ke70dave

What most people cannot supply me is a complete life cycle analysis of electric cars vs petrol cars. Electric cars getting with "zero emissions" labelling is complete BS and fauls advertising. There is no such thing as a free lunch as they say, someone always pays. A quick google suggests that coal power stations are around ~35% efficiency on average. An internal combustion engine is around 20%. which sounds like swapping to electric cars has the advantage. But if we all had electric cars the power stations are going to need to crank the power stations, add more power stations probably. then you have more transmission losses, will the current infrastructure be able to support every house hold hammering the grid over night to charge their car? hell no. we have enough trouble when every house hold turns their oven on to cook dinner or the AC in summer. Not to mention the life cycle analysis of the physical car itself, batteries i suppose is the big question, but the electric motors as well. how much energy does it take to make a massive lithium battery? and what do you do with it once its "done"? Will a 2016 Tesla whatever be still driving around in 2047? we are still driving 30-40yr old cars quite successfully. I'm all for it electric cars as a concept, but the details and engineering challenges are never discussed in the media. Public transport really is the key, not stupid electric cars. Get everyone around major cities on a trainline that is reliable and fast. That would get rid of loads of cars 5 days a week. Whenever i go anywhere I NEVER consider public transport. its just so damn inconvenient.

After all these years, it really is the gift that keeps on giving. And to catch out a senior member, what a time to be alive.

Have a look at my uber long post in here from like 7yrs ago.

Why do you want to go to 5 stud?

wowzer, who would have thought. Never seen one break before. Nice catch.

Damn what a bargain. well done. Looks pretty much the same as that trade tools one. Just like 200bucks less!

Always loved this car. And well deserving of a trophy:)

yep, you are right Matty, i had not considered the people outside the city. Perhaps we will go full circle as a country. Decentralization of big cities so that people don't have to travel very far to their jobs. Australia's fantastic internet should help with this decentralisation, oh wait.

just remember that im pretty sure the same diameter vented disc is not going to improve braking, it will just help with cooling when you start pushing them hard. I always wondered how far you could go on standard KE brakes, high temp fluid, high temp pads, air ducting via a hole in back of the backing plate. Interesting find none the less, I think the DBA catalogue trawling is the way to go. If the tophat is different height you can probably put some spacers between the caliper and caliper bracket. though you want to be careful doing that, changes the moment force on the caliper bracket.

I agree in principle. But that wont fly in Lawyer land.

First of all, silicon chip still exists!?!? Secondly, Nuclear fission being "unpopular" is not a good enough reason not to use it. When the car came out, everyone was riding horses, and im sure there was editorials on why cars will never work cause of XYZ. And for a while cars were more annoying to use than horses, you just had to feed a horse, suddenly you had to put petrol in a car and fix it. How many horses you see being used for transport in the western world now? New technologies come, at first they are ridiculous, the world adapts and then once we have all adapted the new tech we wonder how we ever did life without it. Electric cars i can see happening. Only a matter of time. Self driving cars though. Not convinced. Waay to many moral questions to answer even if we had the tech. There is an interesting youtube video i watched where they talked about the morality of self driving cars. for instance, say a non-self driving car pulls out in front of a self driving car, and for whatever reason the self driven car has to make a choice between hitting the oncoming car, or turning the other way and driving off a cliff, How do you choose? It is not up to the programmers to make these moral decisions. and what government or governing body is going to make a ruling on that? And some say, well just put a tracking unit in every car so every self driving car knows where every other driving car is. Who controls all that data? will it be used for bad? do you want "google" knowing your whereabouts wherever you drive? Targeted advertisements based on your travel route to work? Although, this probably already happens anyway.

As others have illuded to, the fact that the centre two cylinderes are very low, and the others are fine suggests that something is wrong between cytlinders 2 and 3. Unfortunately about all you can do is remove the head again and see what is up. did you check the block for flatness last time? just a straight edge will do.

As my new Zealand mate always used to say, If in doubt - Rev it out. I don't think it was related but he blew up 2 engines in quite quick succession when he was living in Aus.

Yeah i dont like people. People, what a bunch of bastards. Got a dash cam yet? My wife was involved with a car park bingle that unfortunately left us out of pocket due to not being able to prove the other party completely at fault. Apparently a 90yr old driving a car that he admitted he had the seat too far forward causing him to get his foot stuck on the accelerator isnt enough.... So bought her a dash cam. pretty nifty thing, and you just forget about it as it records automatically. Although hers is a bit big for small cars, suits her forester fine. I haven't got one for the bmw yet, but there are some low profile Blackvue branded ones that might suit the small car. Twas a lovely day yesterday for a drive regardless.

woohoo! nice progress. Always the way with brand new things. Ultra sensitive hearing breeds paranoya. After destroying my BMW engine, i built up the second engine and i think i must have checked the timing belt tension 30times to make sure it was tight - all kinds of paranoya. The destruction noise still haunts me.

