Whitney "Vanilla Shake"- 2.9 daily speedbox

[efficient]

Put a 325i afm. I bet it'll run better. Throw in a chip also I bet it'll work better then the m30 afm.
Maybe one day you can add a 3.73lsd.
Keep up the good work.

[whitebulat22]

What I had to say about your m20 afm suggestion:

"Car does not like m30 afm, needs to be kept alive for a bit and randomly loses all power sometimes. Put a m20 afm in, I don't know if it's even misfired once in 150 miles. M50 injectors and 2.5 bar fpr.

The new product doesn't have the same 1200 rpm grunt anymore, but anywhere above the power is equal or greater. Very satisfying when I get above 5000 and it just keeps climbing faster. Smoothest noise I've ever heard coming out of my tailpipe, it instantly started up and felt perfectly refined. Would do again"

Now at 300 flawless miles in 2 days! It's unbelievable, Whitney finally has a heart and the demented soul of the eta is gone. Time to resume pointless projects as always and get out to the track.

[efficient]

oh good to hear.
i have this eBay chip and it works pretty good.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/87-92-BMW-E30-325i-E34-525i-Performance-Chip-/141729741796?hash=item20ffc03be4&vxp=mtr

maybe you should add a 3.73lsd or a 4.10lsd differential. 3.73 is a good choice
with the 4.10 you'll probably waste more gas.

[whitebulat22]

Def feeling a 3.73 would help and be good compromise as is. I'm gonna do some research on chipped dyno graphs: I think a tuned 2.7 power curve might be pretty flat from 4300 rpm up (lowest point post shift from 6800) then I could search for a mild 3.46-3.73 with maybe no compromise at all.

That particular chip you have actually was the first to fry one of my ecus lol. I'll probably save and splurge on a squid. Thanks again for saving my car with the afm!

[whitebulat22]

Not much news on this car, and no news is good news. Whitney feels so alive when my 5k tach gives up and has been the picture of health, still zero hiccups and the eta saga is long gone. A squid chip is now letting her rev to 6800, and the noise up there is improving my quality of life. I attempted to do a m30 afm conversion with a couple specific squid chips and for w/e reason it never worked despite both units almost definitely being good. I’m disappointed because of how much smaller the m20 afm's area is than the throttle behind it, but at least I'm saving time with it fitting and running perfectly.

We had very special times at the Adams Motorsport drifting event and on my first Vegas drive:



Wish my GoPro made it to the event, it was the final Thursday so dozens of badass cars made it out.

Being such a “finished project”, working on her is now is sometimes more for my entertainment than for a purpose. Then again, being on the wrong side of 30 and all there are plenty of little things that demand homemade solutions, such as …



Brakes didn’t quite intercept this BavAuto intake boot, so a bolt with a small diameter hole clamped in the intake is routed to the booster via flexible hose. The reduced air flow through the inside of this bolt seems to have slightly reduced the booster’s effect, fortunately I like stomping the pedal harder anyway. I'm not disappointed with the boot because it survived all four of my attempts at the m30 afm.



I ended up with this ancient Recaro missing a seat bottom, and I really wanted a free seat bottom, so I’ve done this with a junk skateboard. Fits very snug and nice to sit on, can see over the dash easily now. Improvement overall compared to my sport seat IMO, those are great passenger / video game seats but comfort and support were not anything special and they have a 15 lb weight penalty. This ugly Recaro however is an awakening to sit in, and unlike any e30 sport seat it folds forward and lets people get in the back seat! Downside is the bitch of installing- it needs to go in after the Garagistic adapters go in, then you need two hands pulling back the leg bolster and another two trying to get a bolt in that space without stripping the aluminum threads. If this car becomes a track rat I’ll likely get another seat that’s more purely focused for rigid support and passing inspection, but I love this thing with just some new cloth and patching down that Monster logo as my road seat.

I prepped the dash to pull for giggles, ended up just re-mounting my hanging obc and fixing my cluster lights. This slightly defective bulb was left in there after I misplaced $625 fixing my cluster and odometer at a local shop:



On top of that, the brown nut that goes behind my erratic coolant gauge was missing! Thankfully my parts cluster had everything for me,



(besides a 7k tach), things are working, and I’m mostly independent of shops now. Whenever I need motivation I look at that bill and the incredible lack of improvement my car got.

The slave cylinder finally died, not nearly as easy to get the top nut as the internet said it would be! Needed way more extension than I could use while pushing forward towards the easy-to-strip nuts.

Josh1254 helped me a lot with his part out. My throttle cable had two strands left and I really needed that. Job was very difficult until I got my "F this" hammer and a flathead. Also got me a door handle, hood latch handle (my old hood cable snapped on me while trying to install), and cruise / abs fixes, which is sweet.

Last but not least he talked me into my new favorite interior pieces:





At some point gotta figure out what to do with this bs




And these bs heater stubs ruining the entire system and forcing me to do this:



And that's pretty much it. Don't really have much more stuff I care to do as far as mods / fixes, just need to start joining everyone on track days and auto'xes.

[whitebulat22]

Good news on car, smogged again for first time after buying, and basically it shot out 19 ppm of NO with the average being 627 for passing cars. Everything else excellent too, Walker cats work!

