2001 M3 Journey: Laguna Seca Blue Edition

[bavarian3]

Boooooooooring... wake me up when the matching Cinnamon Recaro Sportsters arrive.

JK this car is freaking awesome! Amazing restoration.

Ha ha, patience and you may be entertained! Thanks!

[freshprince2421]

Boooooooooring... wake me up when the matching Cinnamon Recaro Sportsters arrive.

JK this car is freaking awesome! Amazing restoration.

[TexaZ3]

Looking good!

[bavarian3]

Been a while, friends! It's been a winter of enjoying the car as we got little rain in CA.

I did work on a couple small projects, and have some big ones coming. So I'll get back to things here to get warmed up.

ZCP steering wheel trim retrofit

The titan grey steering wheel was part of the plan to go with black interior. As I switched gears to cinnamon, I preferred more black accents to go with it.

I got a cheap set of beatup zcp trim on ebay and immediately sent it out to our trusty TexaZ3 for refinishing.

Removing and assembling the NOS button.



Ebay special



Nice!





The nice thing is I don't have to pull the steering wheel. Just unplug the battery, wait 30mins, then pull the airbag. The trim can then be removed. A look at the old, which I'll keep around if things change.




Now the tricky part. Wiring this up was a bit of a brain exercise. So heinzboehmer was gracious as always to help me problem solve a perfect solution. The reason for the added difficulty is I wanted to avoid splicing into factory wiring.

The TLDR of the solution:
Tap into the sport button ground at the DME side into the cruise control ground. To avoid splicing anything, you can simply use a Y connector harness solution as shown. So to be clear if you were splicing you would depin the cruise control wire from the dme, then splice it into the sport button wire at the dme.

The harness is simply to avoid splicing, acting as a y connector.








Just for reference - For non-smg cars, another solution is you could splice into the control center sport button ground(or any button you wish to activate with the i/o button), and the run a wire into the empty slot in the clock spring. This is a reasonable and easy solution, but if you have an early model like mine, the slot is actually blank with no pins!

All other models should use the same clock spring for cars that have smg or manual, but only smg cars will utilize it for the paddles I believe.





Looking good!





Everything works great. Now when I want a big NOS power boost I have it at the tip of my fingers. In all seriousness, hope this helps non-zcp folks that also want to wire their i/o button to something.

The one caveat to this is you won't have cruise control(well obviously since I won't have the button controls anymore), and if I did the Z4 stalk retrofit I would need to run another wire from the clock spring to the DME (no big deal). For whatever reason I rarely touch cruise control, even on road trips. On this vehicle cruise control would be used 0% of the time, so I'll opt to not do the retrofit.

A couple more shots with my cam even though the forum butchers quality.






Stay tuned. I'll show the install of my strut brace since my car never came with one.

[Gt4]

where might one pick up one of these diffusers?

Just send me a pm here on this forum

[Arclitgold]

Too bad our diffuseurs aren't selling cause fitment is spot on. Better than the first MEC production batch/mold

Now you give me motivation to work on my LSB and get my CSL parts painted!

where might one pick up one of these diffusers?

[bavarian3]

Just read this entire build thread. Fantastic job with this car. Car looks absolutely mint now. Glad you're actually driving and enjoying it!!

Also, agree with that last pic with the 993 being pretty epic.

Thanks! too kind. Hope to be on your restoration abilities one day.

[Casa de Mesa]

Just read this entire build thread. Fantastic job with this car. Car looks absolutely mint now. Glad you're actually driving and enjoying it!!

Also, agree with that last pic with the 993 being pretty epic.

[bavarian3]

Last pic is awesome! Nice work and DIY tips and tricks in your post. Cheers.

thanks! hope it can help some others.

Cold start will be getting a major revision this winter! My car warms up before the end of the block right now, so it's too warm to tune Glad you're out there enjoying it!

looking forward to it !

[Bry5on]

Cold start will be getting a major revision this winter! My car warms up before the end of the block right now, so it's too warm to tune Glad you're out there enjoying it!

[0-60motorsports]

Last pic is awesome! Nice work and DIY tips and tricks in your post. Cheers.

[bavarian3]

CSL Intake

I planned on waiting till winter for this, but I figured with CA smog I better enjoy this as long as possible till it has to come out again. I was lucky to come across a nice deal on a Karbonius Race from a forum member looking to quit having to swap for smog purposes. I won't mind the hassle, so let's go.

Out goes some parts. This was my first time pulling the intake, so it opened up a new area for cleaning. This was post manicure.




Everything was quite simple on removal, figuring out the best way to wire the MAP sensor gave me more of a headache. Some amazon and some awesome heinzboehmer provided bits would help get me to where I eventually wanted to go.




