I'm just getting caught up on GRM reading and David's column inspired me to come back to the forums here and start a build thread. It's been a long since I've been active here but I figured my current project is a good reason to come back. This will largely be crossposted from r3vlimited. I call this build Project Overly Ambitious because I've never done a motor swap and E30 32v swaps are at this point in time much more involved than 24v swaps.
I've had my '91 318i since 2004 when my dad and I left a note on it and got a call from the original owner 6 months later while we were eating dinner. Long story short, the car was ordered here in CA and picked up at the factory in Germany where the original owner lived for a year. She shipped the car back and put another 200k on it before she sold it to me. Since then the car has gone through a few suspension setups, finally landing on BC Racing BR coilovers back in 2010 when they first hit the market.
The M42, I've always thought, was a fun motor but always left me wanting for more power. When a buddy pulled his S52 from his E36M I purchased it from him and stuffed it in a corner of my dad's garage. Two years later, another friend wrecked his '97 540i/6 so naturally I sold the 24v stuff and bought the car from him Nov' 2015. Oof, here we go!
Here's my wife cleaning the V8:
Following, we refreshed the motor with lots of new parts- Pelican must have loved seeing orders come in from me:
Here is what we changed: Intake manifold gaskets, Spark plug boots, Coolant transfer pipes, Upper timing case gaskets, Exhaust manifold gaskets, Cam positioning sensor o-ring, Crank sensor, Thermostat housing, Thermostat, BMWstone cleaned/rebuilt injectors, Coolant crossover gaskets, New coolant crossover bolts, X5 oil block o-rings, Knock sensors, Valve cover gaskets, Valley pan, M60 mechanical waterpump (for the OBDI conversion). We also cleaned and painted the valve covers prior to refreshing the engine. Here's how she looked after the refresh:
I had decided that there was no way I wanted to tip that engine and tranny up and over the radiator support, so it got cut out and I fabbed brackets to make it bolt in:
Strengthening plate and rivet nuts on the other side of that sheet metal:
Since I've had the car for so long, there is TONS of stuff I've been wanting to do over the years. For some reason, I chose being right in the middle of a swap to do a lot of it.
Here's the rear suspension with 80A poly bushings from Garagistic, subframe reinforcements, a medium case 2.93 LSD, new half shafts, new wheel bearings, stainless braided brake lines, rebuilt calipers, new OEM brake pads and sensor, and new rotors.
After that, I tore into the front suspension. I reinforced the swaybar mounts and motor mount tabs with weld in plates from Garagistic. I also cut off the upper rack mounts and fabbed my own for more oil pan clearance- this negated the need for rack spacers needed for the E46 rack swap:
After that I put in new control arms, brake lines, swaybar end links, rebuilt calipers, new OEM pads and sensor, stainless braided brake lines, new rotors, and the aforementioned E46 330i rack and put the car back on the ground for the first time in 6 months:
I got the first opportunity to see the 32v lump in the car when we dropped it in to be able to move the car from my dad's garage to my new place:
Now that it's here at my new house, the dash came out:
This is necessary because I am going to run the Garagistic boosterless Wilwood pedal system as I didn't want to fab up the remote booster setup from an E34. Since my car is an airbag car with the big bulky steering column, I am having to swap in a non-airbag column which clears the Garagistic setup. Here's a picture of the two columns next to each other after I swapped the steering lock mechanism over to the new (old) column:
And that's caught us up! This week I'm hoping to get the column in and bolted down so that I can fab up the steering linkage out of two E46 units.
