Brakes, bigger = badass

Found a great deal on a Massive Brakes sport kit. 300x21mm rotors with Wilwood Superlite 4 piston calipers. Estimated 10lbs of unsprung weight off of the front corners. The calipers required some minor material removal from the ends to clear the barrels of my wheels. Lee Vuong (of Massive) was kind enough to provide 3mm spacers free of cost which improved my clearance with the spokes of my D-Force LTW5's.

Kill Switch

Finally got around to wiring up a kill switch. Which meant making a new battery cable. Since the power distribution block is on the passenger side firewall I decided that was as good a place to splice the switch in as any. After spending 2hrs squeezing all the wires in the small area in the cowl I discovered that the hood interfered with the switch. This lead me to have the rewire the switch after rotating it 180°.

PAINTING SUCKS!!!

POR15 Flexcote gray paint used for the body panels.

POR15 Hardnose orange 2-part paint used for the cage. Unfortunately its not true orange, not sure what I am going to do about that if anything.

Painted the rear package shelf flat black to eliminate any reflections in the rear window.

Steering Rack Swap

I was tired of the 432 turns lock to lock of the stock e30 rack and found a screamin' deal on a rack off a wrecked '95 m3. So here I begin the process of swapping the racks. I still need to order the e36 HP hose and some new washers for the banjo bolts before I can put things back together.

The linkage between the steering column and rack needs to modified due to the new rack being a little bit longer.

Interior Priming

Prepping for painting the interior.

Off to the cage builder...finally

Final work before the car is off to Chris Howard to build the cage. No more holes in the floor.
Cut out the sunroof carrier to allow the main hoop to be closer to the roof which will allow for more headroom.

Aluminum Door Panels

Time to cover up the door guts. Had three options; use the stock door panels, buy pre-made panels from Valley Motorwerks at $99 each(ouch) or make them myself. Me being a cheap bastard chose to make them. The Valley panels only cover the recessed area in the middle leaving some other parts of the door exposed which I did not want so I designed my panels to extend to the outter edge of the door.
Cardboard is cheap, aluminum is not. This was an important step because I am mildly retarded I initally cut the cardboard 2 inches short, I would have been up shit creek if I had done that with the aluminum.
One other thing I have learned is to do the less important side first, that way when you screw up you don't have to deal with it everytime on the driver's side. So the passenger door got the first panel, which was a great idea as I put the hole for the door lock and the door release handle in the wrong spots. These are minor screwups and the panel came out looking pretty damn good for not having a sheet metal break or shear. Just need to add a handle to pull the door in with and a hole for the window switch.
The two 24"x48" sheets of 0.04" 5052 aluminum was $65 shipped from OnlineMetals.com and the construction probably took 6-7 hours including making the template. So it was well worth it to make the panels instead of purchasing them.