e30 316 build x2 (m52/m50, turbo, 3pcs bottle caps etc)

[pazi88]

The new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoYSc0waEvo

After that was filmed, we got the new seats installed:


Engine bay finished:


And tires mounted on the work wheels (Toyo R888R at the back):

[pazi88]

Downpipe in my car got new heat wrapping:


While doing that the vibrant e-vac scavenger was removed, because that smelled all the time


The breather setup will be now converted for turbo inlet side with e39 m5 separator:


The intake camshaft was swapped to m52 one and the exhaust camshaft was degreed to 1mm open at TDC. Previously it was by accident only open 0.1mm at TDC.



Here is size comparison of the e39 m5 separator and m52 own separator. As said, I did use the m5 one with breathing routed to turbo inlet side. The oil dipstick got drain tube for the oil that comes out of the separator.


Then lot of assembly and wiring that needed to be doen for ms3 megasquirt, like oil/fuel pressure, CEL light, speed signal, flex fuel wiring etc. Then car got pushed to lift and the exhaust and gearbox was removed for fixing.


After those were fixed, I added the new GAZ coilover and finally hte car was ready for the road:


Short test drive and everything worked using the old maps from ms2. The PWM controlled fan worked great and for first time I could leave the car idel for long time without overheating.

So because everything worked, I went onto road:

Even the oil temp gauge was working for the first time :D

Steering was lot better than it was previously and engine pulled much smoother. Even when AFRs were 16-17 sometimes. Previously that lean mixture made the engine undriveable.

Next day I tuned the engine little bit to get it run proper AFR when cruising. The idle was still bit off but I was in a hurry to go get the CAR MOT inspected.

Flexfuel sensor and speed information works great:

And it also shows correct gear after giving the ratio info for the ms3.

Then the MOT inspection:


And passed with clean papers:


After that I made some on the road tuning while commuting:


But then wild screw jumped to mu front tire:


The tire got totally flat so I needed swap stock 14" steelies on:


Luckily the tire was ok, and it got repaired. The car also got alignment and it was again looking good:


Video of all this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObWZigLA4Ko

[pazi88]

Next weekend there was track day for the BTCF members:






I made some tuning and after I added more boost the charge pipe ruptured. Luckily I got some duct tape to fix that:


After few tries that did hold and I got into driving and tuning again. After while the car started overheating because the fan died. But I could still do fast lap once in a while. Not that my stock 325i brakes would have allowed more. Here is the fastes lap I could make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPzWl4tB2KE

I also changed the the scrap tires to the car and did some drifting practice::


Here is video from the track day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHb92tEoEDA

[pazi88]

After the trackday, I took the car to be dyno tuned. It was in pretty good tune to start with, so whole thing only few hours. Most of the time was spend fine tuning the vacuum area. But then after tuning the boost side, this was the result:



So 508 hp from rear wheels and 557 hp calculated power from crank. With the small holset hx35 turbo. I was having bit of a problem with vanos not returning the cam back to normal position, so I have figure that out later.

Here is video from the dyno:

https://youtu.be/OiSIWrMekJ0

[Mushi]

After the trackday, I took the car to be dyno tuned. It was in pretty good tune to start with, so whole thing only few hours. Most of the time was spend fine tuning the vacuum area. But then after tuning the boost side, this was the result:



So 508 hp from rear wheels and 557 hp calculated power from crank. With the small holset hx35 turbo. I was having bit of a problem with vanos not returning the cam back to normal position, so I have figure that out later.

Here is video from the dyno:
https://youtu.be/OiSIWrMekJ0

Great numbers.

[econti]

That's some very strong figures! Excellent work

[pazi88]

Thanks guys!

