1997 m3 sedan with s54 swap

[3staxontheradio]

Hi All,
I just bought this 97 m3 with an S54

Details:
S54 Swap using second gen can interface from gpeterson
PO did rod bearings with WPC treated OEM and new rod bolts, vanos rebuilt, and valve lash checked
Getrag 420g out of a euro s50b32 car
3.64 LSD
PO did all bushings, ball joints, bearings, tie rods, etc.
Yellow tag ZHP rack
Stock brakes with brass guide pin bushings
Reinforced Rtab pockets, engine mounts, and rear swaybar mounts
Koni Yellows with GC kit and top adjust rears
rear trailing arms and subframes powder coated
17x8.5 arc-8 wheels
Ebay headers
dual 2.5" exhaust with 200 cell metal core cats
x pipe into vibrant resonators and a stromung muffler
CSF radiator, spal fan



So far I have:
replaced fog lights (and one bracket which is a PIA with the bumper on the car)
Did a 2 stage paint correction and ceramic coating
Fixed a few minor interior issues
Set up a win7 laptop so I can start reading diagnostic codes




Current issues to look into or fix:

*Check control light is on for the hid conversion
*CEL is on for SAP delete
*Airbag light is on- not sure why yet but I'm guessing something related to seat occupancy sensor and it having e46 seats

*It has an aftermarket remote lock and security system that I find frustrating. The car locks itself automatically and sometimes it doesn't readily respond to unlock presses on the key.

*The car came to me about 2 quarts low on oil. Previous owners driveway is heavily sloped so getting an accurate oil reading would have been a pain. The car sat mostly undriven for multiple years too so it may just have a slow leak. I topped it off and set the trip meter and am going to monitor oil levels to see if its consuming any.

*The car has a base tune but never got the final dyno tune so I am planning to do a dyno tune next month. There are some minor driveability issues to look at also. Occasionally bucking at certain low load and rpm combinations and sometimes coasting down to idle at a stop the car will stall.

*paint in the inside of the rear hatch trim has failed and surface rust is forming. Need to decide how I'm going to handle that. Maybe por-15 after sanding it clean.


*Rear bumper paint is especially bad. A few other parts need repaint (mirrors and front bumper especially) but i am debating just having most or all of the car painted.




*Rear door pockets are separating from the door cards.



*The transmission has pretty intense input shaft bearing whine. I have just been pretending its a straight cut gearbox and it's race car noises but I should probably deal with that at some point. Previous owner did provide me with a new bearing to install.




Future plans:
*oil change and oil sample (going to do that this Saturday)
*I bought a steering wheel spacer and will install that soon
*New tires
*Dyno tune - Hoping to hit around 300whp on a dynojet
*Cobra nogaros for the front
*PO gave me a front lip to install so I'll do that soon
*I'm slightly iffy on the reliability of the can interface. If anyone else here has the second generation gpeterson interface can they comment on how well it has held up? PO said he went through multiple first gen units. I have half a mind to get a canbus cluster and preemptively require and install that before anything fails.
*The current shock/strut setup feels great- Zero complaints - but I'm a shock snob and motion control is calling to me.
*Some kind of rear shock tower brace and reinforcement. I have been looking around what what people do and currently thinking I want to weld something in place that addresses it pretty comprehensibly. Plates and a tubular brace or something.
*compression and possibly leakdown testing to satisfy my curiosity. Also depends on what oil consumption looks like and what my blackstone report says.






Before paint correction. There were a few wet sanded spots that cleaned up perfectly.


After paint correction:

[EthanolTurbo]

This thing is badass. Congrats on the M3/4/5!

[stephen]

Kevin’s old car?

[3staxontheradio]

Kevin’s old car?

Yep!

I like this car way more than I thought I would. It's such a blast to drive and manages to do all the things I want it to very well. Engaging and analog like I expect from a 90s car, power delivery is super entertaining, the noises are awesome, it feels very chuckable and more nimble than my e46, ride quality is more than comfy enough while handling well, etc. All that and I can load it up with kids when I need to. I want to do a lot of stuff with this car but its already so good. Coming from miatas where they are pretty dull stock I'm not used to having everything be very good without throwing a bunch of parts at it.

[3staxontheradio]

I got INPA set up yesterday and started pulling codes. So far I can't connect to the cluster and I get this error:


After that inpa quits back to the main menu. Previous owner said he couldn't get inpa to connect to the cluster either (or the original cluster in the car). Again, this a gpeterson can interface swap so it's wired differently than most of the can cluster swaps people are running. I'm guessing its a wiring thing? The cluster is a euro S50b32 cluster. I want to fix the mileage on it and remove the tamper dot. Is that an eprom flash fix or something that could be done through software and a dcan cable?


Also I got a handful of codes from the engine and the one I can't understand what to do with is:

141 Fuellstandsplausibilisierung

Only one dead german page as a google result. Google translate says "Level plausibility check"

Since the e36 has no oil level warning light and I know the oil was low, I'm wondering if its a code related to low oil.

[3staxontheradio]

More research and it looks like I need to get a chip burner to write to eprom to do the cluster changes.

[stephen]

Yep!

I like this car way more than I thought I would. It's such a blast to drive and manages to do all the things I want it to very well. Engaging and analog like I expect from a 90s car, power delivery is super entertaining, the noises are awesome, it feels very chuckable and more nimble than my e46, ride quality is more than comfy enough while handling well, etc. All that and I can load it up with kids when I need to. I want to do a lot of stuff with this car but its already so good. Coming from miatas where they are pretty dull stock I'm not used to having everything be very good without throwing a bunch of parts at it.

