heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[heinzboehmer]

You’re in this far, you should just make yourself a single insert to replace the three piece thing. You could also match the horizontal/arc stitching of the rear seats while you’re at it..

Ha, we'll see. Part of the reason why I want a separate lumbar cushion is so I can put an inflatable bladder thing into it and have adjustable lumbar support. I guess I could do it with the big cushion too, but I kinda just want to drive the car now instead of fighting against a sewing machine lol.

[Bry5on]

You’re in this far, you should just make yourself a single insert to replace the three piece thing. You could also match the horizontal/arc stitching of the rear seats while you’re at it..

[heinzboehmer]

Finished up the passenger side cushion.

One thing I did differently with this one was look up how to cut foam. I thought a hot knife would be the appropriate tool, but it turns out that a serrated knife is what you want. Grabbed a bread knife from the kitchen and tried it out:




Worked surprised well! Much better cuts than with the scissors and just as easy. Did make a mess of little foam shavings though.

Also drove the car around for a while today. Ran boring errands with it on purpose to see how comfortable the seats ended up being. Glad to say that they feel just as comfortable as the stock seats on the street now.

Took the chance to take a few phone pics:





Last thing to do is make the cushions that will go in place of the stacks of towels. Haven't made those yet because I need to get the appropriate fabric. Got some samples of dinamica in the mail the other day and found one that matches closely, so I'll be ordering that soon.

When those are done, I'll grab my camera and get some better pics of everything. I do still think that the seats look kinda stupid with the extra cushion, but the difference in comfort is insane. Was definitely worth spending my time making these.

[heinzboehmer]

Was undoing all the track stuff from the car and found some fluid in the belly pan. Followed it up and saw this:



You can see the weep hole is facing forward, so I'm pretty sure the fluid didn't boil, but rather sloshed out of the reservoir under hard braking.

Ordered parts to build something similar to kaiv's catch can: https://www.m3post.com/forums/showpo...5&postcount=29. Looks like kaiv's pics are dead, but this other post has some good ones: https://www.m3post.com/forums/showpo...8&postcount=22. I know I could just put a sock on it, but I just don't want to be cleaning it up after every track day. Plus, I can never resist planning a new project.

Finally got around to doing this. Used the reservoir kaiv mentioned and then got some nice looking fuel line and a 90 degree connector (think it's 4mm OD):



First had to decide where to mount it. I wanted it above the PS reservoir, so that any fluid that went into it would drain back. Terrible picture, but there's a good amount of space directly above the reservoir, so that's where I decided to put it:



Next I made sure that the fitting I bought wasn't too long so that it wouldn't bottom out against the cap and block the weep hole:




After that came the bracket. Considered swapping out the aux coolant pump for the non-M one so that I could build a bracket from there, but ultimately decided that there wasn't a great place to attach to bracket to. Instead, I decided to attach the bracket to the wishbone looking mount for the airbox. Solidly mounted (enough) to the chassis and super easy to access for removal.

Here's what I came up with. Nothing special, just some cuts and holes in some aluminum angle:





Dug through my pile of "I probably shouldn't throw this bolt/nut out in case I can use it in the future" things for the hardware. Think I ended up using an old, cut down VANOS bolt and a taillight nut. They were both 10mm, which is what really matters.

Before assembling everything, I did what kaiv suggested and removed the seal in the reservoir. Was able to blow through it with little effort even with the cap fully tightened.




Then cut the fuel line to size, attached both ends and wrapped them in tesa tape to avoid fraying of the outer mesh. Heat shrink tubing would probably have been a better choice from this, but that would have involved leaving the garage to get it and would have ruined the whole "I built this exclusively out of things in the garage, most of them scrap" thing I had going on.



Installed on the car:




Bolted it up so that the only thing I need to remove to open up the PS reservoir is the 90 deg elbow connector on the cap. No need to remove the catch can or anything.

