heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[heinzboehmer]

Lol with the way the sensor was milled, I'm just picturing them coming hot off the production line, straight into a giant fixture with like 30 sensors all in a grid.

Wow that old paint is pretty bad... nice job! I need to do mine but I'll do it after I graduate, there's some god-forsaken cat in the underground at my apartment that has taken a liking to my car. And I've came back to my car where someone's left a half-eaten pizza slice, and an entire croissant on my hood. I've done it once back in 2015 and man, I was really feeling it in my hands after, since I just have the el-cheapo vibratey-boi HF DA

Thanks! Yeah the paint is pretty terrible. Guess that's what happens when the car is used as a daily year round in colorado. Fortunately the paint was the only casualty of the CO winters, there's no rust anywhere on the car.

I feel your pain of having to share a garage. It's incredible how little respect people have for other people's things.

I've got the same HF DA and yeah it really does leave your hands tingly with how much it vibrates. But it works just fine, so I really can't complain.

[heinzboehmer]

Mar 2021

Couple small updates. Booked a track day for April 30th at Thunderhill so I've mainly been doing small things that need solving before putting the car on track.

Swapped front top mounts (arrow facing opposite headlight) to get some more camber up front.




Then took the car to get aligned at Elite Performance. Melody was extremely helpful and was happy to listen to all my stupid little picky requests. Highly recommend this place to anyone in the area. Unfortunately, due to having stock camber arms in the rear, I was unable to get the rear camber to where I wanted it, but it's close enough that I'm happy. Here's what I ended up with:



Driver's side tie rod was seized even though I replaced both ~1.5 years ago when I did my rod bearings (thanks Colorado winters). Steering wheel is veeery slightly off center, but it's barely noticeable and DSC still seems to be happy, so I'm not worried about it. I plan to eventually swap in a ZHP rack anyway, so I'll just refresh everything when I do.

I do wish I could have gone a bit more aggressive on the camber for the track, but this will be my first time ever on a track, so I doubt I'll hit the limits of this alignment anytime soon. I do foresee me getting camber arms and camber plates in the future though.

One unfortunate side effect of the alignment is that it made me realize that my rear spacers (12mm) are too big, as my driver's side tire started rubbing like crazy. This is what the inside lip of the fender looked like:



Sanded everything down with a red scotchbrite pad and applied a layer of POR-15 to stop any rust from forming. I've got some color matched spray paint coming, which I'll be using to make everything look factory again in the near future.

Also ordered some 10mm spacers to hopefully fix the rubbing issue. Decided on 10mm after I spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out if something was bent in the rear of my car, since only one side was rubbing. I had convinced myself that the driver's side tire was poking out 5mm more than the passenger's side tire, but the more I think about it, the more I lean towards them being the same.

I measured every single suspension component and they were all the same side to side. I even went as far as to remove all four subframe nuts and try to shift it over to the passenger's side. Don't think there was even 1mm of play between the bolts and the CMP bushings, so that did nothing.

I was unable to get a reliable measurement from hub to fender, as I just could not get the ride height to be exactly the same with the wheels off and had a horrible time setting up a parallel line to the fender that I could measure against. In the end, I just taped a string to the fender and measured the distance from that to the wheel on both sides with the car on the ground (which is how I originally had arrived at 5mm difference between sides). However, I also learned that my garage is not entirely level, so those measurements are also worth nothing.

The car drives just fine and aligned without an issue, so I've just decided to get some smaller spacers and forget about this. I won't be able to get any reliable measurements anytime soon so whatever. Maybe the next time the car is on the alignment rack I'll ask if I can measure the fender to wheel distance.

Moving on...

I was messing around with NCSExpert the other day and coded my odometer to show km. To my surprise, I was about 80 km away from reaching 200k km, so I drove around for a couple days with the odometer like that just so I could snap this pic:



And lastly, I picked up sections 1, 2 and 3 of a fully stock exhaust. I've been wanting to go back to stock volume and get back some of the rasp after I installed my airbox so I jumped on this. Exhaust has 100k mi on it, but it's in surprisingly great condition. No rust of any kind anywhere and super clean. Owner told me his car has always been a California car, so that must have something to do with the way it's been preserved. Will get it on the car as soon as I receive all the new hardware and gaskets that I ordered.




Once again, who said coupes aren't practical

[heinzboehmer]

Installed new AKG pedal bushings today. Got the bronze ones for the clutch pedal and the delrin ones for the brake pedal. Haven't driven the car yet, but the play has decreased significantly.



Made this quick comparison by overlaying a couple pics to show how much less side to side play there is with the new bushings.

