95 BMW M3 LS2 Swap. E36 LS2 Conversion. Boriksh/Bimerok

[bimerok]

I'll see if I can take some pictures of the connections today. But it is pretty simple and straight forward. It connects to the low pressure side. I used the brass barb connectors and regular clamps. One hose connects to the BMW return line from the rack and another to return line on LS P/S reservior.

[Tongboy]

looking good as always guys

did you use those longer heater hoses with the small L bend on the end? it's a lot cleaner than having splices in that area.

i'm going to borrow your idea for mounting the heater valve since mine is still flapping around there

[bimerok]

any pictures of the connections of the power steering cooler? everything is looking good and moving super fast!!!!

I took couple of pictures, but they aren’t great. We did not lift the car on Sunday, so I couldn’t take good pictures, but here is what I have.

looking good as always guys

did you use those longer heater hoses with the small L bend on the end? it's a lot cleaner than having splices in that area.

i'm going to borrow your idea for mounting the heater valve since mine is still flapping around there

For the heater hoses we used some 90 degree connectors (not everywhere though) and one tee connector on the bigger of two tubes on the water pump.




So yesterday, on Sunday, we had a little more time spent on the car. We filled the cooling system, topped of few other fluids and started the engine. The motor started right up again and ran very smooth. We let the coolant to do few cycles to make sure nothing is leaking and the cooling fan turns on. It works like a charm. Fan comes on, runs for about 30 – 40 seconds. That is enough to cool what’s in the radiator. After few cycles we made sure that the heater blows hot air inside the car and that the heater valve works as designed. Everything was 100%. We only added a little more antifreeze and the car was ready for its first test drive.

The car is a beast!!! The sound is amazing! We did few small drives around the industrial area near the shop to see what’s what.

Few minor items were identified. Power steering pump whines (what else is new?). The rack and pinion makes some weird noses (can be heard in the video) – not sure what’s up with that? The good one was a mystery whistle like noise that we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and what was the cause. It sounded like a very bad pulley noise, but was coming from the different location. After chasing the sound for a little bit I decided to open the oil cap and to my surprise it was held by a lot of vacuum. When I finally pulled the cap, the whistle immediately stopped. I started to look at miscellaneous vacuum lines around the engine, and found one really quick. The line that is coming from valve cover and used to go to GTO intake was still capped off with a little red plug from the time when motor came from the salvage yard. Initially I mistakenly thought it was one of the evap system lines and did not pay attention to it. I took the cap off and the problem/mystery whistle is gone (can see part in the video).

Another item that I need to look in to and do a little more research is the reverse lockout solenoid. It is still not activating and some force need to be used to put the car in reverse. I connected the power feed wire for the lockout solenoid, but I guess I am missing the other, rigger wire? I believe there is one wire coming from PCM that could be it, but I need to find out for sure and also find where it is going to, which harness.

Ok, here is another compilation cell phone video of what we took during our Sunday working session. It has the first moves of the car, some noises, whistles, exhaust sounds, obnoxious commentaries by my exited cousin, etc…





Today, I skipped the car day and spent some time with the family instead, while my cousin apparently went to the shop to mess with the accelerator pedal. He called me later in the day to let me know that accelerator is pretty much done and is using the stock BMW pedal to trigger the DBW of GTO. He said that the placement and ratio is not 100% ideal, but works for now. I haven’t seen it yet and don’t have any pictures, but will update as soon as I have more info.

Also, he mentioned something about Tachometer not being accurate and is off by about 2500 RPMs. He says that it bounces of the limiter while indicating 4 - 4.5k RPM. I did not notice that while my test drive on Sunday and it was one of the things on the list for PCM programming guys… So will need to confirm that and also check once OBDII plug is hooked up.

If anyone has any inputs on some of the items, don’t hesitate to chime in and share

[Mas280]

When I was using the ls2 ecu I was not able to get the tach to work right. So I used a dakota digital rpm correction box.

http://www.dakotadigital.com/index.c...cat/cat287.htm

[birdman2447]

Looks great, i cant wait till i have mine done. Have you guys been keeping the restrictor/orifice that sits in the return line? Well i think it is the return line but i cant remember exactly.

