Hellrot e36 'vert with euro m3 power

[HellaQuik]

sub. loving the progress

[Smokey Bear]

Thanks for the positive comments!

I havn't been at this for a few days, have to trailer it from my friends garage where he kindly allowed me to use his ramp and tools for the swap.

Next up is get the motorsports on the back and I STILL haven't had the exhaust repaired. I absolutely love the induction sound from this engine. The ITB's sound excellent, I'm going to look into some sort of home made airbox hopefully when I get the more important stuff out of the way.

I must also strip the laquer from the motorsports and polish then to a mirror shine. That should be fairly rewarding when it's done!

I really wanted to buy wheels but I'm supposed to be looking at an e24 over the weekend...my mom's going to kill me, there's fucking cars everywhere!

[Smokey Bear]

It seems I have a que of projects forming... I collected this tonight. I'll get a thread going as soon as the vert is sorted but it's an e24 635csi, 1985 so it's e28 based, with some rust issues and only 89000 miles. Outside of the rust the body looks extremely straight. It will qualify for classic tax next year so when I have some work done to it I'll take advantage of the cheap tax for a while. I'm not sure if I will sell it or not then but I'll see.

[Smokey Bear]

Picked the car up today finally, had been busy so I didn't have time to trailer it back from my friends garage.



It's great to have it at home now because it's not convienient to get things done and it's inside and will be until I get the roof repaired around the window. Then I plan on putting it in storage until summer.

First job was to unload the m3 interior so I put the roof down and found a place for it.



The lady that owned the car before me had a dog which she said loved to go in the car with her...



Top half has been cleaned for comparison, it might not look bad but it's like shag pile carpet. I personally think she owned a cat because no dog I've ever seen sheds like this. When the seats are taken out to put the vaders in I'll be using a wet vac to bring the carpet back to pristine condition but for now this makes the car a bit more bearable to work on/in



I cleaned the tonneau cover and surrounding trim with doctor leather cleaner and a Meguiars interior brush. It had looked a bit faded so now it had that nice clean matte look.

I then cleaned the back seats in the same way



Looks ok in my eyes but there are parts which I will be dyeing to make the interior spot on.




I was going to head to japfest tomorrow but there's plenty of things I want to get done so for tomorrow I want to get the roof working properly again.



These cables arrived from the dealer to release the tonneau cover. One of them had snapped so I'm taking the opportunity to replace two at once.

The boot door lock also stopped working the day I bought the car so I will swap over the one from the drift car shell. Without the boot door lock working the roof cannot be put up or down.

I found this handy article for adjusting and repairing the roof so I will use it to make some adjustments to the clearance between the roof and the tonneau cover during opening and closing of the roof. The two are currently catching and it's going to cause damage if it's not sorted.

http://www.pelicanparts.com/BMW/techarticles/101-Projects-74-Convertible/101-Projects-74-Convertible.htm

I also need to fit the m3 fuel pump and wire in the abs pump. Hopefully those will be done tomorrow

[Smokey Bear]

This really got f'd in the a... I was cleaning up the headlights one day and decided to take the car for a quick drive and long story short my engine started rattling. I found some pebble sized shrapnel in the sump. Ouch. I'll have to see if the s50 is repairable but in the meantime I managed to get a career job and got me a new engine. I've have been fitting my heat shields from the euro engine to my replacement engine. Need to buy a z3m mounting also before putting it in.



It's impressively clean inside, it also supposedly has csl cams, I'll check that out when I change the rocker cover gasket.



Ordered some e28 engine mount rubbers so I'll see if they work out well alongside with new oem gearbox mounts.

Hopefully all the parts will have arrived when I get back from Gatebil next week. I'll be 100% motivated!!!!

[Vagicle]

I really like where this is going, keen to see what you do with the e24 as well.
Enjoying your progress, keep it coming!

