prefer the look of these ones, especially on a titanium silver Z4.

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Fast forward to today, I changed my front caliper brackets (k-system.pro) to allow for the much better 28mm thick 2-piece OEM M3 discs. I then installed the new M3 discs. Hopefully these wont warp on track like the cheap MTEC ones did. It has been so warm today that I even had to put up an umbrella to provide a bit of shade!

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Excuse the dirtiness of the car and calipers.

[bigwinn]

Good work mate- I may try to join you at donnington one day!

[TheDan]

.
European road trip... completed it mate.

Essentially this trip was a bunch of mini city breaks (Strasbourg, Montreux, Piedmont Vineyards, Riomaggiore, Lucca, Bologna, Italian Alps, Heidelberg and Luxembourg) with great food and some amazing driving in between.

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The route:

We started out in Warwick and drove to Folkestone to catch the 10.20am crossing which we inevitably missed due to traffic on the M25, great start. Eventually we arrived in Calais at 12.30pm and headed for our first city break Strasbourg. This first drive was quite long as we wanted to get most of north France out of the way in one go. To break up the 6 hours journey we stopped off at Circuit de Reims-Gueux to see the old pits and grandstands and take a couple of photos. From Reims, it was 3 hours plain sailing to Strasbourg.

From Strasbourg, the next stop was Montreux on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. On passing through the Swiss border checkpoint just outside Basel we were welcomed by being forced to buy a Swiss motorway vignette for 40CHF! The rest of the journey to Montreux was very beautiful with amazing scenery of rolling forest covered hills to monstrous cliff-sided mountains right next to the road. Finally, when approaching Montreux, the road began to descend from the hills as it opened out to a lovely view of Lake Geneva straight in front.

After Montreux, we were headed for a vineyard on the hills outside the small town of Alba in the Italian Piedmont region. This was one of the routes I pre-Googled as there were numerous options, all of which would have had breathtaking roads and views. The chosen route was to go straight to the Italian border but avoid the much faster Grand Saint Bernard tunnel and take the Grand Saint Bernard Pass instead. This was fantastic. The first section of road on the way up had some roadworks so there was a few areas of waiting for traffic coming the other way, but from about halfway up the road was brilliant. It was a perfect combination of long sweeping corners and tight cambered hairpins all combined with spectacular views the whole time. We stopped just after the lake at the peak for a nice peaceful lunch with a lovely view. I would advise anyone to take this pass instead of the tunnel as it is simply a better, less busy version of Stelvio.

Next destination was the Cinque Terre national park. They don't allow cars into the town we were staying at, so we decided to leave the car in La Spezia station car park and get the 8 minute train to Riomaggiore. Apparently this was quite a popular plan and we found one of the last spaces in the car park at La Spezia station and were surrounded by foreign plates - mostly German and Dutch - doing the same as us. The drive to La Spezia was reasonably picturesque when not in one of the many tunnels. The road unfortunately was quite busy, twisty (not in a good way) and extremely bumpy, leading to us losing a few wheel weights front and rear (more on this later).

The next stop was Lucca which was only 50 minutes from where we parked in La Spezia. There was nothing particularly special about this route as it was so short and we were trying to get to Lucca early to see the town. Driving into Lucca was interesting as we had to go through one of the 3 entry archways, barely wider than the Z4, and then be super careful not to drive into the ZTL (limited traffic zone) which would have netted a €100 fine!

Bologna was after Lucca and the drive was back to the beautiful rolling tree covered hills of the Italian Tuscan countryside with the occasional tunnel through them. These roads were far smoother than the previous two journeys which the car (and us) were quite thankful for. By this time in the road trip we had reached our furthest from home point and were beginning to head back towards northern Europe. Yet again Bologna had some very strict instructions to get to our car park due to the ZTL which had even more cameras than Lucca apparently!

