A Tale of Two 30s: Now with 100% More Boost!!!

[iwantspeed]

nice progress on your car!

[the_eskimo_wonder]

nice progress on your car!

Thanks!

[jeenyus]

So the kit comes with MS2+, is that equivalent to MS3? Very cool you're gettin' the boost! M20 turbo is sick.

[the_eskimo_wonder]

A Tale of Two 30s: Gateway Drug to 325is Restomod

GUESS WHAT CAME IN THE MAIL







Install starts in week. This thing has been taking up all my free time. It gets a few more finishing touches tonight, then we're off tomorrow morning for the Gambler.



Safe, high quality mods include:

- Hunks of welded together bar stock wedged into the springs to lift it

- Extreme fender clearancing with 4.5" angle grinder

- Removed front sway bar for enhanced baja-ness and tail happy slides

- 28" Jeep XJ wheels/tires with rear mounted spare

- Sawzall-ed off muffler

- Ebay 42" curved lightbar to blind the haterz

- Ebay bolt on fender flares for HotBoi fitment

- Extra loud PA system to holla at them bitches.

- Manually operated top because the hydraulic system is obviously completely fucked

- Actual welded on skidplate because I'm not replacing another stupid oil pan



Vinyl livery goes on tonight....

[the_eskimo_wonder]

So the kit comes with MS2+, is that equivalent to MS3? Very cool you're gettin' the boost! M20 turbo is sick.

I think MS3 has a little more functionality but I'm not sure. People seem to use both.

[2mAn]

Awesome, but needs moar lift

[the_eskimo_wonder]

I know. But this thing was miserable to work on. It required special Mercedes specific spring compressors and we just kinda said fuck it and took what we could get.

Considering how bad it already rubbed on the street, it's gonna be less than ideal when we're hauling ass down fire roads. But that's what the Gambler is all about.

[the_eskimo_wonder]

Alright, since I owed you guys a picture of the official livery of the RallyBenz, here we go. She performed flawlessly until we had a complete electrical failure (shocker). Strangely enough, after we towed her home she fired right up and is running pretty well again. Weird.



Anyways, it's turbo time!

Replaced the fuel pump first. Put a TRE 255 in, which I've heard about the same reviews for as the Walbro. After the fuel pump it fired right up and idled normally so I moved on down the list. Swapped the fuel injectors for the big 60lb'ers. Also yanked my entire AFM/ICV assembly as I'm not going to be using those.

I took apart an old AFM that wasn't working and used the connector for the new IAT wires. They went to pins 1 and 4 and retained the factory wiring harness in case I ever want to go back to running an AFM or MAF.



The Megasquirt PNP went in next, and then it came time for the wideband O2 sensor. That's when things got annoying.

I spliced the wideband O2 sensor wiring from the gauge to the engine harness into an old O2 sensor harness so I could forego butchering the factory harness again. The wiring goes from the sensor to the gauge, then back out and to the engine computer. I wired these outputs for 12V power and signal to the factory harness and went to test fire the car. Ground went direct to the body.

Car fired with a little throttle and would stay running but pig rich and the wideband gauge was completely lifeless. Figuring my O2 harness wiring was somehow crap I bypassed that and pulled 12V for the gauge off the glovebox light circuit. At this point I also disconnected the wideband signal wire from the car harness to eliminate that factor.

The result? The wideband gauge starts up and goes through its paces just fine then goes to 14.7 and over time creeps down to about 14.1 or so where it bounces around a little but mostly stays the same. It reads this same value in free air and in the header with the engine running super rich. At this point I'm not really sure what could be wrong aside from a bad sensor. It came out the plastic protector with some anti-seize smeared on the sensor part itself which I wiped off. Could that alone toast the sensor?

And an engine bay shot from before the O2 sensor thing drove me mad.

[sampayne]

What brand wideband? Did you calibrate it in free air before installing?

[the_eskimo_wonder]

What brand wideband? Did you calibrate it in free air before installing?

AEM. It says each sensor comes out of the box individually calibrated and "laser trimmed".

[jeenyus]

looking forward to see what's going on with this. I am most certainly going standalone on my e30 and so this is super interesting to me. Best of luck!

[the_eskimo_wonder]

Well, we've hit a roadblock. I called AEM tech support and they agree that something sounds wrong with the sensor. It's currently on its way back to them, and I should expect a funtioning one 5-7 business days after that. So that sucks.

And when it rains it pours. My car had been consistently running a little warmer than I was comfortable with so I picked up a Z3M S54 radiator to help out with high temps with the boost. I drained my coolant to swap the radiators and out came the grittiest, brownest, nastiest coolant I've ever seen, which is especially conerning considering this engine has 450 miles on it since the rebuild.

Well, my dumb ass filled that shit with some tap water in the coolant. I'm pretty sure my tap water at this house isn't great either. Add heat and an engine block that probably still had a little crap in it and this is what you get....

So now I'm going to fill it with distilled water and vinegar and blow my whole system out a few times, but obviously I should do that with the old radiator to make sure I don't gum up the new one. Oh,but I can't run my engine up to temp to flush it properly because my engine doesn't run until I get my new wideband sensor.

[justinpirie]

What did you send back? The sensor or the controller? Most just use Bosch LSU4.9 sensors you can get from FLAPS or Amazon. Megasquirt doesn’t manage them well and kills sensors... ask me how I know [emoji2357]


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[968Reckless]

Just hook a hose up and flush it out, fill it the proper way once it runs clean.


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[the_eskimo_wonder]

What did you send back? The sensor or the controller? Most just use Bosch LSU4.9 sensors you can get from FLAPS or Amazon. Megasquirt doesn’t manage them well and kills sensors... ask me how I know [emoji2357]

They wanted both. You're probably right though and the sensor crapped out but the gauge is fine.