E30 from Ausieland

[e30davie]

Well its all back together.

arguably no notable changes as it was all maintenance. but i fixed a few oil leaks, tidied everything up and looks much tidier.

But removing those exhaust ports definitely changed the sound of the engine. hard to explain. its definitely quieter. and i dunno, maybe more "modern" sounding? anyway, sounds way better. probably just sounds like every other M20 that didn't have the stupid air ports....

i adjusted the tappets while i was in there and found 2 there were slightly higher clearance. I have a feeling some of the ecentrics are starting to flat spot but i stuffed around on a few of them for ages and got them all all pretty spot on. sounds like a nice sewing machine now, definitely got rid of a couple distinctive of tick tick ticks.

Next job is probably to sort out some shorter ignition leads. you can see the LS1 coils in the battery tray area and i just pieced together the best i could using 2 sets of oem leads. but as mine used to go all the way down to the dizzy in the side of the block they are all too long anyway. id like the leads to go around the other side of the strut tower and then i can route them back inside the spark plug lead holder properly. Im wondering if i can just get new plugs for the ls1 coils and just shorten the oem leads. might be an option.

But its been like this for years, so it will do for the time being...close the bonnet and just drive it!

edit: lookin at that photo i really should get a new coolant resevoir! so much yellow.

[e30davie]

Yer i had a little trouble finding hex plugs in that size locally, so just went for the bolts. nice and cheap. I didnt remember how much those exhaust pipes stuck into the head. they must just about touch the valves!

I got the exhaust all back on Friday night. that was not very fun. looks better already though. All new copper nuts from the local exhaust shop.

Swapped the timing belt yesterday lunch time after de-greasing everything, belt looked ok but the tensioner bearing was a little sad so probably not a bad time to change it. 40,000km and around 5.5yrs. Slightly over due on time, but well under on kilometres. I mean its not completely stuffed but not as smooth as it probably should be. Front main seal, oil pump drive seal and the cam seal seem to be holding up fine, but the rocker cover gasket was leaking pretty bad. So ill have to get a new one of them.

The oil filter right angle doovey got a clean up and 2 new viton o-rings (old ones shown). I think it might have been leaking. The oil pressure switch might actually be leaking too, but i dont have a 24mm socket so ill order one of them and swap out the seal, i think its just a copper washer, soon find out.

The front timing covers got a bit of a go with some wet and dry sand paper and some metal polish. shiny shiny. even painted the lifting hook black. just for fun.

One of the belts is on, ill do the others today hopefully. then its just about time for the radiator.

Also a good photo of my sanden AC comp with my own bracket. I probably dont need the 90degree oil adaptor but it looks a bit neater with the oil filter tucked up.

Hopefully next update is an engine that runs again. Engine bay could do with a little bit of a clean too...

[lukeADE335i]

Nice work on removing the pulse air system and blocking the holes. When I did my old e21 years ago, I used hex head threaded plugs. Worked well, had no issues with any leaking. With the megasquirt, the engine probably runs cleaner than the old L-Jet did in any case.

[e30davie]

Nope. its even cooler than a pump. if you have a look at this photo below (that is on the previous page) item 15 is a couple of 1 way valves. so it uses the pulse of one exhaust pulse to push fresh air into another exhaust port. Totally passive system.

https://www.r3vlimited.com/board/fil...tch?id=7189232

Ultimately its probably not a bad idea, as many new cars do the same thing with a pump, but i assume it would stuff with my wide band readings, so its been blocked off for years. but now (hopefully) its blocked off properly and looks significantly neater.

Once i get this all back together i am going to get a catalytic converter fitted. this car is pre 87 so in Australia no cat was fitted, but it does stink...and it is 2022....so i'd better get one fitted.

[moatilliatta]

Oh wow. That's pretty interesting. I've never seen the an M20 manifold with exhaust injection ports. Does it have some sort of belt drive pump?

Super cool car and wheel setup!

[e30davie]

Well maintenance time. Timing belt. First car I've ever done 2 timing belts on - always sold a car before time is up. So engine is currently in a million peices.

Has been good fun to pull it all apart again after putting it all together 5yrs ago. A few oil leaks were found too to fix. The oil filter right angle doovey needs a new o-ring and the rocker cover gasket looks like it needs replacing. thats only a few yrs old. oh well. they are cheap. everything appears to be in good shape though.

However one job ive been meaning to go for years is block those stupid air injection ports. I tried to remove the ports with the manifold in place but i just couldnt get the spanner in, so ended removing the exhaust manifold on the car which was a complete pain in the ass, but i got it off.

These ports i believe were only on the m20b23 which you guys in USA didn't get in the e30, maybe you did in the e21?. Its an early emissions device before catalytic converters.

