95maxrider's Rally-x '88 E28 build- caged, head swap and more

[irish44j]

dude, the injectors have to be bad. It ran when you had the stock ones in, then you changed them and it doesn't run. Cut-and-dry. Put the stock ones in and get the car running. Deal with getting extra power later!

[irish44j]

or it could be your chipped ECU isn't working and not firing the injectors. Did you try them with the stock ECU?

[95maxrider]

or it could be your chipped ECU isn't working and not firing the injectors. Did you try them with the stock ECU?

I must not be getting notifications for this thread, hmm....

We haven't installed the chip yet for that exact reason.

Update: So after going over everything for many hours, we covered everything that could have been wrong and changed out the second set of rebuilt M50 injectors and put in the 2.5i injectors that came with our IM/TB. And guess what? The car fired right up on the second crank after fuel was primed! There is something seriously wrong with these injectors Maksim is sending out. If our car runs perfect with both 2.5 and 2.7 eta injectors, but not at all with his, I think there is something wrong. I'll post more on this if/when it gets resolved. It's really not cool how many hours we have wasted due to these bum injectors. What do you guys think is a fair way to resolve the situation? Is a refund enough?

Well in working on everything yesterday we discovered what was at first a minor coolant leak at the tee we made to get the "i" water pump to work with our SETA radiator and overflow tank. Due to lack of parts available at Home Depot, we had to combine a 1" OD plastic barbed hose fitting with a threaded female section on the bottom with a 1" threaded metal pipe to go to the overflow tank. We checked the hose clamps and they were a little loose, so we tightened them up. It also looked like the metal section wasn't completely threaded into the plastic section, so I tightened it up with a vise grip. Unfortunately, this seemed to make matter much worse, and our intermittent drip became a steady trickle. Time to get a new tee!

This is what it looked like when we installed it:


And this is what our tee ended up looking like after about an hour of run time:






Not so good, this thing is supposed to be straight! Looks like the tension of the hoses bent it when it got hot, which would explain why tightening the metal part just made it worse since the threads weren't true anymore.

So we ran to the hardware store just down the street and picked up another plastic tee fitting, but this time we found one that was already a tee and didn't need a metal pipe. It's the same material was what we pulled out, and is really only in the car until we can find a metal one at a Home Depot or Lowes. Regardless, we got the new tee installed and there are no leaks. We drove the car around and it seemed happier than it did with the SETA injectors on the 173/351 ECU. I do miss the old low-end grunt of the SETA, but it sure is nice having power above 4000 rpm. I'm a little disappointed that we won't get to run with the 17lb injectors and chip this weekend, but we will live. More updates to come!

[phenryiv1]

There is something seriously wrong with these injectors Maksim is sending out. If our car runs perfect with both 2.5 and 2.7 eta injectors, but not at all with his, I think there is something wrong. I'll post more on this if/when it gets resolved. It's really not cool how many hours we have wasted due to these bum injectors. What do you guys think is a fair way to resolve the situation? Is a refund enough?

I had the same issue. Jason, Josh and I spent 6 man hours and almost $200 to "fix" an ignition issue that wa sa bad injector. In his defense in our case, the injectors were sent to him and he "fixed" them, but they came out of a running, driving car and upon their return only 5 of 6 worked.

I am afraid to even try the set M50 set that I bought for the M20B25 that I swapped in...

So we ran to the hardware store just down the street and picked up another plastic tee fitting, but this time we found one that was already a tee and didn't need a metal pipe. It's the same material was what we pulled out, and is really only in the car until we can find a metal one at a Home Depot or Lowes.

Let me know if you can't find one and I will look up here. I can give it to you @ SP this weekend.

[95maxrider]

I had the same issue. Jason, Josh and I spent 6 man hours and almost $200 to "fix" an ignition issue that wa sa bad injector. In his defense in our case, the injectors were sent to him and he "fixed" them, but they came out of a running, driving car and upon their return only 5 of 6 worked.

I am afraid to even try the set M50 set that I bought for the M20B25 that I swapped in...

Let me know if you can't find one and I will look up here. I can give it to you @ SP this weekend.

Yeah, I'm tempted to ask some of the local guys if they have a set of M50 injectors we could buy before the race. I think we wasted something like 10 hours between these two sets of busted injectors. Really not cool.

The local Home Depots all list having 1" brass tee fittings in stock, so hopefully we can get one and install it Friday night.

[irish44j]

I have the Mustang injectors from Maksim in the M42. One of them turned out to be bad as well. To his credit, he overnighted me two more as soon as I contacted him. I haven't yet put the new ones in (I have one stock one in there that works fine), but at least he's good on the customer service.

Hopefully he'll figure out a new method to test to make sure the injectors are good, I suppose. I don't think he's trying to "pull anything" at all, I think maybe his method just isn't working as intended, IDK.

