biz77

Check with:
Schroefsets - voor alle merken - Pagina 2 | Stroevemotorsport.nl
and
Coilover Kits / Coilovers from Bilstein, Gaz, Tein, Nitron, Eibach, KW, AST, AVO & BC

Booyaazaa

You might want to look at your LPFP and HPFP act since usually running E mixes above E30/40 is not safe. When I logged mixes above E40 my LPFP would drop to 50 psi which is making my HPFP drop down to 1600 psi. You might be able to run a E50 mix for a little bit however it's best to stick to a properly tuned E30/40 map until Steve at fuelit comes up with a LPFP upgrade bucket. Just my 2 cents.

biz77

I've been monitoring both, however because I'm not yet probing for considerably more power, I'm not terribly concerned. As long as both the LPFP and HPFP are properly functioning to begin with (mine seemed to be) there is plenty of headroom in the stock fuel system to supply E50 at basic stage 1 power levels. So far the lowest I've seen the LPFP dip to is 68 psi and HPFP to 2,200 psi. As I start cranking up the power, I will be keeping a closer eye on it.

biz77

Results are in and they are exactly what I was hoping for. Reducing the aggressiveness of the CAT compensation tables has returned my missing power in warmer temperatures. The following two runs were performed back-to-back in 90 degree F temps.


90 Degree ambient temps E50 with CAT compensation adjusted.

Now it’s time to try and make some additional power. I’m going to start with bumping timing up significantly to take advantage of the extra octane and in-cylinder cooling provided by the ethanol mix. As a starting point, I will be using Cobb’s E30 race map main timing table simply copied and pasted into my Stage I aggressive map that has already been altered to account for the E50 fuel scaling and the less aggressive CAT timing reductions. This results in a nice bump in power:


68 and 75 degree ambient temps E50 with CAT compensation and main timing table adjusted.

Up next, I will alter fueling to see if leaning the mixture out can gain a bit more power before I start bumping up requested load. I will be back at it next week, but for now gasoline is going back in the tank and the AccessPORT will be unmarried from the car for the dealer visit on Friday. I’m hoping to tackle some more paint refurbishing and perhaps adding a couple of new cosmetic additions over the weekend.

corey

Check with ModBargains as well. I'm sure they'll work with you on a deal and match or come close.

biz77

I was able to tackle another couple of sections worth of paint correction recently. This time I focused my attention on the rear quarter panels, which ranged in condition from poor to terrible. The driver’s side panel showed even scratching and marring that came out fairly quickly with two passes on my proven 8” Lake Country yellow wool pad/rotary polisher/ HD Uno polish combo. This was followed up with a new combination of an Optimum 5.25” microfiber polishing pad/rotary/HD Uno combo. The final finish was every bit as good as what I was getting with the Lake Country orange pads. So far I’m too impressed with the pads. They seem to grab the surface much more aggressively than the foam pads and they cake up with polish more quickly. I’ve tried varying the amount of polish, but I have not found an amount that makes this combination easy for me to use. I think I will be going back to finishing up with the orange foam for now.
Here is the driver’s side panel. Pretty neglected…



Here’s a 50/50 showing the progress (with my shadow in the way)


The passenger side was quite a bit worse. This marring in particular was very bad. Check out how there is no definition to the light reflection, just a blob of light.


I thought for sure I would be reaching for the sand paper again with this spot, but to my surprise I was able to get it out with two passes on my trusty combo. Check out the light with sharp edges on the left side vs. the blob on the right of this 50/50 shot.

535DREAMER

Looking like a good thread. Cant wait to see more.

biz77

My car spent Friday at BMW having the infamous electric thigh bolster issue being looked at as well as a non-functioning mid/tweeter combo in the passenger front door. Fortunately the CPO warranty covered the seat. Unfortunately it doesn’t cover the stereo system. The silver lining here is the issue was not nearly as bad as I thought it was. My fear was that the IC output for that channel in the main CCC unit was toast; however the real issue was that for some unknown reason, a previous owner was inside the passenger door tinkering and clearly had no business in there. They ended up busting the connectors for both the speakers and the puddle lights. My local dealer (Camp BMW) took care of this and got both fixed up properly and functioning for under $100.
Shame on Kuni BMW for offering this as a CPO vehicle. The two issues above should have disqualified it based on the CPO checklist available for download on the BMW USA website. If you live near the Portland area, I would steer clear of this dealership if you are looking for a pristine condition CPO BMW. They did not disclose any of the issues about this car when I started working with them over the phone. I flew from Spokane to Portland (~400 miles) to pick this car up based on the salesperson’s assessment of this being a pristine car. I discovered the flaws with the car only when I arrived at the dealer and had time to look it over carefully. Fortunately the issues were minor enough for me to overlook once we agreed on a price, which was basically wholesale.

