Medium Pimpin' - 1995 E300 diesel build

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Valve Manifold and Air Lines

With the tank mounted up and most of the work behind the trunk wall complete, I spend the day making up a mount for the AccuAir valve manifold and control unit, as well as bending up the copper air lines.

The mount itself is a piece of scrap steel, with the AccuAir VU4 valve manifold mounted to the front, and the eLevel control unit mounted to the back. To hide the ugly steel, I bent up some of my trademark acrylic using a heat gun:


Some black paint and a mile of copper tubing later, I got everybody mounted up:

I need to redo the right bottom line, as it wound up with a kink in it, but I'm pretty happy with how this is all turning out

[Rubens]

Thats looking sweeeeeeet! Love the writing

[HuH]

That's mint. Top work, mate!

[loekaaz]

Wow. That.

[basyrfang]

vip style!

[bobbyjones]

Looking awesome. Love the work in the trunk.

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Hey all! Progress has been slow these last couple of weeks because my girl was on vacation for a week, and because I spent a bunch of time building a shed for my mom:



pretty. fuckin'. exciting.

I also got in one of the last shipments for the air ride project. Courtesy of Slam Specialties, a set of four SS-5 bags and some upper and lower brackets:


I don't trust my welding skills enough to stick some brackets together, and the shop I'm thinking of using is two weeks out on fab work, so I've got a bit of waiting to do.

In spite of being busy with other nonsense, I've gotten a little bit of work done on the car. If you've noticed in my pics, I don't take many photos of the passenger side of the car, because the paint on the right front fender was kind of messed up from the chrome fender trim. I resprayed the fender with some paint from Paintscratch.com:


Cleared, but not wet-sanded:


I've gotten paint from Paintscratch.com a number of times, and the color match has always been excellent. I obviously have some orange peel to remove once the paint has cured to my satisfaction, but it already looks 100x better.

The trunk lid had apparently spent its life being a shelf for various gritty and/or sharp objects, and the paint was just sort of generally trashed. I did a light wet-sanding job to smooth out the scratches, and debadged the trunk in the process:


Buffed out with Meguiars 105/205 and Griot's Garage Best in Show:


Last, I finally finished up the damn trunk, with a carpeted panel on the right side:


There won't be much to say for a bit until I'm able to get the air ride brackets welded up, but progress is being made!

[MikeyRa]

Nice, what alternator do you plan on running with this system? I am about to switch to a 150 amp alt and put a PAC200 unit inline to the air ride on mine.

[Fred802]

I've been watching this thread since the beginning and I really like what you've done with the car, especially the hard lines.

[skiierman]

Builds coming out great, I cant wait to see more! Hurry up and get everything mounted, I'm dying to see this thing dropped.

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Nice, what alternator do you plan on running with this system? I am about to switch to a 150 amp alt and put a PAC200 unit inline to the air ride on mine.

You know, I've been thinking about this, and so far, I haven't come up with much in the way of options for an alt upgrade on the OM606. Some people have installed the W210 alternator, but it's only 115A, which isn't much of an upgrade over the 90A I've got.

I've been doing some non-scientific observations on the electrical system so far, and I've noticed the following things:

1. The compressor slows slightly at idle when the car is first started, but the slowing goes away after the car is warmed up. I think this is due in part to the electrical system having to recharge the battery after burning a bunch of power on the glow plugs and starter. Just a guess, though.

2. I have no dimming of the lights at all when running the audio system hard, even at idle.

This makes me think that, even though the alt is relatively small, it seems to be keeping up okay so far. The compressor only draws like 19A running at full tilt, which really isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. Keep in mind also that even though the alternator is small, I don't have any spark plugs to power

Basically, I'm going to keep a very close eye on the electrical system, keep researching alternator upgrades, and at the first sign of needing MOAR POWAR, I'll have to come up with something.

As a dumb anecdote, while we're talking about electrical systems, the Cummins in my old truck used a grid heater instead of glow plugs, and the grid heater continues to cycle on-and-off for a few minutes after start up. That monster heater used 200A when it cycled, and you could watch your volt gauge drop down to ~10v and back to 14.4v every few seconds as it ran. I wound up having to size the wiring and fuses on the stuff I installed quite a bit higher than usual, simply due to the amperage spikes that would occur as the voltage dipped. Fun stuff.

I've been watching this thread since the beginning and I really like what you've done with the car, especially the hard lines.

Thank you! I'm also particularly happy with the way the hard lines came out. I'm a little worried that the unions between copper and plastic lines are going to be additional failure points, but so far, the only leaks I've found are actually on the NPT fittings on the manifold behind the sub box, not the PTC ones that the lines use. I am WAY impressed with PTC fittings so far.

