With the motor and transmission in all that was left was too clutter up the engine bay with hoses and wires. I forgot to mention in the last update that while the engine bay was pretty open I mounted the rear euro expansion tank bracket to the firewall.
This is the only one (of two) brackets currently available to us in the US. The strut tower bracket is euro blocked by BMW. The rear bracket was put on US M3 convertibles for some reason so it is available for purchase in the US.
It's a good idea to position the expansion tank with the data link connector and battery terminal block mounted so that you can see what space is available for the expansion tank. I was able to mount the bracket with the battery shelf still installed and the hood can close with about 1/4" clearance to the top of the expansion tank cap. For the front of the tank I fabbed up a small piece of aluminum to hold the clip for the tank. It doesn't look all that substantial but I've taken the cap off over and over and the tank hasn't moved yet.
[url=https://flic.kr/p/Gqzasa]
The main DIY I used for the expansion tank was on bimmerforums by wanganstyle. He opts to run a soft hose around the back of the engine in place of the Euro hardpipe, which is not meant to be installed on the M/S52 engines but rather the S50B32.
There are many options available to run a hose to the expansion tank but I wanted to delete the throttle body heater and retain the heater core. I chose to stick with the stock M52 hard pipe and use the connections I needed.
It doesn't look fantastic, I'll admit, but with everything (intake manifold, TB, intake boot, etc) installed I can easily inspect the hose connections and see if anything is leaking.
I added a spacer block to the oil filter housing so I could run an oil temperature sender. I have to say I don't really recommend this cheapie spacer block. It was inexpensive and it does the job but I needed a T to get the sender installed the way I wanted.
The water pressure sender was a bit easier to setup. Some pressure senders are easily killed by engine vibrations so I used a short piece of hose to remove the sender from being hard-mounted to the motor. I just ran the hose off the TB heater barb.
The rest of the wiring was daunting at first. The automatic harness has some extra connectors but I simply coiled them up and zip tied them out of the way for now. Eventually, I'd like to remove those wires from the harness but for now I just want to get the car running.
This thread (
http://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/sh...wiring-harness) was a huge help in identifying connectors.
The only mods I definitely need to make to the harness are adding a pin to the X20 for the reverse light switch and rerouting the aux fan normal speed relay wiring. Haven't tackled that yet though.