Project Overly Ambitious

[jpod999]

I sold the S52 etc. to a buddy of mine who has an S50 in his Z3. He bought the S52 so that he could swap out the S50 and get the car through the California BAR process. We worked out a deal where I knocked a couple of hundred bucks off the S52 and he helped me pull the M62 out.

Here is an in-the-process shot:


So now the motor/trans is in my dad's garage on a furniture dolly waiting for my Pelican order to come in. I'm replacing the waterpump/thermostat, bolting on an X5 oil block, and a bunch of assorted gaskets. From Garagistic I have the mount arms and mounts, second diff mount, chassis strengthening weld in plates, and RPM module. I think I'm going to go with their boosterless brake setup as well, which unfortunately because my car is an airbag car requires that I swap the column from a non-airbag car.

The car has a 474 DME, but I couldn't get to the EWS module, and Pick n Pull took the only key I had when they towed the car away...so I think I'm going to have to either get a DME/EWS/Key set on eBay or convert to OBDI and get the corresponding DME/harness. I am completely open to input here! Anyone know if EWS can be flashed out of the 474 DME?

I'm looking to pull the M42 either later this month or early in February so I can start getting the chassis ready. While the motor is out I want to do an E36 rack swap, no better chance in terms of access! I talked to my dad about getting a pre-1975 2002 after we finish the V8 swap to put my M42 in- again a little overly ambitious.

[jpod999]

Here's my story.

My dad bought an Alpine 318i sedan back in the late 90s. As best I can remember, he put Bilstein sports and an Eibach pro-kit on the car and did a some HPDEs at a few of the tracks in Norcal. Then, eventually he got bored with how slow the car is, sold it, and bought an E36. What he bought was a 96 318i automatic sedan.



Immediately he regretted it and the hunt went on for another E30. Fast forward a few years and we saw a clean Alpine 318i sedan parked at the curb near our house. We ran home, wrote a quick note with our contact info and slipped it under a wiper. Six months later we were eating dinner and the phone rang, the lady was ready to part with the car. We went to take a look at the car the following weekend and went home with it. Turns out that she had purchased the car here in the Bay Area but was moving to Germany for a year, so she picked the car up at the factory and drove around on an orange temp plate for a year.

A few years later I start driving the car and get into the E30 community. I realize that the Eibach pro-kit that he again installed on this car is actually kind of a shitty setup, so I got some IE3s and threw them on the car.



Not low enough. So I pulled the springs back out, cut the dead coil off the top of the fronts, threw in some drop hats, installed a RaceSkids M42 plate and drove around with the horrible ride quality that followed for a year or so. Then I said fuck it and got a set of BCs back in 2010 when they were first hitting the E30 market. Then I got kind of caught up in the moment:



I broke the low hanging aluminum M42 pan through the RaceSkids plate, so I pulled it off and installed John Hickerson's Severe Duty skidplate: http://www.hikfabrication.com/arvixe...2-m52-s14.html

Then I found some Rondell Type 57s (manufactured by Borbet as their Type Ts, different finish):



Then I got bored and bought an E39 M5 (this is where the V8 affection comes in):



Then had so sell my Rondells to fund the M5 gas bill. After a year and a half of M5 ownership, I decided that I better sell it before it stuck me with a $5000+ repair bill.

In the meantime, I had purchased an S52 + ZF and almost everything else I needed to put it in the E30. All that stuff sat in my dad's garage for about a year and a half when a buddy of mine crashed his 97 540i/6. Naturally I saw that Garagistic makes the swap mounts and decided to buy the car and sell the S52. This brings us to now.

TL ; DR: I've had the E30 for a long time, gone through multiple suspension setups, had a 24v swap planned, bought a wrecked E39 for the M62B44 and sold the S52.