Builds coming out great, I cant wait to see more! Hurry up and get everything mounted, I'm dying to see this thing dropped.

Meeeeee toooooooo! I tell you what, let's you and me round up a bunch of gearheads to go over to Portland Speed Industries and yell at them to drop all their fab customers and move me to the front of the line. That, or I need to find another welder who can do better than the birdshit welds I put out with my old Lincoln buzz box

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Ugh, what a fucking waste of a day. So, with one shop 2+ weeks out on fab work, I called around to some custom shops around town to see if I could get my brackets welded up sooner. The shops shall remain nameless, but let's just say I'm no closer to having built brackets now than I was this morning.

Shop #1 in Vancouver told me over the phone that they fab suspension components all the time, but when I arrived, suddenly they only do body and mechanical work. Oooookay.

Shop #2 expressed interest over the phone, but apparently a '95 E300 isn't fly enough to fit in with the zillion dollar Porsches and Audis they usually work on, and they essentially told me to fuck off.

Shop #3 didn't quite tell me to fuck off, but as soon as I told them that I would be handling the install, and I just needed them to weld up the brackets with material and a design I provided, they quoted me, no joke, $900. Yeah fuckin' right

Shop #4 was nice enough, but basically told me they had no idea how to accomplish what I needed, and they weren't willing to throw me even a ballpark quote. They also were two to three weeks out on fab, which isn't unreasonable, but the whole point of this enterprise was to avoid waiting until August to get this crap installed. Oh well.

So, right now what I need is either a decent fab shop here in Portland or the surrounding environs that actually WANTS SOME MONEY in exchange for a bit of welding, or a friendly local StanceWorks-er who would be willing to weld up some brackets in exchange for money and/or a copious amount of alcohol and/or a whole mess of bomb-ass ribs off my smoker.

Anyone around here have a shop to recommend or interested in doing some welding? Pretty please?

[bobbyjones]

do you have measurements for the brackets you want made? maybe we can work something out.

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

do you have measurements for the brackets you want made? maybe we can work something out.

That is extremely generous of you! I'll take some more precise measurements tomorrow and PM you with what I'm thinking for a design.

Flickr's down for maintenance / changing the UI again, so I have all the images hosted for the moment on my Dropbox. If for some reason they're not showing, let me know and I'll try to fix them.

Got the AccuAir height sensors mounted up today. In the front, I drilled and tapped the control arm, and attached the sensor linkage there:


In the back, however, the suspension is much more complicated, and I couldn't find a spot I liked to attach the sensor linkage. Instead of attaching the linkage to a control arm, I decided to make a bracket that attaches the linkage to the sway bar. The bracket itself is very simple: just an L-bracket, JB-welded and attached with a hose clamp to the sway bar. This put the linkage inboard enough to clear the wheels, and was actually much easier than messing with drilling a control arm:


It looks a little wack with the fresh black spray on it, but whatevs, one good rainstorm and it'll be filthy like everything else under the car

Since I don't have many pretty pictures to show today, I thought we could talk for a minute about suspension design - spring rates specifically. Obviously I don't want to completely trash the handling on the nicest-riding car I've ever owned, so I want to get this right. Supposedly the factory spring rates are about 300 lb/in front and 240 lb/in rear. Since I want ride height to be 2–2.5" lower than stock, I figure a little stiffer on the spring rate can't hurt. The thing is, though, whereas a regular coil spring (I'm ignoring progressive springs for the sake of simplicity here) has the same spring rate throughout its cycle, a little physics suggests that air springs are extremely progressive in how they behave. Put more plainly, as a spring compresses, it gets stiffer, but as an air spring compresses, it not only gets stiffer, but the rate at which it gets stiffer increases geometrically.

I've done a little bit of math with the specs I'm thinking of for the bags, and I'm getting 344 lb/in at ride height for the front, and 259.5 lb/in for the rear. Here's the spreadsheet showing how the effective spring rate changes over the bags' travel, and a chart showing the same:

[skiierman]

Meeeeee toooooooo! I tell you what, let's you and me round up a bunch of gearheads to go over to Portland Speed Industries and yell at them to drop all their fab customers and move me to the front of the line. That, or I need to find another welder who can do better than the birdshit welds I put out with my old Lincoln buzz box

check out Cycle Metrics, off of Thompson road. I'm sure Gary there could help you out. Its a motorcycle shop but he welds too, he's a great guy, worth taking a look.