Good to know. That area is difficult to measure for modeling purposes so I guestimated, I know for the shifter, having it further back will be important too.

 

I bolted up the t56, took off the truck oil pan and exhaust manifolds, and shoved the engine/trans into place. Generally everything fits pretty good (as expected since I'm not the first person to do this. Yesterday I spent a few hours making an transmission crossmember. This will help lock the combo in for/aft.

I made a little video of fabbing up the trans crossmember:

Now I'll be able to level up the engine side to side and start on the engine stands. I was going to make the passenger side, pretty much from the motor mount directly to the engine, but after seeing it in place, I'm going to try to give myself a little extra room for the A/C compressor. I'm hoping to use the stock BMW compressor in a similar location that the LS compressor is.

 

A little update:

Worked on designing the engine stands. There are lots of things to consider, so it took awhile to get the design down. I ended up moving everything 1/4" further forward, so I also had to make another trans crossmember. Everything fits just like its supposed to, but it is very tight around the gear box.

While designing the engine stands I also made a cardboard mock up of the GTO oil pan. I bolted it onto the engine and then was able to cut out the area on the cardboard piece and then transfer it to the real oil pan.

Once I got the trans crossmember, engine stands, and oil pan cut, I put it all back in to double check. The draglink is VERY close to the oil pan at full lock. I could move the trans tail shaft up a little (1/4") if I need additional room once its up and running. At this time I also took measurements for the new driveshaft. I'll get that ordered next week. It looks like I have room for a 3" diameter shaft with 1350 joints.

Then I took everything back apart, finished welding up the engine stands and trans crossmember.

I also took the bellhousing off the trans, as it has a small crack in it that I'm going to have welded when I get my oil pan welded back together.

For the clutch I have a new slave that I got a fitting from speedway to connect it using -3 AN fittings. Installed the slave onto the trans along with the remote bleeder. The BMW clutch uses a 1/4" brake line that I need to go get a few fittings for to adapt to the -3 fittings.

 

Your not wasting any time getting this car put together! Looking forward to seeing how it comes out. Sent you another PM on the 8.8 diff conversion.

S.F.

 

I removed the center console and the auto shifter as well as started digging down to swap out the pedals. The hydraulic line coming off the BMW MC is a 6mm line. I was hoping I could flare it with a 1/4" die (I have one of those eastwood brake flaring tool.....it's great) but the 6mm line is just ever too small to work. So I'm hoping a parts store cheapy flare tool will work....we'll see.

Next I installed the clutch onto the engine. I'm using a monster stage 3. Then I got the trans bolted back up to the engine. I also installed my pro5.0 shifter and started designing a shift handle that will bring it back and through the hole in the tunnel in the stock location. I'll have to do some additional measurements once I get the engine/trans back in before finalizing the design.

I picked up the oil pan from the welder last night, so it's ready to go back on. Engine stands and trans crossmember is painted and I'm going to pick up some allen head bolts tonight (tight clearance on the driver side). So later tonight the engine/trans should be in the car for what I hope will be for good.

Oh, I also got the V-band clamps that I'll be using in place of the manifold flanges. I don't think there will be enough room for the flanges if I wanted to use them. It will probably be this weekend by the time I get to the exhaust.

 

Figure I better update this.

Engine is in and running. I took the last week off and have busted butt getting it put in. I haven't driven the car yet. But I put it in gear while an inch off the ground and put it in gear. I don't have the headlights in, it iced/snowed here, and I don't have insurance on it right now, so those things have made driving it kind of a no go.

Here's a run down of what I did.

- Custom engine and trans mount as I showed

- Measured for the driveshaft and had a custom one made. It's 3-1/2" diameter with 1350 u-joints. It's connected to my Ford 8.8 rearend that is not really included in the swap.

- I welded V-band clamps on the stock truck manifolds. They're forward and down facing. The 2-1/2" pipe come down and then y together into a 3" pipe that runs towards the back of the car. This is all in preparation for the turbo. I'll have to re-do the y-pipe portion when the time comes and I may re-do a portion of the 3" exhaust, but it's super tight until I get down past the firewall.

For the power steering, the BMW pump uses a banjo fitting. I cut that off and had a -6AN fitting welded on and then connected that to the corvette power steering pump that already had a -6AN fitting adapter installed on it.

For the clutch line I installed a stock 5 series clutch pedal/MC. It uses a 6mm hydraulic line that I was able to put a double flare on and adapt to a -3AN line and run to the slave cylinder. I found an adapter that uses the o-ring fitting and roll pin to connect into the slave. To route the line, I found an existing hole in the floor to run the line through.