The bolts are m16x1.5, which is a fine thread, easy enough to get online. I did have to cut them down to around 6 threads. i used 2 copper washes as with one the bolt head hit the casting. and you can see i had to make a "custom" bolt for one of them as the casting was very much in the way of the bolt head. Just TIG welded a smaller nut on the top and then ground off the hex head. of course i don't anticipate any real changes from this just the engine bay will look significantly neater. But those stupid ceramic tubes in the exhaust ports cant have helped.

[e30davie]

yah its definitely on the list. I thought i got an e36 rack, but I got an e46 rack which is fine, but means i need to get some e36 tie rods as the e46 rack has the vent holes in the rack ends...and it all got a bit to complex and expensive as the rack asploding was somewhat of an unplanned event....so give it a month or two and ill try again. took the car for a decent drive this morning and even with the slower steering its still a delight.

[econti]

Definitely do a rack swap, best thing I ever did to mine.

[e30davie]

Anyway, that's about it. Here is a couple of other photos I took yesterday just for fun.

Oh I also painted the seals around the wind screens. Geez that made a big difference to the look of the car. should have done that 5 years ago haha.

I just need to clip on the corner of the front lip properly. I lost it somewhere....and you'll probably notice the slight dent in the chrome bumper. I should get it refurbished one year. but its good enough for the time being.

[e30davie]

Well time goes on, few projects have been completed over Christmas.

For years the bonnet and the front right guard has had dents....and the guard was the wrong colour....and I've sort of ignored them. But I saw someone on here had done some rattle can spraying and decided to have a go. I have done a fair bit of acrylic spraying over the years but always used a spray gun, not a rattle can.

So I went down to the local paint shop and the guy was really helpful and spent ages color matching. So I got some colour cans, some clear, bit of bog and some spray putty, and a fancy 3M mask....

The car doesn't appear to have been crashed but it certainly has had some paint repairs over the years, best not to look to closely as its like 5 different shades of white.

Didn't take too many photos but here is a couple during, and then some other ones just for fun of the finished thing.

I still very much struggle with fixing dents, sanded and bogged a number of times and never really got it completely perfect, but its hard to pick the dents if you dont know they are there. But honestly its a significant improvement. and for the cost (like $120 maybe) i think its quite good.

So here's a few photos.




Here is the shine on the guard straight out of the rattle can. way better than i expected.



The guard was then sanded with 800 then 1500 and then i hit it with a buffing machine. Its actually not a glass finish but it does match the rest of the paint quite well in shinyness, heres a close up of the paint



You can see in the close up photo above the rust bubble on the door, the door was a spare I picked up years ago. . I have a spare perfect door in the shed, though its unfortunately silver. so if i get enthusiastic one of these months i will start on that door and give it the same treatment.

Honestly the rattle can turned out so well that I'm tempted to just keep going and do the whole car! least it will be all the same colour.

Other news is I blew the steering rack, fluid EVERYWHERE, i had suspected the rack for a while but was ignoring it as you do. It was a shaft seal and the rubber boot filled with oil and asploded on my driveway as i was painting the panels. I did buy an E46 rack but ended up just putting a spare oem one in that I had to get it back on the road. E46 rack looks like a relatively easy conversion I just need to buy a few bits so will need to save my pennies. Here's me doing a wheel align, if strings are good enough for formula 1 they are good enough for me. Drives pretty good now. (note: bonnet not aligned in this photo).

[e30davie]

yup car just keeps on going. the "worth" of these things only seems to be going up, so i dont really have any intention of selling it. it can just live in the garage and come out every now and then.

previously i had played with that old haltech E8, I did get it running but i could never get it running right. never even really drove it. so i gave up on that and my mate had an old wire in megasquirt 2 with MS extra etc. My plan was to make it so that i could always swap back to OEM as quick as possible (as i didnt have much faith in myself at this point) so i ended up making an entire new loom, including relays etc to run the fuel pump, wide band o2 sensor and main efi. I only have photoes of hte engine loom itself, but essentially the entire EFI system is now separate from BMW stuff. it basically has 1 main wire in the battery, one wire for ignition 12v, couple of grounds, and then everything is self contained in its own loom. with a couple of fuses and relays in its own little box on the passenger side behind the headlight.

so the stats are:

-m20b25 ballancer with the 60-2 wheel on it
- megasquirt 2 with ms extra
- fuel injectors wired in 2 groups of 3 - just oem injectors, but i did just get a set of modern ones that ill be swapping in when they are cleaned
- 6 x LS1 coils running off the front LEDS of the MS wired in wasted spark
- move the battery in the boot - coils sit where the battery was
- AU falcon idle control valve attached to the rocker cover for full closed loop idle control - had to tap a few holes for the hoses but this works well - there is probably a neater option avilable but a mate used one on his 4age 20 and he had a spare - seems to work really well.
- m42 variable TPS with an adaptor plate to suit the m20b23
- ballenger motorsports afr500 wide band with an NTK sensor - very nice unit - expensive compared to others but 4yrs or so and ive not damaged a sensor.

