E21 316: Inner-Arch Fix + MOT Prep.

Hacking out the inner wheel-arches at the back to make the 16x9s fit left them in a right state, with a big gap up inside the wing. Being where it is, the gap is wide open to dirt and water flinging up off the wheel ready to rot the body from the inside out, so as a temporary measure I covered the area in ally-tape. It worked well, but was never going to last long. I figured the inner-arch would be considered a structural part of the body and would need a steel fillet welding in, but it doesn't appear to be the case so fibre-glass will do.

The area is a bit big for filling in though, so I shot up to Halfords and bought a square-metre of fibre-glass matting, £4.29. You need resin to apply it, which is a bit dearer. A kit is available for £9.99 that includes a small bottle of resin and a small mat, otherwise resin starts at a fiver and hardener is extra. The recommended resin is polyester-based, so it stretches, but I figure that marine epoxy-resin, which can be used for fibre-glass, will do the job as it may not be as flexible, but sure is waterproof and rock hard. I also happen to have a litre of the stuff left over from some carbon-fibre projects a few years ago.

I weighed the fibre-glass mat up to the whee-arch and cut it into rough shapes. The instructions say to coat the mat in resin and then stick it, but I found it just as easy and a little less messy to brush a little resin onto the surface, then stick the pieces of mat on dry and brush in heaps of resin over the top. The epoxy is quite thick and stiffens quickly, so this may the only workaround method using this stuff. It's certainly done the trick, the fibre-glass is as solid as the metal and has stuck well even to the rough under-seal surface, lets just hope it doesn't flex too much and crack away. It should see me through the MOT next week and that's the main thing, but at least there's no mud being flung up into the wing anymore. A quick coat of red-primer and the tester may not even notice the difference...

E21 316: Tyre stretch comparison.

This is for a mate who's bought some 17" BBS reps (Calibre Vintage) for his Mk4 Golf. As with my tyres, the Demon Tweeks guys recommended 45 profile for his wheel size. Im guessing this is for comfort, safety etc., but not with the amount of stretch in mind. The first pic shows my 16x9J wheel with a Yokohama 205/45 tyre. In my opinion this is just too big looks wise and takes over the look of the wheel. The second pic shows my second set of tyres, Toyo 195/40 profile. The difference it makes to looks is staggering, showing the rim off instead of hiding it. In my case the bigger tyre was jammed against my wheel-arch and made me cut more than I needed to when I got the lower profile 40s. 

Lower profiles are harder to find and the tyre sellers will probably say the 5% difference in tyre-wall won't make much difference in order to shift items they have in stock, but as you can see below the difference is actually huge. 

225/45

215/40

May as well be 225, profile same but 5mm less pitch-angle on either side.

E21 316: Sculpting New Arches...

The car survived a trip with 3 people in and no scrubbing at all on the 16x9s, which I found very surprising, but still I figure the arches are good to finish off. I've neatened up the pulled lips and made a start to filling in and re-sculpting the shape of the wheel-arches, but progress has been slow and my intentions of selling the complete project this summer are looking unlikely. I spoke to the guy who did the re-spray for me originally and he said to get the arches as good as could be and pass it back over to him to smooth them off and repaint them without having to go over the whole car again. Great, though I can't keep hurling money at it, and with more to do over summer I've had less time to spend on the E21 and more time spent enjoying driving it on the new wheels for a few weekends in the sunshine like I intended, not just the odd trip to work. Oh and there is the matter of my daily driver needing MOT attention, but that's a different story.

Never the less, both the o/s arches have begun to take shape. Getting the lips off the bigger wheels and tyres was too extreme a job for my arch-rolling kit, so I had to pull them out with grips in the end. This meant a fair bit less grinding on the o/s rear wheel arch and none at all needed up front. The arch-lip needed to be low for as much tuck as possible, I don't like the cut-arch look, so I got the pulled out lip roughly in line with the slope of the arch and built it up flush with P38 filler. This is as close to the look of those European BBS'd E21s as I could figure, with a slight flare to the lip rather than the flat-edged look of the original arches. This is probably the easiest method of smoothing and saves on a bit of body-filler, enough of which is being used already.

I haven't touched the nearside arches yet, the main thing putting me off being the n/s rear one that was used to test fit those oversized Yokohama tyres and has suffered greatly from the spinning-disc. With the extra lip cut off the rigidity has been lost and the general shape of the arch has deformed, as well as more tyre being visible, about 10mm of tuck being lost. I guess my only options are to try and spot-weld the rough section of lip back on that was cut too far, which I still have, and rebuild the shape of the entire arch in filler, or buy a patterned-part wheel-arch off eBay for £25, cut out the current one, weld in the new one, smooth it off, pull the lip out and fill all that in. Well, there's no doubt the first method is cheaper and a lot less work, but this is a large area to be filling and smoothing and a wide margin for error, plus I don't even know if the bent arch will accept the bit I cut off without messing it up even further... watch this space!