[95maxrider]

I have the Mustang injectors from Maksim in the M42. One of them turned out to be bad as well. To his credit, he overnighted me two more as soon as I contacted him. I haven't yet put the new ones in (I have one stock one in there that works fine), but at least he's good on the customer service.

Hopefully he'll figure out a new method to test to make sure the injectors are good, I suppose. I don't think he's trying to "pull anything" at all, I think maybe his method just isn't working as intended, IDK.

Yeah, he shipped out the second set quickly, so that was nice. He offered to refund my money, but that hardly makes up for the lost time involved in chasing down the faulty parts. Oh well I guess.

On a more depressing note, the 1" tee fittings at Home Depot are apparently NOT 1" OD; they are much smaller. I can only assume they refer to working with a pipe with an OD of 1", not ID. I don't know if it's some dumb industry standard type of thing, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to me. :hitler: More importantly, that means we will be running this weekend with a coolant system full of weak plastic parts. Hooray! Off to the store to go pick up some spares....

[irish44j]

Nick...why not find some 1" OD brass (or steel) pipe, and just have a t-piece cut and welded? I"m sure your guys could do that pretty easily.

[irish44j]

or just use all brass/copper piping, since it won't bend or fail. Gotta be some 1" brass/copper pipe that would work

[phenryiv1]

On a more depressing note, the 1" tee fittings at Home Depot are apparently NOT 1" OD; they are much smaller. I can only assume they refer to working with a pipe with an OD of 1", not ID. I don't know if it's some dumb industry standard type of thing, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to me. :hitler: More importantly, that means we will be running this weekend with a coolant system full of weak plastic parts. Hooray! Off to the store to go pick up some spares....

I'll check lowes if I get the chance. They had a ton of T fittings there when we bought my stainless junctions.

[95maxrider]

Time for more silicone!



We also have water coming into the trunk and the corners of the rubber have come up and are slightly torn, so I cleaned up the area and applied a bunch of the black silicone in the corners and tried to rebuild the torn areas. I'm just now realizing I didn't take after pictures, but I can put them up later. Not much to see here...

[95maxrider]

Well we redid those weird parts of the cooling system the night before the first race and luckily it has all held together so far. I spent many hours and more money than I would like to admit to get these pieces. Damn lead-free piping in Maryland!

The new plastic tee we put in a few days earlier had already started to collapse after 30 minutes of drive time. The new ones won't be doing that :)

Old vs. new


1" barbed brass tee


1" to 3/4" reducer

[phenryiv1]

It pains me when I think about how much you spent.

[95maxrider]

So I've been trying to figure out which code reader will work with our car and haven't had much luck. At first I thought this would work:

Peake reader

But it says it isn't compatible with our car (1988 528e). Neither of the adapters they sell seem to make it work either. I figured that since we have the updated wiring harness(1.3, right?) that we would have more options available. Now I'm starting to wonder if this car even stores codes. Can anybody shed some light on the situation?

EDIT-
Here are some quotes I pulled from mye28.org:
Link 1

Link 2

"You don't have to worry about it because your car is not capable of returning any codes. Only cars with Motronic 1.1 or later have the capacity to store codes. All e28s were Motronic 1.0, except the SuperEta, the NA '88 MY version of the 528e produced from 3/87 until the end of the model run."

"No code reader required. Depress the accelerator pedal 5 times in 5 seconds and the CEL will flash one of the 4 codes it can store."

"1 flash - Air flow sensor malfunction
2 flashes - Oxygen sensor malfunction
3 flashes - Coolant temp. malfunction
4 flashes - Throttle switch malfunction"

"Late 1980's systems. Motronic 1.3

The fault codes for these systems will appear on the check engine light when you turn the ignition key to the On position (but dont start it), then: fully depress the accelerator pedal, then fully release it. Repeat the depress,release cycle 5 times fairly quickly, but not too fast. It should be completed in a few seconds. What you are doing here is clicking the wide open throttle switch then the idle switch each 5 times. This signals the Motronic unit to send the fault codes by flashing the Check Engine light. You should see the light flash once then it will start flashing the 4 digit codes. If there are no faults, you should see the 1444 code (and 2444 if you have a 12 cylinder). The codes appear as a series of flashes for each digit. The flashes indicating one digit are about 1 second apart, the next digit appears after a couple second interval. The rest of the fault codes appear in Table 1 below."

I'm confused now; I thought I had Motronic 1.3 but now I'm not so sure....guess I'll go home and try the stomp test.

[95maxrider]

Ok, I just did the stomp test and I'm not sure of how to read the results. As far as I can tell, the CEL blinked once short then once long, over and over again. I'm not sure how to read that/convert it into a code.

This page has code info, but I don't know what to do with my info....ugh. Any help?