e36 M3 technoviolet vert, wide mitos, rms stage 2, ferrari bbk

[vwgti16vt]

Huge fan of the site and all the cool car people I have met through it. Wanted to share one of my current projects.

This is my 98 M3 convertible. I purchased it a few years ago from the original owner with about 68k miles on it. The guy had all records from day one, factory hardtop, extra keys, both window stickers, you name it. He had done a few upgrades. A few dinan parts, adjustable koni shocks and SSR's. Other then that it was bone stock.




Wasn't quite sure if it was the car for me at the time I purchased it. I had never considered myself a bright purple convertible type of guy, haha. But between my wife's supercharged e36 M3 sedan that we had recently built, the rarity and cleanliness of the car and a few months of driving the car with a top down I put my A8 up for sale and was converted to the "dark side"

So all that being said lets get to the fun stuff. As I mentioned I have had my M3 a few years now. (car now has 82k miles) Of course i have already done a few mods. So here is a quick recap!

First item on the list was suspension. At the time I hadn't built any air ride cars at my shop yet so that wasn't an option for me. I had used personally and installed many sets of H&R, PSS9 and Koni Coilovers so I was only looking at those 3 options. Really getting into the sheer "over-the-toppness" of my bright purple car Chrome adjustable Koni coilovers where the obvious winner. And just my luck a friend of mine had a lightly used set that he was more then happy to sell me.

Out came the Koni's and stock springs and in went the coilovers






Install went smooth other then I broken lower strut bolt in the spindle. But it cooperated and came right out.

[vwgti16vt]

Next were smoked lens
before:

gave everything a good cleaning while it was apart

after

[vwgti16vt]

Pretty happy with the car at this point. But I wasn't getting the adjustability I wanted out of the Koni coilovers. The rear had plenty of range. But I had the front turned all the way down and it wasn't low enough. I know that next step would be to install a set of camber plates. It would give me the extra few inches of adjustment I wanted, more shock travel as well as camber adjustment.

I was really happy with the simplistic design of the Turner Motorsports camber plates I had installed on my wife's M3. Instead of buying a set I put my wife's CAD skills to work and had her draw up a pair of them and enlisted a local machine shop to CNC me a few sets.

I don't have any pics of the camber plate installation but here are a few of the actual batch




Camber plates turned out great. Sold a few sets to my e36 buddies, a few sets on the forums and now had my front suspension issues solved

[vwgti16vt]

When I bought my car the P.O. had installed a few Dinan bits. Strut brace, exhaust and adjustable Koni's and sway bars. I found paper work for the entire Dinan suspension kit including springs. They were not on the car when I bought it. The P.O. was an older guy in his late 60's so I am guessing that he wasn't to happy with the lower ride height and had the stock springs re installed at some point.

Going with the DInan theme I picked up a OBD1 CF Dinan intake on Craigslist of all places. It wasn't perfect and I had to order a new filter from Dinan but It was a great deal. Also the repeated beatings I was taking from my wife's supercharged M3 sedan was starting to get to me so I knew forced induction was in the future at some point.

Out with the old and in with the new(ish)

[vwgti16vt]

Now that the easy stuff was done wheels were next on the list. I new I wanted something 18" and multi piece but didn't have anything particular in mind.

After a few months of looking I found just what I was looking for. A nice set of 18" OZ Mito type 2's. They were in decent shape. The rears had been converted to 3 piece and widened to 10.5" with a high ET and the fronts were still 2 piece on 18x8 barrels. The wheels had all original hardware. They came with no centercaps. The front barrel/lip combo was original OZ as well as the inner rear barrel. The dude was sketchy but the price was right so only a few hours after finding the post I had just sent way to much money to a hillbilly with an unverified paypal somewhere in the midwest.

well..... after 6 or 8 weeks of me calling this guy twice a day and being pretty sure that I had been ripped off more then a few times the wheels arrived. And true to the sketchy guy that he was they were not exactly as described.

First off one of the rear lips appeared to have been bitten my a t-rex or something of the sort. Second, he shipped the wheels in wheel boxes for 17" wheels. On the bright side 2 of the wheels arrived un damaged. I guess 3 actually since the dinosaur attack rear lip obviously didnt happen during shipping. Thankfully I handled all the shipping and ran into through my businesses account AND bought tons of insurance.

But none of the above mattered. I finally owned one of my favorite wheels of all time and they were period correct for my car. I couldn't be happier!

[vwgti16vt]

Lucky for me I was about 5 blocks away from Wheel Specialists. One of the best wheel repair companies on earth i might add. These guys are a long way from a pretty TIG weld on your cracked lip. (not there is anything wrong with that) These guys have one of the most state of the art wheel repair facilities or even machine shops I have seen. Long story short they repaired both damaged lips beyond perfection. I mean to the point that if I didn't show you the before picture you wouldn't have a clue that wheels had ever been rolled on!

Got my wheels back. Ordered up a set of 15mm H&R spacers, 225/40 and 255/35 Dunlop DZ101's and this is what I had





a few with the hardtop on

[ratedm]

gorgeous car man, I have a technoviolet myself, any mods to the fenders to fit the 10.5 wheel?

[LowPokes]

That color <3

[vwgti16vt]

gorgeous car man, I have a technoviolet myself, any mods to the fenders to fit the 10.5 wheel?

Thanks man! I did have to roll and pull the rear quarters to get the rear wheels to fit. It was pretty straight forward stuff. Getting all the seem sealer out was the rear pain.

Without any spacers (as it sits in the last set of pics I posted) the ET is actually so high that I would rub the inside of my wheel on the wells when the suspension would really compress.

