RobinJI

Are they gas charged and do you know if they'd fit a 240? I might know someone who'd have them.

Yeah, there's an AEB Passat 1.8t in there, with lots of AGU A3 bits (manifolds, turbo, gearbox.) Tough call for yours, I like the 1.8t in mine, but it was a very tough/close call for me when I did it, was very tempted to go with an ABF on throttle bodies, and I'm still not 100% as to which I'd have preferred.

Thanks, I'll be hoping to still build a car to the plans I've got, but they're what's had all the work plowed into them, the stuff I've actually done so-far in the metal would all be relatively easily re-done, and in fact changing plans mean I was going to re-do most of it anyway. As I'm moving soon, I figure it's probably easier to re-do the stuff I have done once I'm settled down, than it is to mess around transporting and storing what I've currently got. The only thing is, I'm quite tempted not to build the designs under a Mini shell anymore, as much as I love Minis, I'm wondering about putting it all under some sort of classic British sports car, current favorite being a Lotus Europa.

Damn good choice! I've got a set of '90 spec RS turbo seats in the Scirocco and they're awesome, pretty much everyone who gets in comments on them. The rest of the plans sound good too. If anyone would be interested in my Mini, I'm going to be having to get rid of it sometime soon. If anyone wants it or any bits of it let me know. I can't really see it being much use to anyone as anything more than a parts donor. If anyone wants to come and get it they'd be welcome to it for basically scrap money. For anyone who can't remember, it's basically the outer skin of a clubman estate with some random bits of space-frame built inside it. No where near finished, and I'll be starting again from scratch when I've got a lock-up sorted after I've moved, but if anyone thinks they can make use of it, I'd love to see it go somewhere other than the scrap yard.

I'm guessing the petrol 6 speed would even more crap with my tiny wheels (running 195/45R15 at the moment!), but what are the 6 speed diesel ratios like? Are the only really longer in the higher gears, or is it a taller final drive? (Not really planning on changing to an 02M any time soon, or ever if things go to plan, I'm just curious.)

If it's getting rebuilt I don't really see any issue with buying a high mileage lump. It used to be fairly common practice to use particularly high mileage engines for racing, as the block had been through so many heat and stress cycles you knew it was a good casting.

Hey, mine wasn't sneaky, I just wanted to post the first line before ranting about Honda exhausts. Jardo, I doubt I'll be going to SOS no, planning to head down to the beach camping that weekend, otherwise I'd be along.

Probably, but he's never wittered on about his being be best/fastest/gods gift, so wouldn't look like a douche or particularly care if he lost My only real gripe with VTEC owners is their insistence to fit ridiculously gash exhausts. Why? If it's over 100 odd db, then it's too loud to go on track, and if it's not on track, you're not going to ever notice the 2bhp you've lost by having a silly silencer (or lack there of). I know my car's not exactly quiet, but it's no where near the volume of most Civics I see, and I still get a little sick of it, and feel embarrassed in town, I just can't understand the need to make so much noise. Other than that, I don't really want to own any post ~1985 hondas, but I can appreciate that they're pretty good cars. One of my favorite Honda's at the moment (only thankfully he's now ditched the banded steels):

My money would be on knackered lower arm bushes, a bent lower arm or a bent/displaced subframe, there's more to suspension than struts . You need to get the geometry checked properly really, not just the tracking, it's likely that either your caster or kpi's out, which are the measurements that actually adjust the self centering. Tracking being out won't cause a car to pull to one side of it's own, all it will do is exaggerate the effects of caster or kpi being out, I've driven cars with the tracking wildly out, and they've centered perfectly all else being well. The trouble is, those settings aren't actually adjustable on your car, (not to a noticeable degree anyway) so for one to be out, something's likely to be bent/knackered under there. If it is changing under braking, then it's most likely to be bushes, so I'd start there. Get it to somewhere that specializes in alignment, just ask on the phone if they'll check caster and camber as well as tracking. A decent place will check if for free/a small cost, then charge per adjustment they actually need to make. (They won't directly check kpi, but on your car it's linked to the camber angle, so an issue would be spotted as long as they check that.) (PS, caster is the angle that a line drawn through the bottom ball-joint and the top mount leans rearwards at, and kpi is 'king pin inclination', which is the angle it leans inwards at, they're what cause the car to sell center, if you've got more of one on one side than the other then it wont self center to the middle.)

