complete elctrical upgrade

[xzacd]

im wondering has anyone done a complete electrical upgrade like smaller fuse box, new ecu, new wiring and wire tuck, fog light wiring and e46 hid upgrade and is there anything else electrical i should think about upgrading like coilpacks ??

[bmwman91]

What exactly do you mean by, "upgrade?" It's hard to beat the stock wiring harness and fuse box in terms of quality and fit for the E30. No home enthusiast can hope to build a wiring harness of better quality and reliability than the stock E30 one (or the E36 one, minus the little oops that early ones had in the trunk lid). Given the cost of raw materials today, it would take a good $5000US of wire and shrouding to one-off duplicate the stock harness, and years of meticulous fiddling. I have worked on a lot of cars, and I can tell you that BMW has some of the best wiring quality you will find in any car. Honda gets cheap and splits looms anywhere it needs to in order to run the shortest length of wire possible to get connections made. The inside of a Honda dashboard is a spider's web and I can barely get my hand in some places because of the nasty wiring. BMW will run the harness a greater length around obstacles to keep the wiring compact and clean, even though it costs more (since you pay for it in the sticker price anyway).

There are "high performance" coil packs out there, but I think that they are mostly nonsense.

What can be improved in the fog light wiring?

As far as I am aware there is no direct E46 HID retrofit for the E30. Euro or US ellipsoid lights can have HID bulbs safely installed in them, though.

[Geoff]

precisely...saved me from a rant..well done
                                                 Geoff

[bmwman91]

I WILL say that you can see about maintaining a couple of aspects of the wiring.

Disconnect the battery before doing any of this.

Check the main ground strap from the alternator to the engine for corrosion at the terminals. A clean connection is a good connection and a brass bristled brush can knock off crud if it is present. Do the same for the ground strap between the engine and chassis, the battery ground and chassis and at the main ground lug where the ECU and stuff connect to the chassis up by the firewall.

[xzacd]

well most of my connectors are shot and and my fog light wiring has no continuity at all.  i can get materials cheap to replace old wires  etc etc.
i know the wiring bmw does i really good but this wiring is old and no longer reliable.
does any one atleast know where to get all of the the wiring diagrams i have half already just not all of them

[DesktopDave]

If you have to splice a few wires, definitely rewire it.  But if you want to go further, I'd suggest buying a parts car and salvage the wiring harness.  BMW does use very high-quality wiring and fasteners in their cars from what I've seen as well.  That's one of the special things that makes owning an old BMW relatively painless compared to other makes.

Most e30's are pretty similar, but there are little differences between the early and later (>8/87) e30 models.  Engine harnesses are the biggest differences between models.  I'm not an expert on the e36 models, but I'd suspect they're similar.

I have a whole e30 harness if you'd like to try that out, but it's from an earlier model (unless you're in Australia, then shipping costs would be prohibitive).

[xzacd]

i am in australia yes. its mainly most of the connectors and the wiring for lights that needs to be replace all the wiring harness for the engine and everything inside the car is brand new it was redone with the engine swap

[xzacd]

another question is anyone running splitfires coilpacks ?