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Author: Dirk Verhaert

R-Box on TISP open door …

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Sunday 5 May was the annual open day for the Technical Institute Sint-Paulus in Mol.

Since these people have helped us countless times, we could not be missed on the apple. During the tour through all the departments we were really surprised how well equipped this school is. From modern CNC machines to a fully equipped garage department with even a power roller test bench. In the mechanics department, some parts of our BMW were also exhibited.

We would therefore like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for the help we have provided so far.

Thank you Jorn, Peter, Carlo and all the students who participated in this !!

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Bigfoot is back…

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Because we wanted to have some spare parts we made a mold to produce rear and front subframes.

Carl used this molds to strengthen the original car parts. The mold is necessary because otherwise the frames don’t fit anymore due to the extreme heat of the welding.

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Modified starter and alternator

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The R-Box BMW has a lot of electrical features that need a lot of electrical power. This means that we need to use an upgraded alternator.

We are going to use a Denso style 155A version from Luke Motorsport. The pulley has been decreased to 60mm so the ratio becomes 1:1.6 with the cranck shaft pulley

This ratio gives us already sufficient charging current at idle speed.

Overdimensioned bearings allow >14.000rpm for the alternator.

The starter has also been boosted to 2KW to deal with the higher compression of the modified S14.

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Crankshaft pulley …

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Because we are not really wild about all the “non-BMW origin” crankshaft pulleys that are sold here and there, we also had to make some adjustments for this. What worried us most was the fact that these pulleys are always made without a damper. Even though the S14 crankshaft is fairly sturdy in origin, this did not give a good feeling.

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Going hybrid with a power plug

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We like to follow trends and therefore we created the first hybrid M3.

Unfortunately we didn’t find the room to install an electrical engine and batteries. The driver and co-driver didn’t want to go on a diet to compensate the extra batttery weight so this was not a good option.

This means that the power plug can only be used to jump start or keep the battery in good shape whilst not being used.

Because of the strange location of the power plug we wanted to clarify this…

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The spare wheel

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We installed the petrol tank where you normally find the spare wheel. This ment that we had to find a solution to install the spare wheel somewhere else. We looked at a lot of options like the roof, on the rear bumper,the trunk,…but sometimes it looked a bit ridiculous or there was not enough room because of other components like a battery or petrol pumps..

We welded a smal rack that was mounted above the petrol tank The spare wheel now slides in the trunk in its rack and can be locked.

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R-BOX Dash

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The display controllers are being produced by GDM Electronics and meanwhile we tried to find the right positions for the units. Eventually we use 4 simular controllers and the only difference between them is the PCB assembly. For each display an extended temp 7inch TFT panel with touchscreen is used.

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The gear box adapter

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The gear box adapter has become a nice piece of craftmanship.

It took quite a lot of time and effort but we are very happy with the final result. Special thanks to Nick ( Pro-E guru and the students from the Sint Paulus Technical Highschool in Mol (led by Jorn and Peter) for the CNC work)

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