MyE28.com

Well,
my car is at Edge Motorsports for the swap as of 4/12.

Ill be getting some pics when the engine comes out. As soon as the b35 is in, Ill start on the harness modifications and install there.

RussC

Im finally starting the re-wiring of the car tomorrow, 4/21. This will be the most difficult portion of the job, as I don't know what is what yet on where to splice things together. I'll have a much better idea tomorrow.

I hope to have a picture update a few days after.

RussC

Ok,
Engine is out, engine wiring harness is out and all the piggybacks are un-hooked. Pics....
Empty bay


Un-hooked IC, condensor


Old engine on stand


All the parts on a roller bench


Turbo and manifold are in really good shape. I thought there would be more gunk, rust and crap. But they are very clean





This is the bigge. The 17pin connecor is C101.



That is the interface conn for the fuse box. many of the dash signals go through that conn. Plus the fuel pump power and some other bits. That will have to be connected to the C101 of the E30 M20 harness which is a large round 20pin connector. I will be doing that tomorrow along with the A/C signals. I hope to have this M20 harness completely modified and ready for install except for one signal.

More later....
RussC

Hey mate, looks like ur about to have a hole HEAP of fun.
The wiring in my car is finally finish! The car should be being started for the first time tmw Oh yeah! The computer just has to be pluged in and battery connected. I just used the e34 harness, the guy that wired it just cut off the round plug and mated the other square plug to it, somehow, i dont no. We found that the e34 harness had different colour wires to the wiring diagrams that we found (outa bently manual) and i was unable to find one for euro 2.8. So there was a lot of buzzing out sensor and stuff, but didnt not take to long. My latest little hitch is the cooling systems differences and trying to connect up the heater. Should not be too hard tho. Good luck with it buddy. Hope its not too much of a pain in the ass for u

hello,

i'm running an s38b36 M5 motor in my e28 with the original E34 M5 harness
i did the conversion myself(completely) and i had no problems at all...
think that it was a poor 518i...

M535 E28 wrote:hello,

i'm running an s38b36 M5 motor in my e28 with the original E34 M5 harness
i did the conversion myself(completely) and i had no problems at all...
think that it was a poor 518i...

So the main ECU harness was long enough to reach through the firewall to the stock ECU mounting location?

RussC

Ok.....updates,
The engine is finished being built, the M30b35 is ready to install




On to the wiring harness...
The next pic shows C101 being installed with the E28 C101.

The round conn by the dikes is the E30 C101. Its just cut off and the wires are stripped to solder to the E28 C101 pictured in the prior post. The E28 conn is 17pin, the E30 and all other later BMWs use this round water tight 20 pin conn. On the E30, there are 2 unused pins, and the third is SRS diag pin. The SRS has no function for a E28(no supplemental restraint system) so there are 17pins to E28 17 pins. A close up of the solder process,

The finished product,



There is a number of ways to go with this haness, I decided to go with keeping as much of the original harness in tact as possible. So, I used the C103 from the E28 harness and spliced that into the E30 harness,


The white 6 pin conn in the bottom of the picture is the interface from the ECU to the instrument cluster, OBC and cruise control. I also carries some auto tranny signals like park/neutral switch, shift timing retard and lockup. Since my car is a manual, it only has 3 signals, engine RPM, fuel rate ouput and OBC code ingnition kill. The code kill is a power signal from the OBC that powers the main relay. So, if you set your anti-theft code in the OBC, the car will never start, as the OBC will never give power to the main relay. I wired these signals from the ECU side of the harness to C103. That way the E28 harness stays as stock. This way the whole harness can be removed and a stock harness installed with no modifications.

The large red wire from the ECU end is power I added to power my piggyback computers, J&S knock controller, SAFC-II, LM-1 wideband O2 and the AVC-R boost controller. Im the piggyback king. The two red conns in the middle are the splice are for the SAFC-II. This is the AFM signal cut so the SAFC-II can take the incomming AFM voltage and modify it and send it back to the ECU.

