The Cart Before the Horse: Spec 3 Build

[JPolen01]

Yes I'm aware of the antique laws and I've probably had more antique registered cars here than everyone but Dave, Blair, or Paul. However, I don't know how many actual checks they have and I may be able to do some convincing about build dates or something. Doesn't hurt to try.

Ask them to throw in a subwoofer while you're at it.

I lol'd

I lol'd even harder that you think you are going to convince the DMV to register your car as an antique 1 year early. Ha! The DMV can barely do the most menial tasks - you aren't convincing them by blabbering about a hypothetical build date.

[Senor_Taylor]

I'm not molesting my stock seats that I'm selling to fund this.

I don't think I'm going to do shit, Polen, but I'm going to try.

These are all things I've considered and I hoped y'all would assume I did my homework.

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[SlimKlim]

I just skimmed the last page so maybe I am missing something but there's no reason you should have to mess with the stock seats to resolve the airbag light.

The resistor trick for both the OCC sensor and buckle switch involve sticking a $0.50 resistor in the plug on the car side, no need to cannibalize anything off the stock seats. I don't think I even had to solder anything for mine.

[Senor_Taylor]

I just skimmed the last page so maybe I am missing something but there's no reason you should have to mess with the stock seats to resolve the airbag light.

The resistor trick for both the OCC sensor and buckle switch involve sticking a $0.50 resistor in the plug on the car side, no need to cannibalize anything off the stock seats. I don't think I even had to solder anything for mine.

Maybe I'll give these a read again to see what resister every is using. Half of the links to descriptions/diagrams are dead.



I still have to take the box from the bottom of the seat correct? I'd then be selling a seat without parts to it.


Unless I literally can shove the resistor in the body side plug on the car, which no guides seem to indicate.


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[SlimKlim]

Unless I literally can shove the resistor in the body side plug on the car, which no guides seem to indicate.

Yea I think you can, I did a quick google and I don't remember cutting up my occ sensors like all those threads seem to be, I'll see if I can see what the hell I did to my car without uninstalling the seats when I get home tonight

[Senor_Taylor]

Unless I literally can shove the resistor in the body side plug on the car, which no guides seem to indicate.

Yea I think you can, I did a quick google and I don't remember cutting up my occ sensors like all those threads seem to be, I'll see if I can see what the hell I did to my car without uninstalling the seats when I get home tonight

Thanks dude. That would be a good solution to all of this. I'm funding the car with free parts and good will. Tearing up the nice sport interior is a last resort here.

I'm borrowing a reset tool as well. Are there local places to buy resistors now that Radio Shack is gone? Walmart?

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[JPolen01]

Amazon prime^

[*insertusernamehere*]

Google Keep is a pretty cool app to take notes in. You can write all of your unprocessed thoughts there to read back to yourself until you come up with something more refined.



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[SlimKlim]

Shocking revelation about my car, it has a functional occ sensor/mat. Who woulda guessed?

So this is my shit, just one resistor i can't remember the resistance of stuck in the car-side of the seat belt buckle sensor to keep the SRS light off. 




Sounds like you're pulling the sensors off those seats. Or send up the batsignal and see if MM has some extras, I poked around my box of random parts but didn't find any

[SlimKlim]

Also this is dredging up old, bad memories.

http://forum.mmsports.org/showthread.php...#pid225375

Six months. Six. Fucking. Months. I've been chasing this phantom SRS light. 

[Senor_Taylor]

Okay, so I'll order some resistors and shove it into the driver seat receptacle, then just throw the stock passenger seat in since that bracket is easier to get in and out and ruin my seat alignment removing it. My understanding is I just need to defeat the seat belt buckle on the drive side then?

[Scott]

Scott, I've already stated that these seats have occupancy sensors and seat belt recepticle sensors. Not having the seat itself plugged in throws airbag lights faults. 2 for the driver side and 3 for the passenger side if I read correctly. It's not as simple as a Miata.

I know it's not Miata simple, but it's also not that hard to do it right and forget it.  The directions are above.

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Yes I'm aware of the antique laws and I've probably had more antique registered cars here than everyone but Dave, Blair, or Paul. However, I don't know how many actual checks they have and I may be able to do some convincing about build dates or something. Doesn't hurt to try.

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You left me out, I've probably had more than all of you combined (or at least been involved more since I grew up with a car collector), I registered my first vehicle as an antique in 2001......

