For some dark reason for a S14, very often we find the pressure regulator in the area of the CAM wheels. With our original setup it was even worse. The fuel was guided inside the CAM housing. Far from good since the fuel heats up easily by the hot oil splashing around.
Since we have sequential ignition we had to move the regulator anyway because we need this place for installing the CAM sensor.
We were pretty sure we would never break the world record for fuel consumption (economy) with the R-Box M3, but in the mean time we discovered that our BMW belongs to the category heavy drinkers. This has of course an impact on our fuel tank. Was it naivety or did we too much focus on the more attractive prices of the standard fuel cells? We don’t know.
Due to the fact the Romans made a complete wrong decision by only putting 4 weekends in a month, we are again forced to change our 2015 calendar. The goal was to do in March a small rally to test but we won’t be ready. Due to some last minute changes to the fuel tank we are again experiencing some delay.
Due to a delivery of wrong crimp contacts for the coil connectors, we could not finish the wiring between Christmas and new years eve.
Fortunately, we found a good “contact” in the UK for these exotic automotive connectors and with a little delay we have received the correct ones. Thus we were able to craft this weekend a little further to the wiring.
A pair of sensors after everything is ready . We can now produce huge sparks and the floodgates of the eight fuel injectors fully open up so that we are sure we will at no time gallons of fuel can swallow . Gradually the end comes closer. Some snapshots to tease :-)
However a worthy attempt to win some extra time ended miserably . Due to some late changes or things that became clear long after the electronics were designed, it was necessary to change some things. Because it took too much time to create dedicated PCB’s for these small changes I thought it was a good idea to make some proto boards and use epoxy for potting.
Apparently the 80’s were very inspiring. Also the E30 was a 80’s product. Especially the typical sound brings about goosebumps to many people. For that reason we do a lot of effort to reconstruct this “eargasm” as good as possible. Less is punishable !!
I stopped counting the hours that I camped in the very cosy co-driver space to install some wiring. What I do know is that we have hidden 400m wire all over the M3. Additionally we used approx. 25 m CAN cable and double this length for sensor cable. Comparing to the original wiring this is almost nothing.
On an ordinary Monday we installed the steering wheel, to have an idea how many hours we need to spent in the fitness to be able to turn it in a comfortable way. Unfortunately we had a scary movement of the steering column when applying force.
Not really a comfortable feeling so this needed to be sorted out. While we prepared some extra supports, welding man on duty “Biesemans” was called and some moments later it was changed in a very solid construction. Now it doesn’t move at all.
After the Christmas crisis last year, where we had to completely redo the diff support, Dirk as usual continued to work instead of eating turkey. So the turkey who survived 2013 has got new company from a younger one.
These were literary the words from mother Marleen, who finally believes everything will come together, and who are we to disagree?
For more than 4 years she is front row witness of al the action. Not really because she is interested in the technical stuff, but she supplies us all the time with cookies,coffee, pasta, vol au vent, subs,… and lots of Pepsi Max. Numerous times she declared us completely crazy, or best case she returned home under ones breath. So you can imagine what a relief this quote was for us.
And maybe she is right, we are crazy but the most important thing is that the BMW start to look as a car.
