Das Race: My '97 M3/4/5

[Jake]

The head is off and at the machine shop! Mega thanks to DJ and Sean for helping (literally) with the heavy lifting, and to Sean for dropping it off at the shop since it's near his house and thus saved me a trip this morning.

Head is at Fairfax Auto Parts' machine shop. They did my Miata flywheel resurface back in the day, built Sean's Jeep motor, and seem to do good work. Nice guys on the phone, too. They are cleaning it up, pressure testing it, and going to mill it down if need be for flatness. I should have it back early next week, so... yay.

Cam trays and lifters (upside down):



In the meantime, I've ordered a new knock sensor - they are a bitch to replace if the intake manifold and head are on the car, so why not do it now - and plan on deleting the AC. The blower fan hardly works anyway, and it's not like I'm DDing the car on hot 100* summer days. According to the internets, I'll save about 43 lbs by removing the AC components.

She's headless!



Per DJ's recommendation, I cowboy'd the head removal and didn't drain the block, which means coolant went errywhere when pulling it. That's why the cylinders are full of the funky green stuff. I'm going to sop it up tonight, and once the car is back together, plan on doing a few oil changes in rapid succession with some cheap Walmart oil (or whatever is on big sale) to get whatever coolant snuck past the piston rings out of the bottom end.

Oh, and DJ has new exhaust manifold hardware so I guess I'm going to install that. So much "while you're in there" work but hey, I'd rather do this job once and spend a bit more/take a bit more time, vs. do several smaller jobs and curse the intake manifold each time I pull it.

Oops, one more thing. Got an M50 intake manifold from Felton while at VIR, so that's the manifold that is going on the car when this all goes back together. It'll flow 40% more air. Ballin.