E21 316: Stance looking rather complete...

Squat, slammed, stanced, hellaflush, scrapin' and eating the modern metal for brekkies!

E21 316: Stanced on the BBS reps!

E21 316: More Open Arch Surgery! Wheels finally on...

Got the grinder out again today and tackled the job I haven't been looking forward to - cutting away the other rear wheel-arch. Progress was quick and smooth for a change, I guess because I had an idea of what to do now, but I think the lower profile tyres played a part. If only I'd bought them first time round I wouldn't have had to butcher the n/s quite so much. A good notch had to come out at the bumper shut-lines as these were the main bits sitting on the tyre, but less of the outer lip had to be cut away and the arch looks a lot smoother than the last effort.

The main problem with scrubbing was coming from the inner skin of the arch and the best way to get that off was still to peel it back, cut wide flaps in the metal using tin-snips and work them with grips until they snap clear.

It's been quite a bit of effort and hacking away at the car was heartbreaking, but at last the super fat wheels are on and no scrubbing whatsoever. Now to see about neatening up those arches...

E21 316: Front wheels fitted - the easy part.

No fouling on the pulled arch-lip with these skinnier tyres, but the front valance was still just about catching so, with the arrival of the new spacers, I thought I'd get the fronts boxed off before starting the arduous task of the other rear arch. Sadly, my camber-plates have yet to arrive, I guess they must be stuck while Customs & Excise figure out what they are.

Thankfully, the amount of valance that needed cutting away on the n/s was only about 8mm and I didn't have to remove the bumper after all. I did my best to follow a natural curve, not sure if I took a little too much near the bottom. Interestingly, the o/s of the front valance didn't contact the new tyre at all and the fender does not extend past the bumper. I wonder if the n/s wing has been replaced at some point giving a slightly proud line. I matched up to that line when repairing the lower-valance last summer, so that would explain why it was catching the tyre too. Either way, the o/s/f arch required no grinding at all, so a little more pulling and the fronts will be ready for smoothing in.

I've also been driving round the last day or two with NASCAR style staggered wheels - 16s on the n/s and still 15s on the o/s. The car steers great to the right, but is a bit recalcitrant going hard left. I must find time to wrestle that other rear arch on Monday or it'll be like this for a while.

E21 316: New Low-Pro Tyres - Toyo T1R + Stretching Issues!

Thanks to finding a buyer for my ill-fitting Yokohamas so quickly I was able to buy another set of tyres this week without having too feel too guilty about how much I've spent on stance this last fortnight. Stance is what this car is all about though, so money should be the last thing causing me to compromise. You can't fight progress after all...


I got back to mulling over sizes and decided not to take any chances on buying tyres too big again and went a couple of sizes smaller on width as well as a lower profile. The 8-inch wide front wheels have now got 195/40 tyres, as opposed to 205/45. That 5% decrease in the tyre-wall is more pronounced than I figured, but they still just about went on with a couple of assistants pressing the sides in. Still no need for the butane / lighter trick or a 'bead-blaster', but boy are they stretched! I think we're pushing the boundaries of legality here [Offence Code 112].

No such luck with the 9-inch wide rear wheels. With the lower-profile sidewall, the slightly skinnier 215/40 I went for just don't quite reach the inner-rims enough to coax them on, as the 225/45 Yokos did. With the help of my work colleagues we tried the butane / lighter trick several times to no avail. Either the fuel/air mixture wasn't right or we were just plain doing it wrong, so after starting to smell melted rubber I gave in and decided to read up a bit more. One guy at work knows someone not too far away who has one of the all fabled 'bead-blaster' machines [explained here on TyreBayDirect.com], but as is so often the case he hasn't seen him for a while and it'll take a bit of notice to get hold of it. I don't like to hang around so, determined to get something done this weekend, began scanning the forums again to see if there was another trick I'd missed.