With my car going in to the dealership on Friday, I switched back over to our 92 octane fuel and unmarried the Cobb AccessPORT just in case. Once back home, the car was reflashed to a tweaked version of Cobb’s Stage 1 Aggressive map. It is basically small timing tweaks and a slight rework to the CAT table to reduce the aggressiveness of timing reduction based on charge air temps, although nowhere near what my E50 map tweaks were. Ultimately I was looking for a bit more power and saw an increase of 10-12 whp over the basic Stage 1 Aggressive map in 75 degree weather – nothing really to talk about, but what I did notice is that cylinder #4 seemed very unhappy pulling as much as 8.5 degrees of timing on a map requesting 7 degrees of timing. All other cylinders were perfectly happy. Cylinder #4 is occasionally noisy even when running moderate power with E50, telling me there is an issue with the plug or coil pack.
Since the car is sitting at 46,000 miles and has never had the plugs replaced I decided to order a fresh set of the OEM Bosch plugs from Amazon. I will start there to see if that cleans up cylinder #4’s behavior. If not, I’ll be moving coil packs around and possibly replacing.

Yesterday I was able to get back to our single local station that sells E85, E50 and E30. With a quarter tank of 92 octane left in the car from Friday’s fill up, I put in just over 5 gallons of E85 to get back to my desired ~E50 mix.
I left off E50 tuning with a big timing bump that resulted in decent gains of ~ 25WHP on average. My next step is to lean the fueling out from the Stage I Aggressive map’s requested .832 - .789 Lambda (12.23 – 11.6 AFR) in the high load columns from ~3,000 RPM – 7,000 RPM. I tweaked these cells to call for a .850 - .833 Lambda (12.5 – 12.25 AFR) in these same cells while smoothing out the transition areas into the lower load cells. I also made an effort to keep the 2,500 – 3,200 RPM range a bit richer as it seems to be helping boost onset and power.
The results are not staggering. These small tweaks net some small gains and as you can see in the graph below there is good consistency between runs despite a 15 degree ambient temperature swing.

Stage I Aggressive E50 Base with fuel and timing 65 and 80 degrees ambient.

Next up, I will be playing with the requested load cells to get some more boost and hopefully some more POWA! Based on previous experience with the N54 at my altitude (~2,500 ASL), I’m going to take a look at how good or bad the factory intake is as we push close to and perhaps beyond an additional 100 WHP over the stock configuration. I’m also going to start showing you some of the boxes the delivery man has been dropping off at my door step.

A quick recap on performance mods done to the car so far:
-Used Cobb AccessPORT V2 for the N54: $500.00.
-Approximately 2 hours of my time spent modifying maps and data logging.
Results so far: +82WHP Peak gains and +114 lbs./ft. WTQ Peak gains.

Stock 92 octane 75 degrees ambient vs. Stage I Aggressive E50 with timing and fuel 80 degrees ambient

tonyb635

I'm surprised they had a car on their lot that had a finish in that condition. That in itself would have been enough to RUN!

biz77

Initial testing with the increased requested load table is thus far a letdown. Unfortunately the power band is lame. I used Cobb’s basic curve, just bumped up from a max requested load of 180 to 190. This resulted in small gains, but only over a small window between 3,500 and 5,000 RPM, despite boost being approximately 3 psi higher beyond 5,000 RPMs relative to the old MAP.

E50 Stage I Rev 1 vs. Stage I Aggressive E50 base with fuel and timing.

Note how late peak torque is coming on above. I decided to tackle this by increasing load requested in the lower cells to match load request in the mid-range cells of 190. The results are inconsequential. The drop in power is because I let off a bit on this run and then got back into it. Not important since I was really just looking at the 2,500 – 4,000 rpm range.

E50 Stage I REV 1 vs. E50 Stage I REV 2

I did notice on this run that my AFRs stayed much leaner than the last run, which could be contributing to the lack of positive results. Based on the logs and looking through the tables in AccessTUNER Race the only issue I could see was that the car was holding onto spool mode longer on some runs. My initial thought was to limit this by lowering the spool mode max rpm from the default 3,000 RPM down to 2,400 RPM. This should allow the DME to work from the main fuel, timing and load tables more quickly. When I logged this map revision it looked like I cracked the code and picked up about 20ft. lbs of torque around 3,000 RPM.

E50 Stage I REV 2 85 degrees ambient vs. E50 Stage I REV 3 65 degrees ambient

You’ll soon see in subsequent runs that I lost this slight boost in low-end torque. I’m still trying to dig in and figure out why ( I suspect the 20 degree cooler weather was the biggest contributor), but based on AFR results in all subsequent runs so far the car appears to be moving out of spool mode and richening up much faster as the car comes into boost now.