Black & Tan 332iT

[Bry5on]

Front brakes went in and got bedded tonight. Rears will have to follow this weekend.

So far I’m pleased with the more immediate and confident pedal. The dead zone before pad bite is definitely reduced, and there’s less weird feedback on long downhill braking. Looking forward to doing the rears now.

The scales had these at exactly one pound less per front corner than the 325mm euro setup I had before. Not a bad tradeoff, although I swear I could feel the change in inertia from the bigger rotors. Probably just placebo..

[Bry5on]

Calipers arrived last night, so I swung in to the machine shop this morning for an hour to knock out the 5.5mm machining needed to make these fit the 345mm ZCP rotors. These calipers are nearly perfect, really pleased with the paint and seal condition! Looks like the pads in the rear calipers were still the ones from the factory! Fronts were replaced textars

[Bry5on]

It’s been a little bit.. now that it’s summer and warm I’m chasing overheating again. In pursuit of solving that, I swapped the M3 aux fan and radiator ducting in. An improvement, but no dice. The car still overheats on hot days uphill with AC on, even at highway speeds. Maybe another radiator is in the cards, as I’ve been through three thermostats, two thermostat housings, two water pumps and two radiators. Really strange, super repeatable and temps are actually going up, it’s not just the gauge. I’ll get it eventually.




I also made and added some 6mm spacers to the stock M3 springs to bring it more to ZHP height. The roads around me really are shit and this made a great difference.



And last, I swung over to mrgizmo04’s place to test fit my wheels over 996 brakes, as by the measurements it was going to be super close and I didn’t want to commit if it was going to require a large spacer. Well, it was super close, just over 1mm of clearance to the 345mm brakes and 996 calipers over the 17x9 et47 wheels. I ordered some 6mm spacers to make it 2.5mm and placed orders for black Porsche calipers and all the parts needed for the brake conversion. I miss that Porsche pedal feel and one ride sold me on the swap. That, and the fact that my wife’s SUV and my 50 year old stock-brake sedan have better pedal feel than my M3 setup..



Other than that, just putting the miles on. It’s doing great.

[Bry5on]

Math worked out once again. Perfect fitment of the 17x9 et52 e82 1 series wheels after adding some spacers. I’m not a fan of spacers, but there really wasn’t another option that fit the requirements. These end up being 7lb lighter per corner, dropping almost 30lb.

In front, with a 245/40/17 on a 17x9 et47 (after 5mm spacer) wheel, there’s 3.5mm clearance to the strut and just a few millimeters of tire past the fender with 2.15 degrees of camber from flipped strut hats set full positive. We’ve successfully preserved the correct factory scrub radius and steering feel.

Measurements are coming out at around 3mm clearance to 996 calipers, although I’m going to need to test fit this on another car before I commit to changing the brakes.

In the rear, I’m running the same 245/40/17 on the same 17x9 (can rotate these) but with a 12mm spacer and 1.6 degrees of camber. This puts the tire lip straight under the fender, and it also appears to clear with no spacer. I still have to pull the spring out and check full travel clearance to validate, but it looks promising given the tire stretch.

All told, happy with how all this is turning out, even though I’m giving up my favorite factory wheels.

[Slideways]

I committed yesterday and picked up a set of them. Overall they’re still light and ultimately I think this is the best balance of the above priorities. Bonus points that they’re the most affordable.

Also, it might be easier to get replacements or extras if you need them rather than the discontinued wheel.