heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[bigjae46]

Awesome! Glad the car did well. That engine bay is nice looking! Do you have PPF? I'd have a hard time putting such a nice looking car on track.

I keep going back and forth between my caged track car and a dual purpose car. I love the idea of not having to load/unload the car, drag the trailer, put the trailer in storage, and being able to drive the car on the street to test things out with no fear of the cops. Then I remember having to load all this crap in the car so I can be sure to get home.

First world problems.

[heinzboehmer]

Oh also, washed the car after a long time without being washed (two track days ago). Man, I can't get over how good this engine bay looks:

[heinzboehmer]

After the whole thing with the tires, I realized I don't really need the rear pass through, which was the biggest thing keeping e from installing my slon rear bulkhead brace. So I test fitted it again.

Removed the sound deadening that interferes with the adhesion surface:



Here's how it fits in relation to the front vince cups:



It seems like it just barely interferes, which is great! I'll strip everything else back and if it still interferes, I'll grind back a little bit off the top of the front cups.

Wating on the adhesive to arrive now before installing. Had some trouble getting it, so I have a feeling it's going to take a while.

With this in mind, I covered the slit I made in a layer of POR15. I'll grind this back before bonding the brace in place:



After that, I had to redo the rear dashcam (twice). I originally used a micro USB cable with just the GND and power wires, but it turned out that the parking mode wasn't activated correctly this way (in retrospect, this is very obvious). I then spliced a micro USB cable that also had an ID wire into the output of the one parking mode hardware module I had installed in the car.

I assumed the ID wire was just used as a signal for ignition on/ignition off, buuut turns out there's actual communication happening across it. Or at least it seems like it because the cameras would freak out when plugged in.

Final iteration involved two parking mode hardware modules and a couple connectors to make things easier to service:



(I made the E82's harness at the same time. M3 on the left E82 on the right)


Feeding it through the headliner was super easy. Just taped it to the existing harness and pulled it through:




Parking mode works as expected now!

[heinzboehmer]

Quick update on last week's Thunderhill track day.

Was an extra long day, so I packed both my mostly-used sets of track pads, my street pads and my street tires, since I was expecting to wear through both sets of track pads and the track tires.

Managed to get the street tires into the car by putting in three through the rear seat opening and the last one in between the front seats:



Honestly that sucked, not doing that again. I've been driving to and from the track on track tires and this experience made it very clear that I should keep doing that.

Swapping pads twice in the ~100F heat was also not super fun, but I'm very glad all my track pads for stock calipers are dead, since this will force me to finally get the 996 calipers installed.

I did accidentally touch one of the front rotors right after coming off the track (even though it was veery obvious that things were HOT). This is what the glove looks like now:



Extremely glad I was wearing the gloves. That would have been a really nasty burn.

But anyway, the track day was a ton of fun. First time in the open passing group and I realized it's not as scary as it seems. Was hilarious having actually fast cars blow past me.

I did have to sneak in some cool down laps every once in a while because the coolant temps started creeping towards the second dot. I was surprised by this because I've never had any coolant temp issues on track, but I realized the cause of this towards the end of the day. My AC panel will sometimes "reboot" and when it does, it goes back to some previous setting (seems like it chooses whatever was used the most recently). This means that it would turn the compressor back on on track and so the cooling system would have trouble doing its job. I think I might need to get a new AC panel to resolve this, but not entirely sure of the actual cause.

Also, when I got back home, I removed the passenger's seat, so that I could get the tires out of the back. With the seat out, I took the opportunity to loosen all the BK bracket bolts to try and get the rails to free up a bit. Then I did the same on the driver's side. They improved somewhat, but the rails still feel sticky. Biggest positive is that now the driver's seat bottoms out on the rails instead of hitting the transmission tunnel when moving it forward. Not entirely sure why, but I'm all for it. Makes getting into the back a lot easier.

Anyway, here's a short dump of track pics, including one where I was being chased down by 718 GT4 Clubsport MR that was stupid fast (dude was running 1:4x, IIRC) an a couple pics where I was being chased down by my friend in an S2K:

[heinzboehmer]

Welcome to my life as an amateur engjne rebuilder 🤣.

Excited to see the next iteration of the wrap! I bought real Tessa tape and it didn’t seem to work that well in the engine bay for me. Maybe the wrong application of that tape? I went back to my super 88.

Ha, no I was mostly kidding. I'm not rerewrapping what I already rewrapped. I'll just do the other side in electrical tape as well.

There's two types of tesa tapes, fleece and cloth. The cloth one is rated for higher temps. I've used it in the engine bay and it seems to be holding up well. Haven't tried the fleece one in the engine bay though

[tlow98]

Basically just cause I like to make myself to the same job three times.

Welcome to my life as an amateur engjne rebuilder 🤣.

Excited to see the next iteration of the wrap! I bought real Tessa tape and it didn’t seem to work that well in the engine bay for me. Maybe the wrong application of that tape? I went back to my super 88.

[heinzboehmer]

Any reason you're not using the fabric tape? That holds up much better. Amazon - about $2 a roll.