Today however I was deflated. The head swap was by miles the best thing done to the car and the results have always felt great. Here's what the dynapack had to say, stock 2.7i, electric fan, eta exhaust with glasspack, in 3rd gear:



That's 122 whp and 128 wtq. Bottom chart was baseline, gained 9 whp by swapping 2.5 to 3.0 fpr and putting in a stock airbox over my KAmotors intake (was very surprised by that part, it was a solid 5 whp). I will still keep it around in case I do a Volvo maf conversion.

SSsquid tune was positive 9 ish whp. However both that and stock ecu ran very lean, close to 15:1 afr at some points.

I do love this engine setup driving, reliability, and mpg. It sounded incredible on there too. But I'm pretty embarrassed about the numbers. I was expecting above 170 chp or 140 wheel, and I've never heard of a 2.7i without 150 or 160 wtq. Thankfully this guy can help me retune and hopefully get to the bottom of this.

[bataangpinoy]

Good news on car, smogged again for first time after buying, and basically it shot out 19 ppm of NO with the average being 627 for passing cars. Everything else excellent too, Walker cats work!

Today however I was deflated. The head swap was by miles the best thing done to the car and the results have always felt great. Here's what the dynapack had to say, stock 2.7i, electric fan, eta exhaust with glasspack, in 3rd gear:



That's 122 whp and 128 wtq. Bottom chart was baseline, gained 9 whp by swapping 2.5 to 3.0 fpr and putting in a stock airbox over my KAmotors intake (was very surprised by that part, it was a solid 5 whp). I will still keep it around in case I do a Volvo maf conversion.

SSsquid tune was positive 9 ish whp. However both that and stock ecu ran very lean, close to 15:1 afr at some points.

I do love this engine setup driving, reliability, and mpg. It sounded incredible on there too. But I'm pretty embarrassed about the numbers. I was expecting above 170 chp or 140 wheel, and I've never heard of a 2.7i without 150 or 160 wtq. Thankfully this guy can help me retune and hopefully get to the bottom of this.

You need to toss the ETA exhaust and OE exhaust manifolds in the garbage.

[whitebulat22]

Unfortunately, this thing has been turning into a steam engine with the exhaust smoke and water leaks recently- specifically, the current tune and/or ring leakage is causing the smoke and a freeze plug in the head I've replaced twice is still leaking. These may be fixable issues without a full tear down, but I decided Mahle Powerpak pistons and a rebuild sounded better.



Those will of course be paired with a 2.9 engine kit, and a nice Bimmerheads performance head. My alternatives were:

Stock 2.5- Would be cool but a decent amount of effort for not much gain.
2.7i with I pistons- Almost did this, but still some assembly and machining that ends with old internals, no re-boring achieved.
M60 in the backyard- Almost did this too, but on second thought I have enough trouble wrenching an M20 to start with. More work is the very last thing I want.
3.1 M20- Would LOVE the torque, but this 2.9 comes with those sweet pistons and fits a proper oil seal ring. The peak power should be exactly the same, so I decided 2.9 with short gears was a better all around compromise.

So here comes a 2.9 full rebuild, MS2 PNP on the way for me to learn on my current cheap engine. Everything will hopefully fall right into place as all the accessories on this engine are working nicely. It will be built on my current eta block which will give a little compression bump with its shorter deck compared to an I block. End goal is >200 whp, will show more on how I plan to achieve that as parts arrive. Very excited because the I head swap at 122 whp already felt great compared to an eta!


Other stuff that needs to be done-

Handbrake- One side was missing all of the hardware! I finally found it after almost 3 years, but old and new rotors don't fit over new Febi Bilstein shoes. I double checked the handbrake was disengaged, loosened, and adjusted as compact as possible but these shoes are just too thick to work. The factory used shoes are no issue, and are 1.5 mm ish thinner. I will be boring the new brake rotor 3 mm in diameter to get it to fit.

Diff swap, subframe bushings- The subframe will get riser bushings because of ridiculous tire wear issues. Like the fronts when I had my camber plates adjusted to more than 3 degrees negative, thick high treadwear tires went to cords in a few thousand miles.



A 3.73 diff will go in with synthetic fluid and studs along with trailing arm bushings.

Coolant gauge- Really hoping a 7k tach with a harder ground source, not just that little brown nut, will make this issue stop. I can live with it sitting in the red randomly knowing its wrong when my engine is a pile anyway. But that will not be acceptable with the new engine.

Exhaust- My silly welder halfway finished installing IE long tubes and then broke his hand, so I don't have any flanges or mufflers atm. The end system will be long tubes to flanges to factory cat to y pipe roughly 64 in. from header merge to magnaflow 2.5" inch muffler. It sounds like an uncorked Ferrari v12 right now without the muffler so hopefully when finished it will be ferocious but not droney. Torque curve is why I picked the 64" length despite the trouble fitting it, here's a link to Digger's research on his built M20. He tested three harmonic lengths, and all of the benefits of the green below showed up while almost none of the advantages of the other curves did. Even if they did the green curve was the best anyway.



Heater- Tried replacing the corroded heater pipes by chopping and extending, achieved nothing but wasting a whole day I can't get back. Sooner or later I'll get those stupid $60 pipes and a new heater core.

Get to the track days- This poor car never makes it out with the combination of my mechanical ineptitude and its own improbable failures I've had to deal with. Soon, it will have all new fluids front to back, new engine, new brakes and tires on all corners, all new bushings, IE sway bars and springs with Koni shocks / GC plates, F/R strut braces and I'm not letting it sitting in the driveway after all that!