1984 325e Turbo Resurrection

[atmh]

Finally got my garage setup to a point where I decided to do the timing belt on the e30. By the time I got the coolant drained, the radiator pulled, and the harmonic balancer removed, I realized that I don't really want to start putting on old parts that I'm upgrading or replacing. I spent a couple days figuring out some details, and came to the following conclusion: I'm not putting this thing back together "quickly". Once I got in there, I realized that so much of the cooling system gets disassembled for the timing belt that I might as well do the upgrades now - new radiator, updating to the late-model coolant reservoir, electric fan conversion, etc. I also have a euro front bumper that just arrived.

In short: once I got halfway into the timing belt I realized I don't really want to fuck around with all this old shit I'm going to tear out in a couple months, and I'd rather just take my time to get everything sorted as I put it back together. This is kinda leading to option three for my rebuild plan.

Let's review:
Option 1: tear the whole damn thing apart and fix all the chassis, then slowly, piece by piece, put the car back together doing all the upgrades along the way. This was my original plan when I though the car was in completely non-functional condition
Option 2: Since I realized it actually ran and drove, I thought hey, maybe I'll do it piecemeal. A section at a time. Maybe get the car plated and cruise around in it between subsystem upgrades. Once I realized the rust situation is potentially unsafe, this option seems not viable
Option 3: Something of a hybrid of 1&2. I think I should put a bunch of energy into getting the engine bay "sorted out" while the car is still mostly together/running. This is where the biggest changes are happening, and I have the most work to do getting things figured out. So packaging and wiring are the big to-dos. Chassis rust, despite being the biggest hurdle on it's own, is also the "deepest" to get to. It will be best to get down to a bare or mostly bare chassis to do the rust repair, and I'm wary of taking a car apart and then putting it back together differently. In a lot of ways, despite possibly being more work in the long run, I think it might make sense to get it together the way I want it before I really take on the chassis rust. This option has always been in the back of my mind as what might make the most sense, but honestly I'm scared that once I start doing the rust repair I'll realize it's beyond what I want or can do and all the other effort will be for naught. Obviously that's a big of an extreme view: I'm very capable AND if I get all the subsystems done on this chassis and decide the chassis is too far gone, I'm pretty sure I can just source a new shell without too much difficulty. It's not like investing all the time and money in sorting everything else out is in vain. It just leads to weird priorities, like I need to buy the A/C components now, even though I'm not going charge the A/C system and drive the car for possibly years.

So with that in mind, my focus right now is front-end packaging. Here's the plan:

• New radiator. TBD which one. I see a lot of people run some e36 something (M-coupe rad?) but I haven't done hardly any research on this. Would like to avoid M-badged items if I can due to cost, but more research needed.
• Re-install all the A/C stuff. I have done research here, going to convert to r134a if for no other reason than the fact that everything but the evaporator and A/C wiring has been removed. Pretty easy for me to just swap in R134a stuff.
• Install the OEM oil cooler -my car didn't have one, but this will be good with the turbo build (especially if I do oil piston squirters).
• Package it all behind a Type 1 valance. My car is an early model, so it has the type-1 front end. Many people switch away from this because they like a more aggressive front airdam. For a variety of reasons, I'd like to keep the "older" or "less aggressive" look. It's more classic BMW. Early e30's with all the chrome bits look more like a car designed in the 70's. It's, IMHO, a significantly different looking car than late model, plastic bumper cars. Love it or hate it, it's different, and even with a heavily modified car, I kinda like the idea of maintaining it's original appearance as much as possible. Personally, I'm just not that interested in body kits or facelift swaps. Does a plastic bumper e30 look better? I dunno, maybe. But for me it's somewhat poetic to keep the car "true to form" or "period correct". Is that bullshit from a guy who's slapping a big turbo on an M20 and planning on running e85? Maybe. I guess I'm a resto-mod guy. Aesthetically I want it to look like it was originally designed - mostly - but mechanically I'm much more open to modernization.
• With that said. I used to like the idea of keeping the divingboards but... no. The euro bumpers look so much better, especially going for the older / classic look rather than the updated/facelifted look. It's clear to me that BMW wanted my car to have the original chrome "euro" bumpers.
• Finally of course I need to fit an IC in there somewhere, as big as practical.
• Which leads me to... Fans! I've been kicking this around in my mind and I think there's really only one feasible solution for my goals: I need to do the electric fan swap for the main fan, and use a low-profile fan for both the aux and main fans. When I did my turbo a while back, I just removed the aux fan entirely (along with the A/C condenser) and never had any issues. Now I live in a warmer area and will be adding not just the condenser back, but also a big IC. All of which is going to make the airflow much worse for the radiator. I know there are options to do this with the clutched fan, but I think the better setup might be...
• Relocating the radiators! Specifically I'm adding let's say a 3" core thickness IC. Let's assume I can get low-profile aux fan that's ~1" slimmer than the OEM one, which means I need to move the radiator ~2" closer to the engine. My understanding is that this should be possible IF I use an electric fan. My clutched fan has hit my radiator (and the radiator hose behind it) so clearly there's pretty much no space to move the radiator with the clutched setup, but a low-pro electric fan and a low-pro aux fan should both gain some space for the IC, and provide enough airflow to prevent the IC and condenser from heatsoaking. I'm not super worried about the car overheating at idle, because it should have a lot more cooling capacity when all's said and done.

With all that said, since I realized I'm going to be digging into this pretty deep, I might turn my focus back to finishing up the aforementioned furniture / garage cleaning projects.

Here are some of the latest pics:
The coolant was looking truly awful. Lots of sediment, presumably rust and/or maybe aluminum corrosion. Not good. Definitely needed to be drained:


Polyurethane motor mounts - perhaps they don't age well. These will be replaced soon. Trans mounts look similar. Kind of a bummer because I don't think they have many miles on them, in the grand scheme of things. (less than 20k?)


Euro bumper time! Still waiting on all the hardware from ECS Tuning. Hardware was easy to source - they had everything needed in stock. Used RealOEM.com and a 323i diagram to figure out the necessary hardware (see below). I got the euro bumper from a guy on this board for $450ish. I thought that was a little "fair" given the fact that it needs to be re-chromed, but then checking some other sources I realized that people are selling all this trim for an arm and a leg. So getting the full assembly for that price is good! Probably won't be refinishing this bumper for a few years - that will happen with the final tear down. Much to do before then:

And the bumper diagram and part numbers:

[moatilliatta]

Garage is looking like a nice place to be.

With any space, it sure is easy to get filled up. I like purging and get rid of stuff that you can come to realization that you’ll never really use. Old fluid, junk hardware, whatever parts. I do have a great good used hardware bin.

Having an area to store tubs / bins is nice, I try and keep them all labeled. Those plastic drawer parts slide trays in organizers are nice to just take out and use them in the bench separately if you have to real estate. I’m lucky to have a big tool boxes to fit all my tools in.

Looks like you have an attic space to stuff also.

[McGyver]

It looks like the layout is coming along great!

I'd say that my only advise would be to go vertical as much as possible. Hang shelving/cabinets so things aren't in piles and everything is accessible. Also try to think about how often you'll need to access stuff and store seldom used items out of the way where it may be more difficult to access.

Could you make a plat form suspended from the ceiling that you can stack things on and then raise it out of the way?

[ZEKTI]

Fantastic that you're rebuilding it. IMO the personal connection to the car isn't replaceable and invaluable. It is also a great chassis to learn new things on, welding etc etc.

Wouldn't be too surprised if the valve stem seals are all dried out. Only thing that may help is some oil flush to ensure no rings are stuck and add a stop leak, which may help swell them back up. I had an old motor with those issues and caused decent amount of oil burning.