Before:


After:


(Apologies for the super grainy pics, but the lighting was less than ideal)

[heinzboehmer]

Apr 2021

Have done a bunch of little things lately, mostly because of an upcoming track day.

Replaced brake fluid (the BMW stuff and about two years old) with Motul RBF 600. Going forward, I'll be doing flushes every year.



Power bleeder is new as well. The thing is awesome, I should have bought it sooner. Makes the job super easy and quick. I did wrap some paper towels around the fitting, in fear the it would leak. I'm glad I did because it did weep a little bit.



I then installed the stock exhaust I bought. I had forgotten how much I liked the rasp, not really sure why I got rid of it in the first place. The combination of the CSL airbox and stock exhaust is absolutely great.

I did manage break a bolt during the install though. I was threading in the last of the section two mounting plate bolts and I felt it get tight and then loose again. But miraculously, I did manage to get it out! Just backed it out super carefully with the ratchet and it came out in one piece. Felt like I had won the lottery.




Also ran a VANOS test just to make sure all was good with that. Results were fine.



With me working from home, I haven't been driving the car much and have almost run out of battery a couple times. Don't have a battery tender, so I used to rely on the battery never going flat. However, right when I was leaving for my COVID vaccine, I came out to a dead battery. And of course my portable jump pack was dead too. Having to hurry and push start the car so that I didn't miss my appointment was the last straw, so I went online and got myself a CTEK charger.

Went to install the charging harness that connects to the battery terminals and because something always has to go wrong, I snapped one of the t-bolts that clamp the battery terminals down.



I had actually already snapped the other one a couple years back, so now there's two aftermarket t-bolts on the car (can't believe BMW doesn't sell these separately from the cables). It's not like I'm going crazy when tightening these down, so maybe someone had already stretched them in the past and I just got to be the one to break them.

Took the opportunity to check out the state of my battery tray while doing this as I saw that thread with the super corroded tray. Turns out there had been some water ingress through the rear shock mount that had caused a tiny bit of corrosion. I remember seeing the dirt when installing my vincebar, but I didn't think much of it. But, upon removing the black battery carrier, I found a mess.



Luckily there was very little corrosion and most of what I found was just dirt and random things that had fallen in there over the years. The stains coming from the RSM looked pretty old and I replaced the RSM gaskets a couple years back, so I don't think there will be any more water ingress, but I'll be keeping an eye on that area.

I cleaned everything up and sanded down any hint of rust that I saw before adding a layer of POR-15.




Not pretty, but it won't rust anymore. I still need to fabricate the cover for my vincebar and add a fresh coat of paint to the trunk area (I've had the color matched spray paint sitting the garage for too long), so I'll paint this area too when I do that. Should look pretty good when done.

With that fixed, I reinstalled the battery and hooked up the CTEK harness. Decided to zip tie the positive wire to the car's positive lead and leave the fuse in there. In case of a short, the fuse will blow and there will only be a couple inches of live 12V wire left, which I think is safer than removing the fuse and potentially having the fuse socket short against the chassis. Plus, there are two pretty big exposed 12V terminals right next to this harness, so I don't feel like I've increased the risk of causing sparks at all.



I've seen some E46s with a plastic cover over the positive terminal, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with this battery. Still might be a good idea to look into getting one of those.

[heinzboehmer]

As part of my paint correction plan, I purchased some new exterior plastic pieces that had degraded over time on my car. The worst one was the vent in the middle of the hood where the windshield washer sprayers sit. I had always noticed some orange peeking out from what was clearly a layer of black plastidip on both the vent and sprayers and just assumed that a previous owner had purchased an ultra cheap replacement that was the wrong color and then plastidipped it to match.

Here's the old vent (yes, I know the paint is scratched and dirty, I'll get to finishing my paint correction eventually). You can see some orange around the sprayers:


Scratched some of the plastidip off to reveal a very orange vent.




Turns out that this was actually the OEM piece that seemed to have been painted orange at some point. Same deal with the sprayers.



Peeled off the layer of plastidip:



I was kinda bummed because it looked like actual spray paint, so I was either going to have to spend a while cleaning the sprayers up or get new ones. But then I started to poke at the paint and it just chipped off! Oddly enough, it looked like the pieces had received a layer of black plastidip, then a layer of orange spray paint and then another layer of black plastidip.



I have no clue why someone would do this to these pieces (especially black plastidip on top of orange instead of just peeling the orange off?), but I'm glad I was able to salvage them. They look pretty much perfect. There's still some orange overspray left on them, but that part is only visible with the hood open and even then it's hard to spot, so I just left it.



I then installed the sprayers along with a brand new vent:



Soooo much better. I'll be replacing other exterior plastics soon as well.

