First off there won't be any pictures of the early parts of this build. I don't take a whole lot of pics in the first place mostly because i forget that my phone also takes photos. also i switched phones just recently and lost the ones i did take.
This all started 4 1/2 years ago when i bought my first(and current DD) e30, 1990 325i manual. I love the car in general and haven't had too many issues with it. But years of driving a car with only ~170bhp left me wanting more power. Research led me to the commonly done and well documented m5x swap.
plan was to gather all the parts and take a couple days vacation and swap it into the 90 within a week and be back to daily driving the car before i had to work again. everyone laughing at me right now knows why that wasn't a good plan, especially for my first ever engine swap. but... i am getting ahead of myself.
the first hurdle was to find a suitable engine. a month of junkyard searching and price checking led me to an awesome junkyard that deals almost exclusively in insurance wrecks.(I can tell you where it is if you are interested) they had just got in a 97 328is that was in a side accident. 300$ later I was the owner of a nice looking m52b28. just had to wait for them to pull it for me.
That's not a bad price for an engine especially if they're pulling it. Looking forward to updates.
I had very much the same combo; M52B28 in an '87 325is. I loved it. I miss it (it was totalled by being rear-ended in freeway stop-and-go on the way to mail registration for a driving school 
)
I did the Z3 steering rack swap while the engine was out, and recommend it a lot. I found the stock steering painfully slow.
What are you doing for engine management? I bought mine already swapped to an OBDI E36 ECU with a Treehouse adapter, and just swapped the dead M50B25 for an M52B28...
The only really tricky bit was fabbing a better transmission crossmember, as the cobbled together one that was in there initially put a load on the mounts and created weird vibrations. Though I never got around to correcting for the angle of the shifter, which is rotated toward the driver when the trans is hooked to one of these engines.
But the first post sounds like you may be a great deal further along by now than at the end of that post, and I'm just reciting stuff you've probably already researched 
In reply to Ransom:
I am using obd2 ms41.1. I want to be able to use all that fancy obd2 stuff.
So I went to go pick up me engine. I told them i wanted the whole harness, ecu, and all of the other engine components and the car was an auto so no clutch stuff. when i got there, chopped harness, no ecu, no PS pump, no AC compressor or bracket, and finally no engine mount arms. well, not too big a deal I did get it pretty cheap and they told me the pieces were probably still out there. so i go pick up what i could salvage. which was everything i listed except harness, ac compressor and the bolts for the compressor. I get back and they charge me for the items..... really? oh well. there is another 75$ to them. (they are really nice people in general though)
over the next couple of months I collected most of the parts I thought I would need and started getting into planning what it would take to do the swap within a 4-5 day span. I figured it would be tough but doable. now lets rewind a few months to set up the next part. about the time i got my engine, a friend of my dad(not a bmw guy at all) says 'I saw a car exactly like the one you drive out there in jedburg' I went to see and didn't, at least not until a few months later when i was trying to figure out the logistics of a rushed engine swap. it was a bright blue late model 4dr sitting half under a car cover. explained why i didn't see it at first. bad news is that it was sitting behind a locked fence at a clearly abandoned house that was also for sale.
after a week of thinking about it I decided to call the reality company on the for sale sign just as a heck why not. to my surprise they agreed to relay a message and my phone number to the owner of the land. a week later I get a call from the owner. basically he says that the car is his girlfriend's and that she just spent 2500$ on it between new suspension and trying to get it running again. said it shut off on them in traffic and never started again. also it was an auto(eww) and that she wasn't likely to want to let it go for cheap. I figured that was the end of that.
I get a surprise call from him 3 weeks later saying that she wants to sell it. I thought 'well i will just have to let him down easy that i can't afford it'. she was asking a whopping 500$ for the thing. of course I set up a date to go look at it.
When i got there, they had it out from under the cover and were bringing out loads of crap that she had stored in the car. "fresh" repaint looks good only until about 100 feet away. front leather seats are torn up(its a BMW) but the back is good. it has projector headlights, a maplight mirror, and very little dents. I could literally part it out for 3x the asking price, so good so far. but then, I looked under the car. RUST! but it was only one hole in the passenger floorpan and almost none anywhere else(or so I thought at the time) the "new" suspension was just Garbriel rear shocks and front outer tierod ends. 204k on the somehow still working odometer. starter spins it over freely but no start.
he hands the key to me and i try to lock/unlock the doors. I am informed that the key is the only one and it is a 'valet' key....... yeah. works in the ignition but not in any of the other locks..... hmmmmm a bit fishy but whatever. I go to hand her the money and now i get this. "well I really like my car and i don't know if i want to sell it and it cost me time and money to get a new title because my old one was messed up. so the price is now 600$" dirty but whatever i brought a little extra for that same reason. Now I own 2 e30s yay!
when we were leaving, the trailer caught the edge of his fence and bent it. he had me pay 100$ to fix it. my fault so i paid up. he still hasn't fixed it to this day.
now no more rushing to finish the swap in a week and i can fix all the things i want fixed while the car is apart.