Next is the wired in TPS unit. This one has the resistive type TP sensor for the SAFC-II. The red conns are the interface for that. The WOT and idle switchers are soldered into the harness. The round conn at the bottom of the pic is the connection for the injectors and coolant temp sensors. The E30 has a pluggable harness for those, kinda strange.


Tjhe finished harness in all its glory...


And, my old harness completely destroyed to make this install happen..


There are a few other issues that had to be dealt with also. Ill list them breifly here.
1) The oil level sender unit in the oilpan for the Active Check Control. There are different connectors from the E30/E34 to the E28. Since the one on the b35 was cut, I used the one that was in my pan. But, I don't know if the E34 unit will even fit in the E28 oilpan?
2) The O2 sensor conns are different also. The E30/E34 uses a 4 pin round conn and the E28 a 3pin. Since Im not using a narrow O2 at all(using the LM-1 narrow ouput), I just cut the conn off and wired in a soldered wire going to the LM-1. In a NA install that uses the stock O2, you'll have to make a decision if you want to use the overpriced BMW O2 with the correct conn or install some other for a more affordable unit?
3) Starter throw out solinoid signal conn is different from the E30/E34 to the E28. I soldered in the E28 ring lug.
4) There is one signal in the E30 C101 that the E28 doesn't. The E30 has the ground pin for the oil level sender in the harness. If you use the E30/E34 oil level sensor, you will need to hook up this GND signal separate. I added the conn for it, but don't need it since Im using the E28 sensor which grounds through the engine block.
5) Depnding on the year of E28, you may have to make more modifications than I to the C101. Specifically the car speed signal and MIL(malfunction indicator lamp). The 179 ECU uses car speed signal. As a side note, it may be that the earlier M1.1(150 ECU) didn't use it, but this is unconfirmed. But, my car is 5/87 build date. Since it is such a late build, the later chasis harness has the wiring in it for the later OBD-I 528e. The after 5/87 E28 chassis's are all wired for the later ECUs so there would only have to be 1 harness. I got lucky and the car speed/MIL wiring is in the car already, just not used. This made the wiring easier as I didn't have to run those separately. When I pulled the dash pod, there was the wiring for speed sensor to the E28 C101 and the MIL setting right there. Just plug in a lamp to the MIL socket and splice the speed sensor output from C3 to the C101 wiring. Easy.
6) The OBD-I computers use two signals for A/C input to the ECU. These are compressor "on" and A/C "on". Specifically one signal tells the ECU the compressor is actually runing at pressure and the other that A/C has been turned on respectively. Why it does it this way, I don't know. But, to be completely compatable, I removed the one line that the E28 uses which is compressor "on" from the E28 harness and installed it in the E30 harness. The A/C "on" signal needs to be added once the harness is in the car. That splice will be put in later. I guess you can wire the two together and run it from the compressor "on" signal? But Im doing it the way BMW intended it to work. Its the installers discretion.

I have all this info in notes. I will make a schematic for this stuff later when I have more time.

RussC

Oh man,
Its been a while for this. I'll have a quick update now and pics later.

Essentially Im doing the harness over again with a E34 harness. Big advice here, DON'T USE A E30 HARNESS. It fits like crap and looks bad. It looked so bad and needed so much preping, not to mention a entire ECU re-positioning, I ripped it out yesterday and am using the E34 harness. The biggest issues are strain relief and ECU placement.

First, the harness fits like crap everywhere. Stain relief in the engine bay is very difficult. There no where to strap stuff under the intake manifold and the fuel inj harness mounts to nothing. It just looks like crap, even worse than the original harness.

Second, the ECU harness in the glove box area is way too long. The ECU would have needed a bracket do you could spin it and wrap the harness length around the ECU box. No way no how Im doing that.

So I ripped it out and fit checked the E34 harness. The ECU harness is PLENTY long enough. There are no issues at all. And the amount of work to get the C101 at the fuse box done and the other bits are the same as the E30 harness. And the E34 fits the engine perfectly and has the appropriate strain relief where its needed.

I should have this harness convereted by Tue. and installed on Wed 5/7.