There's really no way for it to interfere with the airbox with how I've positioned it, but I put the unfiltered section back on and squeezed my phone in to check just in case:



Looks good! Pretty sure the condensation inside is from me blowing through it lol. A drive should take care of that.

Felt good to tackle a project that only took a couple hours start to finish, been doing too many long winded and overly complicated things lately. Also excited to not have to clean up fluids spills after track days now.

[heinzboehmer]

Do you have any pictures of the final install of the Slon wall (as in were you able to grind away the required material on the cups)?

Did you also notice any difference/improvements after it was installed?

Still have not installed that thing, unfortunately. This is still my only car, so I'm a bit wary to loose the extra trunk space with the seats folded down, but that might change soon. Also, the adhesive I want to use for this is the same adhesive as I'll use when I do a CF roof, so I'd like to combine those two installs because of its short shelf life.

I did have a conversation with Slon about this and yeah, sounds like grinding away some of the cups is the way to go. Wrote down the important bits from that conversation here: https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/m...585#post150585. Hope that helps!

[Mike RT4]

Jan 2022

New wheels!

Got some 18s for the street, as the 19s were quite tiring on rough roads and I wanted less unsprung mass. Tires are PS4Ss (which were not easy to source).

Front: 18x8.5" ET35 Race Silver APEX EC-7 with 235/40/18
Rear: 18x9.5" ET22 Race Silver APEX EC-7 with 265/35/18

Car looks great and (most importantly) rides a looot better.



Here's some weight data:

Front (each):

• Wheel 18": 20.4 lbs
• Tire 18": 21.6 lbs
• Wheel + tire 18": 42.1 lbs
• Wheel + tire 19": 47.9 lbs

Rear (each):

• Wheel + tire 18": 47.1 lbs
• Wheel + tire 19": 53.0 lbs

Saved 5.8 lbs per corner up front and 5.9 lbs per corner in the rear. Not bad!

Buut of course something had to happen. Drove for probably 200 mi before finding this in my left rear tire:



Ridiculous. Got it patched and all is good.


At some point, I also took my rear seats out, so I took the opportunity to test fit the Slon wall with the VinceBar cups in place. Looks great, but unfortunately does not fit that well because of the extra material that the cups add. Cups will need some grinding, but that shouldn't be terrible.

Do you have any pictures of the final install of the Slon wall (as in were you able to grind away the required material on the cups)?

Did you also notice any difference/improvements after it was installed?

[heinzboehmer]

Las thing I did was to get started on my custom seat cushion.

I talked about making an L shaped cushion before, but ultimately decided to split it up. Still going to be L shaped, but just made out of two separate pieces. This is mostly so that the sewing is simpler, but will also make the whole thing a bit more adjustable.

Started off by sketching out a cut/sew plan:



Then came translating the drawing to real things. As mentioned before, I have no idea what I'm doing. So instead of messing around with (and probably ruining) fabric, I turned to the trusty CAD:



These are the final versions of the templates that I ended up using:



Transferred onto the fabric:



The machine I got access to was honestly pretty nuts. It could do a bunch of complicated stitches and all you had to do was press the foot control and make sure the fabric was going through straight. Here's some of the stitch patterns I messed around with:



Crazy.

I do realize that me being blown away by this machine is probably the equivalent of someone being blown away by one of my torque wrenches, but I still thought it was super cool. Didn't end up using the machine for anything other than regular straight stitches, though.

Here's the first stitch I did:




And the final product:




I stiched everything inside out so that there wouldn't be flaps of fabric on the outside and tried to follow how Cobra made their cushion. Images above also show how I left a ton of extra material on the sides. Did this so that I have some room to play with if I ever want to make this cushion any thicker.

Here's the thing turned right side out:




Velcro strips are a bit crooked, but whatever. Decided to use these thinner strips because I felt that the super thick ones that Cobra uses are waay too grippy.

Then moved on to cutting out the foam. Thought that using scissors would work out well, but quickly learned that this was not the case. Edges turned out super jagged and it was really hard to make sure the cuts were orthogonal to the face of the foam:



It's good enough for now, but I want to redo the foam with some sort of hot knife thing.