I get the car home and i decide to stare at it in my yard for about 3 months mainly because i am a procrastinator, but then I strip out the whole interior to find. you guessed it. more RUST! Yay! after a couple more months of being lazy half the time, I get all the rust removed and i am left with 4 fairly large holes in the front passenger pan and 8-10 pinholes in the passenger rear pan. both sides are cleaned up and given a coat of Rustseal(like POR15) the larger holes are cut out to await welding. the smaller holes were painted over and filled with metal epoxy(worked great by the way) and then sealed over again.
after that the car sat all last summer and part of the fall, until october.
at least i had a decent reason that time. I was getting married and had to help plan the wedding. also the house we are now living in needed lots of work to be livable. we replaced all the underfloor in the kitchen plus a whole remodel of same kitchen.3 rooms repainted and lots of leaky plumbing fixed.
I got started back on the car late october 2016.
before I started ripping the motor and trans out i decided to see if i could get the thing running. nope. but i did find out the reason that it wouldn't run. there is a twist together style connector beneath the intake manifold on those engines(m20) that connects the main engine harness to the injector harness. well that must have failed in the past and it was replaced with butt connectors, no tape, no shrink wrap, no sealing whatsoever, and it was nicely corroded.I didn't want mess that so I just left it alone and went ahead with ripping the motor out
Motor out! Yay! After that it was time to deal with the....... RUST. It literally took 8 hours to get done. Our mig welder wouldn't adjust low enough and would burn through if we went too fast. Also weld through primer is a PITA. A solid coat of rustseal later and the rust was defeated(or so I thought).
the whole time all of that was going on i was researching which transmission to use. an original e30 g260 trans would mean that I would have rotate the trans 10 degrees to the passenger side to line up with the holes on the m52 block. that also would mean getting a custom transmission crossmember to hold it at that angle. plus 'twisting' the shifter linkage to line the shifter back up with the hole. but all of that would also mean that i could run my original LSD differential which is a s3.73 ratio and run a stock m20 flywheel and clutch kit with no issues.
an e36 transmission, either g250 or zf320, would line up straight on the engine. so stock trans crossmember and no linkage modification. but the final drive is 1:1 on those trans so i would need to source a 2.93 to 3.25 ratio differential. also the bellhousing is just a bit deeper to because the e36 used a dual-mass flywheel(heavy sob), so if i wanted to use the m20 flywheel(single-mass) i would need to find a way to 'take up' that extra space(about 5mm) or the clutch engagement would be really close to the floor.
I decided to use whichever trans popped up in my area for a decent price first. I spent a few good months calling around and visiting places before a local yard with good prices got in a 98 328is manual that had a tree fall across it. I went and looked at it and it went into all the gears smoothly and held in 5th. plus it was a zf320 trans which is the same one that m3's had so it was plenty strong. I had them pull it for me, also paid for the flywheel and driveshaft to be pulled. got a call that it was ready a week later.
they had used a sawsall to cut the driveshaft in half! and they threw my flywheel into the crusher........ i was not a happy camper. the flywheel i could do without but a 328is/m3 manual driveshaft is hard to find, especially at a good price. I did get them to refund me all the labor and got the trans for 120$
For the flywheel i decided to go with the m20 single mass with e30 clutch set. only modification was that the back of the flywheel had to be turned down to clear the m52 oil pan bolts...... good thing my dad has a metal lathe!
as for the driveshaft the yard that deals with insurance wrecks came through for me again. they got in a 98 328is manual with front end damage. 50$ but I had to pull this one myself. I do not recommend this. laying on my back in a junkyard under a car propped up on random rims, with only hand tools, for hours. yeah.... not fun, but i got my driveshaft.
In reply to Daeldalus:
I actually enjoy that. In fact on Monday I spent at least 20 minutes at the junkyard under an E30 looking at the rear diff mounts so I could figure out making it fit in a 2002.
next up. getting a 2.93 lsd differential.
I didn't really know what diff I already had and internet info was not definite.
so i did the reasonable thing and just looked at the ID tag. turns out I had the nice s3.73 medium case LSD. which was worth just as much as a s2.93 lsd that i was looking for. So I just proposed a trade of one for the other and got a local willing to do just that. my diff came out and off I went to meet him.
when i got there, his diff had the wrong ID tag on it. hmmm...... odd. I ask about it. 'Well I don't know anything about the tags on these things but it spins the right direction to be a lsd' I open it up..... it was an open diff.....