[atmh]

Garage cleaning and reorganization is my biggest task for the e30, currently. The basics are this: I have a lot of old woodworking, furniture, and other assorted projects that I need to finish up before tearing down the e30 because I need a place to put all the e30 parts. In addition to that, I have a dirt bike and a Lotus Elise that also take up a bunch of space in the garage, and I want them accessible. Part of the reason I move the e30 into the garage now is so that I can figure out how best to setup the space before really digging into the project. That turned out to be a great idea! My initial thought was that I would pull the lotus all the way into the back corner of the garage, and park the bike behind it. Once I had all three vehicles in place, it just became clear that the better setup is to have the lotus parked as close to the door as possible so it won't get blocked in. That leaves a good deal of space in front of the car for more workbench/storage. It also became clear that dirtbikes are unexpectedly big. Like, they're basically the size of a couch. So the better place to keep the bike is in between the two cars, and for me to just roll the bike out of the garage when needed.

You can see previous pics for how the garage was setup. Here's a pic of the first step: I had some storage shelving near the door (opposite side from the toolbox/air compressor) which swapped places with the ladder storage hooks. Now the shelving is in the space in front of the lotus, and the ladders are on the wall next to the lotus. My garage is not very deep (19ft I think internal between the door and the back wall) but the lotus is very short (12ft, I believe). Also, the guy I bought the Lotus from loved these jacking car dollies, so I bought a couple to help shuffle the two cars as needed. I figure they will get me some precious added space. I wish they were a little narrower, but it's an improvement:


The big change to the layout was actually moving this workbench/industrial storage shelving unit that had (previously in front of the BMW). Its now situated so the lotus actually parks under the workbench. Dropping tools and stuff is a thing, so I added this 1/4" plywood sheeting to protect the lotus from falling objects. This photo has about half of the sheeting in place:


And finally: I moved my big glowing peacock wall art onto the newly created wall space over the lotus. I think this creates a really nice parking stall for the lotus, and opens up a lot of usable space around the e30, plus creates a previously non-existent workspace in front of the lotus. I turned off the big overhead lights for the next few photos because I think it actually showed off how the space is setup than with big shop lights washing away all the depth of the photos. Plus the peacock looks cooler when it's plugged in and a little dark :)


The overhead nets are just to address my paranoia of things falling from the rafters. Rafters are important storage, so I have no intention of finishing the ceiling.



Here's a shot of the "new" workspace in front of the lotus. It's about 6'x6'.
Toolbox also moved in front of the BMW. It will move into the new workspace once I get it a little more organized.


I would love to hear any tips/suggestions for organizing / optimizing garage space. In particular if you know of any really slick wall mounted storage for specific tools that are common for working on cars, I'm definitiely learning that the best setup spaces make really good use of the vertical space.

Anyways, I have all the stuff to do the timing belt, so hopefully I can get that done in the next week or so now that the major garage reorganization is complete (far from complete overall, but now it's just a very long list of little stuff, none of which is a major redesign of the space.)

[atmh]

Did some exhaust work in prep for just putzing around the neighborhood/pulling the car in and out of the garage. I did some patching, sawing, and bolting on a new muffler. Forgot to take pics of some of that stuff, but here, take a look at the old/new heat shield:

Is a heat shield a high priority for this car? No. But it was a complete disaster:


Old vs new:


Always good to get a look at the rust situation when taking off stuff like this. Overall not the worst, but going to need some stripping and wire brushing and recoating, at least. Probably a little patching needed in this area, too.
I was shocked that all the nuts and studs came apart without breaking. Liberally applying anti-seize is a habit I formed with this car 17 years ago, and I'm thanking myself now as I start to dig into this project. I will continue the practice:

New heat shield in place. I'm kinda on the fence about replacing all the hardware along the way, as well. Only one of these nuts was rusted enough that it doesn't really fit in the right size socket anymore. Part of me wants to reuse/refresh as much of the old hardware as possible, part of me just wants to replace most of it as I work my way through the car.


