I believe I read somewhere that you could take a donor BMW engine/harness and put it in just about anything and it will run as a standalone system in transplanted car. Is this an accurate assumption or does it need more from the car it's going into?
I believe I read somewhere that you could take a donor BMW engine/harness and put it in just about anything and it will run as a standalone system in transplanted car. Is this an accurate assumption or does it need more from the car it's going into?
depends on the model you pull it out of. I know you can transplant the engine/harness from an E46 and put it into an E36... but it is not just plug and play
The e30 and older drivetrains are pretty simple if that's what you mean. The newer ones are nowhere near plug and play.
E30 is like 4-5 wire hookup if I counted my harness properly. 
More details would help, or we can just keep chucking out random examples...
My experience (outside of megasquirt on a 2002) was an E30 I bought already swapped with an M50B25, using a ('95) e36 325is computer. The chassis harness was joined to the ECU/engine harness with an adapter harness from Treehouse Racing (though I believe others are available, as well as howtos on the web for building your own).
Its that way with an E30.
Are you thinking along the lines of locost or swap into non-bmw chassis? If that's the case, sort of. It may take extra work connecting up the chassis harness and for donors later than 1995 there can be issues with the alarm/immobilizer (not impossible, just a factor).
Isn't it a matter of OBD1 vs OBD2?
oldtin wrote: Are you thinking along the lines of locost or swap into non-bmw chassis? If that's the case, sort of. It may take extra work connecting up the chassis harness and for donors later than 1995 there can be issues with the alarm/immobilizer (not impossible, just a factor).
A reflash of the ECU will get rid of the secondary O2 sensors, EWS, and other stuff.
No biggie.
The ews II is a little bit of a pain without the reflash - I believe there were some late obd I cars with it.
That's why I mentioned the flash, you can include a tune with it as well.
sorry for the lack of details, working and posting don't mix.
Plan is to use a late model '95 540 engine in my '85 Audi CGT, the BMW is up for a steal of a deal and an 8cyl in my CGT would sound nice. I can get the whole car so I would have all the 'puters and such, just wondering if pulling the harness and boxes, dropping them in the Audi and then powering them up would work (very simplified terms).
I have no idea how to make it work but a rwd v8 cgt would be awesome.
The rear's easy using early GM camaro parts, axle fits under nicely. Engine and trans are already in the right direction...
'95 is still OBDI (or at least it is on E36s, not as sure about five series).
The other question is what's available in terms of chips/tunes for those computers. IIRC, I got a chip from Turner which had a more or less sort of prefab package of common tweaks, such as telling the computer to ignore the absence of a... road speed sensor? As the E30 it was living in dealt with that differently from the E36 the ECU came from.
If you can find someone who deals in tweaks for that model, maybe that can tell you what that computer needs to run, and whether they can help you turn off any extraneous requirements (i.e. to ignore hardware your installation won't have).
The M60 is fairly stand alone like most of the Bimmers during that time.
http://www.rtsauto.com/e30-bmw-m62-v8-swap-3/
You'll need to log in to post.