I think you missunderstood the thing about them driving differently, they drive VERY well, it's the modern stuff that drives badly. OK there's a few areas that are technically better with modern stuff, but a Mini is much, much more fun, and it's only the tiny tyres that stops them keeping up with modern cars. I'd be careful buying a pre-built car, people bodge stuff, lots, plus there's the people that genuinely think they've done it all 'properly' but haven't at all. Buying a project can be ok, but you as said ideally you want to see it before paint, and have a really good look around it. Duncy, if you need any silly little bits then let me know, we've got loads of random parts at work. Nothing much shiny and nice, but all those fiddly bits you forget exist until you need them to put the thing back together.

They do an R1 powered version too, which is supposed to come in at 420 to 450kg. I can vouch for the general design appearing to be very nice, I'd say it's probably the best designed/packaged kit car I've seen in a little while, all the suspension and steering looks great, only downside I could see's that you can't really be over 6 foot! We've just finished a load of work on a road car belonging to the guy who's just bought the rights to their production, sounds like he's got some interesting plans, and he dropped one down to get us to look at some small bodywork changes, and a possible complete redesign (bodywork wise) in the future. Definitely worth taking a closer look at sometime.

Had a customer drop in a Sylva Riot at work earlier. My god that looks like a lot of fun! Only powered by a little 1.6 Zetec SE, so maybe 115bhp I guess? But weighing in at well under half a ton that must feel like a fair bit! Much better looking in the flesh than in photos too. I was really impressed with how well thought out the chassis seemed to be, everything was very well engineered and you can see why they seem to have been doing well in competition. Really cool little car.

Just got back having been away for the weekend, Adam, yeah, you're right that they tend to aim for a slightly longer roll-couple up front, although it depends on the car, as a lot have a lower front CofG than rear, so can end up with a similar roll couple, but with a skewed roll-axis. With the insurance thing, do you guys declare your catch tank setup or carbon canister removal? Because both are technically just as illegal as the decat. I am with Brentacre yeah, but I'm 98% sure my policy does allow stripping/stickers/semi-slicks, and I was told by them that they do have to know the up to date spec of the car at all times, but that there's no admin fees for changes to the mods, just a quick phone call. That said, I've been on the same policy for 4 years now, so it might well have changed in the mean time.

You see, this is where it gets more complex/awkward. Firstly, adjusting the 'preload' on your coilovers will not make the suspension stiffer at all. All it will do is set where the suspension sits within its travel at ride height, the spring is still the same rate, and will act as such. As the cars weight is already compressing the spring to its ride height, adjusting the spring-perch up will simply move the whole car up. If you then adjust the strut to be shorter to counteract this, the car will simply move back down to where it was, nothing to do with the spring has changed at all, you've just moved the damper down. With these sort of set-ups, the best bet tends to be to aim to set the dampers height so you've got 1/2 to 2/3rds of the travel as positive travel, and 1/2 to 1/3rd as negative (when at ride height.) What you're doing isn't actually preloading, it's simply moving the spring around relative to the damper. In it's true sense, preload is when the spring is adjusted to the point where the damper/droop-stop is holding the spring compressed even at ride height, so you've adjusted to the point where you've got no negative travel at all, and then kept going to compress the spring. The name's literal, the spring is pre-loaded, in that it's loaded before it starts its travel. The only reason some race-cars are set-up like this is down to high levels of aerodynamic downforce meaning that when it gets up to running speed and the downforce is added to the loading the suspension ends up in the middle of its travel. Kind of like you set sag on bike suspension, you set it for the ride height in use with the riders weight, rather than unloaded. Also in terms of dropping the car to reduce roll. Ignoring external factors, lowering the center of gravity is the best way to reduce roll, because a lower CofG will mean less weight transfer, however if the suspension's designed to run higher, then you'll often drop the roll-center by more than you've dropped the height of the car, which will actually result in more body-roll, as well as some iffy handling characteristics, so lower definitely isn't always better. Whether this is the case with an E36's back end I don't know, some cars are fine with low ride heights, but some are really badly effected. It is a bit of a minefield, but I'd definitely start by setting your dampers to be sat somewhere near the middle of their travel at ride height. It would also be worth having a look at what spring rates tarmac rally cars run. Yours do sound in the right ball-park to me, but I'm no BMW expert. You need everything working properly at being suspension before you can really know the best way to correct the body roll.