And please live stream you going to the DMV and trying to talk them into giving you antique tags a year early.  They don't care abouu build dates, chassis, etc.  It's a simple computer system and your car doesn't make the cut.

[SlimKlim]

You left me out, I've probably had more than all of you combined (or at least been involved more since I grew up with a car collector), I registered my first vehicle as an antique in 2001......

Lulz

[Evan]

Don's sunoco in Falls Church has been good to me, too. I've taken my cars there a bunch of times for inspections and minor work.

Thats who the London Auto guys pointed me to,  but they wouldnt even take my Lotus.   
Dan's Sonoco a mile down the road however (by OpenRoad) has been very good to me.

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Thanks dude. That would be a good solution to all of this. I'm funding the car with free parts and good will. Tearing up the nice sport interior is a last resort here.

I'm borrowing a reset tool as well. Are there local places to buy resistors now that Radio Shack is gone? Walmart?

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what ohm do you need? I have a box full of resistors , you can swing by and have one or two. Or you can buy 100 for a dollar shipped on ebay.

edit: forgot about Microcenter, they have a whole section of the store devoted to DIY electronics.

[Senor_Taylor]

Spent some time in the garage yesterday and today.

Front suspension is strilled down to the subframe. Waiting on parts to come in to replace everything. New (to me) bilstein struts with Vogtland Springs assembled. Rear suspension taken out and trailing arm ready to have the bushing pressed out. Borrowed the RTAB tool from Christina.

Jake popped by and peer pressured me into letting him strip more interior out, so him and Tyler ripped some more stuff out, leaving me with nothing behind the front seats and a missing front passenger door card. Not sure I want to strip it further than that just yet. I'll see how miserable it is to drive on the street in its current state, but I can imagine the 4 hours to VIR won't be fun.

When pulling the control arms, I saw absolutely nothing wrong with the ball joints that it apparently failed inspection for. They weren't new, but visual inspection showed nothing wrong and they had no vertical slop. No idea how anyone could fail them. I did get the passenger seat back in.

Plan of attack for tomorrow is press RTABS out and press new ones in, shove a resistor in the drive seat buckle plug. Pray to the various gods that my FCPEuro Package comes in. See if I can track down my new found coolant leak on the cooling system that was just refreshed 3 days before me picking up the car.


This week - My Limiters come on Monday, install those Tuesday after work and get the Rtabs finished. Pray again that my FCPEuro Package comes.

Left to do:
Install front control arms
Front Tie Rods
Front Sway bar links
Front struts with reinforcements
Front brakes
Bleed brakes
Rear shocks with reinforcements
Front SubFrame Xbrace
Get the car titled and registered
Clear air bag code when my scanner comes in
Get the car aligned and registered
Swap passenger seat back to race seat
Fix passenger window

Then hopefully I'll have all of this done by the last refrigerator bowl so I can shake the car down in preparation for March VIR.

Last thing I need to do before then is get tires mounted on my Style 32s. I think I've decided to not go R-Comps yet, so I'll look for some RE71s or similar.

Hopefully after that, I can do every other event with NASA and maybe some autocrosses. Then get my subframe and diff bushings done, while at the same time have my subframe reinforcements welded. Beyond that, I don't think I have anything planned for this car, unless someone can suggest something I'm missing.

[Senor_Taylor]

Jake is Chronicalling this build himself:

http://outmotorsports.com/2019/01/woulda...ec3-build/

http://outmotorsports.com/2019/01/longes...sassembly/

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[Jake]

I mean, sorta.

I'd rather hear about how you fought with RTABs directly though.

[Senor_Taylor]

Trying to avoid the micro updates. My limiters go in tonight and the rest of my parts and my air bag tool get here tomorrow. I'm getting the car titled hopefully on Monday and I hope to get it inspected next weekend.





At Jake's request, here's another RTAB Horror story from me. As you all know by now, RTABs are my arch nemesis. My disaster shit pile E46 I bought from Chan for like $12 and a pack of gum needed RTABS desperately a week before the car show my Junior year so I attempted to tackle it in the parking lot at Copper with no tools, no experience, and no day light. I was working on this during what little time I had between class and work and it was a complete mess. I broke a million tools, got yelled at by Copper Beech for working on my car, and ended up destroying my back and having a piece of my trailing arm permanently lodged in my left thumb.

Last year, I knocked out Jake's RTABs on his E46 in like an hour, so I was feeling confident this time. I borrowed the special tool from Christina and got started.



