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Thread: 1985 745 rebuild log

  1. #276
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    las vegas
    Posts
    338
    My Cars
    85 745
    Quote Originally Posted by Jay535is View Post
    Man, every time I look thru this thread I question my own dedication and abilities.
    So much great work.
    Thank you. I do enjoy working on this car and I've tried to push my skills on this project.

    Quote Originally Posted by lynnbilodeau View Post
    Well, I haven't been here in a while. Really glad to see you back on this Devin. Sorry about the shoulder, and hope you are continuing to improve.
    Some time in the next year, I have to have both my shoulder joints replaced (reverse joint replacement on the left because it is so far gone). I am down to bone on bone in both shoulder joints.
    Rehabbing an old warehouse into a workshop, and trying to get that project done before I go under the knife.
    Great work. Very inspiring.
    Body injuries just suck, I hope you heal up soon! Take some pictures of the shop before and after. Our current shop was a storage warehouse before we took it over. Projects, Projects!

    I finished my physical therapy a few months ago and they said I have 98% of my range back and that is all I will get. I have since started to go back to the gym twice a week and man I have felt a positive difference. I wish It didn't take a broken shoulder to make me want to be in better shape...

    Quote Originally Posted by espoe View Post
    How's the shoulder coming? Hope you are like new! Quick question, how it that Shapeoko and what are you seeing as your main use for it?
    Shoulder is doing much better! The shapeoko is a huge learning curve but it fits in really well with using my 3d printer. I use Fusion 360 to write everything gcode wise. I bought it because it was way less expensive to learn on than a CNC. I have only made 2d projects so far but i'm getting faster at making a lot of brackets and such. Mainly I really bought it to use a learning tool to step into a CNC but will use it a lot for this car.

    Quote Originally Posted by SicStang03 View Post
    Good work. That disk to help with the wire twisting is genius. Can wait to see the next update.
    I've spoke with a few wiring guys who gave me some great concentric twist tips so the disk is now in the trash but it did work well on that project. I've also made another ignition harness in the last week.

    I have been working really hard on this car for the last 2 months building wiring harnesses. It took me 3 weeks of work to figure out my plan and wiring layout for my engine harness alone. The amount of thought that had to do into it was way more than I bargained for. I have a new appreciation for milspec wiring. I'll post of some of these pictures as soon as I finish this engine harness. I'm on my second attempt....

  2. #277
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    las vegas
    Posts
    338
    My Cars
    85 745
    Update:

    I have been working on this project a ton over the last 5 months, but have been really bad about taking pictures.

    Since the car now has an electronic throttle body I don't need the idle air valve any longer so I made up a few plugs.







    After I cut these I put a large knurl on them and pressed them in, then for good measure I welded them into place. I'll have to take pictures of the final product when I get back to work.

    I wanted to add an oil temp sensor for the Link to have a 3d boost table but couldn't come up with a good spot. I'm thinking i'd like to have a oil filter adapter made to use a remote mount filter but that will take some time to make. For now I figured I would put it in the factory oil filter. The filter housing was super dirty so I cleaned it first in the vapor blaster then drilled and taped out the drain screw hole to mount the sensor in.
























    I wasn't happy with my old engine harness or the layout so I made a new one. This one took me about 1 month to work out the design and almost another month to build. I got a program called Rapid harness to help me work out some of the details. This harness was very challenging for me because of all the features I wanted it to have. Here is the basic layout:

    core = 4 wire shielded cable. 3 22awg 2 wire for crank, and 2 knock sensors. 1 3 wire 22awg for cam. To make sure this combination would wrap well I made a few more test sections like below. The second one from the bottom was the test for this.




    Here is how I approached making this harness and the materials I used.



















































































    This is the engine harness that is missing its cam and crank sensor connectors. I wanted to install the harness then finish installing the connectors in place to make sure the lengths are were I want. I will have to redo this since I haven't found a food bracket to hold the connectors yet. If you look close you can also see the new ignition harness. The harness I posted pictures of a few months ago didn't turn out like I wanted and I made it again.







    The largest milspec connector in the harness goes to the firewall. To help hide some of the wiring I installed the connector in the pedal bracket assembly. I also had to do this twice and my first one I measured and cut for a different style connector that I didn't end up using.





















    Now that I got the pedal box section built I needed a way to hold the steering wheel and a steering linkage. I started with some brackets and bungs that I made on the lathe to hold the steering wheel so I could measure the steering shaft.

















    In the last picture you can see how I hung the wheel before I made this last bracket. It worked for mockup but moved around a lot when steering the car.











    I didn't get a final picture but in this last picture I ended up removing that rubber mount since one was already at the bottom of the steering shaft stock. The steering is now rock solid. I'll upload all the pictures as the car currently sits next week. It is up and driving now and i'm almost done with the rear harness of the car.
    Last edited by DevInAz; 11-29-2019 at 01:09 AM.

  3. #278
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    las vegas
    Posts
    338
    My Cars
    85 745
    Engine bay currently:





    I still have a long way to go but its making some progress. The engine now runs smoother than it ever has for me.

    In this next picture you can see the latest coil harness. I still have to cut out the coil bracket but these coils are so light that they don't really move even if you push on them.



    While this PDM is now mounted in place and I have started to build my main body harness you can see where I ran the connector as a bulkhead fitting to get all the wires in and out of the engine bay.