With my brothers car the things aren't going as well. But for start he added new Sparco seats:




Engine bay got finished:


Some rubber on to the 3pcs work wheels:




The steering has acted strange and only thing that we hadn't changed was the rack. So it was swapped to e46 rack:


Some fresh paint:




He is clearly getting hang of painting. Test fit:


And after putting the rear axle back to the car it was pushed outside:


Everything was looking good so I started tuning the engine. At first everything was looking good, but when the engine warmed, the AFRs were acting strange and I coulnd't get the engine to idle below 1500. This was because there wasn't enough vacuum in the intake. The AFR problem was later to be caused by strange EGO correction settings, even thought I was meaning to disable it totally. But the vacuum problem was caused by too much overlap on the cams. Well even though we had worked with the cars for 14 hour days straight, we ripped away the cam cover and did re-degree the cams surrounded by hundreds of mosquitoes, because it was starting to be late night. The exhaust was accidentally open over 2mm at TDC and intake was open little less. So we degreed those both to 1mm open at TDC. After that the engine finally started to idle correctly. We were happy and stopped there. But then next day this happened:




So while re-degreeing the cams we had made some mistake, and the intake cam bolts came off and then the cam sprocket too.

After recovering from the depression, my brother checked the combustion chambers with endoscope, and surprisingly no further damage there.:


Cams and cam holders were fine, but some lifters being low, told us that there is bent valves:


Head off and yeah:




The pistons luckily had only minor contact markings so no problems there.




And the video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xP-VfUM8SI

[econti]

New rubber looks awesome at least

[pazi88]

Sorry for late update.

But continuing from the last post, the head had some damage in the valve guides and we decided to get new head, because that would be fastest and cheapest way to go. And leave the old head to be refurbished later. Luckily there was two NV m50 heads available where we live. First had cracks from exhaust valve to spark plug hole. But the second one seemed fine.


Well seemed fine. In machine shop they did find that almost all valves were bent slightly. So we took some valves from the old head and some new ones got bought. We also did get new headgasket and the engine was put back together with the "new" head after visiting machine shop. After the head problem was fixed the engine did run better than it ever did. So the old head probably had some leaky valves even before the accident. Here is the video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91moYcwJmdA

After some street tuning, we took the car to dyno. It was very hot day, so we weren't expecting any ground breaking numbers. But it did got even worse because the wastegate refused to work and we did only did got 1.2 bar boost levels at max. When we planned to use 1.5-1.6 bar boost. So the result was 562hp:

Video of that: https://youtu.be/1eGggj_L_Nw

After that we threw away the chinese wastegate and replaced it with genuine turbosmart.


We now got stable 1.5bar boost level, but we were running out of injectors. So we lowered to boost to 1.3bar to the rest of the season.

[pazi88]

Then back to my car. At the track day I had problems with the engine temps rising. Because the e39 fan died. Well it turns out that the fuse was just blown.


That 20 amp fuse worked just fine with the spal fan. But e39 fan required at least 30 amp fuse to work. So that tells about how much more powerful that one is compared to the spal one.

Also the plastic thermostat housing started to leak, so I replaced it with aluminium one:


And as I earlier said, I had problems with the vanos not working. Here is log about what happens. The vanos should follow the vvt duty:


But yeah. It doesn't come back to base position at all when the car is accelerating.

To fix that I took the vanos unit out of my e36 that had freshly replaced vanos seals (I didn't want to wait for new seals to arrive). And I also modified the vanos with m52tu vanos solenoid and solenoid spring and modified valve. To achieve PWM controlled vanos. Instead of the m52 on/off vanos.


I also drilled the oil passage larger because it's quite restrivtive in m52 on/off vanos compared to m52tu PWM contoller vanos. Probaply to make the vanos to move more slowly with the poor on/off control scheme. But that too slowly moving vanos has always been problem in fast revving tuned m52 engines. And I wanted to fix that with PWM control.


The system worked on bench so it was time to install it to the car. I changed the megasquirt vvt settings to PWM controlled and did some testing. First tests showed horrible oscillating vanos angle. Like in this log:


I then noticed that about 50% duty the cam angle stays same and below that is decreases. And above that it increases. So I enabled the hold duty at 50% and did another test.


Well now it follows target quite well. I then did some testing with different vanos angles and got results like this. My vanos solenoid had loosen bit, so it was oscillating again. Just a little bit. But I still got good results.


