DeadPool DEFEATED! -- 540i6 Front Mount Turbo Build

[JimLev]

Thad, where are you buying them from? I'd still like to get some 305's or 315's in 18" after I burn up the 295's.

[tptrsn]

I got these from tires-easy.com, Jim. I think I could have gotten them for a few bucks even cheaper from some seller through Amazon. But I wanted them in a timely fashion, and I knew that tires-easy delivers FAST!

[dovlet]

Hi Thad, i am building currently e36 with m60b44 engine holset hx40 turbo. Everything is installed and i run it with stock ecu. Now ecu changed to aftermarked one by name invent ems2. Goal is 400whp and 9sec 100-200kmh.
20180612_222830.jpg

[tptrsn]

Hi Thad, i am building currently e36 with m60b44 engine holset hx40 turbo. Everything is installed and i run it with stock ecu. Now ecu changed to aftermarked one by name invent ems2. Goal is 400whp and 9sec 100-200kmh.
20180612_222830.jpg

Well, I am not familiar with the invent ems2 or really the Holset HX40, but honestly I don't think you'll have any trouble making 400whp with a m60b44. The m60b44 will give you better cams and valve springs, but also a bit more compression, so your problem will be your bad gasoline. You'll need to inject a lot of water+vodka, and then you should be ok to make a lot of power!

[dovlet]

Well, I am not familiar with the invent ems2 or really the Holset HX40, but honestly I don't think you'll have any trouble making 400whp with a m60b44. The m60b44 will give you better cams and valve springs, but also a bit more compression, so your problem will be your bad gasoline. You'll need to inject a lot of water+vodka, and then you should be ok to make a lot of power!

It has cams from m60 and as you noted good springs. Also, compression is decreased, it is now 1:9. No vodka any more in engine, only inside of me.

[Mannyf540]

It has cams from m60 and as you noted good springs. Also, compression is decreased, it is now 1:9. No vodka any more in engine, only inside of me.

Then you should be good for another 10 HP, with the addition of Vodka in ya Dovlet!

[tptrsn]

It has cams from m60 and as you noted good springs. Also, compression is decreased, it is now 1:9. No vodka any more in engine, only inside of me.

Ok, so thinking back, M60b44 generally means M62b44 block and rotating/reciprocating assembly, with M60b40 heads, cams, and cam drive setup. This configuration gives a small bit of extra compression.

Since you are saying you have LESS compression, I am guessing that you have also used the M60b40 crank shaft with the M62b44 pistons and block (same rods either way). Is that correct?

Assuming that is correct, I think you have something I might call an M60b42. With an M60b42, it will be interesting to see how your power production comes out, but it should be good! You can use a bit more timing and/or boost than you would be able to with more compression, but I don't think it will be enough to negate the use of water/ethanol injection.

What I'm saying is that I think if you optimize your setup as is, then add water/ethanol injection to the setup and optimize again, you will be able to make significant additional power.

[tptrsn]

A little followup on the Achilles ATR Sport 1s: I had them out to the drag strip the other night, and their grip was excellent after a little 2nd gear burnout out of the water box to warm them up. Then today I took a road trip in the 540 to tune a couple of cars over on the east side of the state, and the ATR Sport 1s just seem to be excellent tires all the way around. Quiet, smooth, and grippy!

The car totally rips with them on it, both in a straight line and around sweepers. I honestly don't understand why they are so cheap.

As an aside, when I was at the drag strip, I got the normal compliments on the car ("Beautiful," "Sounds amazing," etc.), but then I got one more new one. The guy said something like, [paraphrasing] "That 'MF-er' really got down through there! What did you do, LS swap it?" I thought that was pretty funny.

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And by the way, I didn't get 'er to go any faster. Chris' reign as the fastest recorded E39 540 with A/C and a BMW V8 still in it continues on. All hail the king!

[philly98540]

Alright you got my interest on these tires. Maybe next round I'll try them out.

Love that LS comment! Lol.

Not sure I'm a king of much lol. I'm sure you'll get the crown soon Thad

[tptrsn]

Alright you got my interest on these tires. Maybe next round I'll try them out.

My only reservation about them is if you want to drive in any snow. These seem to be true summer tires that are absolutely hopeless in snow. I got stuck in a flat gravel driveway in the spring when there was about 2" of slightly crusty snow on it. It was absurd.

Other than that, I give them a full endorsement for summer use. I've had a pair each of front and rear ATR Sport 2s, and now a set of rear Sport 1s. Love them all!

Love that LS comment! Lol.

