Karter16's Silbergrau E46 M3 Journal

[heinzboehmer]

Excellent work! Looking forward to the complete c style disassembly that you're gonna share with all of us

[karter16]

Excellent work! Looking forward to the complete c style disassembly that you're gonna share with all of us

Haha well it might not be the entire binary but I will be sharing everything I do figure out. I find it crazy that after 20 years there isn't more information available around the MSS54 and how it works. I do appreciate people who put the effort in on stuff like this often want some return for their efforts so it makes sense perhaps. Anyway I certainly don't want to make money out of this or gatekeep anything I figure out, so will absolutely be sharing for the benefit of the community.


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[Slideways]

Haha well it might not be the entire binary but I will be sharing everything I do figure out. I find it crazy that after 20 years there isn't more information available around the MSS54 and how it works. I do appreciate people who put the effort in on stuff like this often want some return for their efforts so it makes sense perhaps. Anyway I certainly don't want to make money out of this or gatekeep anything I figure out, so will absolutely be sharing for the benefit of the community.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There was a massive thread on M3F which had a lot of disassembly stuff in it, but that got lost with the old forum.

You've probably seen the new thread, but it is a fraction of what it once was - https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/s...me-information

[karter16]

There was a massive thread on M3F which had a lot of disassembly stuff in it, but that got lost with the old forum.

You've probably seen the new thread, but it is a fraction of what it once was - https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/s...me-information

Yes I remember perusing the old thread many years ago. Such a shame it was lost 😭

[karter16]

Got a few bits and pieces done this weekend.

On Saturday morning dad and I welded up the cracks in the top of the front right RACP mount. As usual I did a bad job of taking photos as we went, but I did get a couple here and there.

As a recap, this is what the front right looks like from the top:



As you can see in the photo above the crack coming down towards the bottom of the photo is hidden behind the rear seat sheet layer. So that we could see how far this crack went we inspected the bottom side of the top layer of the RACP with my boroscope.



As can be seen the crack extends just to the point that the RACP bends down to layer up with the rear seat sheet. For reference the threaded insert visible on the right hand side of the image is for the seatbelt buckle.

Knowing how far down the crack extended meant that I was easily able to cut the small section of the seat layer out so that we could access the end of the crack to drill and weld. We found that a rounded nose carbide burr in the die grinder was the best way to clean up the surface around the cracks.



Dad then MIG welded the cracks up - I unfortunately didn't get any photos of this as I was running extraction and lighting while dad welded. A couple of comments though:

- We used some ceramic fibre insulation segments to pack the RACP cavity to prevent sparks, grindings, etc. from traveling inside the cavity. the ceramic fiber insulation is good in that it's non-flammable.
- I had previously measured the thickness of the RACP layers to be welded and dad had obtained some equivalent sheet metal to run some trials on and dial in the settings on the MIG.
- We went slow to avoid heating everything up too much, even so the cavity wax on the underside of the top RACP layer tends to melt and smoke along where you've welded, good extraction is advised.
- We used the boroscope again to check the other side of the welds (where they are on a single layer of sheet) and confirm good penetration of the weld.

With the welding done I then cleaned up the top surface with the carbide burr to level out the welds and leave an, as flat as possible, surface for the brace to mount to.

I unfortunately didn't get any photos of the welds prior to cleaning up and putting a protective layer of undercoat on.




As you can see the surface is not perfectly smooth (the flash from the phone actually makes it look more pronounced than it is in reality - it is less than 1mm, which will be perfectly fine for this situation. The OE welds stick up a couple of mm anyway. I didn't want to take away too much material at any point with the burr, so played it safe and left a small amount of extra material in place.

You may also notice that we welded the little cutout that we made to access the end of the crack back in place and smoothed it out with a little body filler. Not really necessary given it's going to spend the rest of its life under the seat again, but for the sake of an extra 20 minutes work it's worth it in my opinion.

I hand painted on the under coat as I wanted to make sure I could get it into all of the corners well, there's not a lot of room in there to rotate a spray can. I'll do another layer of undercoat, and then sand it back a little, mask up, build myself a little spray booth inside the car and do a couple of coats with the e-coat matched enamel I have. I'll then dust on some A08 on the seat bench (when I can finally get some, whole other story) to replicate the original surface as much as possible.


Secondly the DIN7984 hex head bolts for the MAP sensor arrived, they're identical to the original items except 18mm long to address the greater thickness of the 101 sensor mounting point, plus they're stainless rather than the zinc-coated original bolts. I'm happy with how these have turned out:

[karter16]

Today I cleaned up the top front RACP points and sprayed with the e-coat matched enamel I have.

First up I masked the area around the mount (photo taken prior to clean up).



Then I used a ziploc bag as a miniature spray booth by taping it to both the RACP and the spray can. I also made sure to cover/block every other hole/exit point in the RACP so I didn't get any over spray wafting out anywhere.




And the end result (paint is still wet here):




I have some clean up to do on a few rust spots on the seat bench, but will do this once I have the A08 in hand and can touch it up properly.

At this point though the front mounts are ready for the installation of the brace (drilling and tapping will be done at the time of installation of the brace as I need to take the subframe off to tap the threads.

[karter16]

I've been going through the public XDF for the 0401 binary and sorting out some of the incorrect references. They're usually pretty easy to confirm by looking at whether the data makes sense. This one made me chuckle 😛

[karter16]

I've spun up a thread (https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/s...assembly-notes) in the Coding section which I will keep updated as I work through the disassembly. Aim is to make the info easy to find and also splits it out from this build thread.

[karter16]

Finally made it to my summer break! Did a quick fitment check of the airbox, filter and Haimus snorkel to make sure I don't get any surprises during install. I've noted others have found the hose attachments to be tight so am prepared that I might need to do some adjustments there like heinzboehmer did to get them to click in correctly.

The CSL dipstick tube is finally with the local courier for delivery, more than 6 months after I ordered it, so should get it in the next few days. The only other thing I'm waiting on is the silver replacement screws for the two halves of the airbox, but they aren't a blocker given I can use the ones the airbox came with and swap out easily later.