5 Speed Swappers Help Needed

[ltflint]

I completed my 5 speed swap about two months ago. Everything works well and I can't believe what a difference the manual makes.

Here is the issue I am having. In order to get the car to start and the cruise to work, we jumpered two wires on the transmission wiring harness to make the car think it was in park or neutral so that the starter would work. We then wired this jumper to the clutch switch so that when using the cruise control, if the clutch is depressed, the cruise will turn off, thinking the car was in park or neutral.

Problem is, every time that I put the clutch in now, the idle starts pulsing. If I disconnect the jumper wires, once the car is running, and drive it around, when I put in the clutch, the idle is not affected at all. Problem there is if I am running the cruise control and depress the clutch, the throttle opens up and the rev's increase until I hit the brake and/or turn off the cruise.

Apparently the DME tells the idle to change when the car is in park or neutral. I think I need to figure out what wire is sending the signal to change the idle and cut it. I do want the signal to be sent to the cruise control to turn off when the clutch is depressed, I just don't want the idle to change.

Any help would be appreciated. I have a 1995 525iT with EWSII.

[Ross]

Someone correct if wrong, I'm unable to confirm as my only manual car is buried in snow. Even in factory manual trans cars if the clutch is depressed while in cruise it doesn't shut off but will rev the engine attempting to maintain speed.

[sal_park]

Someone correct if wrong, I'm unable to confirm as my only manual car is buried in snow. Even in factory manual trans cars if the clutch is depressed while in cruise it doesn't shut off but will rev the engine attempting to maintain speed.

How about connecting the wires to the brake light switch instead ?

[ltflint]

Someone correct if wrong, I'm unable to confirm as my only manual car is buried in snow. Even in factory manual trans cars if the clutch is depressed while in cruise it doesn't shut off but will rev the engine attempting to maintain speed.

I know my E30 would shut off the cruise with the clutch. The donor car I bought for the swap did too now that I think about it.

As far as using the brake light switch, this would probably cancel the cruise, but wouldn't allow the car to start. Wouldn't want to have the brake lights on everytime I hit the clutch either ;)

[whiskychaser]

Any car or truck I've ever driven ditches the cruise if you hit the clutch. Just the same as if you hit the brake. Both auto and manual will kick you up the arse if you had the cruise set to 55 and hit 'resume' when you are doing 40: they will try to get to 55 asap. Maybe Sal has the right idea but you need different switches for the brakes and clutch?

[Sailor]

I am not sure I understand how you wired this. I think the funny idle is due to volts going to the wrong place. The clutch switch closes and sends volts to the cruise module and it turns off the cruise. The wires you jumped have their own volts or path.
What colors did you jump? what lug did you plug into on the clutch switch? The jumper wire needs to go #3 on the cruise actuator. the out of the clutch switch should go to #2 on the actuator.

[Kalevera]

The clutch switch is a simple switch to ground. All E34 525 cars should have clutch switch wiring harness connectors in place, simply install the switch/good to go/no need to do strange wiring.

The main problem with using the brake switch for anything is that it is hot, essentially a foot actuated relay, so you'd need to wire in another relay to get any sort of switch to ground control out of it, but that's largely irrelevant because a properly functioning brake switch cancels cruise on its own, so it already does what it's supposed to do...

The issue here is that the EWS (or the start relay in the case of pre-EWSII cars) has to see that the car is in park before it will allow the engine to fire, but the cruise can't be activated if CC sees that the car is in P/N. My solution has always been to trick the CC (or the DME if the car has EML, it doesn't in this case) into thinking that the car is in D while the EWS thinks the car is in P. There are a couple of ways to do this, check the wiring diagrams or get me over on BFc if you get stuck, but the thing that makes it easy is the signal for the car being in D to the DME or CC control module is no signal at all...so find the appropriate wire and disconnect it. Also, if it hasn't been done already, highly advise removing completely the EGS/trans computer.