[mateo m3]

exited is not the word!!! it a great feeling to hear it start and drive it for the first time!! looking really good

[Tongboy]

did you switch the output to 6cyl from the stock PCM 4 cyl output?

[Mas280]

did you switch the output to 6cyl from the stock PCM 4 cyl output?

You can do that on a ls1 ecu, but I could not find it on the ls2 ecu.

[bimerok]

Thanks guys for your feedback and support!

When I was using the ls2 ecu I was not able to get the tach to work right. So I used a dakota digital rpm correction box.

http://www.dakotadigital.com/index.c...cat/cat287.htm

Hmm that is strange. Thanks for the heads up and the link. I will also try to call up wait4meperformance, who did the PCM settings and verify that there is no other way around it via programming.

Looks great, i cant wait till i have mine done. Have you guys been keeping the restrictor/orifice that sits in the return line? Well i think it is the return line but i cant remember exactly.

Yes, this one has this restrictor that sits in the return line. I tried it both ways. On my LS1 with old return line I had it cut off and then left in when I replaced the return line with a new one. I did not notice any difference with or without it.

did you switch the output to 6cyl from the stock PCM 4 cyl output?

I did not do the PCM settings myself and used wait4meperformance instead. The tach change was on the list of modifications needed that we provided to them. I'm not sure if they missed it or like MAS280 is saying it's a limitation of LS2 PCM and decoder is needed

[SHhhhh]

WOW great work! That exhaust sounds awesome!

How loud is the exhaust from inside the car? Any droning?

[bimerok]

It’s pretty quite from inside. Defiantly no droning.

[bimerok]

It’s pretty quite from inside. Defiantly no droning.

[girolamous]

I'm interested in hearing how your A/C comes out if you do it. On my LS2 swap, the A/C can be on and it blows cold air from the vents while hot air is on the floor. I'm not sure if the heater valve is stuck or I got the hoses in the wrong ports...
I also have problems with the power steering pump. I melted the stock GTO reservoir at the track after about 45 min of work, then replaced it with a cooler and had psc (Performance Steering Componentes) revalve the GTO pump for lower flow and pressure. BMW specs on a e36 325 are 110 bar, lower than GM. I have and external metal reservoir also, and run with no problems other than some squealing when it is really hot (here in TX). Also curious about your shifter plans. Mine is a Hurst, but I don't like the throws, especially from 4-3. I'm rebuilding now and am looking at options for smoothing that out.
Jerry

[yeager360i]

I'm having problems with my tach as well. We have made adjustments with HP, but it doesn't change. At 800rpm idle, tach shows around 400.

I'm not having any issues with my reverse solenoid. Is the ECM getting a signal from the VSS still? Are you getting 12V to the solenoid with the ignition on? The ECM has a Yellow wire I believe that grounds the solenoid when not moving. Not sure of the pinout but I can check if needed.

[bimerok]

I'm interested in hearing how your A/C comes out if you do it. On my LS2 swap, the A/C can be on and it blows cold air from the vents while hot air is on the floor. I'm not sure if the heater valve is stuck or I got the hoses in the wrong ports...
I also have problems with the power steering pump. I melted the stock GTO reservoir at the track after about 45 min of work, then replaced it with a cooler and had psc (Performance Steering Componentes) revalve the GTO pump for lower flow and pressure. BMW specs on a e36 325 are 110 bar, lower than GM. I have and external metal reservoir also, and run with no problems other than some squealing when it is really hot (here in TX). Also curious about your shifter plans. Mine is a Hurst, but I don't like the throws, especially from 4-3. I'm rebuilding now and am looking at options for smoothing that out.
Jerry

For this swap Boriksh decided to go without AC, so that was easy for me

Your problem with hot air blowing to the floor while AC is on sounds so much as heater valve. I had the same issue on my first e36 a while ago and it was the valve.

As far as shifter goes, for this swap it will be stock F-Body shifter for now. I recommended it for this swap as I also have Hurst shifter on my LS1 and I'm not a big fan of it either. Very hard and not precise!