Anti-seize on top of the nuts, too. Mostly just for the corrosion protection and heat tolerance.


Next post: Garage reorganization

[atmh]

Great updates and awesome garage space! I'm glad to hear you've got it running again, even if there are a bunch of things to work out.

Thanks!

The garage is smaller than a standard 2-car garage, I have a 14ft wide door instead of the standard 16. But I have a little 6ft wide storage room off the side of the garage which kinda makes it effectively a normal size 2-car. This project has forced me to get really organized and clean out a lot of old stuff and finish up old projects. I'll keep the e30 in running condition while I finish up the remaining projects and organize the space a little bit better - just needs a storage spot for all the parts as I take them off the car, plus enough space to get the rotisserie in there. So it might be a few months before I really tear into this project, but hey in the meantime I can post garage organization updates. :)

[McGyver]

Great updates and awesome garage space! I'm glad to hear you've got it running again, even if there are a bunch of things to work out.

[atmh]

I didn't have much of an agenda for today, except to start the car up and see how the smokey tailpipe situation was in the daylight rather than in the dark. The car did basically the same thing as last time: No smoke when the engine is cold, then increasingly smokey as the car gets close to operating temp. As it gets close to operating temp the engine runs better - missing less, and it seems almost like there might be a cylinder or two that are misfiring when it's cold, and then when it gets warm they start firing, and then we get the smoke. I'm also not 100% sure that it's oil smoke - it doesn't look like the telltale blue smoke, more like a grey/black, which is more like an engine running really rich. In any case, it seems the smoke is probably from the engine warming up, not necessarily the fresh oil. Could be fuel related. Could be head gasket related. Oil could be a component, but I'm not sure it's the whole thing.

I don't really think it's worth my time to try and diagnose it, to be honest. The whole car is getting torn down, the head is coming off, and the turbo is getting replaced. I'm pretty confident it's not the bottom end or valve guide seals, which is about as good as I could hope for.

Pic from today: My first (new) go fast bits installed! The intake boot was cracked, so here's a nice new silicone one. Thanks to CATuned for including the clamps, as previously mentioned! Only trouble is my charge pipe is smaller than the stock mass flow meter diameter, so I got my first janky fix alongside the new go fast bits: the old intake boot cut and shoved in between the pipe and the silicone boot. Works great! I'm sure it will get me around the neighborhood, but yeah, I'm going to have to come up with a more permanent solution.

[atmh]

Today I put the car on jack stands and changed the oil. After changing the oil, I wanted to let it warm up to temp to see how it would run (still idling a bit rough).

So two things worth noting about that:

1: Fresh oil is running ~60+psi at idle,vs the 11 year old oil at ~20psi. In hindsight I wish I had changed the oil when prepped the car for shipping, or made sure my dad did it. Unfortunately that didn't happen and I expect the engine has an hour plus of run time on the old oil. My mistake for not making sure it was changed.
2: With the new oil the car is burning a LOT of oil. So either one or more seals went bad over 10 years of sitting OR the run time on the old oil damaged something. It's not uncommon for engines to burn more oil after an oil change: fresh oil is "slippery" compared to old oil, and that causes it to slip past the seals and get into areas it can be burned: Valve seals, piston rings, head gaskets, and turbo seals are all reasonable guesses. My money's on the turbo seal or head gasket. I know the valve guides/seals were changed in 2009, and I can't imagine they would go bad by just sitting for 10 years. Usually the atrophy from sitting is related to water damage and rust and stuff like that. Generally I don't think of cars sitting an extended period of time causing internal damage. Of course, I could be wrong.

A potentially simple way for me to check the turbo seals is to unhook the oil line to the turbo and see if that fixes it. The turbo hardly spins at idle (I've stopped it spinning with my finger at a idle before) so I might try that before going down the rabbit hole of replacing all the internal seals in the engine. My turbo has water cooling, so I'm not super worried about cutting off oil pressure for a minute or two to see if it stops burning so much oil.

