Not an AWD, but still plenty of fun Deutchland style!!!

They say you can't mess with perfection, but watch me do it anyway. 

So I decided to play around with my 05 E55 AMG.


Now for those of you that have no idea what these are capable of, what you see here is a 5.5 liter supercharged v8. It rivals the CTS-V of the same period, among other cars. 469 hp, 519 tq, 0-60 is 4.5 seconds. Sure it has a governed speed of 156 mph, but the speedo has a top speed of 200mph. Not bad for a bone stock car, but we can do better. So I will and on the cheap (so to speak) (Somehow I can hear Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May's voices as I type this.)

More to come soon.

I'm pretty sure that you of all people could take care of that governed speed cap!

Silly me. I probably should have mentioned that I already did.

My first order of business is not a mod per se, but rather I purchased a STAR DAS of my very own with full development mode. As of now I'm mechanically limited to 189 mph.

I've also just as quickly begun acquiring a few parts. But I'll save all of that for when I have all of them in hand. Some of it is enroute as I type this.

It may be appropriate to say this is a bit of a sleeper project considering that most people have no idea how this car compares to a standard E-class.

Somehow with all the boxes I have showing up this week, I was half expecting UPS to simply drop the truck off at my house with a note on the door saying "we'll pick it up in the morning"

LOL! When I had my eclipse back home the UPS guy would drop the packages off at my dad's work cause he knew no one would be home to sign for them.

Almost ready to begin. Mind you, I'm not going to go nuts with this build. Far, far from it. However, it will make some fairly decent gains all things considered.

So without further delay, here we go.

What you see here is a M113K, the 5.5l hand assembled piece of goodness that we'll be playing with. The builder was even kind enough to autograph his handiwork.


And here are the mods I'll be doing.
First up is a smaller supercharger clutch/pulley. This is where the bulk of my power is coming from aside from the tune.


Unfortunately, when playing with the boost, you tend to create a bit of belt slip. To alleviate this potential issue and make more consistent power, here is what's called a belt wrap kit. Just for good measure, I'm also changing the associated pulleys to metal.


But when upping the boost, you up the heat produced. So we address it with an upgraded heat exchanger/intercooler. This one is by Eurocharged, and is far more efficient than the stock one.


Finally, to maintain that cooling efficiency, we upgrade the intercooler pump. When the stock one fails (and it will), you get ZERO boost and you will know it. Luckily this can be easily addressed courtesy of teh good folks at Bosch.


I'm waiting on few more odds and ends as at the same time I'll knock out some scheduled maintenance. More to come soon.

Nothing much to see here. Just a bad man doing bad things.

Now the only reason I had to pull the bumper was to change the heat exchanger/intercooler. I think these pics clearly illustrate why this switch is happening.





Here is a common issue with these cars, the supercharger pump. They may initially look identical, but the one on the right is a revised unit that flows a bit better.

Always cool what a drill and a few rivets can do for you.



But we're not done yet. Decided to get a couple of additional fueling and cooling mods before ecu and tcu tuning next week. All of this should be good for another 100+ hp/tq when all is said and done.

Very nice, I remember a girl in high school had this exact same car cuz her dad was loaded with money. I got to take it out once or twice and it definitely had some power as it was!

On account of these cars costing $90k new, how was this girl not the love of your life.

So Friday is tuning day where we'll see if this all pans out. Yesterday I sent the shop my TCU so they can start tweaking it.
On today's agenda, supercharger pulley install, belt wrap install, and cooling system split.

So I got most of what I wanted done, but got distracted in the process.  Damn you, Cable Television!!!!!

Quick comparison shot of the pulleys

For some reason, pictures make it a little hard to tell, but in person you can clearly see the difference in size

And here is how it looks installed with the belt wrap kit

Say goodbye to belt slip.

I am so itching to install my new fuel rail setup, but can't yet until I push the new fluids through the car.  More to come.

So I was supposed to tune tomorrow, but my TCU did not show up. Oh well. Gives me time to retrofit a cd changer into my stereo setup.

Hopefully, it shows up tomorrow so I can finish the transmission service and then install the fuel rail.

After 8+ hours of trial and error, cursing, pain, agony, despair, grinding, and hammering (really, it was that involved) I finally got the looped fuel rail installed. This was definitely not a mod for the feint of heart. Wish I had a how-to to guide me through this, and had I had the 'where-with-all" I would have created one.

Now that I know what I'm doing with this, I could do this for other people but I would definitely charge an arm and a leg to do it.

I apologize in advance for not being able to get a bone stock baseline.  The shop is 4 hours away from me and only open on weekdays.  Most stokk w211 E55s make 342(ish).  The smaller number is baseline with only mods and no tuning.  Overall, not too shabby.


My traction control F*** hates me as the car loves to tq steer even when already rolling.  I think I see an LSD rear diff in the near future but for just under $2k in mods and tuning, I'm not bitching.

That's pretty impressive

Well, this project continues even if it's through the meticulous upkeep. You know, the kinds of repairs that will break normal men. But bear in mind, I'm far from normal

Anyways, my front air suspension went out and had to be replaced. Not the worst job in the world (nor the cheapest (fml)), but would absolutely have sucked had I not ponied up and bought my own STAR DAS. SOrry, no pics of the process or the new parts.

Next up, new and far more grippier tires, valve stem seals, and then back to the upgrading.

Back from the dead. I really have not done much of anything with the car except collect parts. SO when I finally get around to installing everything, life will get very interesting very fast.

So right now I'm sitting on most every gasket imaginable I decided that it would be better to pull the heads to replace the valve seals vs trying to fill the cylinder with either air or rope. I don't have to do this, but I'm going to.

On top of that, I decided to beef up my cooling a bit with a larger intercooler reservoir, boost all the time by switching to a fixed supercharger pulley rather than the clutched one I'm currently running, Kleeman headers with a new x pipe to really deepen my exhaust growl, and finally adding an LSD to really bring out the animal within this beast. I'll also retune of course

So when will this magic happen? Well, I'm busy studying for a graduate school entry exam so we'll see when I have the time. But don't worry, it will be soon.