heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[Tbonem3]

Yes and they're chea... oh wait, they're up to $30 inflation strikes again

[LatinSkllz]

When you replaced the crankshaft seal, did you also order new vibration dampener bolts?

TIS mentions to replace them but I do wonder before spending $100 on bolts.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[heinzboehmer]

I did (both times). Figured they're pretty important bolts and I didn't want them to fail

[heinzboehmer]

Done a good amount of (mostly small) stuff lately, need to catch up on all of it.

First up, an update about the adapter I made for the stock airbox.

When I made the x60003 harness, I simply copied over what was already on my car, with the exception of any MAP related pins. I should have checked the wiring diagrams, but for some reason I didn't.

I ended up removing pin 25, which is a ground, so the car was going nuts. Tach was jumping all over the place, DME had codes about TPS, water temp gauge was pegged to the right and throttle bodies were readjusting like crazy when pressing throttle. I chekced the pinout and realized my mistake, so I added that pin back into the harness and all was well.

Relevant TIS: BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Electrical Components / Connectors / Components / A: Control Units, Modules / A6000 Control unit, Digital Motor Electronics /

Also, I added the 5V reference for the MAF (pin 7), but didn't bridge pin 7 between the engine and the DME. This is also a 5V reference for other sensors, so the was was acting a little weird at higher throttle inputs and eventually went into limp mode. TIS only listed this pin as being the 5V reference for the MAF, so it was a bit of a pain to figure this out. Finally figured it out, bridged the pin and the car ran totally fine.

Relevant TIS: BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Electrical Components / Connectors / Components / A: Control Units, Modules / A6000 Control unit, Digital Motor Electronics /
Relevant TIS: BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Wiring Diagrams and Functional Description / Power train / Engine control / Digital Motor Electronics / Sensor / Throttle valve potentiometer /

Also, one thing to note, pin 19 does not show up on the DME x60003 pinout, but it's definitely supposed to be there. Fortunately, this didn't pose any issues, as I copied over the pinout that was already on the car.

Relevant TIS: BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Wiring Diagrams and Functional Description / Chassis and suspension / Wheels and tyres / Run Flat Indicator / Run Flat Indicator button /

Once the harness was ready, I had a horrible time trying to get the emissions monitors to set. For some reason, my HP converted DME would just not set them. Only way I could see them set is if I triggered an EML light, which was of no use as you can't smog a car with active codes. I flashed a million different software versions and none made a difference. In the end, I ended up just buying another MSS54 to use for the stock airbox.

Documented all of that process here: https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/m...sions-monitors

[heinzboehmer]

Still need to catch up on a bunch of things, but thought I'd document my most recent project, as the details are still fresh in my mind.

In preparation for the SSV1 install, I decided to build my own DIY euro O2 harness. I mostly see people cutting open the conduit that runs from the DME area to the engine and fishing out the O2 and EGT sensor wires. I couldn't come up with a satisfactory way to do seal the conduit back up (electrical tape was not an option, I don't like the stuff), so instead I decided to depin the wires in the DME are and reroute them through where I wanted them.

Initially, I wanted to depin the wires from the connector side, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to do so without damaging the pins. I started with the wires that go to the X60002 connector, as those are the easiest ones to depin. Tied some twine (don't judge, that's all I had) to the pin in case it got stuck along the way and needed to be pulled back.



I did have to babysit it as the knots in the twine were getting caught up in places, but it was not big deal:



Success!




Now that I knew there were no pieces of tape or anything within the conduit that would make the wires snag, I removed the rest of them. I decided to just remove the whole harness and do it off of the car, so that I had better access to everything. Here's the post-cat O2 and EGT parts of the harness free of the main one:



The biggest modification I had to make was to the crimped ground and power "bundles" in the DME area. This is what I'm talking about:



You can see I cut off one of the wires from the bundle so that I could fish it through the conduit. In the end, I just cut off the whole crimped part and soldered everything back together, like so:



I then added some adhesive-lined heat shrink over the solder joint to make it as water proof as possible:



And also put the green cap back on to make it look factory:



Here's the finished product:



I fed the post-cat O2 and EGT sensor wires (with some extra conduit covering the bare wires) through the same place that the transmission sensors wires go through, so that it mimics the euro harness. Forgot to take a final pic before I put it back on the car, but I also added some adhesive-lined heat shrink to the point where the post-cat O2, EGT and transmission sensor wires join the main harness (bottom right in the previous pic).

