Smokey

welcome. Good luck in your M3 search, let me know if you have specific questions. I have pretty good experience with both e36 (obviously) and e46 versions. In the end, the e46 is the better car with more potential in every way pretty much. The downside is cost. It will also cost more in every aspect (initial cost, maintenance, mods). It's up to you to decide if the cost difference is worth the performance and potential difference. It's also going to depend on what you want to do with the car. Any goals? Auto-x, track (turns), 1/4 mile, just a fast street car?

if you're honestly interested in a turbo 850 and want to know everything you need to know.....take an afternoon and go up to Auto Assets and talk to Matt. He'll get you sorted out.

When I was little my uncle kept his black 69 camaro with a cage and spray in our garage while he was in the Naval Academy. I remember my brother and I would open the garage and just stare at it and tell the neighborhood kids how cool it was. One of the other big influences was the first time I saw this car http://www.eporsch.co.uk/images/Turbo2MidnightB1.jpg and then followed by this car http://www.butzi.cz/modely/95_911_gt2_(993)/95_911_gt2_(993)_01.jpg

^^^HAHA, that's about the truth! The cars I had thru HS and beginning of college weren't anything worth keeping. I was somewhat forced to part out the Talon after totaling it one night being stupid I'm pretty happy with my stable of vehicles right now. Honestly the M3 is worth more to me than it's worth in cash value so I'll keep it and run it into the ground.

I'd say for sure that my driving habbits have become more "grown up" over time. It's not very often that I'm messing around on the street anymore (unless Erik is around ), and when I was younger that happened much more. I think the biggest change is that I came to be more realistic about goals for a car before going crazy on mods. I now plan what I want the car to be before modifying it and try to stick to that plan. For instance I knew that I wanted my M3 to be a good street/track car and stuck to that with the mods. I got to the point where I wanted to do some things to make it faster on the track, but that would have made it much less streetable, so I got the FD to move forward on the track. Same applies to the FD, the turbos are blown on it, but instead of going full tilt on a single setup I'm replacing the twins because it's already got more power than I want/need for what it's main purpose is. I'll be honest I've always wanted to have a fast drag car, but it just wasn't high up enough in my priorities list for me to spend the required money on....maybe that'll be my mid-life crisis.

I'm very sorry for your loss. Keep the car, you'll regret it later if you don't. Andy and I share our father's favorite watch. One of us has either worn it or wound it (automatic) every singe day since he left us over 2 years ago.

don't give me that crap, in the beginning of the thread you wanted to remove the fan and seal the box to the lid. hrm....wonder if you could rig up the fan to pull air into the bay instead of out? what's the "box" part made out of again?

I can see that. Let's try sealing up the "box" and see if that helps or hurts.

that's what I was getting at, sorry for the confusion. Thanks for clearing it up Dave. I guess my biggest concern with that would be if it would be choked down by going to a bigger box and then back down to the snorkel....one way to find out I guess. Are air temps that big of a deal with the 996? What's the flow like thru that back deck, is this even an issue at speed?

think the "snorkel" that goes to the deck lid does a good job of pulling in fresh air, but it's not a sealed source of the K&N so it also pulls in hot engine bay air. If you somehow sealed the area around the K&N to the snorkel it would solve your fresh air problem....but would it choke down the intake? Does your car register air intake temps? I can't remember. Has anybody on Rennlist taken on a similar project you can piggy-back off of their experiences?

<------This guy, not surprised by this. Thanks for the link Carl. I'll have to try to take some more time to play around with it later, but when I tried to go to the index and choose a story I got into a scrolling frenzy with the page and it won.

Thanks for the recommendations Draco and Max. I've considered Car and Driver, or Road and Track and while they are written well and usually have some stories I like, there are also parts of the mag that I feel just don't appeal to me at all. That was one of the things I loved about SCC the most is that I usually would read every damn page of the thing.

I'm sure I'll get stuffed with at least 1 Modified before I can cancel it, but I remember buying one in the past because of an FD that was in it. I remember beautiful full page pictures with some of the most horrid articles ever written. I guess it could be a good quick flip thru but that's about it.

The news on this has been floating aroudn for a while, but a couple of weeks ago I got an offical notice from them that the March issue would be the last produced and my subscription would be instead filled by Modified (read: crap) magazine. I still have Grassroots Motorsports which is going strong and honestly one of the best out there, but I will really miss SCC. I always thought they had great writing and covered stories and editorials that I wanted to read and they were done the way I would have wanted them to be. They were also one of the first to routinely use a dyno to test products and cars, and they had THE BEST shootout test each year with their Ultimate Street Car Challenge. I had been a reader for about 8 years and subscriber for almost 4. SO, what other mags are out there that are worthy of replacing my subscription to SCC? I'm obviously going to tell Primedia to sit on it with the Modified subscription.

congrats Erik, but try to remember that the days of the no-headlight no-farings no-tag R6 are gone....let them be!

where are you a tech at?

^^always wanted to try one, but never wanted to pay for it I'm pretty sure it's rare for your shop to even have 2 available. The only other times I've heard of shops getting them, they have to raffle off spots to just buy the damn thing and they only got one. (yes, the deal was if you won the raffle you merely won the ability to pay full price for the Utopia)

Johnnie Blue...if I'm bumming some off of my father-in-law If I'm paying, probably more like a MaCallan 12, Jameson Gold Reserve, Jameson 12, Johnnie Gold, or Abelour. Though my favorite go-to right now is The Glenlivet French Oak Reserve 15....tasty indeed. All neat of course unless you enjoy ruining something that took almost as long to make as I've been alive. Mark, I like your tastes.

sorry Ben, I must have missed this in the thread updates. I guess technically I don't ride right now since I'm without bike... This was the first summer in 10 years that I didn't ride. Still have the helmet though and it gets good use with my car track days!

THIS

^^^He gets out of his crate so fast now that I can barely put him in it and turn it around to have the door face the wall before he has it open!! My wife and I struggle with this decision as well. We've crated our dog since he was a puppy whenever we leave. My wife feels more inclined to leave him out than I do, but it is nice if we're at someone elses house that I'm not always worried he'll get into something he's not supposed to....so I somewhat feel it's training for that situation. We still crate him every day when we're at work, but we've started leaving him out for smaller time intervals such as us going out to dinner or running to the grocery store.

nice intro and car. Welcome.

http://www.motocard.com/imatges/articles/10296g.gif

sorry Charles, I guess it'd be more specific to say that he forgot to use his last dying breath to utter..."by the way, I own a fantastically rare supercar from the 30s that's worth 8 milllion in a garage somewhere that I haven't even bothered to look at for 50 years because I've just been too busy to be bothered with it" Then he'd drop the mic on the floor and die just like all the old school English ballers do.

too much bloody money. "Hey remember that time I bought that historically significant and rare supercar that I paid a bunch of money for?.....where'd I put that again?"