Not sure I'm a king of much lol. I'm sure you'll get the crown soon Thad

That LS comment was pretty funny to me too. It's a true compliment as fast as the LS cars are running these days, and I took it as such. I was also happy that I took down a few lightly modded LS powered cars at the drag strip in my last few outings.

Also, I guess I didn't mention it in the thread, but last time out I ran a guy with a gorgeous SRT8 300C WITH A PROCHARGER! He had drag radials and out 60 footed me by several tenths, but I was gaining a tiny bit on him at the end and ended up having around 1 or 1.5mph trap speed on him. My car was definitely pulling a little harder. So there's that... Lol

[doktor b]

Thad, i logged into bf.c just to see what you're up to. glad you're still hooning that big body and having all the fun. (i'm doing bodywork/sanding and having no fun.)

[tptrsn]

DokB!!! Great timing my man, I was just thinking about you, and wondering how to find your thread on the P-car site. I haven't received any updates from it lately, have you made any?

So anyway, it's sad to hear that you feel you're having no fun, but I think maybe you are. Knowing that your project is inching closer to your vision of what it will eventually be. That has its own sort of satisfaction.

But yes, I am still having fun with the 540, despite my continual, unsuccessful efforts to sell it. And the continual playing with it because it doesn't sell...

Speaking of which, I put it on the dyno today! Would anyone care to make wild or careful guesses at what it put down before I blab all of the details?

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Chris and Robert are ineligible to guess! (unless they want to guess as they would have this morning. Lol)

[JimLev]

Thad, 535HP at the wheels.
Hi or low?

[tptrsn]

I **WISH** Jim... Too high unfortunately.

At the crank though, that's pretty close! I'd say it's safe to say my 540 makes 540 (at the crank). 475 at the wheels, and 455 torque I think it was. Charts and geekery forthcoming.

[Mannyf540]

Sweet Thad,

A vid of one of those pulls would be great !!

I love what you’ve done with this beast. All, while keeping cold A/C and it’s drivability.
Well done!

[computiNATEor]

~1.8 hp per cubic inch - nice!

[tptrsn]

Thanks Manny! All that and cruise control to boot! Lol

Here's how much of a dummy I am though. I took a tripod and video camera along, and totally forgot to set it up... One of the shop owners did shoot some of the pulls on his phone, so my hope is that he'll upload one to facebook. That's about my only hope at this point. And it's a shame because she was RIPPING!!

To briefly run down the session, we started with a pull in 5th gear because I couldn't remember which gear was 1:1, but I thought it was 5th. We used my exact setup that I had at the track the other night. It made 465whp, and a ridiculous amount of torque because all 16.3psi of boost were accounted for by 4400rpms. AFRs were running about 11:1-11.3:1 through the pull in the log. The log reads a couple of tenths leaner than it does on the actual gauge due to some setup differential I don't have quite right.

So the first thing we did was trim out some fuel to target 11.5-11.7s. We also decided to run it in 4th gear since the 5th gear pull was a bit longer than seemed necessary, and wheel/drum speed was pretty high. Unfortunately, even in 4th gear, with the fuel trimmed out a little bit the torque hit too hard and blew straight through the clutch... So we dropped the boost down to about 15psi, and stepped it down to third gear for the rest of the tuning. 11 more pulls after that.

The car was a beast. We whittled away at different areas of the timing curve, and in the end it looks like I had a degree too much down low, just right around peak torque, and maybe a degree too little up top. All in all, not a whole lot gained there, but there was some.

In the end, even in 3rd gear it made 475whp SAE, and only 448ft-lbs of torque because boost comes in slowly (relatively speaking) with this setup in 3rd gear. It was only at 10psi at 4750rpms where it made peak torque. It was at about 13.8psi from 5577 to 6080, and then climbed to about 14.6 at 6350, dipped a little to 14.2 at 6600, and then climbed back up to 15psi at 7k. The little boost dip seems to correspond to the odd looking dips in power and torque in that RPM range on the graph. The pull happens so fast in 3rd gear, that I can't be too mad about the little fluctuations in boost control.

At any rate, after really detailing this all out from the logs like this, I guess I have decided that we really did unearth quite a bit more power than I initially thought, since the last pull was using less boost than I thought due to the low gear. The first pull of the day that gave 465 had a super flat boost curve hovering right at 10-16.3-ish PSI from 4400 to 6500. I'm not sure why I don't have that pull on any of my info, but I don't seem to.

Hope that made sense! Lol

Money Shot.jpg

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~1.8 hp per cubic inch - nice!