Pretty happy with how it turned out. Basically a factory euro harness now and it only cost me a few hours of my time, instead of $600 or so.


Edit: These are the TIS sections I referenced for the post-cat O2 and EGT wiring.

BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Electrical Components / Connectors / Components / A: Control Units, Modules / A6000 Control unit, Digital Motor Elecronics /

BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Wiring Diagrams and Functional Description / Power train / Engine control / Digital Motor Electronics / Sensor / Oxygen sensors /

BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Wiring Diagrams and Functional Description / Power train / Engine control / Digital Motor Electronics / Sensor / Catalytic converter temperature sensor /

[D-O]

Nicely done. I need to dig in and do the same for my SS install.

Jesse

[heinzboehmer]

Nicely done. I need to dig in and do the same for my SS install.

Jesse

Thank you! It's kind of a pain to fish all the wires out one by one, but it's absolutely worth it.

[heinzboehmer]

Finished up the V1 + catted SS section 1 install. Didn't take many pictures, as I was a bit busy contorting my hands while trying to get to all the nuts. But, I did take one after getting the headers on:



Install was tedious and time consuming, but very straight forward. Surprisingly, no studs came out and I didn't even use any penetrating fluid! Unfortunately, multiple studs did back out a little, so I decided to replace them anyway with N54 studs. Kinda wish all the studs had come out with the nuts, as it was super time consuming to remove them.

I didn't buy new post-cat O2 or EGT sensors, as mine were working fine (and I was cheap). However, the post cat O2s were a little more rusty than I remembered them being, so I might need to replace them soon anyway. Time will tell.

I am a little disappointed in the quality of the parts. Everything fit up fine, but I did have to fight with it a little to get it to go on. The studs were sort of tight on the header flanges, but by far the worst part was lining up the flanges between sections 1 and 2. Overall, not a big deal, but I was expecting pretty much perfect fitment after paying $3500 (and that's the discounted price!).

I am very happy with the post-cat O2 and EGT wire routing though. There were some empty clips next to the transmission where I clipped the wires into:




I then ziptied the connectors to the fuel filter and ziptied and tucked the excess wire out of the way (forgot to take pics of this).

Next task was to get the upper header heat shield to fit back on. First, I drilled new holes 12mm below the current ones. Then, I used a dremel to further extend the notches for the coil ground bolt and the crank position sensor. Turned out pretty good:



It does stick out past the head though. I'll have to see how annoying that is next time I have the valve cover off. If it is too annoying, I'll just trim the top too.

Pleased with how it turned out. If you didn't know what to look for, you wouldn't be able to tell something was different:



I also discovered this when messing around with the sensors:



I guess I found why my DME would throw an EGT code sporadically. Fixed it by cutting, soldering and heat shrinking.

I'm hopeful that this is also the reason why my car was getting rich and losing power up top on the dyno. Maybe the exposed wire was shorting out somewhere and prematurely causing cat protection to kick in? I guess the next dyno visit will give some more insight into that theory.

Anyway, the one snag I ran into was with the length of one of the pre-cat O2 wires. The sensor for bank 2 is too short to be clipped back into its place in the valve cover. This is about as close as it will get to clipping in:



Looking around on realoem tells me that the same sensor on euro cars is significantly longer (185mm!). Thought about buying the euro one, but it looks like the key for the plug is different and won't work. I think I can route the current sensor something like this:



We'll see if that works once I finish putting the engine bay back together today. If anyone has run into this issue before, I'd appreciate any help/suggestions!

After that it's just a matter of flashing the DME (SAP delete and cat protection disabled) and taking the car on a test drive.

[heinzboehmer]

Figured the sensor wire issue out after talking to Cubieman .

I had originally placed the O2 sensor in the furthest downstream bung. Moved it to the bung right next to it and now it just barely reaches. It's not too tight or anything, but I was unable to route the wire through all the clips on the valve cover. This is how I ended up routing everything:



I should have listened to Tbonem3 lol. In my defense, I was mostly concerned about the bungs in the bank 1 header and kinda just chose one at random for the bank 2 header, as they were right next to each other

Also, I ended up unclipping the wire to the other O2 sensor out of the holder in the heat shield. Having it clipped in there made it run a bit too close to the headers, so I just ziptied it to a brake line to keep it as far away from the heat as possible.

