Alright, made a lot of progress on a bunch of little things over the past couple months. To start out, my buddy Brian and I figured out the sync-loss issue. I took a variety of different logs while it was running, sent them off to DIY, and did some looking ourselves. On these cars, they can have signal break-up at high RPM, which can be solved by wiring a 10k resistor inline with the crank sensor. Since the toothed wheel is a 60-2 (2 missing teeth), the problem is the MegaSquirt will see a "phantom tooth," so it won't send a signal, since it is only seeing one missing tooth. The resistor can clean up that signal, but it didn't totally solve our problem. We ended up adjusting the trim pots for trim on the crank signal, didn't need to adjust hysteresis, and got it running nicely.
Another MegaSquirt problem was a discrepancy between the AFR readings that were on the AEM gauge, vs what the MegaSquirt was seeing. This ended up being fixed by moving the O2 sensor ground to the same place as the MegaSquirt. There is a little bit of calibration to be done still, but most of the problem is fixed. The rest of our issues are going to be purely tuning related, I hope.
Moving on to the other progress:
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I got in contact with an old school Hot Rod/VW guy just a few miles away from me who has a home-built hydraulic press and dies for stamping louvers. I've always liked the look of hood vents, and I know this kind of hood vent hasn't really been done much in the BMW community. I also know it got quite a lot of hate on one of the E30 Facebook groups, but I think there were as many or more people that did like them. Here is a picture of the hood on the car:
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Regardless of the looks, these vents are functional. E30s are known for high-pressure air building up under the hood, causing front end lift at high speed, and also limiting flow through the radiator. I kept the vents far enough forward of the dead-zone that happens at the base of the windshield, and the vents start immediately after the radiator, and over the intake and exhaust. Should be very helpful for heat management.
Next, part of the look I've always wanted for this car, is putting on euro grilles, instead of the US spec ones. They have kind of an eyebrow over the headlights, which gives a more aggressive appearance. They normally cost $90-$100 used, but I found a guy selling a bunch of sets for about $90 AUS, which translated to around $55 USD. Couldn't resist, so I picked them up:
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The car is apart right now, will post a picture once they are installed. Third to last: I'm not tuning the car at the moment, because I sent off the gauge cluster to a guy in California who rebuilds them for a reasonable cost, and also puts in some cool cosmetic changes. That should be back within two weeks. Found him through Instagram, his name is @e30_dad if anyone wants to take a look at his work.
Second to last: My Christmas gift to me this year was a Tig Welder! Ordered an AHP AlphaTig 200X, and a starter kit of cups and collets. The welder should be here next week, it was lost in the mail for a couple days.
Lastly, I got motivated this weekend to pull the Air conditioning out of the car. Took out the compressor, condenser, auxiliary fan, and all the lines in the engine bay, which pulled about 50 pounds off the nose of the car. While doing that, I decided now is as good a time as any to upgrade the cooling system, so I also pulled the stock clutch fan and radiator, and replaced the thermostat. Have a SPAL 16" pusher fan, and a Mishimoto all aluminum radiator in the mail. There is a lot more room than I thought in the front of this car now that the A/C is gone, should leave plenty of room for an intercooler:
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Current plan is to clean 30 years of grime out from where the A/C components were, and start planning out wiring for the electric fan until parts get here.