With all that said, I'm not completely convinced that there isn't water in the exhaust, and exhaust in the coolant. Kinda looks to me like yes, coolant and exhaust are mixing, which 100% implies the head gasket is leaking.

Getting under the was a good reminder of just how much rust is down there. It's bad. I've got my work cut out for me, and even though I was thinking "piecemeal" a week ago based on how well the engine seems to be running, I think the reality is that I still need to think of this project as a complete tear down and rebuild. There's so much rust that if I pull the head off, I might as well pull the block and transmission, and then I might as well just strip the whole undercarriage and interior and make sure the chassis is good to go. That pretty much means priority #1 is getting my small garage space ready for a complete tear down. My original plan was to get a lift installed, but at this point I think I can actually wait on the lift and instead just pull the engine and transmission then set it up on a rotisserie. I'm like 90% certain a rotisserie will handle a mostly assembled car, or at least minimally disassembled (the engine being the primary big heavy thing to take out first).

Still might change the timing belt and take her for a drive around the neighborhood. Would be cool to feel the turbo kick in a little bit before tearing into the whole project.

Just one pic from today: a smokey tailpipe.

[atmh]

An update and some pics! Here's what the last week has presented. As stated the car landed in my garage a week ago, and I spend the past week figuring out why it wasn't running and doing some initial prep work to get it up and running.

Ordered (mostly not installed) New goodies:

• Silicone intake boot/kit
• Timing belt, tensioner, sintered cam and oil pump gear
• water pump
• muffler + heat shield
• Spark plugs + distributor (previously mentioned)
• Oil and oil filter

The sintered cam gear was on backorder most places. I ended up spending $100 to get it shipped from canada. Might take a few weeks, at that, so it could be a few weeks before I have the car putzing around.

Anyways, here's some pics from the past week:
The new home:


I wish I had a bigger garage...Oh well


Busted Hella H4 still works!


The distributor probably wasn't the reason the car wasn't running, but it also probably wasn't helping. The contacts are pretty worn.


That's all for now!

[2mAn]

But that still leaves me with a big question: Where to begin?

Step 1: Take some pics
Step 2: Change the timing belt and oil
Step 3: Drive it.

From there, I’d probably unfuq the rats nest and start gameplanning the other headaches to deal with.

[atmh]

Yesterday I was able to confirm my suspicion: 6 new spark plugs plus a new distributor rotor and cap, and the car fired right up! Seems to run great on all 6 cylinders. Idle is rough, but I'm guessing the injectors are a bit fouled as well, and it might take some time for them to clean up. But with that said, I'm not planning on actually letting the engine get up to temperature until I at least change the oil.

I also did a compression test, and the results are OK for an engine with 300k miles (did I mention this block has 300k on it? Yeah.) Anyways, Cylinders 1 and 6 were both a bit low, 121 and 124psi respectively. The rest were all between 130 and 140. That's a 13.5% difference. Ideally an engine has less than 10% difference between the cylinders on a compression test. So not great, but also it's fine. 120psi is great, actually. The car has an MLS head gasket and a "2.7i" eta block+i head motor, which is only ~8.3:1 compression ratio. In fact, I'm not even sure how the compression test is higher than 122psi since 14.7psi * 8.3 = 122. Maybe there's a lot of carbon buildup from running stupid rich! (Addendum: actually it makes sense. A piston compressing air can be modeled as an adiabatic process, which means that as the volume gets smaller, the temperature will go up, meaning the pressure goes up exponentially, not linearly. A quick internet search confirms that the temperature can be +200°F and pressure of ~300PSI for a perfect system with a 9:1 compression ratio and no mass or energy loss to the surrounding system. So yeah, 140psi makes sense for the slower compression speed of a cranking engine, plus valve overlap, blow-by the piston rings, heat loss to the combustion chamber walls, etc.)