I'm having problems with my tach as well. We have made adjustments with HP, but it doesn't change. At 800rpm idle, tach shows around 400.

I'm not having any issues with my reverse solenoid. Is the ECM getting a signal from the VSS still? Are you getting 12V to the solenoid with the ignition on? The ECM has a Yellow wire I believe that grounds the solenoid when not moving. Not sure of the pinout but I can check if needed.

Thanks for the feedback. It sounds like you are having same issue as we are, where our tach shows 400 at idle. I spoke to wait4meperformance, who did our PCM flush, etc. and he said that if I gave him tach readings while engine is at 2k and 3k RPM then he would be able to adjust some percentage and it should fix our issue. To do that I will first need to hook up OBDII plug to get the scanner connected. I will report back on the tach issue and how it will be resolved.

BTW I assume that you’ve connected the OBDII plug in your car. If you don’t mind me asking, for the data wires, did you just use PCM Pin 1 and Pin 2 from the C1 (blue) connector and connected them to Pin 6 and Pin 14 respectively on OBDII plug? Or did you have to use some other data wires? Was your donor 05 GTO?

On my reverse lockout I think I found my problem yesterday while reviewing the wiring. Like you mention, I did not connect the signal wire from PCM pin 42 (Yellow) so nothing is triggering the solenoid.

[yeager360i]

Yes I did connect the data wires to 14 and 6 from C1 Pin 1 & 2.

I ordered one of those Dakota Tach units last night, looks like it should work.

My donor car was an 06 GTO.

[girolamous]

Tach correction can be accomplished with HPTuners setting for #cylinders. Set it to 6 (I believe) instead of 8, or something like that. It's what the tuner shop did for me with stock PCM from a 2006 GTO, and it works like a charm. Only thing that doesn't work on my dash is the MPG gauge.

[bimerok]

Small update:

I was able to work on the car today again for a little bit. I think the wiring is now complete and the only thing that I need to do with it is to pretty it up and put the OEM shields, etc around it to hide everything.

Today I was able to tackle reverse wiring, which included the reverse lights and finally connecting the missing trigger wire for the reverse lockout solenoid. It’s finally all working. The shifter goes in reverse with the effort of pinky and the reverse lights are now working too.

After that, I started with routing OBDII connector into the cabin. I routed the wires on the passenger side as that is where PCM is located and there was a place already where BMW has some wires going under the glove box. So I used wire hanger to feed 3 wires through existing rubber grommet and connected OBDII plug. I am still not 100% sure where I will mount it once interior is assembled, but probably somewhere in the glove box, maybe in place of the flash light charger.

Once the OBDII was connected, the next thing I did is fired the car up and connected the scanner to make sure it works and to see why I was getting the Check Engine light On after we ran the car for a little bit. The OBDII works like a charm and reader sees everything using CAN protocol, so it is perfect! Now to the check engine light, the two codes that came up were MAF sensor and O2 Bank1 Sensor1 heater element. That was weird… Both of O2 sensors are brand new and MAF should also be in working condition too. So after a little bit of testing, I noticed that MAF sensor does not get +12V and I realized that I must have missed one of the wires that power MAF and the second O2 sensor. After a little bit of looking through my wires, I found one, last, missing ignition 1 wire that I have overlooked. After soldering that wire to the Ignition 1 voltage, I restarted the car and everything was 100%. No check engine light and no codes. Yet again I was very happy that the problem was troubleshot and solved.

For the tachometer, I measured what was the reading on 2000 and 3000 RPM and will provide that to wait4meperformance and see what he will say. The tach was showing 1200 and 1950 RPM respectively. So I hope they can do their magic adjustment and tach will work correctly.

Tomorrow we have big to-do list which I’m not sure will all be taken care off. On our agenda we have 3 cars to work on – this LS2 M3, my LS1 e36, and my cousin’s GTO. We have a track day to attend this coming Thursday, so we need to get some attention to our cars too. But for the LS2 (which is not going to track day yet), we were looking to work on air intake, organizing wires, finish shifter relocation bracket that I have started today, and start putting interior together.