Yeah, not too shabby. Thanks!

[computiNATEor]

There's a big torque drop off after 5800 or so - what do you think that is? Cams? Exhaust housing? or...?

[computiNATEor]

Because I was curious, I did some (possibly completely wrong) back of the envelope math for maximum acceleration shift points:

1-2: redline
2-3: redline
3-4: @6.6k
4-5: @6.3k
5-6: @6.2k

As I understand it, one should upshift when the engine torque drops by the same percentage as the gear ratio.

For example:
3rd/4th ratio: 1.669/1.226
= 1.361, or 3rd has 36.1% more torque (than 4th)

So, when does the engine make 36.1% less than peak torque?
448.45*(1-.361)
= 286 lb-ft.

Referencing the dyno chart, the engine is making ~286lb-ft at 6,600, and drops from there. Therefore, for maximum wheel torque, upshift to 4th at 6,600rpm.

Rinse, lather, and repeat for other gears.

It's been a while since I've done any practical math, so it's been fun

[tptrsn]

Nate, you bring up some fantastic discussion points. To answer the first one about what I think is causing the abrupt loss of top end, I think it's a combination of factors, but mainly cams -- keeping in mind that this is mostly speculation on my part.

But, the other biggest component is air/fuel mixture. We found out on the dyno that the power difference between 11:1 AFR and ~11.7-ish is more significant than I thought with E85, and my AFRs in that upper 6Ks area were trending strongly down toward 11:1. I was gradually pulling fuel from that area, but I never did get it completely cleaned up. I'll finish that on the road or drag strip possibly. At any rate, my current feeling is that there is no reason for my engine to be spinning that high other than in first gear as we will get to in a moment. This is much to my chagrin, since I love some screaming RPMs.

Back to cams though, on the first 5th gear pull straight off the street, when the AFRs were basically at 11:1 and the turbo was loaded from low RPMs, I think I got a glimpse of the true torque and horsepower curves this setup can make. That pull yielded about 465whp, but with over 16psi from 4200-ish, the torque number was huge. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I think it was something in the range of 560wheel torque. That's close to 650ft-lbs at the crank, so it kind of says that my clutch isn't so horrible after all. The other thing it shows though is the true character of the power band the cams create. It's a torque heavy setup, as people have said about M62s on this board as far back as I can remember.

When looking at information like this, the shape of the boost curve has to be kept in mind, versus the ever-rising boost of centrifugal superchargers that artificially biases the torque band toward the high end of the RPM range. I feel like this diagonal boost line is an advantage for an M62 setup, since it creates linearity in the power band, rather than the over-the-hump, fell-off-the-ledge feeling at the top end. Lol

BUUUUT, if you have enough clutch to handle massive torque, then I think that my setup should be faster down the track. When mine gets livened up in the mid-4k range, it just blows through the clutch, and now I know why.

Which brings me to the discussion of shift points. It's complicated on my setup by the fact that the boost builds slower in lower gears, but your thought on loss of torque multiplication from gear to gear is very interesting, and actually leans even more toward redline shifts in low gears when you factor in the reduced lower RPM boost in those gears... Very interesting.. I've always just aimed to try to maximize time around peak horsepower when going through the gears, since physics determined that power is what creates acceleration, but now that you mention torque multiplication issues, it definitely complicates my thoughts on the topic.

What I've been trying to do at the drag strip for the sake of consistency -- and because the butt dyno said it was the right thing to do -- is basically begin the process of shifting at about 6,200rpms. That means that in first gear I'm pretty much running the engine to the high 6900-7K range, and then maybe around mid-high 6es in 2nd, and low-mid 6es in third. It's not too far off from what your math indicates to be correct. I'll have to go back and look at my logs from the track to verify exactly where I have been shifting through the gears.

And back to one final thought on cams: If I'm correct that cams are biasing the power band quite heavily toward torque, it could mean that this setup can be a lot more fun when/if I finally put in the new(est) clutch. The big lump of torque that is blowing through the clutch would presumably be blowing through the tires instead, which would make me a happy boy.

On the other hand, if a guy wanted to maximize power production, it probably sends us back toward trying to use the M60b40 cams (M62b40 setup), or ideally turboing an S62 -- especially if you had the ability to control the dual VANOS. THAT should make a super nice powerhouse. Not something I'm interested in doing, but I think with E85 protecting the thin cylinder walls by keeping everything under control in the chambers, now is the time for a well-designed turbo S62 setup to make some big power.

