These were literary the words from mother Marleen, who finally believes everything will come together, and who are we to disagree?
For more than 4 years she is front row witness of al the action. Not really because she is interested in the technical stuff, but she supplies us all the time with cookies,coffee, pasta, vol au vent, subs,… and lots of Pepsi Max. Numerous times she declared us completely crazy, or best case she returned home under ones breath. So you can imagine what a relief this quote was for us.
And maybe she is right, we are crazy but the most important thing is that the BMW start to look as a car.
We didn’t finish the exhaust yet but we already want to show some pictures.
The front part and the rear muffler are ready. This only leaves us to finish the center part. We have also made a mould so it is easy to duplicate the exhaust line.
Some wires dangles already for months at the underside of the car desperately waiting to find a home in one or another connector housing. All of them are labeled with a piece of paper tape, handwritten with some kind of cryptic description that dates from a previous life. At least that’s how it looks like. Cut, gearpot, GBtemp, lambda, rev, … Luckily it still rings a bell for some of us.
Time to clean this and fix the permanent labels before we become gaga.
That not everything is going like clockwork on a project like the R-Box BMW is unfortunately inevitable. So every now and then a skeleton drops out of the closet and with united forces and minds we need to come up with a solution. We thought about the opportunity to set the “ hold “ RPM from the launch controller using a 10 positions switch. We thought it would be a nice feature considering that Belgian weather is not very reliable and grip conditions even less.
Minor detail for this implementation : we had to sacrifice that one analogical input for the pedal sensor of the throttle controller. DTA has a solution for this problem in the S80 and S100 but unfortunately not for the S60. Seeing that there’s no big demand for this, a firmware update hasn’t been scheduled for the near future. Bad luck for us.
So we had 2 options: 1; we forget about the launch control setting. 2; we switch to an S100. After weighing the pro’s and con’s we choose option 2. Doing so would let us make some more modifications. Seeing the S60 is intended for an engine with 4 cylinders and we have 8 injectors we were forced to control them by the pair. Using the S100 things change and we will also immediately install a camshaft sensor so that we’ll be able to control the coils and injectors sequentially. This will not increase the power of the car but we hope to reduce fuel consumption.
So yet again.. some more cables in the cable tree and a new ECU.
We had already stopped counting the indignant looks and remarks about our flashy antenna. Admittedly … we’ve even been contemplating to keep it as it seemed to be a real eye catcher. After wise consideration though, we’ve decided to install a little more civilized version and “ the hunchback” will be relocated to our service truck were the dimensions are a bit more in perspective.
Because we still want to be able to control certain functions after being strapped in we’ve installed a little switchboard on the tunnel. Nothing spectacular but we only need a few basics.
Initially we had the idea to hide a jumpstart connector behing the fuel tank door. This way we should be able to start the car without opening the hood in case of problems with the battery. Since we chose to use a big gel battery this option was abandoned.
Instead we use this location to hide the air lock from the fuel tank. Putting this at the rear of the car was not really an option because there is too much vacuum so the fuel is being drained from the tank…
Sometimes a solution can be very simple, unfortunately most manufacturers don’t aim to please! Basically this story had ended but our 45 degree rotating disc to place the TPS sensor onto the actuator wasn’t state of the art production. We thought it would be so simple that we wouldn’t even have to bother our mechanical guru Nick but nothing could be further from the truth.
To avoid having to admit that I had been premature about the simplicity of the installation I thought I could remake the axle of the actuator and rotate the cogwheel 45 degrees. Apparently this was more complicated than we thought and manufacturer Jenvey wasn’t really up to it. Another even more simple solution would be that instead of having 2 fixation points for the sensor they would foresee multiple fixation points but yet again our UK manufacturer wasn’t feeling up to it. Strange actually when you think of it because the easier to use the more they would be able to sell them. Because there’s was no collaboration from the UK we were forced to become creative yet once more and we moved the sensor to the back and made a joining piece with a 45 degree twist. Unfortunate but couldn’t be helped. Plus side is that we now can use an P&G sensor.