So basically you need to read that so that the leanest AFR is the best vanos angle, because it means that there is biggest amount air coming into engine with that vanos angle. After looking at the logs, I came up with this vanos map:
¨

Here is also how the vanos angles affect the turbo spool:


So really noticeable difference. I didn't include the log with fully tuned vanos. But boy it's like ten times better engine after I tuned the VE map to match new vanos maps. The turbo spools about 500RPM earlier than it did before. And now the throttle response is instant even at low RPM. Because the vanos turns all the way in less than 0,5 second. When previously it took over 2 seconds to do so. And because the vanos angle is spot on even really low RPM, it feels like I'm driving bigger displacement engine than before. The difference is huge. The PWM vanos mod has been the best thing that I have done for the engine in long time. It doesn't give me bigger torque/hp ratings in dyno. But the engine is totally different off boost below 3000 RPM. Where 95% of my daily driving happens.

[econti]

Big numbers from the white car!

[pazi88]

Big numbers from the white car!

And hopefully bigger next summer :D But it all matches, because mine and Petri's cam specs are almost the same, same displacement, almost same compression ratio, same boost pressure etc. and only 5hp difference on hp level.

Video of the vanos upgrade and other stuff from last post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IjBddEne4o

After that it was time for bimmerparty 2018. Here is video of that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux48FsFivBs&t=1011s

Unfortunately I don't have any pics from there. But I got third place in autoslalom:

The best time on 1/4mile was 12,445s speed was 205km/h

There was serious traction problems and I decided to tackle that by using the traction control in ms3. I already had speed signal from rear axle using vss output from instrument cluster to nitrous input at ms3. So I needed to add vss from front axle also. So I added abs sensor to drives side front hub:


That is vr-sensor so I needed vr-conditioner to be able to use the digital inputs in ms3. For that I made my own max9926 vr-conditioner boards, because the ready made ones were non existent or very expensive:


I have couple of those for sale if someone is interested. Or if someone want's to make own ones, the pcb project is here: https://easyeda.com/pazi88/vr-muunnin

Works like a treat (click for video):



The output signal goes to ms3x card in pt4 input, couple of settings in tunerstudio and it works (click for video):


The settings for front and back are not 100% right because different tire size, but close enough:

You can clearly see when car breaks traction:


After getting that, I tried to tune the traction control and went to try my luck on 1/4 mile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcU0vdnlShA

Best: 12.029 / 209 km/h

Other results:
13.403 184 km/h
12.158 207 km/h
12.626 210 km/h
12.283 208 km/h
13.436 141 km/h
12.372 198 km/h
12.286 207 km/h

So close to going elevens Well it clearly has it even with current setup, but I need to modify the rear axle more for better traction.

I did something like 10 pulls one after one with almost no waiting between without any problems. But later I found out that the lsd is not locking anymore and rear end was covered in oil:

It looks like the diff oil overheated in that heavy 1/4 mile use, started leaking and destroyed lsd disks. Well I need to do something for that also.

[dasmanschaft012]

just fine with the spal fan. But e39 fan required at least 30 amp fuse to work. So that tells about how much more powerful that one is compared to the spal one.

No, it just means the e39 one is more inefficient.
I bet the spal CFM is either the same or higher than the e39 fan, with 2/3 the current.

[pazi88]

No, it just means the e39 one is more inefficient.
I bet the spal CFM is either the same or higher than the e39 fan, with 2/3 the current.

Don't know the e39 readings but there night and day difference on the airflow if you try it with the hand. Never going back to the puny spal fan that had problems keeping engine temps level. With spal fan there was hardly any air going through the radiator. I needed to put my hand to the radiator to feel that. But with e39 fan there is breeze that you can feel even standing by the engine bay with hood open.

[pazi88]

Moving on with my m52tbo e30. Time to do brake upgrade. For that I got e38 4-pot brembo brakes:


Disassembled those:
Test fit on my 16" wheels that really have 14" bottlecap "centers" :D Looks like 294mm mini brake discs could be doable:




So I got those:


the e38 brakes were made narrower to work with 22mm discs:




Then e36 rear discs for rear:


And Z3 brakes for those:


Rust go away:




More stuff appears. Like e90 booster and e36 ABS unit.


Some material taken off from the front discs to fit them to e30 hub:


Rings to center the rear discs to e30 hub:


The e36 ABS unit:


E9 resevoir for the E90 booster:


Adapter for the front brakes:


First try was total fail:




But at least rear brakes are bolt-on as expected:


Video of all that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1MHWRJ0Xo