March Madness

19 Mar March Madness

While at least one of us is eternally grateful to the NCAA gods for letting Duke lose in the first round, this isn’t that kind of March Madness at the shop.

It’s definitely March at Fluid MotorUnion, despite the weather reports looking more like June. And no matter what, it’s always a madhouse here at Fluid (and we mean that in the best way, it’s always busy!), so we’re in the midst of our own little version of March Madness, with less betting on brackets. As always, we remain steadfast in our effort to relay this madness to you as often and as thoroughly as possible, so let’s jump right in, shall we? First up today is Vytas’s Genesis Coupe. He’s in for a pesky sensor issue, along with an oil change and the clutch repair we’ve pictured below. Along with that work, he had some new wheels mounted to new tires, and we’ll be doing a fender roll after the clutch is finished, because his front wheels are rubbing too much for regular driving. Since he has a few bolt-ons and a tune, and plans to add more later, we upgraded him to a Clutch Masters FX300 for a little extra grabbiness without any intense chatter.

Over in fabrication, the E36 M3 motor swap is basically complete. Last time you saw the blown S50, it was hanging around outside the E36’s body, as we prepared it to receive the newer, slightly-higher-displacement heart we’ve purchased for it. Instead of another S50, it’ll now have an S52 powering the rear wheels. After a weekend spent swapping parts from motor to motor, we popped the S52 onto the subframe and brought it up into the E36. Everything’s back in the car now, so it’s just a matter of reconnecting parts and then turning the key!

And lastly, we have a Lexus IS300 on the dyno for some quick reworking of his Megasquirt tune before heading back out into the wild. He originally came into the shop with a corrupted stat/sync calibration file; we sourced a replacement file and now he’s all ready for some quick number-crunching before depositing tire all over the Illinois roadways. Seriously, with a turbo that big, it should be able to lay down some nice tire treads.

We’ve got some craziness in store for the blog this week, so sit tight, things are about to get real.