[Smokey Bear]

I think I'm going to knock the e24 on the head, I don't have it in me to do all the welding that needs doing so I might sell it on again. It's a pity because id like a stanced e24, but this isn't the right car for me.

Today I got some quotes on parts from the main dealer and was pleasantly surprised. I'll have to buy the s54 z3m inlet side engine mounting bracket because the euro s50 leg only lines up with 3 holes on the s54 block. I was surprised because I hadn't read that in any of the conversion threads that I looked at leading up to the purchase of the engine. In any case it's less than €100 so that's a relief!

i probably won't get all the parts until I come back from holidays next week though, I'm a bit anxious to get cracking at it!

[Smokey Bear]

Got back from holidays Tuesday and was really busy, had to do timing belt in my car so that fucked up last night and worked late rest of the week.

Got the gearbox on tonight though and the clutch tightened up, fitted the new Gearbox mounts and engine mounts. I used e28 m5 ones not as tall as e36 so I spaced them up a bit.

http://s16.photobucket.com/user/32E83/semedia/E51D7FB4-6BAA-48E7-B629-7DF6FE2D18CF.jpg.htmlI

Going to collect some wiring tomorrow from an e46 then will put the engine in tomorrow evening.



Some pics from gatebil









Volvo museum in Sweden, well worth a visit!

[Smokey Bear]

When I purchased the engine I re I ever only the engine loom, plug number three to the dme or ecu.

This turned out to be less of a problem than I first thought, there isn't an abundance of e46 ms being broken here so I thought it might be a bit of a search. Turns out any obdii car petrol of course from an m52 to m54 shares the same ecu plug. As for pin location I'm not sure. I completely agree the mss54hp against a e39 523i ecu which I had lying around.

Bosch vs Siemens but same connections




This info might be useful for somebody else that buys an incomplete package like what I bought.



Here it is layed out on the ground, I got this wiring from an e46 320i prefacelift, it shared lambda sensor wires and the coil harness.





not a hugely interesting update but I hope it helps someone out!

The engine is now in and ready to be bolted up. More this weekend!

[Smokey Bear]

Winter is coming so my attention is turning to this again. Wiring is nearly done, so far hasn't been to difficult. I received my furniture clinic leather repair kit yesterday so I said I'd try repairing some tears in the vaders with nothing to lose attitude.



Canvas patch laid into the hole with some glue applied, so far so good.



Headrest looks like a real piece of shit. Hopefully I can get it and the seats to looks good again!



I haven't gotten around to getting to my storage unit to continue with the repairs to the vaders although the headrest I started filling is starting to look ready for sanding and I'm very happy with the robustness of the repair. This long weekend was very productive. I made up 90% of the interior wiring loom consisting of the OBD II port and the drive by wire. The plan was to originally route these through the existing hole in the bulkhead to the fuse box. Unfortunately that was tighter than a ducks ass so used a 32mm hole saw through to the ecu compartment. I used an 18 pin block connector which was pilfered from a doner e39 along with the OBD port and electric accelerator pedal. The 18 pin connector will serve as a quick disconnect of the interior harness to the engine harness in case I ever want to put this engine into another car with an X20 connector.

Some pictures of the looms I cobbled together:





The route through to the ecu compartment, don't mind the wet looking bit thats just oil so I wouldn't burn out the hole saw....burnt it out anyway.



The random block connector which will fit through the 32mm hole, its taken apart here so that I can see pin numbers and so that I'll be able to fit it through the hole. Using an e39 boot door loom grommet here also. I'd be lost without a parts car!