[heinzboehmer]

The car is absolutely hilarious to drive now. And there's definitely a significant bump in power. Excited to see how much it'll make when I get it dyno tuned.

It also feels like it pulls hard all the way to redline now. Almost as if this work fixed that dip in power high up in the rev range. Hit the limiter a couple times accidentally on my test drive because I wasn't expecting to get to redline so quickly.

Sounds absolutely awesome too. At WOT, it sounds like there's a swarm of angry bees underneath me. Love it.

Super, super pleased with the headers.

[jet_dogg]

The car is absolutely hilarious to drive now. And there's definitely a significant bump in power. Excited to see how much it'll make when I get it dyno tuned.

It also feels like it pulls hard all the way to redline now. Almost as if this work fixed that dip in power high up in the rev range. Hit the limiter a couple times accidentally on my test drive because I wasn't expecting to get to redline so quickly.

Sounds absolutely awesome too. At WOT, it sounds like there's a swarm of angry bees underneath me. Love it.

Super, super pleased with the headers.

Love these kinds of updates man.

You've not dynoed since the car was stock right? So now you have the airbox and this setup with a pcs canned tune for these two mods?

[heinzboehmer]

I've dynoed three different setups.

1. Completely stock
2. Karbonius airbox, US headers and stock CSL tune
3. Karbonius airbox, US headers and PCS canned tune

Those were all just power runs though, no tuning on the dyno yet.

I talked to Paul and he said I should just run the same tune he gave me for the US headers until we can dyno tune the car. Now I just need to find some time that works for everyone and I'll get it dyno tuned. I'm going to be out of town a fair amount in the upcoming months, so might not get a chance to do that for a while though.

[jet_dogg]

Do you recall the hp/tq figures for those?

[heinzboehmer]

Do you recall the hp/tq figures for those?

Yep, in the same order as above:

1. 269 max WHP, 230 max WTQ
2. 285 max WHP, 234 max WTQ
3. 294 max WHP, 245 max WTQ (different runs)

Here are the posts with the dyno graphs and all the other details:

https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/main-forum/e46-2001-2006/1925-s54-dyno-database?p=118154#post118154

https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/main-forum/e46-2001-2006/1925-s54-dyno-database?p=126356#post126356

[heinzboehmer]

Actually, I should copy that second post over to here too, just to have the info in the same spot.

From last time:

269 max WHP, 230 max WTQ

Put the car on the dyno again with the CSL airbox on. This time I tried out two different tunes, the stock CSL one (that I modified to work with stock cams) and an off the shelf PCS tune for my specific setup. Did this mostly just out of curiosity, but I'll be going back to get a dyno tune from Paul when I get my V1s on the car.

Updated setup:

• 128210 mi
• US spec pre-facelift M3
• Karbonius full carbon intake with carbon snorkel
• Kassel MAP
• Stock CSL IAT location and sensor
• HP converted MSS54
• Fully stock US exhaust
• All engine maintenance done
  • Rod bearings replaced ~15k mi ago
  • VANOS done ~15k mi ago, passes VANOS test with no issues
  • Engine retimed ~4k mi ago
  • Valve adjustment done ~4k mi ago
  • New front and rear TPSs <500 mi ago
• No mechanical fan, just aux
• Dynoed at Sonoma racetrack so altitude is ~sea level
• 75ºF ambient temp
• 50% humidity
• All O2s are original, got new ones in a box ready to go in when my V1s arrive, but potentially left some power on the table because of this
• Running Shell V-Power 91 octane

Stock CSL tune:


285 max WHP, 234 max WTQ

As expected, the car was running rich, but made more power than I was expecting.




PCS tune:


294 max WHP, 245 max WTQ (different runs)


All runs were done back to back, so you can see the car progressively get heat soaked. I flashed the car while it was on the dyno so it had a good ten minutes to cool down then for the PCS tune, but looking at the last PCS run, I think it could have made a little bit more power if we had let it cool down some more. Torque was up significantly from the first PCS run and then it just fell off.

Not the most insane numbers, but happy to have satisfied my curiosity. I'm excited to see what the car will do with the Supersprint stuff and Paul's dyno tune. Also attached the individual runs in case anyone is curious.