With the engine running decently, and the head gasket apparently HODL this state of affairs leaves me with a bit of a conundrum -it's a good problem to have- but now I don't know what my next steps are. I was planning on tearing the motor down and at least fixing the stripped head bolt threads, and throwing in ARP studs, but I also don't want to get too deep into the motor right now - not super interested in rebuilding either the head or the block before sorting out the rest of the car. Eventually I probably want a head that has the water jackets welded, and probably plane both the block and the head, and maybe o-ring the block, but I don't think I want to sink that much time and energy into the engine with the whole car needs a lot of love.

At the same time, I don't really want to be tempted with a good running motor when the chassis needs so much love and rust to repair.

My thought right now is to take the win - probably just replace the timing belt and change the oil, and leave the motor internal stuff for after I complete safety critical repairs - suspension, chassis, and brakes, plus start cleaning up the wiring and organizing the engine bay in a way that's not complete chaos. Basically I'm realizing right now that I can piecemeal this project more than I originally planned: take on one subsystem at a time rather than tear the whole thing down and do it all at once. I think I might enjoy doing it piecemeal a bit more. I've also been really thinking about how clean I want it to be, and the answer is... maybe not that clean. Cars that are clean with fresh paint and de-cluttered engine bays are great and all, but I think I'm just not that motivated. At the very least, I don't find that part of car building to be *fun* and this project is supposed to be all about *fun*. I can have the car up and running much faster if I just don't worry too much about the cosmetics. once I'm done with everything else and have the car sorted out, maybe I'll paint it then- or maybe not! Ratty cars are their own look, and one of my favorite hobbies was driving this car on dirt roads - would I really want to do that if it had a fresh coat of paint? No. The answer is no.

But that still leaves me with a big question: Where to begin?

[atmh]

I guess this thread isn't going to die. At least not yet!

The car is safely in my garage. Woo hoo!!

The last few months have been a bit of a trip, mostly with my dad trying to get the car ready to ship and battling some intermittent engine running/not running issues, and me trying to help him from the other side of the country navigate the rats nest that my college-aged self thought was reasonable. I'm going to try and paraphrase the last few months into something of a coherent story. Here goes:

When I left my folks' place, the car ran, and ran fairly well, with basically nothing done to it besides pulling it out of the weeds, cleaning it up, and freeing up the front brakes, which were seized. I couldn't get megasquirt to connect, but it kinda didn't matter since it was running. The exception to this is that when I drove it back to it's parking spot for the rest of the summer, it stalled and wouldn't start again. This basically lead to a situation where my dad decided to try and get it running prior to shipping, in a nutshell, that went something like this:

First he replaced the fuel filter, drained out all the 11 year old gasoline and put in fresh stuff. Still didn't run. So he figured out there was an issue with some intermittent ignition. Sometimes the car would start and run, sometimes it wouldn't. He got it running really well at one point, enough to top off the coolant and let it get up to temperature, and actually verify that everything seems hunky dory. While it seems like the head gasket is still intact, since one of the head bolts is stripped out of the block it's presumably only a matter of time before it causes bigger problems, but for now it's fine.

Anyways, the day after he got it warmed up, he went back to having some ignition issues. While hunting for the problem (coil firing intermittently), he discovered that the aluminum case for megasquirt was positively charged. While this isn't 100% diagnosed, my suspicion is that the ignition coil driver was shorting out on the megasquirt case: My MS build has the BIP373 ignition coil driver, which is *not* an insulated unit and comes with a mica insulator. I always thought it was crazy that they included a metal screw with this assembly rather than a plastic screw. My dad insulated the BIP373, and the ignition coil seems to be firing all the time now. One problem (presumably) solved!

Unfortunately, once that was completed, the engine would run, but barely: it was super super rich now, and had basically now power. As soon as you let the clutch out it would stall, even at full throttle. No bueno. Unfortunately as it was now getting later into autumn and I wanted to ship the car before winter, I just had to bite the bullet and schedule the truck even with the car in intermittent/crappy operation. Unfortunately, when the truck showed up it had to be winched on. Bummer. That's a $200 surcharge for a non-running car.