Heres a random picture that just looks cool because wires are boring

[Smokey Bear]

Last night I made some changes to the ecu to body adapter harness. Initially with all the wires I struggled to get my head around what was actually needed and what could be discarded from the connectors. Another problem with looking at pin outs lists for connectors is you have no idea of the physical destination of the wires. I connected the wires up at a desk and just forgot about the lengths of them making sure that I had my connections correct rather than focusing on lengths also

The loose wires up the top of the X20 connector which are all cable tied together are I think at this point surplus to requirements outside of maybe needing to connect oil pressure and temperature. There are now roughly 4 wires going from the x20 connector to the x60004 mss54 ecu connector, the rest of the x60004 will go through the hole I made in the ecu box these are for the electronic pedal and the diagnostic OBD II port. I could probably have made these run through the X20 but it keeps the wiring in keeping with the original X20 so the engine can be removed for another car in the future if needs be.




I still have some work to do on the fuel pump relay wiring with regards to getting the correct lengths and final position.



Apologies if these are boring updates, I promise there'll be burnouts at the end!

[Smokey Bear]

Small amount of progress made. The garage at home is fairly tight for space so I swapped around the convertible with my fathers car at the weekend so that I could access both sides, up to now to work on it I had to push it out from a wall on wheel dollies and push another car forward to make that space available. I'll make one last push now to get it running.



The wiring is nearly finished, I had been trying to figure out a couple of pins but I think it's all correct now. Just the little white connector to the ignition switch left, maybe 5 wires in that and the reverse switch and I should have enough to get it running. The wiring is a woeful mess at the moment but when it's running I will try to do a better of job by shortening wires so that they are the correct length etc.

Complete with accelerator pedal



I also realised that I'm missing the wiring for the coils so along with that I also need to get the oil temperature sensor from my 3.0 engine and the oil cooler so that it doesn't piss oil out of the oil cooler outlet hole on the oil filter housing. The sensor will require another wire to the x20 connector as this is usually conveyed to the cluster through the DME on the e46 m3.

All in all I'm happy with the progress however slow it might be as I haven't really benn giving any time to the car.

[Bimmerteck]

The wiring on those swaps is a bear, but well worth it once properly sorted!

[Smokey Bear]

Tonight I didnt start until 10:30 or so, not a whole lot done but did pick up the oil cooler from storage. I decided to buy a new sensor for the oil temperature, it was slightly awkward to get off the old engine and I'll have to buy one in the future anyway.

Wiring the M52 coolant temperature sensor was the job for tonight. Firstly checked the impedance of the s54 sensor and this was between 2.7 and 3 ohms. No pictures as it took both hands to hold the multimeter to the pins. I then checked the M53 sensor to verify that it would give the same readings. One side read in around 3 ohms and the other side up around 6-7 ohms.





The higher of the two values should be connected to the clocks as per the following diagram and from checking the values of old sensor against new. Found this on bf.c



Wires Soldered



Doing some heat shrinking



I also recycled some cable tidy tubing from an old engine loom to run these cables and the oil temperature cables up into close proximity for the x20. It's worth using something like that to protect the cables from chaffing and causing faults in the future.

I wired up the connection for the starter motor trigger also. Not far away from turning the key to see if it swings.

[Smokey Bear]

Spent tonight connecting the laptop to the ecu. At first I had no indicator light on my OBD diag. plug. After finding I hadn't wired this up to power and ground. I then had this result:



Still no communication to the laptop so I traced the k-line wire which is the wire which carries info to and from the ecu through the OBD plug. I traced this through my Adaptor loom which is my own makey uppy interior loom. Turns out one side of the connector it was at pin position 12 and the other side pin 13. I changed both to pin 13, connected the laptop and nothing. At this point I was ready to just get my card out and buy a loom. I stared at the ground for a second to take stock of how much time I had wasted, saw the Adaptor loom was still unplugged. Plugged this in and tried to read the ecu again. Great success!!!



As shitty as it all looks it cranks and connects to the laptop. I read the ecu and send away for ana activation for my binary tool which will allow me to make the necessary changes in the ecu settings so that the engine transplant will work.



No updates until Friday or Saturday, on Friday I'll have the oil temperature sensor in from the main stealer so I'll wire that do a small bit of tidying and attempt to start. Wish me luck!