Finally ended up having some free time to start throwing the parts I recently bought on the car. Since this doesn’t need a tune or any other supporting mods I started with the Riot Racing throttle body. This is a factory throttle body that was sent out and bored from the factory 63.8mm to 68mm.
These cars came with a really dumb traction control system in that the car essentially has two throttle bodies. The one pictured above, with the butterfly open, is for the tractional control system. The butterfly is open 100% of the time, however whenever the car sense any sort of traction loss it shuts this baffle, preventing any airflow. As you can see this doesn’t exactly create a smooth intake tract.
For the time being until I install my Bimmerworld ASC delete boot with the upgraded MAF and injectors I simply removed the plate entirely. It’s very easy to do and helps clean up the intake tract for maximum airflow. That being said, I think this will throw the ASC light up on the gauge cluster when it self checks. The traction control system is junk anyways and it’s likely you never intentionally use it. I intend to just remove the bulb in the cluster at a later date.
Like most things that are rubber on the E36, the throttle cable bushings almost completely disintegrated upon removal. If you are taking your throttle apart for any reason I would highly highly recommend replacing these bushings. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that these rubber bushings are sold separately and instead sold as one piece with a whole new cable, so I opted for some CNC’d pieces from Garagistic. Super easy install, just thread on and lock it into place with a snap ring.
I installed the throttle body with the old rubber bushings and the throttle response with the new TB and the ACS butterfly removed was night and day. The butt dyno also seemed to yield a couple of extra ponies as well, definitely a good upgrade for the money. Once I added the CNC’d bushing it was even more crisp. So crisp it’s hard to imagine what it was like before as I thought the response was already pretty good. Anyways, these bushing replacements were about $35 or so for both throttle and cruise control and they are a must have.
After reinstalling everything and putting some miles on the car testing the new throttle body I noticed that the initial 1-5% of throttle seemed to stick a little bit. It was intermittent and seemed to get worse whenever I would do hard throttle open/close pulls. After a couple of hours and failed diagnoses, my friend finally noticed the problem. The new throttle plate provided by Riot Racing to fit the new 68mm bore was *slightly* too big. When the throttle would snap shut the edges of the valve would contact the housing itself, as seen in the pictures above. The way we adjusted it was to adjust the manual stop on the throttle body for the idle. We nudged it forward just barely so that it fully closes just very very very slightly higher than how it was set. We reinstalled and now it’s perfect!
As I said before, this is one of the best modifications you can make on a NA E36. I felt more response and more power than I expected and couldn’t be happier.
Visceral M3 