Yeah, it is a newish thing, I believe it was a recent change when I took my test nearly 6 years ago. The American test said that either 3 and 9 or 4 and 8 was fine.

Bloody hell, no wonder your set-up always looks crashy, 2cm of negative travel's nothing most single-seaters will have more than that, for a tin-top driving on rough surfaces that's really not enough. In answer to your question though, unless you're rolling enough to run out of travel then it's not going to make any difference. If you are reaching the end of your travel through just roll, (which is something that shouldn't really be happening) then yes, you will get more roll with more travel. To reduce the roll you either need stiffer spring rates/shocks (shocks will only really reduce roll on turn-in/direction change, not in the middle of a long corner), stiffer anti-roll bars, lower the center of gravity, or raise the roll-center. Unfortunately other than lowering the center of gravity, they all have their disadvantages.

(Worked in Halfords for 4 years during my education, their advertising department deserve kicking in the balls, hard.)

You're not meant to hold the wheel above 9 and 3 over here either. It's to stop you punching yourself in the face if the air-bag goes off in an accident. I got 13 wrong, a fair few of which were distances in feet (I'm a metric man other than mph/bhp) or right/left ones. Especially confused by the fact they still give way to the right, even though they drive on the other side of the road.

Depends how dirty the screen gets in my eyes. In cars where the rear screen actually attracts dirt like my old Passat I'd definitely leave it. The Sciroccos one I removed, because it was particularly ugly and never got used, as the rear screen doesn't really get dirty anyway. The Fabia wiper looks like a nice upgrade if it is useful to have a wiper there, much cleaner looking.

I know that car really well, hadn't realised it was for sale, but it makes sense as he's got a much cooler daily now. Glad to see he's being honest with the advert. I was involved in bending it back after it's little shunt, in fact if you peak at page 12 of his build thread I'm in it quite a bit wielding my porta-power and helping him make a giant slide hammer, haha. It is a really good fun car.

Ah shit, I thought it bore at least some resemblance to the front of a mini Back to the drawing board. But more seriously, you're right that it's not something that'll see the road, but it's not a bbq. The wheels not meant to be cut in half by the way, I just screwed up the very quick/messy render.

I think I'd be fighting Nick for that MX-5, or buying something silly and old that would be slow but a giggle. How I've spent this afternoon; can you tell what it is yet? (Not finished yet!)

Anybody fancy lending me £950? I'm pretty keen that one of these will be my next daily, either in diesel form, or with LPG fitted as soon as I can. Skoze, sod em. It's not like Capri's are even that rare. Your dads old car doesn't happen to be based anywhere near Weston Super Mare does it? I saw a nice looking white X-pack Capri at a smallish car show there a few months ago.

My understanding's that standard rods will basically be fine with anything a k04 can throw out as long as you don't map in violent features like anti-lag and you're not pumping in gallons of meth to squeeze every last ounce from it. Rule of thumb wise though I've always been lead to believe that around 300lb/ft of torque was the limit for standard rods to be considered 'reliable'. As Jardo said though, it's quite dependant on the delivery of the specific set-up.

Yeah, Jersey looks amazing, I'd definitely be interested in a trip if you did go. There's a whole list of places I'd love to visit. Generally the weirder and more revolutionary technology's my sort of thing, and anything to do with submarines is a particular interest as my Grandad was a Submariner in WWII, but most things to do with either war still really interest me. Oradour-sur-Glane has fascinated me for a while too, I'm sure it'd be an amazing place to visit and I'd love to do it someday. I keep meaning to visit Tyneham too, abandoned for different reasons, but still a ghost village that's a result of the war, and a lot closer to home. I can't imagine it being anywhere near as moving as Oradour-sur-Glane, but I'm sure it'd still be interesting. (PS, still not had a proper read, I'll definitely give it a proper look through soon though, hopefully it'll jog my memories of it a little, and it looks interesting anyway if not.)