Liam821's other cars

[liam821]

This thread will be about my other cars & toys, if you want to read about my e46m3 be sure to click here https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/m...phoenix-yellow

[liam821]

My 1993 Honda Civic Si. Originally was bought brand new by my dad in 94, I bought it from him two years later in 1996 and I've owned it ever since. It was my first car. Over the years it went from a completely stock car into a time-attack race car/track car. While it technically has a license plate, I very rarely drive it on the street and it's basically only seen track miles for the last 15 years.

I originally built it to compete in the Southern California NASA Honda Challenge class but ended up having kids shortly after I finished building the car so it sat hidden away in the garage for a few years. I decided the money and time requirements of trying to compete were unrealistic so I rebuilt the car to run in time attack/hpde/track days. Since the car was now completely unrestricted by rules, the naturally aspirated dohc b16a in there at the time got a bit of help by way of turbocharging. Fast forward 7 years and a few hundred hp, it currently has a sleeved 85mm 9.5:1 2-liter b18c5, BorgWarner EFR 7064 turbo, JUN valve train, and basically everything else under the sun. It makes something north of 400whp at over 20psi of boost.

Now that we're all caught up.

I've signed for a track day next month at Oregon Raceway Park and am taking the Honda - its first outing in over a year because of covid. I pulled it out of its trailer and in typical Honda fashion it started right up, and in typical modified car fashion it proceeded to pour oil all over the place. One of the oil cooler line fittings went bad.





Thankfully it was a fairly easy fix and I was able to do a quick drive around the block. All seems well, need to play with the boost settings and the throttle body is sticking a bit...but other than that runs well. I forgot how insanely mental this car is. It's sooo fast. 2150 pounds and over 400whp is a spicy combination!

Pulled the wheels off and inspected the brakes, gonna need new pads, and after this upcoming trackday probably rotors.



#bigwingclub




Older interior pictures

[liam821]

Here are a few more older pictures

Sadly, I ended up not using the red TypeR valve cover because it was minty and I didn't want to cut it up to install the AN pcv lines and cut the end off it so I can access the cam gears without pulling off the valve cover.


Super tight in the front of the car. There is an oil cooler, trans cooler, power steering cooler, intercooler, a double-core Integra radiator, and of course the turbo and manifold. The power steering pump didn't make it and I run a MR2 electric-hydrolic pump now.


My old e46m3 and the honda together


13 years ago at Street of Willow




The Honda's home

[Sharocks]

I love that Honda.

Built well, probably the most fun you can have for the money.

[liam821]

I love that Honda.

Built well, probably the most fun you can have for the money.

Yeah, it's hard to beat for the money. They're as fast as you want to go or as cheap as you want to make it. Can't beat it on consumables at the track for sure.

[liam821]

My wife and I bought our 2011 BMW X5 diesel wayy back in 2012. It had 4k miles and was practically new. It now has 156k or so miles on it and still going strong. It's been an absolutely amazing SUV/family/tow car for us.

Our enclosed trailer (this is the Honda's home)


The one thing we did wrong is the options ours came with. By buying a slightly used model it saved us like $6k - but of course, we had no choice on the options the car had. The thing it's really missing is rear heated seats, heated steering wheel, and the premium HiFi/logic7 stereo. Turns out our X5 has the super rare "base" model stereo which is absolutely awful. It has a whole 4 speakers, no tweeters. For how much this car cost new, it's completely unacceptable. We've talked about upgrading the stereo a number of times...but it turned out that bmw didn't even equip this version with an amp. The speakers run directly off the headunit. And the EQ, which you cannot change, has been tuned to those completely shitty speakers. So if you get an aftermarket amp and real speakers, it will continue to sound like shit. There was some guy on the forums that upgraded one and ended up costing him a ton to get a custom EQ all done to make it sound good. It was enough of a story for me to give it a hard pass on the aftermarket. I've thought about retrofitting the premium HiFi into ours, but since ours has no amp in the rear, that also means none of the wiring is there either. So to make the retrofit work, I'd need the whole amp harness & amp, speakers, wiring, brackets, etc etc etc. Finding all those parts from one car was really difficult, and getting somebody to pull the wiring (which went from the rear to the front) was almost impossible because nobody wanted to pull apart the whole car for a single harness.

So...I did a thing... 2013 BMW X5 xDrive50i. Fully optioned! 75k miles.



Smallll damage in the front, I'm sure that will buff out


The interior, though, is completely MINT. Leather is soft, no wear marks, somebody took extremely good care of this thing.


Everything about the interior is amazing and clean and nice. The whole car looks extremely well cared for. I really lucked out. The plan is I'm going to retrofit the stereo, soft-close doors, and heated steering wheel into mine. I'm not sure if I'll swap the whole interior, while the leather is beautiful, we already have the "20-way comfort" seats and I like our cinnamon/brown interior better than the white. But anything I don't end up using I'll part out and sell. If anybody is after a twin-turbo 4.4-liter v8, let me know! Hopefully, after it's all said and done, I'll have doubled my money and got a decent stereo out of the deal... or so that's the plan. I'll be posting the process here, more to come!