Cause I wanted it to match the driver's side, since I wasn't planning on rewrapping it. But now I am...

Basically just cause I like to make myself to the same job three times.

[bigjae46]

Any reason you're not using the fabric tape? That holds up much better. Amazon - about $2 a roll.

[heinzboehmer]

I’d say drivers side is easier. One exception being the fog light harness. Wait, m3 has a different front harness. There is a large connector that unplugs and allows the harness to be separated from left to right if memory serves.

Pics are of the 330i with an extension to the coolant reservoir plug.

Nice, thanks for those pictures. Might as well rewrap the other side on my car then

[tlow98]

Yep! It was very much like that on the parts of the harness that are exposed to high heat (along the shock tower, under coolant expansion tank, etc.). The parts that aren't (inside drug bin mostly), had that regular super sticky residue from electrical tape on them. It was actually great cause I hate dealing with the super sticky stuff.

This is why I'm tempted to rewrap the other side too. Whenever I touch a piece of the harness, the tape just kinda falls off. Do you remember how many things the driver's side harness went to, compared to the passenger's side one? If rewrapping the driver's side is something I can knock out in a couple hours, I'll go for it. If it's gonna take days like the passenger's side, then I'll just ignore the peeling tape.

I’d say drivers side is easier. One exception being the fog light harness. Wait, m3 has a different front harness. There is a large connector that unplugs and allows the harness to be separated from left to right if memory serves.

Pics are of the 330i with an extension to the coolant reservoir plug.

[heinzboehmer]

Yep! It was very much like that on the parts of the harness that are exposed to high heat (along the shock tower, under coolant expansion tank, etc.). The parts that aren't (inside drug bin mostly), had that regular super sticky residue from electrical tape on them. It was actually great cause I hate dealing with the super sticky stuff.

This is why I'm tempted to rewrap the other side too. Whenever I touch a piece of the harness, the tape just kinda falls off. Do you remember how many things the driver's side harness went to, compared to the passenger's side one? If rewrapping the driver's side is something I can knock out in a couple hours, I'll go for it. If it's gonna take days like the passenger's side, then I'll just ignore the peeling tape.

[tlow98]

Was your old electrical tape surprisingly brittle? Mine had very little tack left and peeled off easily after being cut with a straight blade.

nice work here! Tedious job.

[heinzboehmer]

Alright here's some more details about the grommet replacement.

To start, I just followed the harness and disconnected all the plugs that were on it. This involved removing the turn signal, moving the coolant expansion tank out of the way, etc. The hardest plug to get to was the one on the AC drier. I ended up moving the wheel well liner out of the way and disconnecting it through the wheel well. Here's the sensor:



The firewall grommet snaps into place from the inside out, so I pulled the entire thing into the passenger compartment:



Old grommet was cut off cause I didn't feel like feeding a million wires through it. Here's a comparison between MK20 (right) and MK60 (left) grommets:



And from the back:



It's pretty obvious that they're pretty different. The MK20 grommet is a two piece assembly with two mounting spots, while the MK60 grommet is a one piece unit with only one mounting spot. Fortunately, they're mostly interchangeable. I did find that I had to slot the mounting hole slightly, but that was the only modification necessary:



With the old grommet off, I got started on feeding all of the harness wires through the new grommet. To do this, I depinned every connector and then repinned after the wires were through.

The one caveat were the ground wires. These attach to a ground point behind the turn signal that is not like the rest of the ground points on the car. This one is completely sealed, so there's no depinning the wires and feeding them through. What I did instead was to keep all ground wires that I depinned from connectors "outside" of the grommet. I did try stuffing the entire ground post thing through the grommet opening, but it was waay too big.

Halfway through:



Aand finally all of them:



It's hard to see, but there's one ground wire that I ended up cutting. I wanted to avoid cutting any wires, but I tried following this one and could not find where it went to without taking a bunch of the interior apart, so I just gave up and cut it.

Grommet in place:




Getting those three tabs clipped in required a decent amount of messing around. I ended up using a socket extension to push on the grommet from the inside and got them seated.

Here's that one ground soldered back:



And heatshrink added:



I also took the opportunity to clean the super hard to reach places, which was quite nice.

And finally, everything wrapped back up in electrical tape. So far the super 33 has been holding up great:




I kinda want to rewrap the other side after seeing how this side came out. Maybe when I decide I have nothing better to do to the car I'll do it, but I'll be taking a break from wiring for now.

[heinzboehmer]

Success!



I ended up having to pull the harness into the interior and depin every connector to get them through the grommet. I did give up and cut one wire though, a ground that I wasn't able to trace in the body harness. Not bad for the amount of cables running through that grommet though.

Now just need to rewrap and reassemble all of this:



I'll post up some more pics later, just to document the hard parts (and to remind myself not to do this again).

[heinzboehmer]

You are an absolute madman. I definitely would have just plugged that hole with plastic!

I strongly considered it, but I already have the grommet so might as well. What's five extra hours on a job that would have otherwise taken 15 min, right?

The thing that fully convinced me to do it this way was that most of the tape close to the plugs is peeling off, so it's going to be nice to rewrap all that.