GTO needs compete brake work – we got a set of 4 rotors and HAWK HPS pads all around. We wanted to do a brake fluid flush and clutch flush too.

On my LS1 car I wanted to mount my power steering cooler and possibly few other small misc. items, but with all that is on the agenda, we will see what actually be done…

As always, more updates to come.

[bimerok]

We got few more items done on LS2 beast.

Today I got into the shop a little early to get the head start. I began working on arranging the wires so that mess could be checked off the list. It took me about 3 hours or so to get that done, but I’m finally over this and I like the way it turned out. No more wiring mess.

Once the wiring was organized, I start putting cowls and misc. pieces back together including the wiper arms. One thing I just thought of as I’m typing this, is that PCM might have to come one once again to send it back to tuner for tach adjustment, oh well. Shouldn’t be too bad.

Next I continued working on the shifter relocation bracket that I have started yesterday. That did not take too much time to finish and within 45 minutes to an hour I have finished with the shifter relocation bracket and found all necessary bolts. I apologies, but I forgot to take a picture of it. However, it looks very similar to the one I did for my LS1 swap.

By that time, my cousin arrived to the shop and started working on his GTO brakes.

Meanwhile I started assembling the interior pieces and routing the OBDII plug up to the glove box. My initial idea of putting the OBDII connector instead of flashlight charger was scrapped since there would not be adequate space for the scanner to connect. Instead I have mounted it to the top of the glove box where it already had slits for the bolts.

Once OBDII was routed and mounted, I continued on assembling the interior and got a little help on that from my cousin too.

Now, on to some pictures.


This is how I started the day and how the wires looked



This is how it looked after I was finished with wiring



OBDII connector in the glove box.



Complete interior. Everything is assembled.



This is how GTO accelerator pedal look in a BMW




So right now the car is all assembled and buttoned up. The only thing that is still missing is air intake. We did not get a chance to work on that yet again other than that, engine conversion is pretty much done! Still there is suspension and brakes that need to be done as well and are waiting on the shelf to be installed.


EDIT: 10/06/2012
I have people asking me regularly how we hooked up DBW pedal from GTO to a BMW pedal. Unfortunately, we did not document this well during the initial conversion, so I went ahead and reproduced the model using the cardboard, drywall screws and a pen.

Here is the legend:
Everything cardboard represents the sheet metal.
Pen represents the metal rod that is coming from GTO gas pedal/actuator.
Drywall screws represent bolts.

So what we did was cut a sheet metal to the shape of the back of BMW plastic pedal that was later bolted to it. Then we cut two strips of metal and bolted them down tightly around the GTO accelerator rod. These strips of metal took semi-circular shape of the rod and are held tight around it. Then we cut two "D" shaped ears and drilled hole through them. These D shaped ears were welded to the sheet metal that we bolted to the back of original BMW pedal then the strips of metal that were bolted around the GTO accelerator rod were bolted to the D shaped years making a swivel point. Below is the crude video that I quickly threw together, showing how it is working.

Hope it helps.

Video Link:

[Maynor]

Nice Leo. Very nice.

[bimerok]

Thanks John!


I spoke with wait4meperformance today and gave him my rpm readings vs what's on the tach. He says that he can correct it. So I'm probably sending out pcm tomorrow.


Also took couple of picture of two beasts side by side

[yeager360i]

I just got my Dakota Digital today and installed it. After changing the output several times, 4cyl is what my tach likes. Not sure why that works since I have a 6cyl tach.

[Tongboy]

nice wiring cleanup!

[bimerok]

This weekend we spent few hours finishing up the intake. So now we can check that off the list and I think everything LS2 swap related is done on our part. We are still waiting on PCM to arrive back from re-programming for the Tach. I really hope that this will be corrected without additional box.

Here are few low quality cell phone pix.









Our tentative agenda for next weekend is to replace all four rotors and pads and to install the coil-overs. Both sets of parts were laying on the floor in the shop for a while now, waiting to be installed.

[M5Hunter]

Clean looking setup