I will post more pics. Photobucket was being a pain so I took a break.

[vwgti16vt]

As I mentioned in my previous post my wife and I own a small BMW/Audi/VW repair and performance shop here in Arizona. Over the past few months prior to getting my wheels I was building a 96 Cabrio for a customer of mine. The original plan was to have it ready for Wuste 2012. But like all custom builds go changes in the scope of the build as well as delays with with paint/ body work resulted in the build taking longer then originally planned.

The guy I was building the Cabrio for was also a good buddy of mine. With his car not ready for Wuste we decided that we would take me and my wife's M3's instead. We ended up having an awesome time and I came home with this!!!!

[vwgti16vt]

(I ended up finishing the VW Cabrio a few months later. The owner took it back to Wuste this follow year and won 2nd place in VW. He was totally robbed of 1st but that's just my 2 cents, haha)

Here are a few before and after shots






(the owner of the car took it to an "expert" he met at a GTG for the hardlines. Non symmetrical bends, non matching fittings and non lined up sh*t isn't anything that you'd ever see rolling out my little shop. Plus it makes my trunk setup I built look bad.)

[vwgti16vt]

After Wuste I pretty much took a break from working on my personal cars. I got married, bought a house, fixed up the house and focused on growing our biz.

I was happy with the car but it wasn't good enough. I wanted to take it to another level. I figured I was lucky enough to have found a rare super clean M3 so it didn't deserve anything but the best.

Taking a break from the car gave me time to formulate a plan. First plan of attack were the wheels. I loved my wheels but the super stretched tire look was really starting to grow on me. When I initially found my wheels I had posted up a few fitment questions on bimmerforums about fitting the 10.5 rears wheels and was basically told it was "impossible" Needless to say it wasn't.

Going with the "impossible" theme I started looking around to see what hadn't been done. I found that the holy grail of e36 front wheel fitment was a 10" front wheel. After much research the only guy I found running an 18x10 front wheel on an e36 were the guys at vorshlag. I gave them a call and ask how it was done. They were very helpful but basically told me that this setup was only used on there purpose built track car and they didn't think it was possible for street use. i wasn't happy with that answer and decided to ignore all the naysayers and see what I could figure out on my own.

Being that my front wheels were only 2 piece I was now officially in the hunt for 40 hole lips and barrels! My rear lips are 3.5". for the front I wanted something at least 1 inch narrower to give me a balanced look AND leave plenty of room for whatever BBK I ended up going with. I really wanted to stay with as many original OZ parts as possible so a quick phone call to order parts was out of the questions.

After months of stalking the forums, craigslist, ebay, instagram, etc I lucked out. The stars must have aligned or something because within a matter of days I found a set of 2" original OZ lips from SeanDub here on stanceworks and a set of 8" original OZ barrels on ebay. Unlike my wheels when I first found them both the lips and barrels were in great shape and didn't need to much more the a fresh polish and a good cleaning.




the 3 piece 10" vs the 2 piece 8"

[vwgti16vt]

So time to build these wheels and figure out how to make them fit.

The build was straight forward. Took everything apart. Cleaned, scrubbed, polished, put it back together.







all finished up!

[vwgti16vt]

I realized I forgot one issue I ran into when I first got my wheels. They were missing the center caps. At the time I didn't think it was an issue. I had built plenty of BBS's and even a set of Gotti J55's and I never had an issue finding center caps.

If I only new what I was in for, haha. The first thing I quickly found out was the OZ had traded hands a few times and was no longer owned by the same people that it was when my Mitos were built. The next thing I learned is that the only info I could get from the current owners of OZ was that they wanted me to by a new set of there wheels instead of help my find parts for my 15yr old set. And the lastly, OZ had made what seemed to be about a million different center caps over the years.

So the search began. I tried hitting up every single person that had Mitos for sale and see if they would either just sell me the center caps or at least give me some sort of part number so I could try and find them. Unfortunately I had no luck. My next thought was to search for the center caps by size. I ran into 2 issues. The first being that the center caps I needed were a really strange size and the second was do to the design of the wheel center the center caps were held in with some very specific tabs.

After a TON of searching I thought I had found my answer. I found a guy selling original carbon OZ center caps. I sent him the specs I was looking for and he let me know that what he had was a perfect fit! Thinking ahead I ordered 6 of them from him at a not to fair price. I held my breath and waited for them to arrive.



Well.. unfortunately when the center caps arrived they were NOT an exact fit. They weren't off my much but the diameter was just to big and they wouldn't drop down into the recessed center cap hole. Also the tabs weren't even close to working. I considered putting them in the lathe and turning the outer diameter down to fit but I still would have had to cut the tabs off and devise so way of attaching them to the wheels. I wasn't apposed to making something custom. Actually I love it. But I had had such luck finding all the correct parts for the wheels that I didn't want to give up quite yet.

So i was back on the search. Days, weeks, months passed. But everyday I would while drinking my morning coffee I would search the good old interweb in hope of finding something. And then I did! I ran across a guy that was cleaning out a storage unit and selling everything on ebay. I could hardly believe it but he had the exact caps I needed. But it kept getting better. Not only did he have the caps I needed but they were an extra set he had ordered and they had never been installed. They even still had the blue protective plastic covering them. I dont think I have ever clicked "buy it now" so fast in my life, haha. (not to mention they were $20 shipped!!!!!!!)

Anyways, center caps arrived a few days later. They were perfect! I felt like I won some type of car guy lotto peeling the protective plastic off.

[Evil Panda]

Looks good.