The Blunderwagon - 89 325iX touring 3.1L stroker

[kronus]

insta-bookmarked. teach me your sheetmetal ways.

[jeenyus]

Those drive shafts cleaned up really well. I'm jealous. Did you get an x5 guibo for it or are you just planning on leaving it as is?

[wworm]

eh, I haven't done much here yet. The rust repair will be a big project, probably going to have to take it down to a bare shell to get it done. Thinking about getting it acid dipped as well, since the undercoating is such a huge pain in the ass and absolutely all over everything.

In a few weeks I'm also doing a road trip to harvest spares for a stroker build. Haven't thought about internals much, yet, but that will be a longer-term project as well.

I just hope this moves faster than the white car...or you finish the white car. Lol either way, very cool addition to the collection. Looking forward to progress on either of your unfinished cars lol

[kronus]

Those drive shafts cleaned up really well. I'm jealous. Did you get an x5 guibo for it or are you just planning on leaving it as is?

I've got the fat giubo on it and have the x5 centering flange in box. Need to pull the oil pan cover off and get it machined to have enough room to mount both.

Also, yeah, I was pleased with the shafts. A skim through a wire wheel on a bench grinder took all the nasty stuff off, and then a few coats of rusty metal primer flattened it out nicely.

I just hope this moves faster than the white car...or you finish the white car. Lol either way, very cool addition to the collection. Looking forward to progress on either of your unfinished cars lol

Well, this one is moving. The white car needs the engine bay painted and the motor dropped in.. it should be relatively close to done after that, but having to paint the bay is discouraging me a lot.

[Julien]

I've got the fat giubo on it and have the x5 centering flange in box. Need to pull the oil pan cover off and get it machined to have enough room to mount both.

Also, yeah, I was pleased with the shafts. A skim through a wire wheel on a bench grinder took all the nasty stuff off, and then a few coats of rusty metal primer flattened it out nicely.




Well, this one is moving. The white car needs the engine bay painted and the motor dropped in.. it should be relatively close to done after that, but having to paint the bay is discouraging me a lot.

Then don't ;) Rock the car for a year or two with a sub-prime engine bay, or worse (better?), rhino line it

[kronus]

Then don't ;) Rock the car for a year or two with a sub-prime engine bay, or worse (better?), rhino line it

you're not wrong.

I'm not going to rhino-line it though.


No immediate updates on the touring, waiting to get some time to dig into the electrical. Spent this whole weekend driving to Idaho and back to pick up lots of various iX parts, though, including a decent motor core for a stroker build. No idea what kind of stroker yet..

[AndrewBird]

FYI, only US market cars were wired for a CEL. Functionality is there though, you will just need to add the wiring.

In my E34, they jumpered the ABS light to the CEL on the back of the cluster to get it to turn on with the key on.

[D.Martijn]

Any news the touring, Kronus?

[kronus]

I've been in Spain for two weeks, so unfortunately progress has been slow and trending uphill in annoyingness of execution. Today was very much a 1 step forward, two steps back deal, so this update is not so flashy.

built one functional US cluster out of a mishmash of whatever I had lying around -



figured out how the CEL wiring should look like from the ETM -



ran a CEL to the cluster -




on this euro build car, the engine harness wiring has a complete CEL circuit. The body side does not, so it needed to be added separately. I ran a wire from the body side of C101 pin 12 by slotting a spare connector into the plug. Broke four or so before realizing that it has a twist lock. Good thing I harvested a couple dozen spare male/female pairs from various cars we've parted in the shop.

The other side of the bulb was run to switched power.

Interestingly, the ECU that came in the car might have had a problem with this setup. It would blink at like 90% duty cycle in ON with the engine on or off. The ECU was a 380 with a random chip in it. I swapped in a spare (153, so, Motronic 1.1) and the behavior resolved itself. Unfortunately this means no stomp test.

I have a couple spare 179 ECUs from our racecar, and will try to stick an M20-tune chip in one of those if I can find a stock one somewhere.


not much else happened - I sweated and cursed for an hour underneath the car getting the manifolds bolted up, but the rear one has a massive exhaust leak still. At some point during the process the car also slipped off the jack and now I've got a caved in passenger floor pan I'll need to push back down.

at this point I was frustrated and in pain, so I wrote down the list of things I need to fix, flipped the car off, and went home.







oh, also I got tired of wanging my shins on the trailer hitch, so it now has a hat.

[kronus]

I finished up that entire list today, but generated a whole new one in the process.

The inop windows turned out to be interesting. I had previously made them work by swapping out window switches (both were dead, somehow), but they stopped working when I fixed the current draw by removing some old radio stuff. Some wire tracing later, I found the whole window harness to be lacking power, all the way up to the fuse (17).

Right above the fuse was the empty socket of the R5 relay, which is supposed to power it... with a relay back in there, everything works. So, how the hell were the windows working before?

Good news: I had to pull the carpet up to hammer the passenger floor back into shape. Amazingly, the floor is all there, the rust is not all the way through.

Bad news: the M20 is running a bit weird.. too cold. Sits at 3/8 at hot idle, goes down to 1/4 while driving. I have a coolant temp switch in box that I can toss at it, but I'm going to see how hot it actually is first with a thermometer, since the gauge is an unknown.

[2mAn]

Hang in there, I know you will keep chipping away at it and it will get there.

My passenger window has a mind of its own and I really dont want to chase down sketchy wiring ... ugh

[kronus]

I think I'm actually pretty close! Once the m20 is sorted, it will be enough of a runner that I can try to get it on the road.

The brakes will need to be done at some point before it spends too much time commuting, though. They look like they came off the titanic. I have pads, front rotors, and rebuild kits stashed up, just need the time..

[Julien]

Thermostat and coolant temp sensor magically got replaced



On a side note, this touring smells like every touring i've ever owned. I want to say a mix of stale cigarettes, eastern european sweat and a hint of mold :D

[kronus]

On a side note, this touring smells like every touring i've ever owned. I want to say a mix of stale cigarettes, eastern european sweat and a hint of mold :D

hey, I'm allowed to put my sweat where I like. thanks for dewaffling the touring though!


I'm also currently working on getting stuff together for a stroker build. I have most of a spare iX motor that needs to go to the machine shop. Any nuggets of wisdom? other than "finish the white car"?

[nando]

use the ix intermediate shaft, or you'll have a bad time. lol