[Sharocks]

N63 TT swap into the Honda.

Do it.

[Xmetal]

I can't believed BMW downgraded some stuffs on the e70, especially the stereo. My base stereo on the e53 came with 10 speakers and a separate amp to drive them! All I needed to do to make it perfect was to add a sub and amp.

[robgill]

I've been looking at X5s as an around town car + occasional track day tow vehicle. Do you think the BMW X5 diesel is a better choice over the gas motors?

[liam821]

I can't believed BMW downgraded some stuffs on the e70, especially the stereo. My base stereo on the e53 came with 10 speakers and a separate amp to drive them! All I needed to do to make it perfect was to add a sub and amp.

Yeah, It's unbelievable how bad it is, especially when you consider the sticker was $68,000. It was my fault though I should have done a custom order. At the time we were expecting our 3rd (and last) child and our 330i wasn't going to cut it. I didn't want to wait 3+ months. My dealer looked all over southern California (I lived in San Diego at the time) and finding a diesel with the options we wanted just didn't exist. I didn't think the base stereo could be THAT bad but boy was I wrong.


I spent a few minutes working on the new X5 yesterday. I unplugged the front power lead to the alternator which I think got crushed which shorted out the battery. Once I unplugged that and replaced the battery it came to life! Thankfully it looks like the infotainment system survived the accident and sounds great! It's amazing how much better the stereo is!

70,918 miles new.

[liam821]

I've been looking at X5s as an around town car + occasional track day tow vehicle. Do you think the BMW X5 diesel is a better choice over the gas motors?

I think so. They get 25% better mpg and they can tow just about anything. The e70 has a 7000# tow rating and I've used all and more of that - make sure you get one with the optional air suspension in the rear. Our enclosed trailer is around 3300 pounds and I towed our e93m3 (4000#s) plus a bunch of tools from San Diego all the way up to Portland and it never broke a sweat.

My dad has a newer 2016 F15 diesel which has the 8spd ZF and he averages around 30mpg where our e70 with its 6spd get around 22-23. In the 150k miles we've only had a few minor problems.

[liam821]

Well... it was a marathon two weeks of work but I'm finally finished... Here is the tl;dr; version.

My eye on the prize...Premium sound with an actual amp!


But first, sadly, the stereo amp harness runs straight through the middle of the floor under the carpet, so everything has to come out


The dash center console is built like a tank. You could park an e46m3 on top, its insanely complicated to get apart and way overbuilt.


dash out


My garage is getting full...


Now that the dash is out I can start figuring out the what wires I need


There are MILES of wires in this thing




We bought our X5 new 9yrs ago and at the time our kids were super young (-1 and 2) so we ended up getting the 3rd row option. Now that your kids are older they never sit back there so I gave them the choice. I can swap in the Oyster interior and they get a heated rear seats or we can keep the 3rd row. Easy choice for them - we want heated seats dad. So next was starting to pull apart our X5...

I hope this thing will work again...




omg, what have I done!


Wiring fun!


I ended up leaving the old TCU harness which included the rearview camera and sensors. You can see the new harness amp harness bundle I added next to the old.


All the new things had to plug into the fuse box, so I had to trace and run wires to the two fuse boxes in the car (one in the front, one in the back)


Finally got the wiring done and the rear seats in


Center console back together


This part was SUPER scary, so I let my wife do it. haha! Cutting a hole in the top of the dash for the heads-up-display


We couldn't use the dash out of the donor because the airbag blew a hole through the top


Looks stock


Bezel fits perfectly


Heads-up-display retrofit


Dash back in the car, hopefully for the last time


Finished!






Believe it or not, I plugged the battery in, plugged my laptop in and a few minutes with NCS Expert coded the car for the new modules and everything just worked - first time!

In the end, we retrofitted an m-sport wheel with paddle shifters, heated steering wheel, heated rear seats, heads-up-display, premium sound, and did a 3rd row delete and swapped to the Oyster interior. I replaced any trim all the trim that didn't look perfect and now the car looks basically brand new. I really lucked out with the donor X5, it was in extremely good condition! I also used 10 rolls of tesa tape (like electrical tape, but fabric on one side like bmw uses to wrap all the wires) having to rewrap all the wires I added.

I took it on a trip down to Salem (~100 miles round trip) and its so lovely having a great stereo. It's a night and day difference.

[liam821]

I'm heading out for a track day at Oregon Raceway Park this Monday so I needed to spend some time with the Honda getting it ready.

First up, race fuel. VP110. I mix 5 gallons of VP110 with 5 gallons of 92 just for safety. I'd love to convert it to e85...one day


Tried to start it, the battery completely dead. Would not hold a charge. Big sad. RIP Optima. Thankfully Batteries+ had another Optima in stock!


Next up was fixing the sticky throttle. The throttle body likes to stick slightly open sometimes, which is mega annoying.

I ended up drilling a small hole in the top of the throttle body wheel and ran another metal wire around the other side with a spring


Ridiculously annoying that I would have to do this...I so want to convert to drive-by-wire. Quote MCM's, My SKUNK! It's not a super big spring, but it should add just enough.


More to come tomorrow!