He really still wanted mine so he paid me fair market for it and gave me the open 2.93. well at least i have the correct ratio now.
Stampie wrote:
In reply to Daeldalus:
I actually enjoy that. In fact on Monday I spent at least 20 minutes at the junkyard under an E30 looking at the rear diff mounts so I could figure out making it fit in a 2002.
don't get me wrong. I usually love going to junkyards. I will visit one 40mins from my house on my days off just for fun..... and for finding cool stuff.
but that job was such a PITA. it was 98 degrees and 95 percent humidity(normal day around here but still) and the grass was really tall. I could feel the ticks watching me.
also, do 2002's come with the medium case differential? IRS? if so the rear cover from the 2002 will fit directly onto the e30 diff.(does the 02's diff mount ride in the cover like e30s?)
and the output flanges are a direct swap too.
LSD search part 2.
for some reason I was not content to keep my open diff and decided that i must have LSD. I remembered that there is an active e30 community in the next state over from me so i put up a WTB ad over there (NCE30) I found someone who had a e30 s2.93 that he had converted to e28 with a different rear cover and output flanges. hmm.... I seem to have just gotten a whole open diff that has good e30 flanges and rear cover. the price was good but it was(of course) in the next state over.
my wife and I were just happening to go on a short vacation about 40 mins from the location. A little bit of talking and we had a plan to pick it up one night during said trip.
I bought it. it was in great shape and actually was a LSD unit. when i got it home I bought some new seals for it and swapped over the flanges and the cover. it was very easy in fact. just pry out the flanges and they just pop back in with a rubber mallet. one of the easiest parts of the swap.
I has LSD!
In reply to Daeldalus:
I don't think the rear covers are interchangeable. It is IRS but the best I've been able to figure is the E21 case will swap covers with a 2002 and the E30 internals will swap into the E21 case.
After a super busy couple of months and some laziness. I have decided to start updating this build again.
The next things that I did was a quick cleanup of the engine bay, engine block, and tranny.
The rack and pinion was leaking out of the end seal. Never a better time to replace it than with the engine out of the way. got a reman A1 unit and installed it. done!(not really. effing A1 sucks) Also I installed my e34 oil pan and all new gaskets on the engine, plus all new seals and fluid in the transmission.
time to install my flywheel and clutch. the dual mass flywheel on the e36s are slightly thicker than m20 single mass flywheels(like the one I have) so the e36 transmission is a bit deeper, but only by 5mm. I did a bunch of research to see if i needed to address that issue. some people said to by a special $100 TOB. everyone else said that it was fine as is.(Wrong!) If you are doing this combo, BUY THE SPECIAL THROWOUT BEARING. you will thank me later. I tried to see if I could space out the flywheel a bit. Nope. then just said screw it and went with the stock setup. Did I mention that this was a bad idea?
I had bought a used(supposedly only for 3000 miles) clutch setup with me flywheel. I messed up by not looking at it until I went to install it. yep it looked like it had 30,000 miles and that he rode the clutch all the time. So I got a new one and had to wait another week to put it in.
back to the TOB. the clutch will not disengage if you put stock m20 parts in with a zf320 trans. Unless, you buy a SS braided clutch line and a brand new clutch pivot pin but even then the engagement point is so low that I had to ram the pedal into the carpet to get it to fully disengage the clutch. I will update how I fixed that problem when i get to that part of the story.
I was gonna post a couple pictures tonight, but I can't figure out how to do it from my phone.
It will only let me post one picture at a time. So here goes.
This is how she is now. Still keep forgetting that my phone has a camera.
Engine bay! Woo! (Yes it isn't the nicest bay but it gets the job done.)
Before I could install the engine into the car I had to deal with the brake booster. the stock booster is too large in diameter to fit with the stock m5x intake manifold. so, one must deal with that somehow. there are a number of ways to go about it. most common are swapping in an e21 or e32 booster and MC, you can also use a Porsche 944 booster with the stock MC but you need to modify the rod that connects to the brake pedal. you can slot the firewall and move the stock booster over(sounded sketchy to me), or cut the m5x manifold and fiberglass it back into shape.(also sketchy) I chose to go the 944 route. that still required me to slightly dent the casing of the booster to gain full clearance.
on these cars it is generally a good idea to install the engine and trans already bolted together as a single unit, because the placement of the engine makes it very hard to get to the top bolts on the trans. so, that is what I did. here is one of the areas that demonstrate why I like bmw engineering. I used stock engine mount arms, m5 mounts and the stock crossmember, and everything just went together no custom parts, no fab work. the transmission crossmember and mounts were even easier. stock crossmember, e21 mounts and it just bolts together. the best part about the engineering is that the studs that the crossmember bolts to are in a track that allows them to slide which means that almost any size trans is easily adjusted for.
engine is installed Yaye!
