The road to Phoenix (Updated 5.15.09 - Massive Brake work)

[bmw1602.com]

love the red....makes your car stand out.......

We all makes dumb mistakes from time to time.....I also make an incredible stupid mistake with my roof that I will not mention, suffice to say took me many many hours to fix it.

I call it my idiot tax. Every year I do something that I can attribute to payign my idiot tax. One year I was in a rush and got caught in the carpool lane by myself......once again I knew better......

At least you have a hot assistant! It always helps to have a extra hand helping you out. If only I could get my girlfriend to even approach the garage.....\

The car is looking great! keep it up can't wait to see more progress!

[madjurgen]

Man, you must really enjoy frustration, putting the motor in like that, without the tranny.

[H_Krix]

Man, you must really enjoy frustration, putting the motor in like that, without the tranny.

The 5-speed I'm using is a junkyard transmission, and unfortunately I don't have the money right now to replace the seals and get the 5-speed kit I've been looking into. There are a lot of things I need to get sorted out with my MS conversion that can't move forward without the engine in the car (wiring, throttle cable, oil and intake lines, etc) but I DO have those currently, so I'm moving forward with what I can do as my finances permit.

Thanks for your... "consideration"... but I'll deal with the frustration as it comes.

[Todd21]

Harrison, you are the man! Keep hammering away your work motivates a lot of us out here......

[H_Krix]

So I figured I should post some higher-rez shots of the engine going in and some of the other work I've been doing as well. Engine shots shouldn't need much explanation, so here they are:

A couple of shots of the 02again pulley shim w/ trigger wheel:

Removing some of the clips to put the welting on (I used the same stuff from McMaster-Carr that Bill Williams showed in Pikachu 2)

Testing the best way to cut out the dome light hole in the headliner on some scrap and a spare dome light assembly (when I first did my car, i had a spare, so I put two in. It had to be the worst wiring you'd ever seen... They would only work if the switches for both were in opposite positions...)

All of that was done while it was ASS FREEZING COLD outside. I realize some of you guys will laugh at this picture, but down in Atlanta, this is groundbreaking stuff. Thank god I bought a space heater, I think it was like 18 degrees in the garage before I turned it on...

So that was 2 weeks ago, and the following happened this weekend:

Wiring!

Man, I've been putting this off for a while, but since the engine is in the car and I can lay everything out, I really don't have any excuse anymore. While I'm at it, I'm adding in 2 extra fuseboxes: one for constant power and one for Ignition switched, because I'll be adding a lot and want to leave the factory harness more or less intact. These will control the radio, alarm, radar detector, foglights, aux fan, aux Gauge panel, and MegaSquirt. If I want to add anything in the future, it will be easy to add onto with these under the glovebox.

Relay Board for MS Under the glovebox, the fuse panels will go to the right of this.

Engine wiring, all this has to end up somewhere...

All the unwrapped wires coming through the firewall are new. They all fit through one new grommet, which is good because it fit a pre-existing hole that I had drilled at some time or another. I still need to route the battery cable through, but that can come later (and probably on the passenger side - its getting kind of crowded over here...) You can see red ends on all the leads here - I wrote the associated number of the plugs on these from the wiring schematic on the wall when I rebuilt the harness. This makes life much easier as I can just look at a plug, read the number, then look at the wall. No more tracing wires.

And a quick picture of my aux wiring schematic, as drawn on the side of a really big box with sharpie marker. I'm pretty low-tech.

More to come... cant wait to figure out where all this mess goes.

[Kidasters]

Harrison -

It's coming along great! At this rate, you'll be driving by the time summer rolls around!

Keep it up!

Ken

[RClippa]

Harrison,

It was great to meet you today at the yard. Thanks for saving me the cash on the trans. Your project is sick. It really looks like you have thought this through. I look forward to seeing your updates. Not to mention what you think about MS. I have to go to the lab tomorrow and assembly mine for the audi.

Robert

[H_Krix]

Harrison,

It was great to meet you today at the yard. Thanks for saving me the cash on the trans. Your project is sick. It really looks like you have thought this through. I look forward to seeing your updates. Not to mention what you think about MS. I have to go to the lab tomorrow and assembly mine for the audi.

Robert

Cool man, glad to help. Best of luck on the MS assembly, mine took me about 2 days or so, on and off when I got home from work on the evenings. I'm still learning a lot about it, so I'll pass on any useful tips that I can while I'm putting it together.

I ended up yanking a couple of ICVs out there for my project. The best looking one came off a Saab - it has a nice mounting bracket that actually lines up pretty well with the studs on the bottom of the 318i intake manifold - if you're going to be using that one for your car. I'll post some pics when its all mounted up.

Did you ever get those rear hubs off that 320?

[RClippa]

Yea, we picked up a 3/4 breaker bar and got the nuts loose. Then pulled out the 6 ton hub puller I built and they came off with just a few pumps of the jack handle. I thought it would only be usefull for getting the '02 hubs off but it was a life saver at the yard. The brakes are now on the 02 and I am just waiting to get wheels and the driveshaft rebuilt.

[H_Krix]

Been in and out of town recently so I don't have a whole lot finished from when I uploaded last. I've got a bunch of stuff that needs to go out to be plated (and I really want to make sure this my last bunch. I'm really tired of driving up to the place that does this stuff because they're very far out of my way, and expensive)

I've been concentrating on wiring for now. I've got all the EDIS and MSII wires sorted out, so I can hopefully finalize those connections next weekend.

Sorry for the crummy photos, taken with my cell phone because I left my digital at home.

Auxiliary fuseboxes: one is switched power and the other is constant. I'm trying to make all of my add-ons completely separate form the original factory harness so it will be easier to track down any problems in the future. The only interface between the two is the 12v switched purple wire coming off the hazard switch which will be used to trigger the relay for my switched power fuseblock. (Yes, I'm labeling them with a sharpie marker for now. I'll print some nicer vinyl labels later but this should keep me from confusing myself until that happens)

The large 4ga wire here routes from the dist block near the glovebox through one of the former air conditioner lines and to the starter

Distribution block. I used one I pulled from an e30, mounting it in the same location as in Blunt's car. This provides the 2 fuseboxes with power.

I'll be running a single Odyssey battery with a 1-farad capacitor wired in for big surges. This is coupled to an 80A alternator from an e30. I'm using Zenon's mounting location under the rear seat. Eventually the amplifier and capacitor will go here as well.

Believe it or not, I actually know where all of this is supposed to go. I'll post better pics of the EDIS mounts later - I'm using the factory ford brackets as well as the relay bank strip above the brake booster where all the emissions crap was set up originally. Its pretty clean and out of the way up there.

Better pics - and hopefully more progress - to come soon.

[BLUNT]

wow looking really nice harrison.

[Kidasters]

Harrison,

I was wondering when you were going to update again. Glad to see you are moving forward!

Ken

[2002Targa]

looking nice.

Where did you get those fuse blocks??

[H_Krix]

Where did you get those fuse blocks??

I got them from this website: http://www.wiringproducts.com/

They have a lot of good stuff, and some neat push-button starter panels which I would totally do if I hadn't spent all this time trying to keep the factory ignition in place. The fusepanels I got are these:

$16 for the 6-slot one and $18 for the 8-slot. Hopefully I won't be running much more than 14 additional circuits!

[2002Targa]

Damn, I wish I would have seen those before I did mine. I just used a terminal block, no fuses. Maybe on my next one.

TK