Anything to do with the throttle points at TPS too. Unplug the tps, try again and report back.

Therse not much on a 7afe, i would pull off the rubber hose that goes between the airbox and the inlet and inspect. Inspect all the vac lines. Worst case, get some throttle body cleaner and spray it around where you think there might be leaks. With a map sensor you are really looking for issues after the throttle body. also keep in mind map sensors are dirty cheap from the wreckers, if you have a wreckers close go and grab one. Note the code on the map sensor it self and go and look at Toyotas of similar era if you cant find exactly your car, they used the same map sensor on loads of cars.

Map sensor code I think can indicate a vacuum leak too, as the map sensor gets a funny signal. I'd be removing the ICV and cleaning the crap out of it, then check every vacuum hose for leaks especially the big rubber hose on the inlet manifold.

Buy quad light setup, genuine japanese/newzealand will cost you a bit, including grill. If you have flat front already, just a matter of bolting it all up. Wiring might be an issue if you are not electrically minded. I cant remember if OEM the quad lights are sealed beams or if they are H4 bulb. either way to get the inside lights to light up you will need to run a relay from your high beam.

Much to research you have. I think your question is more around the best internal parts to rebuild the actual engine rather than the parts to install it into AE71? Reality is there is no "Best" parts. Question is, why d you want to rebuild it? is it stuffed? has it done a bearing? does it blow smoke? blown headgasket? do you not know the history? does it run?

ah does mr mechanical sympathy live in Brisbane? Damn id love to see this thing once its complete.

As Matt alluded to, having a way of braking the engine is great, but what you really need is the electronics to control the RPM and the electronics setup to measure it. Then to be successful in tuning you need a good O2 sensor setup, and probably more importantly for making power is a decent knock sensor or knock ears setup. Now all of this is doable. My idea was to get a water brake from a truck, god knows where you get one, but they exist. And i assume you could get one second hand from somewhere. Now the controlling the rpm i haven't looked too much into, but id guess the truck does this somewhere to regulate the braking, I am imagining. But realistically youd want to do this with precision. So you might need an electrically actuated globe valve attached to an arduino that takes the rpm signal from the engine and then you would need some kind of interface to tell the arduino what RPM to target. My dyno knowledge is limited, but if you want to do a full power pull, your ramp time of the brake comes into effect, how do you even design this? Now for actual measuring of torque of the engine this is quite "easy" however you mount your water brake, it needs to be restrained by something that you can attach a decent strain gauge. then you take that strain gauge, connect it to a strain gauge amplifier and connect it to another arduino. Then you can calibrate your strain gauge using a known torque value. Ie 10kg, on the end of a 1m bar = 98 newton meter. display that on an LCD screen, multiply it by the RPM within the electronics and you have power too. Arduino can data log relatively easy and you can even get yourself a curve. All of this arduino stuff is very do-able, i have done a fair bit of arduino work and im comfortable i could do the programming and electronics, with a fair bit of R & D and alot of trial and error. I suspect the majority of this is possible. But i suspect what you will end up is a machine that can measure relative torque and power. Ie you will know that what you did has increased or decreased torque, but i don't think the actual values can be used to compare against anything else. unless you calibrate it, but im unsure how good you can calibrate it. A water brake from a freakin truck might not be that repeatable. So the accuracy is very much in question. I would very much know how a water brake dyno works, but i guess thats why you pay big bucks for them. Side note, don't start tuning peoples engines without insurance, i would fear blowing up someone elses engine.

yeah it is amazing how good a good jack is. I mean yeah you can get by with a cheap one, and i have for many years. As afterall you put it on jack stands anyway. Back in the day i used to stuff around with scizzor jacks and what not swapping wheels, oh if i only had a good jack back then. The Bahco one, like most i assume in this price bracket, has a quick pump feature. I think you can pump the thing from min to max in 2 full pumps when it is unlaiden. Handy when taking car off jack. Admittedly these days i don't jack the car up very much, but when i do....its awesome.

Parrott, not sure on bahco as a brand. Their website suggests they are decent. My mate had one for a few yrs and never had any problems so for 400bucks I have it ago. I think lowest point is 90mm....i think some go lower but the price goes up. 90mm is low enough for the e30 but what is great is the reach. My old hydraulic jack would go low enough but it would be tricky to get the first few pumps. The bahco is quite long so the pole is outside body of car both front and rear.

For the last 10yrs ive been using cheap trolley jacks. Been through 3 id say. All work fine for few hrs but eventually fsiled, one was about 100, others cheaper 50dollar jobs on special at super cheap. One the chassis bent.... For my 30th I bit the bullet and got an aluminium jack from tradetools. It is incredible. Bit over your budget but if you can wait a bit and save a bit it is weellll worth it. https://www.tradetools.com/product-range/machinery-and-workshop/garage-equipment/trolley-jacks/bahco-2000kg-alum-trolley-jack