The complete repair, rebuild, repaint, and v8 swap of my early model sedan

[JGood]

But wait, there's more! While cleaning the heads up, I noticed one of the cam cap nuts was finger loose. This seemed very odd. So I pulled the other nut, then pulled the cap. It was absolutely destroyed. Proceeded to pull the rest of the caps on that cam. That head and cam are destroyed. The other cam on that head is perfectly fine. The main oil feed to the front cap seems good, and the front cam cap is fine. It's the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th that are trashed. I ran some brake cleaner through the oil feed tray, and it ran out of each hole. So I have no idea how or when this happened. My only guess is a blockage that cleared itself out at some point, probably before I put these heads on this block. I never saw any glitter in the oil since I built this engine. And it has always had 20psi oil pressure at idle, up to 80+psi at 6k.

[JGood]

Nope, not done yet. I have the early m60 intake manifold with the large seperate trumpets. Well, two of those broke off, and were just laying in the back of the intake manifold, completely jamming up any type of flow into the rear cylinders. You can see the tabs on each side of the trumpets. That tab breaks off, then the trumpet falls off. There are several others that are very loose, so I'm likely going to go with the single piece manifold without the trumpets. I'd rather not deal with that shit, and trade off a likely negligible amount of power. Also, that is a LOT of sludge in that manifold...

[amcp]

Well, that is vexing.

[moatilliatta]

S62 time?

[JGood]

S62 time?

Nope, keeping the car cheap to own and maintain. s62's are not exactly a dime a dozen, but m6x's are. I have another set of heads on the way for just the price of shipping.

[DEV0 E30]

Glad to hear she'll be back, and that you're still around!

[2mAn]

M62 is plenty of power for an E30 IMO

[MrBurgundy]

Jeez, that engine is fucked up lol

[JGood]

Picked up some clean m60b40 cylinder heads, then took them to a friends machine shop to have them hot tank and decked. Took .004" off. Also replaced the valve seals.







I bolted the heads on, at which point I realized the new passenger side head was missing the boss for the inner timing guide. After much confusion and hours of research, I came to the following conclusion:

-Original m60b40 inner timing guides were 3 bolt, and the same part number for driver and passenger
-At some point, they switched to a 2 bolt design guide, with different parts for each side, eliminating the upper mount on the heads. The heads also stopped being cast with the mounting boss.
-When I built this engine, I apparently ended up with 2 new driver side timing guides
-This wasn't a problem back then, because my old heads had the upper boss, so the 2 bolt guide was still being held on by 2 bolts
-When I bolted this new head on, there was no mounting boss, so my guide was held on by 1 bolt. This would have definitely failed catastrophically and destroyed the entire engine.


Luckily, I noticed this. Unluckily, it required removing the lower oil pan, upper oil pan, power steering pump, alternator, water pump, lower timing cover, etc... to get to, which then required replacing all of those gaskets/seals. At the time it sucked, but now that it's done, I do feel good about the very fresh engine.

[JGood]

Back together! Put about 30 miles on it so far. Hopefully it’s good to go for another decade!

[Panici]

Oof you weren't kidding when you said that cam was destroyed. Don't think I've seen one that bad.

Glad it's up and running now!

[DEV0 E30]

Nice work!

[QuiqueUy]

very nice work man ! just took the time to read the 79 pages and i can say you delivered very good !

22 years in your ownership and that car is amazing , really love the front radiator mount being removable and the style of the car ! hopefully the car is good for a lot more miles !

btw , the cams were really trashed haha ..

[m60power]

Wow, what a thread! And what a badass looking E30! I just finished reading through all 12 years and 79 pages of posts, and it kept me hooked! Your dedication to making the car perfect is so awesome. Also your consistent string of experiencing unlikely issues and failures is kind of wild – it’s like your car is cursed.

Reading the saga of getting your first m60 to run correctly in light of all the motor's drivability issues gave me automotive PTSD haha. A few years ago I swapped the auto trans to a 6 speed manual 420g in my e32 740 and had ALL the same exact problems you experienced. The stumbling and hesitation going on and off the throttle, the stalling coming down to idle, the rev-hang issues, the decel fuel-cut not behaving correctly, the rough running, heavy shaking, and hesitations in the mid-range rpm and partial throttle, the engine back-firing on throttle tip-in and throttle release, low power under 3k rpm in the rev range. All of it. The engine only seemed to run correctly at wide open full throttle above 3,000 rpm. I was pretty damn frustrated trying to figure out why the engine suddenly ran like shit after doing the manual swap.

Well it turns out it was the same fix as your car. The problem was my 'manual transmission' DUDMD DME chip which was likely in reality built upon an automatic trans, 404 DME chip. I was eventually able to track down an unmodified factory chip file from an OEM E34 540 6-speed with a 404 DME and burned it on to a blank chip myself, and that fixed all the problems! I almost couldn’t believe all those issues were simply from using an automatic based chip tune. I then sent the file to DUDMD and he made a chip tune based on that OE 6-speed 404 file, and all was well.

Anyway, I’m curious what your thoughts are on that head gasket fire ring failure across the two cylinders. Especially since the other cylinders didn’t look too far behind in their progression towards failure. Do you have any idea what the root cause was? I’ve never seen that occur on an m60 or m62. I would think without knowing what exactly happened then it may be destined to just occur again after some time, necessitating frequent head gasket replacements? What specific M62 head gaskets did you use (brand, thickness, etc.)? Were the heads torqued exactly to spec? Do you think the issue could be attributed to using the M60 heads (which probably have a smaller combustion chamber diameter than the m62’s 92mm cylinder / head gasket bore) on the M62 block; creating a ‘quench’ area between the piston top and m60 head surface on the combustion chamber sides, and maybe causing localized hot-spots at the points between the cylinders (eventually eroding the head gasket)? Just a thought, no idea if this is actually what’s happening.

I’ve also never seen an M60 cam get trashed like that, improper torque on the nuts? Oiling issues? I know the M62 and M62TU blocks have a few oil control valves / non-return valves / spacer sleeves on the actual block which don’t seem to appear anywhere in the diagrams for the M60 engine and its block. I wonder if there are other oil gallery modifications that must be done when making an m60b44 hybrid, beyond plugging that oil hole that would normally feed the timing chain guide on an m62?

EDIT: good work on researching and figuring out that early vs. late production M60 inboard timing chain guides thing. Minor changes over the production run can be a pain to sort out what's going on. Reminds me of the many M60 / M62 oil pump and crankcase oil separator tube design changes over the years. And BMW will be like, sure it's retroactively interchangeable, but you gotta also change all these other ancillary components too...