Lastly, the test fit:




It fits quite well! Pretty happy with how this turned out, especially considering that I was learning how to do all this as I went along. Seat looks kinda stupid with the Cobra cushion pushed all the way up like that, but whatever, it's a lot more comfortable on the street like this,.

Next step is to replace those towels with a cushion wrapped in fabric that matches the Cobra cushions. Ordered some dinamica samples, so will get to that once I know what matches best.

[heinzboehmer]

Knocked out a few things this weekend.

First off, I noticed that the fabric on my A pillar covers was starting to get pretty bunched up when I ran all my new dashcam wiring. Glued it back on with some 3M super 77.

Masked and adhesive applied. Put a ton on because that seemed to be what worked best when I was trying it out:




Turned out great! They look brand new now:




Then I trimmed the plastic trim pieces that come on the stock seat rails so that they would fit onto the new rails with the nogaro brackets.






For the first one, I almost exclusively used a dremel to do all the trimming, but I found out with the second one that it was quicker and just as good to use a box cutter. I did have to remove a decent amount of material, so I added some foam and zip ties to keep everything from rattling:






And here's the final product. Much nicer looking than the naked rail, in my eyes:



After that, I mounted the fire extinguisher under the driver's seat. Used to have it under the passenger's seat before getting the nogaros, but it's much harder to reach that seat now, so I decided to move it over.

I just zip tied the plastic clip that came with the extinguisher to the substrap bar:



Fits quite well in between the sides of the substrap bar. However, it does sit pretty far back, so it's not super easy to reach. I can reach it no problem with the three point belt on (even with it locked), but can't reach it with a buckled harness. There aren't any other good spots to mount it on, so I added some string that I can reach when strapped in with the harness:



String goes up and is held below the bottom cushion by a small piece of velcro:



Pretty happy with how it turned out. Extinguisher is super easy to retrieve and is kept above the lowest solid part of the seat rails (substrap bar), so there's no danger of it getting crushed when moving the seat back and forth.

[heinzboehmer]

Seats look great! Only people on the forum will know that you colored your seats in...lol

The inboard side mount bolts are the worst. I use B7 studs with loctite on the inboard side of the seat. Makes installing the seat no longer a chore. Eventually I want to remove the upholstery and screw in a bolt from the backside.

Thank you! I'm pretty sure I saw you say somewhere that you mounted your seats with studs and that gave me the idea to do this.

Definitely! Too bad it's been raining so much lately. You should also try my seat out (and vice versa), I'm pretty curious how the two differ.

I was lucky not to have discomfort (our torsos are likely different, but also maybe the wings on the Sparco are higher) - my shoulders are on the lower end of the wings, and don't really get pushed forward a whole lot. I think my height is similar to yours and recall it being quite disorienting as well, but I quickly grew to love it. I generally like sitting low, and usually push the seats in other cars to their lowest setting - not sure if the M3 seats are any lower than the non-M sport seats, but I felt they were always too high for a sports car. When I need to see the hood as reference for parking or pulling in/out of parking spots, I lean forwards off the seat back haha.

Yeah definitely have been getting used to the seating position, am liking it a lot more now. And yeah! Welcome to try out my seats whenever. Also curious to try yours out.

[timmo]

Hey man! It has been a while. Maybe we can do an occasional autox soonish

I'm pretty set on trying to make these seats work for me, as they're the only ones I know of that meet all my requirements (three point compatibility, harness compatibility, ease of ingress/egress, lightweight, etc.). The only others that might meet all of that are Pole Position ABEs, but I'm not fully sure how comfortable they would be on the street with the three point receptacle having to come through the seat. I think it'll be pretty much impossible to find a local car with those seats installed, so I'm going to try my best with the Nogaros. I've been messing around with them a good amount and I think I have a plan to make them comfortable on the street. But I'll definitely let you know if I find that I just don't well in the Nogaros.