My E36 is a weekend car and because I don’t drive it that often I am constantly thinking about trading/selling it for something I would drive more. Like an E46 M3, E9X M3, E39 M5, 987.2/981 Cayman S, etc. Those thoughts quickly disappear when I am behind the wheel of my E36. Other cars may do other things better than an E36, but the level of engagement that an E36 offers on the street is hard to match. S54 swapped E36 is just the best front engine RWD street car for me. It’s an E46 M3 that’s more communicative and the lower limits make it more fun/tossable for street driving.

[3staxontheradio]

Yeah I work from home and have no commute so I use mine for pleasure driving and when I want to run errands in something more fun. We have a v70r for kid hauling duties, and I have an 87 Toyota truck for other daily driving and truck needs. I haven't had a really fun car in years. I had a well prepped 95 miata but it's been sitting without and engine for a long time and I made it very light and very impractical - 1920lb with half a tank of gas and a welded in 3/4 cage + ast shocks , fully done suspension,. megasquirt, etc. this manages to be almost as engaging as the Miata but not slow, has ac, can put kids in it, etc.

[3staxontheradio]

If anyone has a cosmos black sedan trunk lid they want to sell i'm looking for one.

Took a drive earlier:

[3staxontheradio]

I'm wanting to do a carbon airbox in the future but I don't want to pull in any engine bay air so I started scanning the car to design duct from the fog light opening. Quick measure on the fog light opening says I have about 14500mm/2 of cross section to pull from and so far exploring the area near the headlights I have a similar amount to pass a duct through into the engine bay. I'm still waiting on my crash structure/engine bay scan to finish processing to measure it. I have done intake design work before and I think I can come up with something that flows really well and will verify with CFD. First iteration would be something like SLS nylon and then I can either sleeve it in carbon or make a multi part mold and pull some carbon parts from that.

Past intake project on my miata for those that are curious:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3001440

Bimmerworld (and other retailers) sell a German made CSL box that necks down to 120mm

https://www.bimmerworld.com/Intake-Fuel/Intake-Systems/Carbon-Plenum-Airbox-CSL-120MM-Kit.html

120mm is still a huge inlet and from a peak flow restriction perspective I think its a non issue. Having the panel filter inside the airbox is something I'm not sure what to make of. There is a reason you don't normally see plenums with openings this big. 200mm is going to attenuate the pressure waves forming in the plenum but then having that panel filter inside the box, I'm not sure pressure waves are significantly making it past the air filter anyway. I would be very curious to see a/b testing with and without the filter an a smaller opening to see how the torque curve responds.

I'm also deciding if instead of that bimmerworld intake I want to make the neck down from 200mm to ~130ish for the duct on my own. I could probably do it smoother and over a longer distance than the bimmerworld part. Either way the first step is to make a general purpose duct I can use for whatever end product. I could even make one that sits flush and feeds a hole I cut into the AFE intake on the car now.

Inner bumper surface scan:



Scanning setups

[3staxontheradio]

Finally finished processing the bigger of the two scans:

[3staxontheradio]

First rough in pass on the duct. It's going to need a lot of iteration and clean up for flow and fit. There is a lot of unnecessary waviness to clean out too. The triangular space under the headlight is pretty constrained but right now it makes a linear taper down from the inlet area at the foglight to the area of a 120mm diameter circle:

[3staxontheradio]

Working on getting the cross sectional area dialed in before moving on to CFD. Red line in the graph represents the area of a 120mm circle. It currently transitions to a 200mm circle roughly where a CSL airbox inlet sits. I'll need to get a CSL box and install it, then scan it in the car to get the position where the two parts will need to meet. Also planning to do a test print of the bottom 2/3 that are fit critical before moving forward.

[PowerSax]

That is some nice tools, and some serious skills to use them properly!

[3staxontheradio]

I have done a few more design iterations on the ducting. I'm going to make it in 3 pieces that slip fit and tab together. Section 1 is a bell mouth and about an inch of flange for the first main section to fit into. This will be mounted directly to the bumper itself. Section two will run up to sit level with the top of the frame rails. And then section 3 will run to whatever intake use case. This makes the design more flexible and it becomes a general purpose high flow duct for a e36 m3s by changing out the section 3 piece. I plan to run the first two sections just feeding my afe intake until I decide what I'm doing for an air box. It's looking more like I'll do a karbonius CSL box. Also if anyone is local to me (NC) with a CSL box I can scan their installed intake to come up with a section 3 that will fit their car.

I also think I'm going to print the intake parts in nylon12 either sls or hp mjf. Getting quotes for both. I eventually want to pull some carbon parts but I'm not attempting to design around easy parting lines/draft angles so a split mold might need to be made from something flexible like silicone.

I have a lot of little things in the car I have been taking care of. Cluster mileage fixed by JBanzhaf. I replaced a hid ballast with the cheapest next day delivery option on Amazon. For now this is just 3m dual lock mounted where I can move it easily. I don't love having my passenger side ballast in the bumper since it makes bumper removal a pain in the ass. Looking for recommendations for who makes good hid stuff. It would be good to stop tripping the low beam failure error.



Euro lights take up so much space and my googling suggests they are adding 11lb to the front end. They work really well and look nice though so I'm split on what I want to do. It would also open up more space at the most restrictive area of the duct path but I think so many people have euro lights that I should design this with them in mind. I did remove and trim the headlight pin piece because it was in the way. Probably not too much to ask for people to cut a little plastic. Putting it back in place without much to hold onto was a challenge but doable.


I'm waiting on oil analysis from my first oil change and Blackstone appears to have long wait times so it's going to be a few weeks. My first change had some magnetic crap stuck to the plug + a fair bit of grey sludgy stuff in the first part of the stream. This is the first change since the bearings were done though so I will wait to see what they say.

My power steering pulley has what looks to me like excessive wobble. I have had some belt squeal on startup too. Interested in what people think and also best route to replacement. New OEM pumps are like $700.