The issue wasn't how to wire the MAP. It's only a few wires. The issue was how to do it without splicing into the factory wires. I wanted it to be completely reversible without leaving traces of tampering. To my luck, I found an amazing writeup from karter16 which was exactly what I was looking for: link.

The gist of it is you wire the MAP and IAT lines straight into the now open MAF connector. Then you just re-pin one slot in the x60003 DME harness. I drew up a diagram for those confused, and even included the part numbers for each primary component(you still need little bits like grommets and pins which Karter covers in detail).






This is what the final harness is like. Left is MAP harness, middle is to IAT, and right goes into the MAF connector. Go into the X60003 harness and re-pin slot 1 to slot 18. The best part is it's completely reversible and will leave no trace of tampering, and no need to feed any wires through the harness weatherproofing.

I will redo this when I take things apart for smog to optimize the length, and put some proper sealing on the MAP connector end.





With the wiring figured out I could get to fitting the airbox in. This was pretty easy I just took my time not to muscle the carbon too much. The clamps were fine as well once you know what to do.





Given that I have a 2001 MY, a couple aspects require a little more effort. One being the DME. Since 2001's use MSS54 In comes a donor MSS54HP.





Another annoyance with the 2001's is the vacuum line many use the covid-19 kit for doesn't seem to fit too well. Besides, this also helps avoid tampering with factory equipment(not that a hose is a big deal). Other solutions(kassel) seem to have question marks around them, so there was only one fool proof solution that I figured I'll buy while I still can.

Genuine CSL air rail.





This is where a 3d printed parts comes in handy with Karter and Heinz's awesome contributions. The adapter in the pic above with the wiring loom is glued(I used epoxy) to the map sensor for proper fitting to the CSL air rail. This is necessary to get a nice fitment with the Saab MAP sensor(0261230101).





All fitted





With that set I can move to the DME for the re-pinning as previously mentioned. Straight forward as can be. You can actually see on the far right where it has a "1" marked.




In to 18 it goes. You can count as it's marked 14 on the left, 26 on the right. With that done I dropped the new DME in and continued with the intake.





Kind of a lousy pic but this shows the routing of the wiring harness. As mentioned there's a bunch of extra slack I plan to refine later. You can see how it plugs into the MAP, IAT, and MAF. I don't really have a great solution for routing this formally, so I'm open to suggestions.





After fitting the second half of the intake. Starting to get excited. The airbox also came with the csl air shutoff valve fitting and extended crankcase hose.





I was amped to get this running. Based on positive feedback I went with the Bry5on tune. TLDR, no regrets. Do it and don't look back. More on this later.




Some close to final shots after firing it up and making sure everything runs.










If you noticed the air duct panel that connects to the stock intake is missing. I had an idea to make things more CSL like. I picked up an extra panel and trimmed away the extended part that's no longer needed.



After more filing and some trim black solution now everything is buttoned up and looking how I want. I did intentionally remove the drive side shroud. The CSL omits it(due to the snorkel iirc), and I despise the part. Classic troll move by the BMW engineers to route the cooling hose through it.




Summarizing

And there it is all done. So what can I say that hasn't already been said? The car absolutely rips now.

Driveability is 95% that of stock. It's not to say there aren't SOME compromises, as there is a low-end hiccup or two, and bumpy throttle for a short period of time on cold start. I could not care less about the minor negatives with the overall improvements this solution provides. Bryson is also continuously improving things so I look forward to the next iteration. As others have stated, Bryson is also very friendly, helpful, and patient. This goes a long way.

Sound wise it's loud as hell if I want it to be, but completely muted if I want it to be. It's not exactly an exotic sound, but it's rowdy and a crap load of fun. I'm curious if it sounds any different from the standard Karbonius box.

I'm not sure if I care to dyno this, but with the tune, intake, and euro headers the power increase is not subtle or bs. Adding to that some mild weight reduction goodies, the car is really just a blast to drive.



I actually drove the car outside of town for the first time and caught Monterey Car Week. I usually just hang out there with the commuter car, but this was way more fun this time. A little stressful at times with all the crowds and "content creators" everywhere. The GF wasn't prepared to be in that many pictures. 🤣

Naturally I didn't take many pictures of my own car with the level of operation there. Our hotel's parking lot alone was a car show.

[bavarian3]

Thank you 0-60motorsports sbay

Gt4 I'll write you all a review. Perhaps not enough people know about it. I think at the price point it's a no brainer for the quality received.

[Gt4]

Too bad our diffuseurs aren't selling cause fitment is spot on. Better than the first MEC production batch/mold

Now you give me motivation to work on my LSB and get my CSL parts painted!

[sbay]

Clean