Speaking of, I put a bunch of towels in the car and started driving around. Sat on them, put them behind me, put them besides me, basically tried every configuration I could think of to see if any made it more comfortable for me. I've learned two things (that kinda go completely against what I initially thought was uncomfortable about the seat):

1. I'm pretty confident now that the discomfort of sitting too low is 100% in my mind.
   1. It felt very disorienting to have such a drastic change in the driving experience of a car that I've become so used to. However, the more I drive it, the more I like the "racecar" feel. I still think I'm at the limit of too low because my eyes are only about 1-2" above the steering wheel, so any lower would significantly limit my visibility. But point is, I'm liking it more and more, so I'm pretty sure I'll get used to this.
2. The discomfort is exclusive to my shoulders
   1. The length of my torso puts my shoulders right at point where the "wings" of the seat extend the furthest out. This means that my shoulders get pushed forward a LOT, which becomes uncomfortable after driving for a while. If the radius of curvature of the "wings" were a bit larger, I wouldn't have any problem.

Since the discomfort is isolated to the shoulders, I should be able to solve the issues by modifying the seat so that my shoulders can sit a bit flatter. I initially thought that if I sat further up, my shoulders would move out of the most aggressive part of the "wings", but it turns out that I have to sit too far up for this, so that idea won't work. The thing I did find that worked was to add extra padding to the back of the seat. This pushes my entire torso far forward enough so that my shoulders can extend back before hitting the seat. Here's prototype number one:

Definitely! Too bad it's been raining so much lately. You should also try my seat out (and vice versa), I'm pretty curious how the two differ.

I was lucky not to have discomfort (our torsos are likely different, but also maybe the wings on the Sparco are higher) - my shoulders are on the lower end of the wings, and don't really get pushed forward a whole lot. I think my height is similar to yours and recall it being quite disorienting as well, but I quickly grew to love it. I generally like sitting low, and usually push the seats in other cars to their lowest setting - not sure if the M3 seats are any lower than the non-M sport seats, but I felt they were always too high for a sports car. When I need to see the hood as reference for parking or pulling in/out of parking spots, I lean forwards off the seat back haha.

[bigjae46]

Seats look great! Only people on the forum will know that you colored your seats in...lol

The inboard side mount bolts are the worst. I use B7 studs with loctite on the inboard side of the seat. Makes installing the seat no longer a chore. Eventually I want to remove the upholstery and screw in a bolt from the backside.

[heinzboehmer]

With the extra padding, is the seat even an upgrade in supportiveness? For me, as a pretty big guy, the nogaro is already not super supportive, especially in the legs. If you move yourself forward, you’re basically eliminating the side support, other than the very small area (for seat belt receptacle clearance) by your hips.

Slightly. The wings of the seat still hold my shoulders in place a bit.

But I only plan on using the extra padding on the street. I'll take it off on track, which shouldn't be as uncomfortable because my arms are always fully outstretched.

[Bry5on]

With the extra padding, is the seat even an upgrade in supportiveness? For me, as a pretty big guy, the nogaro is already not super supportive, especially in the legs. If you move yourself forward, you’re basically eliminating the side support, other than the very small area (for seat belt receptacle clearance) by your hips.

[heinzboehmer]

I do want to add a small bit of velcro at the very top of the cushion (already glad I went with the velcro) because it seems to "untuck" itself after you sit in the seat. I don't think it does that because of what I did, but maybe. Regardless, a bit more velcro should keep it on no problem. This is where I want it to go:

I ended up doing this to one of the back cushions and it didn't solve the problem. Turns out the "untucking" is due to the fact that the fabric on the seat is not anchored to the seat shell and has nothing to do with how secure the cushion is against the seat fabric. I ended up removing the extra strip of velcro.

However, this won't really be an issue with the thing I'm going to be making for the back cushion, so whatever.