After Bologna was a small village called Trafoi, in the Italian Alps at the base of the Stelvio pass. This was a route I was very much looking forward to because we drove via the shores of Lake Garda which had some fantastically picturesque roads alongside the lake which were great to drive too! We stopped off at the tiny lakeside village of Navene for a pizza and refreshing swim before continuing along the lake and heading deeper into the Alps. The roads in the Alps were reminiscent of the earlier Grand Saint Bernard Pass with beautiful views and lovely sweeping cliffside turns. We then drove the lower section of Stelvio (without all the hairpins) quite late in the day to reach our hotel in Trafoi, which was also fantastic as there was barely anyone on it at 7pm. We decided not to drive the main Stelvio pass as we've been told so many times that its overcrowded, is essentially just a series of hairpin bends and we would just end up following a slow RV anyway. A group of bikers in our hotel concreted our decision as they went up and down 3 times to try and find a quiet time, but they kept catching slow vehicles and said they wouldn't do it again.

Trafoi to our next stop Heidelberg was a long 6.5 hour journey where the first 2-3 hours were superb with scenic mountain roads leaving the Italian Alps and a lovely section in Austria called the Fern Pass which we luckily managed to hit at lunchtime so it was basically empty! After this we entered Germany, home to the famous Autobahns. Nearly half of our distance to Heidelberg from the German/Austrian border was derestricted, allowing us to burn money in the form of petrol and press on. Unfortunately, because of the lost wheel weights there were some bad vibrations over 120mph so we didn't go for any 155mph attempts despite being overtaken by a couple of Ferraris clearly trying to achieve 200mph+!

Our final mini city break was Luxembourg which was just over 2 hours from Heidelberg on some rather nondescript German Autobahns. By now the car was beginning to develop a few more nuisances (again, more on that later).

After Luxembourg was our long journey back to Warwick, a route that was meant to take around 8 hours door to door. In the end it took us 11 hours because of a long delay for the Eurotunnel at Calais and then yet more traffic on the M25!!

We arrived home at 10pm, 19 days and 2457 miles after setting off.


The car:

Now, the car. Overall, it performed brilliantly. It only needed an oil top up once and barely needed 0.5L. In terms of the wheel weight issue, this was a minor inconvenience but at 70-80mph didn't actually cause too much vibration. However, by Heidelberg the car was beginning to develop a bit of a lumpy acceleration/throttle between 1500 and 2500 rpm. It only seemed to occur when in 1st to 3rd gear when accelerating gently or 4th to 6th when accelerating gently or quickly. At the time I was almost certain it wasn't engine related because when accelerating hard in 1st, 2nd and 3rd the issue wasn't present and the engine pulled like a train, so we carried on and the car got us home.

Yesterday when I went to get the wheels rebalanced they said 3 of the 4 wheels are very slightly buckled, so I can't determine whether the lumpiness is caused by the wheels or something else. If its not the wheels it could be any of the following:
Clutch / Flywheel
Hub and Bearings
Springs and Dampers
Bushes (front lollipop, RTAB, rear arm bushes)
Prop Shaft Donuts / Guibo Bush
Trans / Diff Mounts
Trans / Diff Fluid
Engine Mounts
Subframe Bushes
Axles
Prop Shaft

I will source some new wheels and try to diagnose and fix the lumpiness if its still present.

All in all it was a fantastic trip that I would definitely do again once the buckled wheels and lumpiness is fixed. Really happy with how the car performed despite the minor issues considering its an 18 year old car.


The Photos (sorry there aren't more!)

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[Mr Tidy]

It sounds like you had a great trip and got some lovely photos.

[Barty]

Looks like a great trip!

[TheDan]

I haven't updated this thread in a while because I didn't manage to get a huge amount done over the winter. The last few jobs I carried out were replacing the hubs and bearings at all four corners, including the brake disc dirt shields that actually weren't in terrible condition, but I thought its best to swap them out while I am in there (as the hub needs to be removed to do these).

