Volvo 5 Cylinder in an E30

[Steve o 77]

All, sorry for abandoning this project for quite a while. I just could not for the life of me figure out the overheating.

Well, I finally figured it out today. Turns out I'm a moron and didn't know that clamping your timing light on the low voltage wires to the coil results in very different timing than the actual spark timing. I put an inline spark plug wire on the number 1 cylinder, locked the timing at 10 deg BTDC, and found that the actual timing was 3* AFTER tdc. What a moron lol. Corrected the offset, essentially advancing the timing 13 degrees and it runs perfect rock steady at 200*f.

Soo, I'm hyped to get this thing done for real. I'm getting surgery soon but should be recovered pretty quick and will work on finishing the little things.

Things left to do:
-Fabricate sway bar mounts for the front
-Swap out to the 3.23:1 diff I have (it's a 4.10 now)
-tidy up some wiring
-Tune the engine to a reasonable spot, then find a tuner that will try their hand at a maxxecu, or just rent a dyno.
-Fix a pinhole in the oil pan
-Install a catch can

Hopefully more to come soon!

[e30austin]

wow, not sure how i missed the original post. very cool project. glad you have it heading in the right direction. thanks for sharing.

[varg]

Aw no the latency due to dwell time got you when measuring off of the primary wiring, your timing light was firing before the coil actually fired, and since dwell is longer than the spark pulse it would have been inconsistent anyway. Glad to hear you got it sorted. I was glad to see this one pop up in my subscriptions again. What muffler is that visible in post 40?

[Steve o 77]

Aw no the latency due to dwell time got you when measuring off of the primary wiring, your timing light was firing before the coil actually fired, and since dwell is longer than the spark pulse it would have been inconsistent anyway. Glad to hear you got it sorted. I was glad to see this one pop up in my subscriptions again. What muffler is that visible in post 40?

Yes exactly. Not sure how that never crossed my mind back when I was setting up the base offset but I won't make that mistake again.

I honestly can't remember what muffler I used on this thing, I know its a magnaflow but I bought it probably 10 years ago for another car. It sounds pretty good, I might experiment with a resonator at some point to knock down some drone.

[Steve o 77]

Still chugging along.
-I’ve got the fuel map pretty well dialed in on wastegate pressure.
-Catch can is mounted, still working on plumbing.
-TRE 255lph fuel pump is installed. Still need to run the heavier gauge wire back to it but I’ll try it on the stock wiring for now.
-Finally got the 328xi front driveshaft extended so I have proper spline engagement now.

More tuning soon, I’m pretty excited to start messing with the boost control stuff.

[Steve o 77]

Sway bar mounts moving the bar in front of the subframe are done, stock bar is installed (with modified brackets to work with my two bolt design), and the subframe is finally painted.