Pics to come tomorrow....

RussC

Hey Russ,

Welcome to the world of huge projects! Looks like you are doing a great job. I cannot wait to see the results. You should be able to max out the H3 wheel now!

Todd

The car runs.....It actually started first time. There was no coolant in the system so it ran for ~20seconds. The Edge Motorsports guys first comment was "it runs so much smoother than the other engine". Yep, it sure did. It was very pleasing to hear it run.

Couple of older pics from ~2 weeks ago,
First is the dash. The left led is the new "Check Engine" light, the other is the ABS. The BLU/WHT wire is the vehicle speed out put that only the later '88 E28 had in the harness. This is the one signel I had to splice to run the new 179 ECU.


Pic of the 179 DME. A truley modern ECU with surface mount components and multi layer PCB.


Engine installed for the first time 2 weeks ago.


Close up of the relays from the E30 harness. These are gone as this harness is gone and the E34 harness is installed and running.


Ill have some more in-deth informatice info later, I hope to get the car moving tomorrow with coolant.

RussC

Congratulations!!!!

That has to feel great to finally hear it run.

russc wrote:The car runs.....It actually started first time.

No crap, I wish I could say the same with mine. I was a very frustrating period of time before mine ran well.

Congratulations!

russc wrote:

M535 E28 wrote:hello,

i'm running an s38b36 M5 motor in my e28 with the original E34 M5 harness
i did the conversion myself(completely) and i had no problems at all...
think that it was a poor 518i...

So the main ECU harness was long enough to reach through the firewall to the stock ECU mounting location?

RussC

exactly...ecu mounted at original location

one point: the speed signal output from the e28's instrument cluster is analog and i think that the 179 ecu needs digital signal
i had problems with this...ecu runs in safe mode(6000rpm limiter)
anyway i bought a custom pulse generator producing 63hz square pulse(50km/h constant speed) in order to solve this problem and remove the 250km/h speed limiter
i'll test it this week
if you have more information about this i'd be glad to hear it

Hey,
The car runs on its own power, but just in the parking lot. I didn't go faster than 5mph. But it moves.

M535 E28,
OK,
Thats good info. I haven't run the car fast enough to see if theres an issue. What your saying sound plausible. Ill look into it. A simple signal conditioner would work also, like a schmidt trigger circuit. It sounds like these DMEs have all sorts of limp modes. Great.

RussC

this is a common issue with m50,m52,s50,s52,s38b36/38 engines when used in e30/e28 chassis...so i think the same for the b35
the signal coming from the diff is the same for all bmws but, the e32/e34/e36 instrument cluster converts it before sends it to the ecu

about the ecu: as i saw from your pic 179 has one board
today i opened my fathers 150 ecu and i realized that it has two boards...what is the difference between them?

M535 E28 wrote:this is a common issue with m50,m52,s50,s52,s38b36/38 engines when used in e30/e28 chassis...so i think the same for the b35
the signal coming from the diff is the same for all bmws but, the e32/e34/e36 instrument cluster converts it before sends it to the ecu

about the ecu: as i saw from your pic 179 has one board
today i opened my fathers 150 ecu and i realized that it has two boards...what is the difference between them?

OK,
Again, that could make sense, but.....

Looking at the schematics from BMW, it shows the speed signal from the diff going into the IC that runs the speedometer. The signal that drives the ECU, cruise control and OBC is a separate signal from that same IC. Is it conditioned, I don't know. If Im motivated enough, I might o-scope it and see what it looks like. Im 90% sure the Bentley shows the 528e w/150 ECU has the speed input to the ECU as un-connected. If thats correct or not, again, Im not sure. We would need to see a super ETA '88 to see if thats really the case.

If the 150 ECU is a pancake PCB setup like the older 059/080, then its probably very similar to those older ECUs but with updated software that is OBD-I(error codes and possibly live data). I know the 150/153 ECUs were a '88 interim ECU that bridged the gap to the later 173/179 fully OBD-I ECUs until the E30(M1.3), E36, E34/E32(w/V8s). My pressumption is the differences are minor in the software and large from the hardware.