    Most of the stuff that needs wiring is now in place and i'll spend the next month building/finishing all the harness work inside the car including the trunk.
    Last edited by DevInAz; 12-03-2019 at 09:57 PM.

  4. #279
    Join Date
    May 2019
    Location
    Sweden
    Posts
    63
    My Cars
    1986 M535 turbo
    great build ,,, i have a question ,, all the extra parts for the installation of the electric ,, rubber shrinking parts .like from 2 to 1 and o the big connectors , where do you order that ?

  5. #280
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    las vegas
    Posts
    338
    My Cars
    85 745
    Quote Originally Posted by M535turbo View Post
    great build ,,, i have a question ,, all the extra parts for the installation of the electric ,, rubber shrinking parts .like from 2 to 1 and o the big connectors , where do you order that ?
    I order everything from www.prowireusa.com

    I still need to order my last round of wiring stuff.

  6. #281
    Join Date
    May 2020
    Location
    Phoenix, Arizona
    Posts
    342
    My Cars
    1990 BMW 535i/5
    I must say, this is one of the most thorough build threads I've read in quite a long time. I admire your dedication to this car for sure.

  7. #282
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    las vegas
    Posts
    338
    My Cars
    85 745
    Quote Originally Posted by danespann View Post
    I must say, this is one of the most thorough build threads I've read in quite a long time. I admire your dedication to this car for sure.
    Thank you, I wish had more time to dedicate to this build.


    Year and half later... update:

    I had different types of glass in the car between new, aftermarket, and the difference between factory euro blue tinted glass and US regular clear glass.





    I had a lot of glass to choose from... Next up was rebuilding all the window regulators. In a few pictures you can see I took them all apart and put each piece in my vapor blasting machine. Cleaned, reassembled, and lubed up.
















    After assembling the window regulators I had to pick out what motors I wanted to use. To figure out the best ones I hooked each one up to a power supply to measure the amperage draw.




    The best motors registered about 2.5amp each direction when running by itself. After putting the motors back on the regulators and installed back into the vehicle i'm seeing around 3.5amp per motor without hitting the closed or open position. This is where I ran into a large decision, how will I wire these motors up... Factory would be super easy, but I couldn't find new factory connectors. I looked everywhere I could think of. Heres an example of the connector I was trying to find:




    The switches can be ordered through the dealer, the pins could be bought through te.com or something but the cases I thought about having someone cad them up and have a resin printer make the cases since they have such a high print resolution. After kicking this around I would have window one touch like I wanted so I started playing with arduino's. This is what I came up with first:



    two of these with a microcontroller would do the trick! I ordered multiple of everything assuming I would fry something along the way.



    If anyone has played with shields for Arduino's before, you could probably relate to the part I got hung up on. You can't just stack as many shields onto the Arduino that you want. They have to have signals moving through the pins, then you need a Arduino library to make everything work with your design. An Arduino library is basically a map or sent of instruction for the hardware to follow. Mind you I have essentially zero experience with electronic design so this part took me a few months to work through.




    This is the physical path that had to be connected. In the pictures below you can see the little green wires.








    With these little wires and a few weeks of rewriting code and understanding libraries I was able to install this into the car with E39/E38 window switches and make the windows move up and down. It was a fun project but I didn't really have an idea on how to make it durable enough with a connector to use it in a car so I started looking around for solutions. I found a PCB designer on Fiverr.com and paid him a few hundered to design a board for me with everything I already had.



    This is the picture and file I got back a few weeks later. I placed an order with jlcpcb.com and another couple weeks later this arrived:



    I had a bunch of small problems over the next few months trying to make my board work so i'll skip that and jump to the final product.





    Its now all wired in the car and I have one touch windows. Instead of purchasing some cheap autoloc solution I took a really long way to get my windows to work but made a pretty good learning situation out of it. Next I need to make a good looking case for it and have a way to mount it into the car.

    Here is the first seat bracket that I tryed.



    It was about an inch off, too close to the inside so I redesigned it.




    I'll get more pictures of the brackets that were made and have been installed for months. I could have sworn I took all those pictures but can't find them on my phone.

    New cooling system hoses and such. I reused a bunch of these parts when the motor was rebuilt now years ago.



    I cleaned all the floors in the car and installed a lot more sound mat.









    I'll update this in the next week. I'm missing a ton of pictures that I thought I had to finish everything i've done up to today.
    Last edited by DevInAz; 08-02-2021 at 08:03 PM.

  8. #283
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    las vegas
    Posts
    338
    My Cars
    85 745
    Here are the seat brackets, these are an extra set besides the ones already in the car. The bottom one was my test template and is 1/8 thick while the final ones are .25in think.



    I welded nuts to the bottom of the brackets so I could use bolts from the top side like factory. When the interior is done I think I'll have these powder coated black.

  9. #284
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    Quadratechtown, PA
    Posts
    741
    My Cars
    5, 7, 4x4
    Interesting glass with choices.

    BMW offered Clear, Green and Bronze. What you show is the Green. Both the Bronze and Green are mentioned as heat barrier glass. I think the bronze was standard of that type and green with and without tint strip on the front were options on that upgrade.

    What you show appears to be green glass, the standard glass for all US cars.

    I have never seen so many pics of the window operating systems on these cars. Nice picture posts in this thread.

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