The rear hubs and bearings are an absolute PITA!

The standard method is to remove the left and right half shafts from the diff and then pressing them out of the hubs. The problem with this is that on one side the exhaust is in the way so needs to be removed first and access is not easy meaning you have to contort yourself under the car, something I did not want to do with the car on axle stands on gravel.

I managed in the end by removing the upper and lower arm bolts to the trailing arm and levering the trailing arm off the half shaft. This was actually very easy and didn't require me to remove the half shafts. The problem arose after changing the hubs and bearings out as it was very difficult to manoeuvre the heavy trailing arm assembly back onto the half shaft splines.

The fronts were so much easier! Was done with both front hubs and bearings in 2 hours. The hilarious part was undoing the hub nut. My better half was away when I was doing this so I didn't have use of a helper foot to hold the brake while undoing the nut. Fortunately I had seen someone use the electric seat and a plank of wood to push on the brake, genius! Once the brake was held on all I needed to do was jump on a 3 foot breaker bar a few times and the nut came undone (didn't even need to unstake the tabs). After this it was plain sailing.

Here is a little teaser of upcoming future work/parts :

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[TheDan]

Fitted the new test wheel (Protrack 17x9 ET38) on the front with a 245/40/17 Goodyear EF1A6 tyre and there is "plenty" of clearance to the strut and no rubbing at full lock either (the car does need to settle a little). I will be increasing negative camber with some coilovers and camber top mounts soon anyway.

Anyway, here are the pics

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Now... need to order 3 more

[AndyBeech]

Nice mate, looking good

[jock156]

Good work

[TheDan]

I might be confusing people who follow this thread by not posting in such a long time, but here goes!

I finally found a set of lightweight wheels that were to my fitment criteria (not too aggressive, but still fit over my Brembo BBK). The single test fit Protrack wheel that I bought fit absolutely fine in 17x9 ET38, but between receiving the test fit wheel and ordering the other 3, Protrack stopped making this specific fitment (the ET38 aren't a big seller for them). I was actually quite glad about this in the end as I've heard a lot of stories recently of Protrack wheels bending/buckling when hitting potholes or kerbs on track.

I contacted Apex as I would have loved a set of ARC-8s, but I specifically wanted the concave look in the front as well as rear (17x9 ET30). Unfortunately, Apex weren't convinced it was going to fit, but they didn't seem sure (I think they were just covering themselves). I bought a test fit ARC-8 and lo and behold, it didn't fit over the BBK! Again, I am quite glad about this result as I think ET30 would have been just too aggressive in the front and led to a disappearing arch liner.

Now for the better bit, I found out from the M3 forum that Bimmerworld have their own lines of forged and flow-formed wheels. I went onto their website to check sizes and they have what seem to be perfect fitments for many BMWs (E36, E46, E85/E86, E92 etc.) depending on OEM, OEM+, road/track or pure track use. I went for a solid road/track fitment which is 17x8.5 ET38 in the front (equivalent of a 15mm spacer from stock) and 17x9 ET42 in the rear (equivalent of a 14mm spacer from stock) while having no BBK or strut/damper clash issues.

Once these arrived and I double checked the fitment (clears BBK and strut with ease), I got tyres installed (Goodyear Eagle F1 Asymmetric 6). I then installed the stud conversion kit I had lying around for months. Did the fronts last night (for the loctite to dry) and the rears this morning (loctite currently drying).

That's the boring waffle out the way, time for the photos!!

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PS I know the brake discs are bad! I am planning to hone them or replace them if they are too far gone, but I think they can be saved.

[Mr Tidy]

Those wheels look great.

[TheDan]

Basically a duplicate post of the one in 'What have you done to your car today?', but I like to document everything here

Finally fitted all 4 wheels after the stud conversion kit was solidly installed. Overall, pretty happy with the new wheels!

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Next is to replace the bonnet release/catch mechanism in order to pass its long overdue MOT.