335D E91 Touring Project

balinm · June 28

Not much progress on the wagon in the last wee while, moved house and jobs so plenty on with all that. The new place has a garage! Pretty excited about this, a nice dry place for the wagon to live and a place to work on it too.

Anyways, todays progress was a transmission service. Dropped the pan and valve body, replaced the 4 sleeve seals and bridge seal and threw it all back together with a new pan. Also replaced the mechatornic sleeve while I was at it. I used Penrite BMV which looks to work with Lifeguard 6 spec, will see how this goes in the coming months. The old fluid was very clean, I believe it was replaced before I bought the car. Was an interesting project having never dropped a valve body before this. Cool to see the inner workings of an auto box. Overall was a pretty easy job, dropping the trans brace and exhaust hanger helped to get to the mechatronic plug.

Will give this a few weeks of driving before throwing an XHP tune at it, have heard good things about the tune, looking forward to seeing the results.

Big thanks to Tony at TPD for coming in on a Saturday to use a hoist for this one.

balinm · Sunday at 08:12 AM

About time for another update.

XHP - In my last post I mentioned I was going to drive it for a couple of weeks before throwing Xhp at it. Yeah nah not a chance, managed to wait all of 4 days before buying a license and flashing it. I started with stage 2 and quickly moved to stage 3, now just playing around with the settings, mainly torque reduction, rev limiters to match the dyno graph power, torque limiters and all those similar. Definitely made a big difference in waking up the gearbox, even in D it feels much more modern. Having a gear indicator in D and S is also nice too. Will keep playing around with the settings and see how it goes.

Heated Seats - I found a set of dakota leather heated sport seats on marketplace and decided it would be a worthy upgrade for the wagon. A little bit of leather cleaner and conditioner softened them up and I threw them in. Still a bit of work left to go here, need to add in the extra wiring on the car side of the wiring loom as well as source an LCI IHKA for the heated seat buttons and figure out the coding. The seats also came with lumbar adjustment which is kind of nice.

Wheel Spacers - The car already had a set of 12mm spacers on the rear, but it left a lot of be desired in both front and rear wheel fitment. I bought another pair of 20mm spacers to test out on the rear and switch the 12mms to the front. The front is now sorted, very happy with the fitment and no rubbing at all. Will lower it a touch to match the rear too. The rear still has a bit to go, with only 225s on an 8.5" wheel there is some stretch which I need to get rid of, once I get some 255 or 265s it'll help a lot.

CP3 R90 Pump - An R90 popped up on FB and I couldn't help myself, don't see many floating around and this one was from darkside developments and has been refurbed already. Will pop it on the shelf and install later on down the line. To make any use of this I'll need to retune so I'm not in a rush on this one. Unfortunastely the connector on the fuel control valve is damaged and the seller didn't know at the time because it was still wrapped up, however I believe the valve is the same on the R70 so I should be able to reuse it, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Water pump and thermostat - The m57 thermostats seem to slowly open earlier and earlier over time so that the engine never makes it to operating temp. Mine was ok but thermostat was opening at 83-84. Also replaced the water pump while I was there, the M57 pumps seem to be ok but they have a plastic impeller that is eventually going to die with all the heat cycling, replaced it with a metal impeller version. Overall the job was pretty straightforward. The waterpump did come with an extra nipple on it that isn't used on this car, easy fix by chopping off the end and tapping it for a 1/8" NPT fitting. A bung and some thread sealant later and we were back on track. The AC belt also caused some issue, given I hadn't read ahead to see that I would need a special tool to turn over the crank it took us much longer than expected to get the belt on. The final solution involved Tony under the car with two prybars turning the flywheel through hatch in the bottom of the bellhousing while I used a screwdriver to get the crank to grab onto the belt. A bit like mounting a tire. This all turned out to be a total waste of time, on my way home I flicked the ac on and noticed it not getting cold. Turns out the belt had shredded itself and got thrown off the pulley. The belt that came off was 5mm longer but the one we mounted was correct on realoem, will try the 5mm longer one and see how things go. Now that I've gone back to look at realoem it looks like there were two options an 830mm and an 836mm, the latter being forthe s1cba co2 package, which seems like a co2 refridgerant version? I've got R134a so I'm not sure why the 830mm won't fit.