To my amazement there was - the 'bicycle inner-tube' gambit. This involves stretching a bicycle inner-tube round the wheel-rim and inflating it to create an airtight seal in the gap between the rim and tyre, deflating it as the tyre expands and finally sliding it out as the bead is reached. It sounds almost simple and to be honest it is. Unlike the butane / lighter method, which is very hit-and-miss when you don't know what you're doing, the inner-tube trick has a much steadier learning curve. You can see what's going on, gauge the pressure, find leaks easily and if the tube is going to pop out and break the seal it does so gently and with fair warning. With a bit of common sense anyone can handle a tyre popping off the rim at 40-odd psi, so this is by far the safest way to stretch tyres at home - I even managed it with a foot-pump, though I wouldn't like to do that again. It only took two proper attempts to get my first tyre on this way and, of course, there's zero chance of damaging a rim or melting rubber. Here's a great vid on Youtube of how easy it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxHYEdA8Qo, and it really wouldn't take many tries to get it down that good. I got 3 inner-tubes from Halfords for £10, so even if you need a dozen practise goes it still costs less than paying someone.

It's best to keep the tube size close to wheel size, but a bit smaller to get a tight fit. For my 16" wheels I bought 14" tubes, but a guy on the forum that convinced me was using 12" tubes on 15" wheels, so a few inches smaller is fine it seems. Getting an airtight seal was the most difficult part, but once you get a few PSI in and the tyre begins to press onto the tube you're away - make sure the valve on the tube is well proud of the seal as it inflates. Deflating and sliding the tube clear without breaking the seal can be troublesome, but it is just trial-and-error needed to get this right and it doesn't take much. Even though my first try was a fail and popped the seal it still managed to fully seat the opposite-bead, which is something two of us couldn't do using the old suspending the tyre on axle-stands and jumping on the wheel trick, so this is a good, safe method to do that. On my successful attempt, I still got a bit of tube caught in the bead, which is still stuck in there and caused the tyre to need quite a bit of pressure to pop onto the rim over it - about 65psi in fact, thankfully as with the foot-pump my legs just couldn't make any more! Still, the skinny 215 is on and I would recommend this technique to anyone stretching tyres at home.

E21 316: The wrong tyres! Sold.

Wallace and Gromit are back, this time they've got the right trousers on, it's the tyres that are right out. They're just too hi-profile and are wreaking havoc amongst the villages wheel-arches. Yep, those wicked Yokohama Advan have had to come off again and go on to eBay, as the wheel-arch chewed 2 of them pretty badly and they can't be returned, but the damage is only in the tread so I figured someone would want them cheap. Bearing in mind they've only covered about 0.2 of a mile and are worth ~£500 new, I figured £300 would still be a good deal and it looks like I was right - I had a buyer on the first day of the auction and got damn close to my asking price. The latest set of tyres have ony cost me £280 anyway, so I've had more expensive screw-ups it must be said.

The new tyres I've bought are good-old Toyo Proxes T1R, a bit boring and predictable, but again it's tough to get matching tyres in the right sizes. I am sad to see the lovely semi-slick design of the Yokos go though, but they just don't make a 40 profile and Toyo do, the new ones are 195/40/16 for the 8J front and 215/40/16 for the 9J rear - it's going to be quite a stretch! Watch this space.

These really were some of the coolest road tyres I have ever seen, what a shame they're like big balloons, hopefully the new owner will get the benefit of all that grip with the Scooby Impreza he's putting them on.

E21 316: Making the 9Js fit the rear...

Summary of the bank-holiday weekends activities:

Pulled the N/S/R wheel-arch back out and cut it off.
Peeled back the inner-skin of the arch and cut about 4 inches off it.
Cut a notch out of either side of where the arch meets the bumper shut-line.

The outer rim of the arch is now way off the tyre, but I could see a black rubber mark further up inside the inner wheel-arch.

The car was now rolling with a driver in, but one test drive revealed that any bump causes rubbing and the rim of the tyre caught the sharp edge of the cut inner arch, which chewed it pretty bad.

I've made a lot of space up there, so before I start hacking away any more arch, I'm going to buy smaller, lower profile tyres, I think that is now clear.

E21: Getting low on sixteens...

They say fitting 16x9J to the rear could not be done... but people have done it. They say it cannot be done without cutting the arches... and it seems like they were right, so before I make a total mess of the car by grinding away those beautiful rear arch lines [already started yesterday :s - pics coming soon], I thought I'd throw up some more inspirational pics to remind me that I'm chasing dreams here, not just fitting fat wheels...

E21 316: Deep beige BBS?

I'm planning on painting the new wheels in the same Peugeot Panama Beige I did the rims of the Melbers in, maybe having them powder-coated in time, but here's a quick test on one of the 9J with my remaining rattle-cans.

E21 316: Slight arch foul!

As you can see, the arch was sat on the tyre something awful with the 9" wide wheels at the back and the 225/45/16 rubber on...

A bit more arch persuasion...

Credit card clearance!

Or is it? The arch is still sitting on the tyre a little. The car just about rolls, but there's nowhere for the tyre to go either on a bump or with the weight of the driver...

It looks very flush and tidy, but something drastic will have to be done.