Last update has to do with my airbox. The unfiltered section has been rattling at idle ever since I got it. I originally fixed it by adding some heat shrink tubing to the metal pegs, but after taking it apart a couple times, the tubing started to tear and the rattle came back. I decided to instead get a thicker gasket to replace what is at the bottom of the filtered section, with the hope that this would hold the unfiltered section more snuggly and not have it rattle around. Reached out to Karbonius to see if they had any recommendations for gaskets and they shipped me a roll of what they use all the way from Spain, free of charge. Super happy with their customer service.

What they sent me is the same thickness as what was already on the airbox, so I decided to add an extra layer to the unfiltered section instead of replacing what was already there.



This seems to have done the job quite well. No more rattle at idle. We'll have to see how it holds up to taking the airbox apart multiple times, but I think this is a better fix than what I had done before.

Also, with the airbox apart, I saw that the wiring for the IAT and MAP sensors was a bit closer to the belts than I would have liked.



It's not like it was dangling right on top of the belt, but I decided to not risk having it catch on it and rip everything apart. Moved it out of the way and zip tied it in place.



Wires look a bit tight in the pic, but there's way more than enough slack in real life to allow for the engine to rock under acceleration and not pull on the wires.

[heinzboehmer]

And finally I went to my first track day!



Packed way more stuff than I needed, but I'm glad I had everything there just in case something went wrong.

Took some pictures in the paddock just after arriving:




And some more at the end of the day:




Crazy how much brake dust got on the wheels. I swapped in some Hawk DTC-60 pads and while they were great on track, they are super dusty.

I also ran with my PS4Ss and they were fine. Not too much wear (wasn't expecting much as I'm a complete track noob still) and they had more than enough grip for my skill level. This is what they looked like at the end of the day:




I had a blast and can't wait to go back. It's crazy how much I suck at driving compared to others with more track experience lol. Definitely need to work on that quite a bit.

I plan to keep the car as is (well, maybe get some track wheels and tires just to avoid wearing out the PS4Ss and having to spend a ton to replace them) before doing more performance mods. I would like to get to the limit of my current setup before trying to make the car faster. We'll see if I'll be able to resist the temptation to mod though.

Still debating if I want to spend $100 on track pics, but the watermarked versions can be found here (don't judge my driving too much, this was my first time ever on a track): https://www.gotbluemilk.com/2021/Apr.../210430HOD/52/

[heinzboehmer]

Jun 2021

Painted my reflectors with some paint I ordered from AutomotiveTouchup. Color match was pretty good, but damn I suck at painting stuff (which makes me hate doing it). Regardless, I plan on using this same paint for whenever I decide to stop being lazy and fabricate the cover for my VinceBar.

I originally wanted to get some OE reflectors for painting, but I ended up just painting the aftermarket smoked reflectors that were on my car. They fit fine and I didn't want to mess up some brand new parts.

Started by scuffing the reflectors with some red scotchbrite and then applied plastic adhesion promoter:


Primer:



Base coat:


And finally clear coat:


Unfortunately (probably cause I suck at painting), there's a good amount of orange peel on them. I plan on wet sanding them later to get it off.

I also found some sketchy wiring in my engine bay left by the person that installed my CSL airbox (me lol):


Leading theory is that I was testing out my MAP sensor and then completely forgot about this. It's all fixed now though:

[timmo]

What clear did you use? Standard 1K acrylic clears will always come out with some orange peel and you have to cut and buff them to get a smooth finish. The newer (and more durable) spraymax 2K clears are nearly smooth as glass right out of the can

Sent from my SM-G781W using Tapatalk

[heinzboehmer]

Yeah I used a 1K clear, specifically the one that came from AutomotiveTouchup. I do want to give the 2K clears a shot, but I don't feel like I can get adequate ventilation at my place for those. Isocyanates are scary.

[skristedja]

Great updates! Congrats on your first track day! Can't believe that orange paint on the hood vent, lol!

[heinzboehmer]

Thanks! I know, that orange paint was ridiculous, I laughed for a while when I found it.

[heinzboehmer]

I'm anticipating this next update to be very technical and detailed, so probably quite boring too. However, I ran into a good amount of things I wasn't expecting, so I want to get everything documented.

I need to smog my car soon, so stock airbox needs to go back on. When I installed my CSL airbox, I cut the MAF connector off and wired the MAP and IAT directly in, instead of using the Turner adapter harness (or similar). In order to go back to stock, I would have had to move pins around in the DME connector and re-run wires through the conduits. Why spend a few hours doing that, when I could spend a few days building an adapter harness instead?