For the gas pedal, I made a plate that mounts to the BMW floor with an existing bolt and locates off another "stud" to hold it in place. It's a tight fit to for the brake pedal to not hit the gas pedal and still get full throttle. More on the gas pedal later.

For the radiator I had a used F-body radiator and e-fans. As I was starting to mount up the radiator I popped the cap off and man this thing was NASTY, so rather than trying to clean it out, I bit the bullet and bought a new one.

Then on to the wiring. Of course this took awhile as I knew it would. I used the information off of LT1swap.com to wire it up, great information there. I found a switched power source off the BMW, and found a wire from the ignition switch for the start wire. I wired up a relay that then runs down to the starter. I used a fuse/relay box i found on amazon. It has spots for 6 relays and 6 fuses. One relay runs all the switched circuits, 2 for the e-fans, and one for the starter. I also used the BMW fuel pump relay. Normally in the BMW, the ECM (aka DME in BMW lingo) grounds this relay to power the pump. After I found the darn fuel pump relay, I re-wired the relay to work with the GM ECM.

For the air intake, I found some 4" aluminum pipe, an elbow and a couple of 4x3.75 connectors to connect to the MAFS. I then modifiied the BMW airbox lid to accept the 4" pipe that I screwed/siliconed together. I looks nice, but I"m concerned that engine movement will pull the setup apart, so we'll see.

So the time came to test fire up the car (no exhaust, no cooling system). I flashed the ECM to turn off VATS as I've done with other swaps and nothing. So I did a little more reading and ended up having to turn off the start relay fault check or something like that. Then it fired to life. I ran it for just a few seconds. I did note that I didn't have any throttle response. Now when I wired up the gas pedal I had the wiring notes from LT1swap.com and found a diagram of the connector that goes to the gas pedal (aka APP) since the pin out wasn't imprinted anywhere on the connector I didn't realize that the diagram and the wiring notes didn't match. I went with the connector diagram initially, and when I re-wired it to the wiring notes, bam....I had throttle response.

Once I got the engine going, I noticed that the speedo (on HPTuner that is) wasn't registering when in gear. I was able to go in and change a few settings and now the speedo is working. For now my gauge cluster isn't working, but I have a head unit that has Torque on it, so I can run all my gauges off of that for now.

I still have more to do, but want to test drive it before I button it all up. Still to do:
-get the reverse lights to work
- figure out something for the reverse lockout solenoid
- get the BMW guages working
- cover and protect all the wiring
- mount the fuse block
- mount the overflow bottle
- install the front end, headlights, and hood
- put the interior back together
- take videos of me doing smoky burnouts!

 

Well I got the car running and worked through most of the issues. For some reason that I haven't figured out, it has a 4000rpm rev limit. Not sure what parameter needs to change to fix that.

So today I took it out for a test drive. Before I left, I noticed the belt squeaking so I checked it, and it had walked about 2 ribs off the tensioner. So I shut it down and put the belt back on properly, no more squeaking and away I go for my test drive. I drive about 5 miles into town and a mile through town with no issues. I have HPTuner going for my guages. (I've probably done about 20 miles of tests drives with no issues, so I was feeling pretty confident, just working out some details on the tune).

So I stop at the hardware store to get a few little things and then start heading home. Head out of town doing about 45 and I start smelling something. I'm thinking its just something outside; then I realize that its antifreeze and I look over and the temp gauge on HPTuner is PEGGED, I slow down and look for a place to stop. I get out and check it out and it had thrown the belt.

I called my wife and she came to rescue me, went to the parts store and got a new belt (found the old belt torn up laying on the road). Get back to the car, throw the new belt on (the idler pulley was loose, so that's probably what caused it to throw the belt), and start driving home. About 3 miles down the road its starts to get hot. I still had power steering, so I know I still have a belt. I baby it home and check it out. Fans are on, and nothing seems out of the norm. By this time I was out of time, so I had to close up shop.

So tonight I get back out there, and start it up after adding a little coolant, and the thing heats up to 225 at idle. So I've pretty much determined that the overheating has cause me to blow a headgasket.....so I guess I have some more work to do

 

A little update: no blown headgasket! I did a compression check and it looked all good. I realized that the car was getting hot idling in the shop because the fans weren't kicking on until like 234 degrees. I reprogrammed the fans and temp. is under control at a level I'm confortable with. The E38 ECM for controling the fans is more complex than the earlier ecms where you just enter an on and off temp.

Got the temp guage on the cluster working. Required flashing the guage cluster with BMW software. The speedo magically began working. Now I just need to add the wire for the tach and the guages will be done.

Still have several little things to work on: cover wiring, pcv hoses, AC compressor, finish installing interior, wire up TCM to make ECM think its in gear so I can rev past 4000 rpms, wire up BCM so I have cruise control.