Quick note about shipping cars: Apparently it's not necessarily standard practice for private car carriers to drop cars off at their final destination. I did not know this, otherwise I would have rented a car trailer. I'm pretty sure I was sold on a "door to door" service, but the truck driver said "nope" - can't drive an 18-wheeler on residential streets, which of course makes sense, but also I thought $1600 got it dropped off at my house ($1800 total with the non-op surcharge). Luckily for me the truck driver was nice enough to get as close as possible to my house, which was only about 5 blocks away. Not great, but much better than the walmart parking lot he planned on dropping it in.

He was apparently able to start it and back it off the truck, but once we tried to drive it, even on a flat road, it just died. So we towed it to my garage with my SUV, and were luckily able to get it up the small ramp into my garage without too much trouble.

So that was where last night ended - this morning I was able to make some progress diagnosing the issues - I was able to get megasquirt connected (yay!) and download the tune and read live data (double yay!). That lead me to quickly identify that the intake air temp sensor and throttle position sensor were both disconnected - this is obviously why the car was running so terribly: With the intake air temp sensor disconnected, Megasquirt thinks the engine is sucking in -40°F air, rather than +70°F air. This means it thinks a lot more fuel is needed than actually is, causing it to run super rich. That's exactly what the engine was doing - running so rich it was barely running at all, and had no power, even at full throttle. As for the throttle position sensor, this isn't usually a dealbreaker, but in this case it compounded the issue: Since the engine was running super rich, a smart thing to do is go full throttle to put the ECU in "flood clear" mode. For those that don't know, with most fuel injected vehicles, if you give it full throttle while cranking the engine, it will actually turn off the injectors to try and clear out unburned fuel from the cylinders. But without TPS, my car never got the message at full throttle to turn off fuel and clear the cylinders. Hence: more fuel in the cylinders.

All this unburned fuel in an engine that would kinda run, and presumably the effort from my dad, the car hauling folks, and myself resulted in at least two other symptoms: Overfilled oil that smelled of gasoline and according to my dad: significantly less gas in the gas tank. I'm not to worried about the gas in the tank, but the gas in the oil means it's time for an oil change sooner than later (although 11 year old oil needs to be changed, anyways).

Ok, so why/how/when did the IAT and TPS sensors get disconnected? Simple! When I put this build together, I just crimped on spade connectors and jammed them into the now-unused connectors for things like the air flow meter. The only thing holding them in place is friction, and there's not much friction. So when my dad was trying to diagnose the problem with the car not running, he disconnected these things. The IAT probably got knocked loose unintentionally, and the TPS he disconnected because he thought the plug was for the idle air control valve. I can't blame him for that one: he had no way of knowing that I never hooked up the idle air control valve! Again, this is a rats nest that just barely works.

Unfortunately after that, the car still isn't running. Through megasquirt, I can see that the ECU is getting all the signals it needs, but we still seemed to have ignition issues. The coil appears to be working, but the cylinders are only firing occasionally. This leads me to believe the problem is the wires, distributor or spark plugs themselves. My gut is telling me that some of the spark plugs are just completely fouled. I'd wager that 6 new spark plugs and the thing fires right up and runs mostly ok (maybe even runs good if all 6 cylinders have good compression). The distributor is probably also playing a role: it's visibly worn. So that's what's next: With a bit of luck, tomorrow will see a new distributor and some fresh spark plugs, and hopefully a running engine.


No pics today, I'll try to share some soon!

[moatilliatta]

That’s Tetanus-izing, But what a great paraphrase!

Søren Kierkegaard: "Rebuild the e30 or don't rebuild the e30: Either way I'll regret it".

Awesome you’re bringing back an old friend.

Keep up the literature, I love a cars story.