RussC

i didn't know super etas had the 150 ecu...
my father's 150 is from an 89 m30b35

also check this site about speed signal

http://www.kempower.be/indexe.htm
race preparation->kempower electronics->bmw m speedometer simulation

ok, what i've been told was completely crap

today i connected the plug coming from the "tempo" pin behind the speedometer, to the black/white going to the ecu (pin 29)...
and guess what: my rev limiter climbed at 7500 rpm
so, there's no problem at all

stefan

OK,
Update, it been a long trip.

First, Ive been trying to get the car to stop going into a idle limp mode. While it is a "limp mode" per say, it doesn't effect drivabilty at all if idling at 1k rpm is considered bad. The 179 ECU is not happy with the narrow band output of the LM-1 controller. Ive tried many settings, some work better than others. Ive got it to where it idles right at 14.7:1 and it gives MIL but they go away. It gives fault 1222, which is idles rich/lean for more than 10seconds error. Funny, but the wide band is telling my it is idling right at stochio w/o fail. Ive found some settings that work better. Mostly adjusting the SAFC-II to give more fuel at idle. This made the most difference so far and only gives the error ~once every 4-5 minutes of just idling. It idles great, but after a while it goes into what I call fail safe idle limp. It pumps up the idle to 1k and runs with the last known good adaptation value, which of course is stochio.

The ECU will dither fuel at idle ~ once every 30 seconds, then stops. The MIL will not come on all the time though. It seems it doesn't want to dither the idle. Then all of a sudden does. Anyway, I may give up on this and install a O2 sensor. Its obvious that the ECU monitors the O2 voltage in the non-linear areas and makes decisions on fueling from it, regardless what the admin at Innovate say. Since the LM-1 narrow output can never similutate the O2 properly(or completely), Im 80% sure it may never work.

One interesting thing. When I first got the car going at Edge, since the car was running lousy at first with SAFC-II changes and idle issues, when I drove it around, the idle was OK, but cruise was pig rich, 10:1. There was a MIL light, but it when out, so we thought if the MIL turns off, it must be running OK. Well, NO. When we hooked up the X431 diag tool, there were 4 faults set, AFM error, coolant temp error, O2 error and Lamba control error. We reset the errors and the car immediately re-adapted and ran fine. I though if the MIL is off, then there are no limp modes. Nope, even thought the light is off, it will still run limp modes depending on the error!!!

Pics.
The engine bay, the E34 cleans it up a bit,


Backside of engine w/diag conn.


Heres the pic of the main harness. As you can see the harness reaches OK. Threre is still some left in the interior if you need to pull some more out.



More,


As you can see, the harness runs right where the ground strap should mount to the firewall. Well, its a nightmare to get this to happen, so two new GND wires were made. The bolt and eye conns are the harness GND that is run to a bolt on the old air filter bracket. The other harness is to the engine from there.



Pic of the fues box and new harness for C101, this brings the dash/interior signals into the cockpit.


Another shot, with the ground strap for the oil level sensor.


Another, this is the ugly side of the engine with all the wires and such for the master cylinder/bomb, fuse box etc. Notice the nice welded bracket that will get painted in the future for the diag 20pin conn.



Oh my, the interior. This is a mess right now. I have not bundled it all up yet an make it look pretty. This is the nighmare because im the piggyback boy. Theres the wiring for the SAFC-II, J&S knock controller, LM-1 and AVC-R boost contoller all in there...


Plus the main/fuel relays and the +12V connection..what a mess. Ive got my work cut out for me.


So, today I made some more adjustment with the SAFC-II. With getting the throttle crossover point decent and the right amount of fuel change, the car made 0.42AT(Kg/cm2)...Oh OK, 5.5psi in 3rd. AFR was 12:1. Car felt good. That is very good also, there was no knock at all. That is big as I have the stock chip(lots of advance) in it and no knock controller hooked up. Beautifull!!!!

Cant wait to get this 5x5 and get some real run time in. More updates shortly...