[heinzboehmer]

Been a while! Sucks to hear... and it wasn't something I planned on but let me know if you want to get rid of them. I no longer do track days (might do the occasional autox) but I still have my Sparco Pro2000 because the height and feel is so much better than stock, but a PITA to ingress/egress out of. Never sat in these specifically but I'm thinking it'd retain a similar feel, but would be much easier to get in/out of

Hey man! It has been a while. Maybe we can do an occasional autox soonish

I'm pretty set on trying to make these seats work for me, as they're the only ones I know of that meet all my requirements (three point compatibility, harness compatibility, ease of ingress/egress, lightweight, etc.). The only others that might meet all of that are Pole Position ABEs, but I'm not fully sure how comfortable they would be on the street with the three point receptacle having to come through the seat. I think it'll be pretty much impossible to find a local car with those seats installed, so I'm going to try my best with the Nogaros. I've been messing around with them a good amount and I think I have a plan to make them comfortable on the street. But I'll definitely let you know if I find that I just don't well in the Nogaros.



Speaking of, I put a bunch of towels in the car and started driving around. Sat on them, put them behind me, put them besides me, basically tried every configuration I could think of to see if any made it more comfortable for me. I've learned two things (that kinda go completely against what I initially thought was uncomfortable about the seat):

1. I'm pretty confident now that the discomfort of sitting too low is 100% in my mind.
   1. It felt very disorienting to have such a drastic change in the driving experience of a car that I've become so used to. However, the more I drive it, the more I like the "racecar" feel. I still think I'm at the limit of too low because my eyes are only about 1-2" above the steering wheel, so any lower would significantly limit my visibility. But point is, I'm liking it more and more, so I'm pretty sure I'll get used to this.
2. The discomfort is exclusive to my shoulders
   1. The length of my torso puts my shoulders right at point where the "wings" of the seat extend the furthest out. This means that my shoulders get pushed forward a LOT, which becomes uncomfortable after driving for a while. If the radius of curvature of the "wings" were a bit larger, I wouldn't have any problem.

Since the discomfort is isolated to the shoulders, I should be able to solve the issues by modifying the seat so that my shoulders can sit a bit flatter. I initially thought that if I sat further up, my shoulders would move out of the most aggressive part of the "wings", but it turns out that I have to sit too far up for this, so that idea won't work. The thing I did find that worked was to add extra padding to the back of the seat. This pushes my entire torso far forward enough so that my shoulders can extend back before hitting the seat. Here's prototype number one:



Note that the seat has the back cushions from both seats stacked one in front of the other in the pic. I was messing with different heights and widths for the top part, so that's why there are multiple towels up there. I found that to be comfortable, the extra top padding could not extend further from the limits of the Cobra back cushion. Which led me to prototype number two:



Still both back cushions stacked, but now with the frontmost one shifted up. I'll be doing a longish drive soon (that probably will involve a decent amount of sitting in traffic), so I'll set it up like this and if I don't experience any discomfort, I'll move forward with making an actual cushion.

My plan is to make an "L" shaped cushion ("L" shape is perpendicular to the plane of the back of the seat in this case) that velcroes onto the seat in place of the Cobra cushion. Then the Cobra cushion will go on top of that. The bottom part of the new cushion (the lower part of the "L" and what's represented by the towels in the above pic) will be wrapped in alcantara to match the Cobra cushion. The rest of the cushion will be made out of something that the Cobra cushion can stick to.

Making it this way as opposed to simply an extra cushion to place in the seat solves multiple problems:

1. No need to try and get good at sewing so that the cushion looks good (with decorative stitching and curves and shit), as the only visible bit will be the lower rectangular protusion.
2. No need to go hunting around for comfortable seat foam. I could stuff the thing with rocks and it would still be fine, since the outermost layer will be the Cobra cushion.

It won't be the prettiest thing in the world, but I think it will finally make the seat comfortable. Plus, everything is held together by velcro, so I'll be able to make it look normal in ~30s in case I want to show off to others how cool the seats look. Oh and I also found a fancy sewing machine that I can use, so no more wasting time sewing by hand.