First thing I had to do was get a hold of the female DME connector. Lead times were fairly long from the usual electronics suppliers, so instead, I ended up getting a messed up MSS54 (thanks again skristedja !) and salvaging the connector from that. I knew there were about a million solder points on it, so I anticipated a bit of a challenge, but I wasn't expecting the connector to be practically impossible to remove cleanly.

It looks like the DME uses a 6 layer board with many of the pins connecting to multiple layers. This made it veeery hard to remove all of the solder from between the pins and the board.

Here's the board after I attempted to unsolder all the pins. You can see there's still a lot of them with solder left on them:


Layers:


And an example of a pad (leftmost one) with solder going all the way through it:


I ended up dremeling the X60003 section of the connector off, thinking that 52 pins would be more manageable than however many the full connector has on it:


But of course that wasn't doable either. I had to cut the board into small pieces and get each of those off individually:


Connector finally free:


Test fitting in the ebox:


Connector all cleaned up and ready to go:


I got a super simple breakout PCB made for the female connector. My idea was to bridge all pins that were currently populated in my DME (besides the MAP and IAT related wires) and then add the MAF wires to the male connector. This meant I would have a bunch of wires hanging off the PCB, so I added some slots to it that I could feeds the wires through for strain relief:


The X60003 pigtail I got came off a 325i, so the wires were all in the wrong place. I took some pictures of how the X60003 connector was wired on my car and just replicated that for the harness. I thought about bridging absolutely all the pins (except for the MAP and IAT ones), in order to make this harness compatible with SMG cars and stuff, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth my time. If I need more pins bridged, I can easily add those in the future. Here's the completed X60003 part of the harness:



For future reference, this is how the MAF is connected to the DME:

MAF Pin 1 - X60003 Pin 22 (IAT Signal)
MAF Pin 2 - Fuse Carrier Pin 6 (12V Supply)
MAF Pin 3 - X60003 Pin 17 (GND)
MAF Pin 4 - X60003 Pin 7 (MAF 5V Supply)
MAF Pin 5 - X60003 Pin 1 (MAF Signal)

This is the path of where I found the info in DIS: BMW E46 M3 Coupe / Wiring Diagrams and Functional Description / Power train / Engine control / Digital Motor Electronics / Sensor / Hot-film air-mass flow sensor

That X60003 harness takes care of four MAF pins, but the 12V supply still needs to be tapped into. I decided to do this by building another small harness for the power connector in the ebox. I was unable to find anywhere that had the connector in stock, so I ended up grabbing one from a car in the junkyard. Unfortunately there was only one E46 in the entire yard (and of course someone had taken the engine out and then thrown it back in all hastily) and the connector I got is somewhat beat up. It's cracked in a couple places and is missing one of the clips, but it works so that's okay.

Soldering this was also not easy. I ended up removing the female pins from other wires and soldering them onto the wires coming off the male pins. I thought about buying the pins new and the right crimper to get them on, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth it because the connector was all messed up already. I'm not entirely happy with this part and I'll probably end up redoing this in the future. But also it works, so whatever.

Soldered connectors with the wire tapping into the 12V supply (red/white):


Heatshrink applied:


And connector reassembled. It's pretty obvious here that the wires are way too short and the connectors are all beat up, but, as I said before, it works just fine:


Last step was to assemble everything and make it look nice. I bought another DME cover so that I could drill a hole through it and feed the new MAF harness through. I also bought some conduit that looks basically exactly the same as what BMW uses and reused my old MAF connector. Here's the completed harness:


This is how the ebox looks with everything installed:


Closeup of the power connector:


Closeup of the X60003 connector:


And installed on the car:


For that pic, the MAF connector was still not soldered on, so I fed the conduit through a hole next through the strut tower (it usually has a plug on it). However, I will probably end up feeding it out next to the brake booster line that runs to the airbox or similar. To use that hole, I would either need to unpin and repin the MAF connector every time I install/uninstall the harness or find a five pin connector that fits through that hole, so that I can split the harness in two and feed it in.

But that's basically it, a quick project that ended up taking way longer than it should have lol. It will save me a good amount of time going forward though.

Bonus thing I did was redo the foam I added to the unfiltered section of my airbox. I had previously run it only along the bottom of the airbox where the pins are, whereas now I applied it to the whole lip. It was still rattling a bit, but it seems to be gone now. However, I have only put about 50 miles on it, so we'll have to see how it holds up.

[BMWahba]

Damn, you've got some balls to do that. I'm way too scared when it comes to wiring stuff to get that deep. Gives me anxiety lol.

[heinzboehmer]

Lol thanks! It does help that I went to school for this, but it's still a daunting task to deal with so many wires.

[Will]

That's seriously bad-ass! Thanks for documenting and sharing the steps.