RussC

RussC could you please post the cable colors for the oil level sensor? (b35+e28 harness)
tell me exactly how you connected it

M535 E28 wrote:RussC could you please post the cable colors for the oil level sensor? (b35+e28 harness)
tell me exactly how you connected it

I wired it
E34_____________________E28
BLU/YEL-oil level low________BLU/WHT-dynamic/low
BLU/WHT-oil level full________BLU/VIO-static/full

Edit: The oil level GND is either a seprate wire with another conn or grounds through the oil pan depending on engine type.

RussC

russc wrote:

M535 E28 wrote:RussC could you please post the cable colors for the oil level sensor? (b35+e28 harness)
tell me exactly how you connected it

I wired it
E34_____________________E28
BLU/YEL-oil level low________BLU/WHT-dynamic/low
BLU/WHT-oil level full________BLU/VIO-static/full
BRN/ORG-oil level GND______N/A

The oil level GND I grounded at the fuse box(see pic above). The E34 grounds this pin IN the dash. The E28 has no wire for that.

RussC

thanks a lot!
i missed the ground cable

russc,
i've searched three harnesses, one s38b36,one s38b38 and one m30b35 but there was not a brown/orange cable going to the dash...
are you sure about the color?

thanks again

Doh,
I missled you. Your right, there is no BRN/ORG for the oil level. I was thinking the BRN/YEL for the coolant temp sensor! Sorry.(Ill edit the above post)

Um, if you have the E34 oil level sender, it has a seprate GND on the conn for the sensor depending on engine type. It either goes to GND on the ground harness through another connector or grounds at the oil pan through the sensor itself.

RussC

ok, no confusion any more

in your car which cable was the ground?

M535 E28 wrote:ok, no confusion any more

in your car which cable was the ground?

Umm,
Ground for what? There are many GNDs. Most of which terminate at the two large eye lugs in the engine harness.

RussC

russc wrote:

M535 E28 wrote:ok, no confusion any more

in your car which cable was the ground?

Umm,
Ground for what? There are many GNDs. Most of which terminate at the two large eye lugs in the engine harness.

RussC

i mean the oil level ground, the one in the picture above
i'm asking you because in my car the oil level light is always on...

M535 E28 wrote:

russc wrote:

M535 E28 wrote:ok, no confusion any more

in your car which cable was the ground?

Umm,
Ground for what? There are many GNDs. Most of which terminate at the two large eye lugs in the engine harness.

RussC

i mean the oil level ground, the one in the picture above
i'm asking you because in my car the oil level light is always on...

OK,
There is only a seprate GND if you harness is from a 525i. Since I believe yours is not, then the sensor GNDs at the oil pan throught the sensor. There is no GND to hook up.

If the light is always on, do you have it wired wrong? You'll need to check the two lines to see if there is a problem with them. The ETK shows what state their suppose to be in for proper operation. Do you have that?

In light of that, unplug the sensor and take some voltage measurements with a DVM on both sides. See if its a voltage problem on the check control side, or a bad sensor.

RussC

all those piggy backs....man my head would be spinning

russc wrote:

M535 E28 wrote:

russc wrote:

M535 E28 wrote:ok, no confusion any more

in your car which cable was the ground?

Umm,
Ground for what? There are many GNDs. Most of which terminate at the two large eye lugs in the engine harness.

RussC

i mean the oil level ground, the one in the picture above
i'm asking you because in my car the oil level light is always on...

OK,
There is only a seprate GND if you harness is from a 525i. Since I believe yours is not, then the sensor GNDs at the oil pan throught the sensor. There is no GND to hook up.

If the light is always on, do you have it wired wrong? You'll need to check the two lines to see if there is a problem with them. The ETK shows what state their suppose to be in for proper operation. Do you have that?

In light of that, unplug the sensor and take some voltage measurements with a DVM on both sides. See if its a voltage problem on the check control side, or a bad sensor.

RussC

no, i don't have the ETK...but i can find it
ok, i'll check the lines and the sensor...
my harness is from M5 E34