21 Feb The Wire
Today’s project happenings are down to the wires — quite literally.
We’ll start with that E60 engine swap taking place in our service department. If you’re unfamiliar, engine failure befell this poor 5-series, and we’ve been tasked with transplanting a new heart into this Bavarian so it can romp around on the asphalt for (hopefully) a very, very long time. When we last left this job, the old motor was removed from beneath the car along with the subframe. We’ve removed the motor from the subframe, and have been spending quite a few hours swapping over the necessary parts onto the new 6-pot.
From there, we put the old motor aside and dropped the new one onto the subframe for reinsertion into the vehicle.
With all the new pieces installed on the new motor, we started the process of placing the vehicle’s body back over the motor. Since things may have moved ever so slightly during reinstallation, we have to go slowly and check the clearances from every angle to make sure that not a single wire gets stuck between the motor and the body. People over cars, people under cars — you name a location, odds are somebody is there with a light making sure the engine is reinstalled without issue.
A little while and some elbow grease later, the motor is reinstalled in the vehicle! That’s not the end of it, though. Now it’s down to the, erm, wire, as we have to reinstall a good number of parts and reattach all the wiring we had to disconnect. But, in theory, the hard part is all done and it should be smooth sailing from here on out.
In other wiring-related news, Alex’s LS-swapped Subaru WRX has moved from fabrication to service as Keller begins to work on the wiring. Seeing as how this motor isn’t designed for this body from the factory, we’ll have to get a little creative with some of the wires, but we’ll be utilizing the stock LS1 DME to power the vehicle as it’s a relatively flexible platform that should allow for a good bit of tuning to take place. This one may take a little while, but we want to make sure every wire is run to the best of our ability — no shortcuts, no jury rigging. We’ll keep you tuned into what happens!
Have a great day and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
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