You may not be able to tell, but the "old" style bushings have a rim around the outside that makes them larger in diameter and a lot harder to remove without a specialty tool. The tool consists of a U Shaped piece of metal, a thread rod, and a metal block. You thread the rod through the bushings, place the block on the other side of the bushing on the rod, then place the U shaped piece on the rod on the outside of the bushing. You double nut the rod and turn it to pull the block towards the U shaped piece and pull the bushing out of the trailing arm.

Like I previously said, I blew out my back trying to turn my ratchet using a similar tool I made out of a ball joint kit the first time I did this in 2015, so this time, I figured I'd use an impact. The drive side came out in less than 15 seconds, honestly. I was very very pleased. Zach got back from Starbucks and I triumphantly held up the bushing in my hand showing my prize.



I walked around the car to get started on the other side. I thread the rod through, attached the blocks, and hit it with the impact. The bushing started to inch its way out of the trailing arm, then suddenly it stopped. I let off the impact and soon found that the block, and the double nuts had cross threaded and seized to the threaded rod. I spent the next hour trying to get one or the other to thread off the rod so I could at least get the tool out of the bushing and ended up snapping the rod in half. This at least allowed me to get the rod out of the bushing. The bushing itself was 1/4 of the way out.



I gave up, went upstairs and let off some steam and complained in the group chat. I punished my already empty wallet more and ordered a new $100 tool from Bimmerworld to give it back to who I borrowed it from, waited a few hours and went back down to the garage. I started to sand the inside of the trailing arm on the driver side and figured I'd take a shot at pressing in the new bushing with the tools I had. I placed some zip ties around the outside of the bushing to keep it from mushrooming as I pressed it in and coated the outside with dish soap. I repurposed some parts from my ball joint kit and salvaged the now bent, stripped rod with the block fused to it and made a new tool that allowed me to pull the bushing in 3/4 of the way, which was enough for me to make another tool from parts of my ball joint kit. This tool was a large C Clamp, with a round place on the end of the rod. The other end had a large cup slightly larger than the diameter of these new bushings so I could push the bushing through the arm and not have it bind as it came out the other side. At this point, Tyler came down to the garage and helped me with this process.

Feeling a second wind of energy, Tyler and I vowed to get the other bushing out that night if it killed us. We spent probably 30 minutes heating the trailing arm and trying to flatten the rim on the outside of the bushing so we could use the new tool I had made (The cup is big enough to fit over the new style bushing, but not the old style with that extra rim). We didn't have much success here, so we then decided to drill out the rubber of the bushing to feed a hand saw through and cut the inner sleeve out, then fit a sawzall in to cut the outside of the bushing and chisel it out. This also was a failed attempt as it proved more difficult than we anticipated. At this point, I was ready to go nuclear and decided to cut the flange off of the bushing with an angle grinder so our tool would fit over it. Tyler, for some reason, left me unsupervised as I started contorted myself under the car, wedged between the wall of my garage that's only 6 inches away from rear quarter panel, angle grinder in hand.

What happened next still amazes me. After about 30 seconds of cutting with the wheel... the bushing just falls out. It literally just fell out. I have no idea why it decided to do that then, but after a combined 4 hours of hammering, drilling, chiseling, heating, pulling, etc... it just fell out. Pressing the new bushing was trivial at this point and we wrapped up quickly. My only regret is that I nicked the inside of the trailing arm with the drill, but It's not going to affect anything and I'll probably forget I did it.

[Senor_Taylor]

Reset airbag light and now the light doesn't stay on. Short lived because it will when I take the passenger seat out after inspection.

Got the new RTABS in their pockets with the limiters. These fill up the space between the pocket and the bushing itself which basically removes an axis of deflection. These supposedly make a world of difference and make your stock bushings last much longer.

I also got my control arm bushings in the mail today since FCP decided to ship my stuff in at least 9 different boxes all on different days. Didn't realize I ordered poly bushings but the installation was stupid easy with my ball joint kit.



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[Senor_Taylor]

The rest of my parts came in last night and I had a 5 hour marathon until midnight to get the car back on the ground. New control arms, tie rods, ball joints, struts, springs, sway bar end links, shock tower reinforcements/mounts, rotor, hawk pads etc.

The car feels completely different and is very low now! I romped it around the neighborhood to bed the brakes and really enjoyed it. The front tires rub quite a lot near full lock, but that's probably due to the alignment being WAY off. I even managed to install the tie rods on the wrong sides, I think.