Notax compact update

[bruvs1]

£150 to £200 quid is reasonable for cwp sets. £150 for a casing is steep, £350 -£450 seems about right for a build with parts. gripper lsd's never come in a casing, an ebay bmw casing and lsd should come in at £200-350 ish so would have gone that route. you need to spend time rebuilding/testing and generally going through the car with a fine tooth comb. that way it will pay back in finishes. not trying to sound over blunt but its just sounds like your spunking money and not getting anywhere fast

[Eddie]

Hi Chris,
It was good to meet up with you at Benson, I think it's about time your luck improved!
We had a good day in the other compact, the old girl didn't miss a beat. Also very happy with 14th OA
Considering it was the cars first rally.

Hope to see you in the new year.

Nick.

[notax]

Well, you haven't heard from me for a while. After enormous effort and expense we are tackling our first event in over a year tomorrow... here's my latest update:

I just thought I’d let you all know how testing went last night. Woody has put in a load of hours to get the various issues resolved and a very big thank you to the ‘bruvs’ John and Dave for all their help redesigning the back end for us and all their other advice.

We finally set out to test the car late last night having run the gauntlet again at the barn with the damn horses and collected and sorted various spare parts for the rally. Extra work created when we found the barn flooded and had to retrieve all my Z3M interior parts and fill up a spare room in my house…

Woody had earlier taken Zippy around the industrial estate and found out just what an uncontrollable beastie it is in the wet, esp on road tyres. Before I got behind the wheel to test more enthusiastically he wisely fitted rally tyres up front to help overcome understeer.

We drove about 50 miles in pouring rain and I got in some sideways practice on a few roundabouts… quite a few actually! We have now wound the brake bias all the way back instead of all the way forward and, on the road at least, this works well with the fronts locking and the rears refusing to even under duress. We only experienced one brief bit of understeer coming into a sharp downhill off camber bend but otherwise neutral to oversteer as I like. At the moment we haven’t fitted a rear ARB, we have two to choose from and will do some more testing after this event, but for now the handling feels good and we don’t have time to test. This rally could be a good opportunity, but the forecast is for very heavy showers and it is probably safer to stick with what we’ve got until we ca test without the pressure of a rally.

The only issue I kept having was struggling to take lock off at the end of a slide. We have fitted a quick rack, whereas Zippy used to have one with a ridiculous number of turns – I think we’ve gone from 3.4 or 3.6 turns down to 2.7. During the slide it is easy to modulate but the steering seems to weight up unnaturally when trying to straighten things up. Never had this issue in any car before, will have to have spinach for breakfast!

Good to get away from our previous noisy, banging diff and the whole back end feels good.

The engine pulled really well and ran sweetly even through massive puddles. Our biggest issue by far was shocking to nil visibility. Woody may have been secretly relieved as it kept our speeds down in places but Granville’s decision to remove the heater continues to cause issues. The car steamed up really badly. I have now researched and found this:

http://www.t7design.co.uk/index.php?mai ... cts_id=192

so hopefully we can this sorted for the next outing. Until then we’ll have to stick to de mist which doesn’t work too well. The screen is heated but most of the filaments don’t work (and this is the second one we’ve tried) Only other issue is that the headlights are shocking and whilst the Xenon spots are stunning straight ahead they cannot be adjusted to light the area to the side of the car which means you are blind turning into sharp corners. Woody is getting uprated headlight bulbs which may help. A slight redesign of the lamp pod might be called for at the next dark event.

Thanks for all your support, fingers crossed for tomorrow…

Chris

Team Notax

[mrfuzzyfelts]

Good update!

Keep us posted and we like pictures

[notax]

Good to hear from you! Sadly I'm a total numpty and have no idea how to upload pics, all of me on the site have been put there by other people. Needless to say I have loads so will try and post if there is a very easy explanation of how to do it!

[M3 Compact]

Great to hear from you again Chris and great that you've got the car more sorted now.
Well done today, really pleased for you both. Hopefully now you'll enjoy some of the reliability that your persistence & investment justifies.

[notax]

Great to hear from you again Chris and great that you've got the car more sorted now.
Well done today, really pleased for you both. Hopefully now you'll enjoy some of the reliability that your persistence & investment justifies.

Thanks Very pleased with today's outing, off on holiday in 5 hours and haven't started packing yet - very long day so have to be brief...

Seeded 15th but I think about 10th in class! Very, very strong field with lots of very quick Mk2s and the odd WRC car, Darrian etc... Car set up totally new and very slippery track with regular torrential downpours and hale. Biggest scare was when Zippy understeered off the track onto wet grass at about 70mph, no issues kept going! Very pleased with set up (thanks Bruvs ) and no reliability issues. Tweeks need to be made but overall car feels great I just need to learn it and get some more steady finishes under my belt.

Ended 14th OA and 6th in class, next outing Bovingdon on 1st March - stunning tarmac event on south coast regs out, fills very fast. Must dash!

[is-si]

Good effort Team Notax

[notax]

Good effort Team Notax

Good effort Team Bruvs

[notax]

Well, finally a couple of photos showing roughly how Zippy now looks...

[notax]

[notax]

[notax]

Having finally managed to change my profile picture it is already getting a bit monotonous - maybe I need to shrink it?

Anyway, back to the diff discussion. I have never yet had a problem running the 188mm except when driveshafts have let go and caused damage. Otherwise they seem fine - and were standard even on Z3ms with their S54 engines as far as I know. I'm still a bit confused by the gearing on my car - Drenth carried out a computation for me (using my exact tyre diameters which we had to measure) showing that a 4.45 cwp should give 137mph top speed and 57mph in first gear at our max of 8k revs. On the rolling road it topped out at 129mph and in admittedly rough testing on the road reached around 50mph in first.

Looking at Drenth's figures I wonder if the cwp I was supplied with was actually a 4.7 and not a 4.45? Drenth says a 4.7 should give 54mph in first and 129mph top end...

For a 5.1 they quote 50mph and 119mph (which would probably be ideal) although whether a 4mph reduction in first gear would make much difference I don't know?

I'm going to stick with the current set up for our next event and see how the car fares at a more typical, lower speed rally than Bovington. Looking forward, if I did go for a 210mm diff would I still be able to use the Z3M driveshafts? Do you know which model of BMW this diff would be from?

Woody has tracked down an actuator and what we hope will work as a throttle blipper, so hoping the paddle shift will be ready soon. Does anyone have any idea how much a throttle blipper should be set to increase the revs by? Thanks

[M3 Compact]

Z3Ms used a 188mm diff Chris, but the crownwheels were different and used larger diameter bolts to mount the LSD units (M14 as opposed to M12), and the higher ratio (3.15?) is stronger.
When you get to lower ratios the pinions aren't as strong, this is the same for all diffs.

IMO 210mm is the WTG for your car.

What are your actual gear ratios in the box and what ratio diff is in the car ATM?

Car looks great BTW.

[bruvs1]

Looking at Drenth's figures I wonder if the cwp I was supplied with was actually a 4.7 and not a 4.45? Drenth says a 4.7 should give 54mph in first and 129mph top end..

You have a 4.45 , i counted the teeth!! If it was a 4.7 I'd have kept it!!!