Initially i had it setup for fuel only, and kept the m20b23 vacuum advance distributor running the ignition. I had it like this for about a year or so. allowed me to really fine tune the fueling, idle control and the acceleration enrichment. i spent ALOT of time getting the cold starts right as well as temperature compensations. i did have some issues when sitting in traffic the IAT would report very hot values and the ECU would lean out, but i eventually sorted it. also lots of time on dialing in the closed loop cruise settings and adjusting the tune to make sure that my tune was close enough so that the closed loop was only changing maximum +/- 5-10% or so. Acelleration enrichment was good fun to, i experimented with the wall wetting technique in megasquirt, which actually worked awesome sometimes, but i could never get it perfect all the time, reverted back to the TPS based which seems to work well enough.

I then added in the LS1 coils - wired in pairs and run off the front LEDs. LS1 coils being logic level driven they need bugger all amperage to fire. These have worked perfect from the second i installed them, zero issues. For the timing map i just used some data i found on WOT settings of the m20b23 vac advance distributor and then filled in the map to match a "normal" engine map. Which seems to work ok. I've added a degree or two here and there. its definitely faster and snappier than it was with the distributor, but i really dont know how far i can go without going to a dyno. which has been on my list for....a few years.... i think there is definitely more in it at the top end, but as to how much ill not know until i dyno it.

I have recently made my own set of band pass knock ears to try and tune the ignition - bolted a knock sensor to the block. it actually seems to work quite well, but jeez its disorientating driving around listening to it. I need to get a mate to have a drive while i have a play on the laptop. its also on the list haha.

The distributor still remains, as it runs the tacho, but theres no igntion wires attached of course.

As you can see by the engine bay photo its all a bit of a science project, but hey, it works good.

And all in all its been rock solid reliable. With the AC now working i haven't needed to do any sort of AC idle up as the closed loop seems to take care of it. it does dip a little bit if using the AC when engine is still warming up, but it never stalls. i have linked to a few short youtube videos, one where i was stuffing around with a new camera mic, and another showing a cold start. Dont really have any videos of it driving.

youtube 1 - cold start after sitting for 2 weeks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74oIgcX9tQY

Youtube 2 - stuffing around with new video mic in the dark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdDi6myfYfk

[lukeADE335i]

Good to see the car is still going after all these years! Would love to hear a bit more about the Megasquirt swap on the 2.3L. Must be a bit of a revelation after the L-Jet (although they do run pretty well when they're well tuned).

I'm about to embark on an early e30 project myself. Should be a bit of a weapon hopefully with the 3.5L in the lightweight shell.

[e30davie]

Couple of more pics. One on the track is at "lakeside raceway" here in Brisbane. was just a euro car cruise fun day, and even driving at ~60% the RE003s lasted about 1 lap before turning to schmoo haha.

[e30davie]

Well its been a few years hasnt it. but the car is still here. had it for about 5 and a half years now. up to 190,000kms or so. So ive done about 40,000kms.

I didnt post much here for a few years in there due to different work circumstances and generally not sitting in front of a PC all day, but now that im back to a desk job i started posting some more, so i figured i would update.

Car is really just a weekend toy now due to having a work car, so it gets out most weeks for a drive or two.

I sold those wheels above as it became clear that i would need to modify the guards to much to fit them.

So i dunno, few mods of note:

- Megasquirt 2 on the m20b23 with LS1 coils in wasted spark
- koni yellow shocks
- oem Mtech 1 rear springs with no spring pads , "super low" king springs front - this has proven to be a nice compromise in comfort and sportyness and work well with the Koni shocks
- rear whiteline sway bar - this has been a great upgrade
- EXIP 15x7 wheels with RE003 tyres - tyres are pretty good street tyres - hopeless on the track!
- momo 350mm wheel.
- Aicon fixed ! <-- biggest upgrade

Anyway here's a few photos.

Ive got plenty of plans but at the moment its really quite nice to drive. An LSD would be nice and i also need to paint the bonnet and the guards as the color is a bit wrong, but its presentable enough as it is. I do need to get the drivers side floor mat repaired one of these years too...

[e30davie]

Long time between drinks,

Not a whole lot has been achieved, other than its been my daily driver for 6 months and haven't had any dramas. Just happy motoring.

Some of you may have seen my post, in that i picked up a set of Zender 15x8 zero wheels. Still havent decided what to do about them, or how to make them fit. Probably need to redo the suspension before i put them on anyway.



I did purchase a pair of S7 FD rx7 seats a few weeks ago. Pretty good condition for age (2002?), They are like a dark charcoal swede. On the weekend i fabricated up a rail for the drivers seat. Pretty damn comfy and it looks quite good. Certainly an upgrade over the crappy calapsed seats that were in it. Price to date is 400AUD for both seats and material for rails. And like 8hrs of my time remembering how to weld!

Hopefully get the passenger seat rail fabricated this weekend.

Fwe photos, ive no idea why the seat photo has alot of white dots. something up with the camera phone i think.