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Wow, a novella! If anyone reads that whole diatribe, please post up and proclaim your tenacity. Lol

[JimLev]

Good read Thad and Nate, now just get that LS fired up if you are looking for some big numbers!
Just a side note, my TIG'en is improving. I'm no longer melting holes thru the stainless exhaust pipe. The welds aren't nice pretty rows of dimes yet, more like puddles of dimes, LOL.

[1999 540i m]

Wow, a novella! If anyone reads that whole diatribe, please post up and proclaim your tenacity. Lol

I read it,

Thanks for the earlier e85 info. I've been running it for around 1500 miles now, Great stuff, Hard to find, I now own a 55 gallon drum and 10, 5 gallon jugs just for it

[computiNATEor]

I read it

So some fine tuning to even out the lumps could go a long ways, nice.

I got the idea from this video, just because the torque dropped a lot at high RPMs, but the theory is pretty simple. We want to maximize acceleration, right? Well, F=ma, and since mass isn’t going to be changing significantly, all we can do is maximize the force. And also F=Tr (where T is torque at the wheels and r is the constant radius of the wheels), and since the driveline gear ratios and the engine are the only things that change the torque, it becomes easy to solve for the maximum wheel torque.

https://youtu.be/zZBqb0ZJSwU

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Your shifting strategy is solid right now, as I’m sure a rev limiter cut would hurt the time worse than a couple hundred more RPM.

[philly98540]

Nice discussion guys and monster torque numbers Thad! Congrats. For the shifting out of first and second gears, the E39 tach lags by a fair amount when the power comes up to this level. This makes you need to anticipate the shift sooner than what the tach displays. For first, I think I shift when the tack reads about 500 rpm under where I want to shift, and like 200 rpm less for second. After that its good. The stock ECU and Thads MS3 has the correct RPM and will cut off stuff via the rev limiter as needed, so at least that keeps things safe.

[tptrsn]

Good read Thad and Nate, now just get that LS fired up if you are looking for some big numbers!
Just a side note, my TIG'en is improving. I'm no longer melting holes thru the stainless exhaust pipe. The welds aren't nice pretty rows of dimes yet, more like puddles of dimes, LOL.

A puddle of dimes ain't too bad Jim! TIG sure requires practice. I practice it just for the fun of it sometimes.

And yes, I want to make some serious progress on the LS project this weekend if I'm able.

I read it,

Thanks for the earlier e85 info. I've been running it for around 1500 miles now, Great stuff, Hard to find, I now own a 55 gallon drum and 10, 5 gallon jugs just for it

Congrats on your persistence for reading all of that! Lol

I'm glad you're enjoying the E85 life. I sure hope it stays around, I love it too. And I find out new good stuff about it all the time for performance uses especially. At this point I'd really just like to run everything on it, even though I would have to fill up a bit more often.

I read it

So some fine tuning to even out the lumps could go a long ways, nice.

I got the idea from this video,

Your shifting strategy is solid right now, as I’m sure a rev limiter cut would hurt the time worse than a couple hundred more RPM.

I've done a couple rounds of pulling fuel from the top end, and it does feel like maybe the sharp dropoff in torque has been alleviated some. At least I understand the benefit of the new AFR target I'm shooting for now, and it will allow me to push the fuel system a bit further too. Previously I really didn't understand there was such a big difference in power production between 11:1 and 11.7:1-ish. The difference seems to be bigger than it is with gasoline.

And thanks for that video. I'm still pondering it because torque vs. horsepower stuff, but I think it makes good sense in terms of gear change points. My 3-4 shift point might be best stretched out a bit further.

Nice discussion guys and monster torque numbers Thad! Congrats. For the shifting out of first and second gears, the E39 tach lags by a fair amount when the power comes up to this level. This makes you need to anticipate the shift sooner than what the tach displays. For first, I think I shift when the tack reads about 500 rpm under where I want to shift, and like 200 rpm less for second. After that its good. The stock ECU and Thads MS3 has the correct RPM and will cut off stuff via the rev limiter as needed, so at least that keeps things safe.

Thanks Chris, that tach lag issue makes perfect sense now that you mention it!! Before I raised my rev limiter years ago, one of my biggest annoyances with the 540 was the fact that I was always bumping into the rev limiter at the top of 1st gear, when it seemed that I was nowhere near it... As it is now, 7k seems to be fine. It's far enough past the beginning of the torque ledge that I rarely hit the limiter now.

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Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing.....

As of yesterday afternoon driving the 540 around for nothing other than fun for a couple of hours, I actually REALLLY enjoyed it and don't want to sell it.