14 years - 1991 325ix, Stroker/5-Speed (N52 swap?)

[Bimmer_man]

Dang man nice transmission wish I even had a manual to drop in my car.

[nando]

Is it AWD too?

nope, RWD. it's a 330i with the sport package, 6 speed. really nice. it sort of reminds me of the E30 when it was like new.

actually, the E30 is the only car I've ever owned that wasn't RWD.

Nice!

Donor for 6 spd awd E30? ;D

well, it's RWD, so no. I already have the 24v AWD drivetrain anyway. :p

New daily? I sense something big is going down on the iX, and I think we all have a good idea of what it is.

not immediately, there's some stuff I want to deal with first. basically, some things need attention and reconditioned.

here's a nice rust bubble that's new as of last year:


the clearcoat is failing on my roof. here's a tip: don't use cleaner wax on a car with a clearcoat.


my interior is awful. there's a reason I never post pictures of it.


yeah, that's black duct tape covering the rips. I'm trying to at least protect the foam from further damage. it works pretty well except in the summer when the tape gets hot and sticky.

anyway, immediately I'm not doing anything to it other than taking a break from working on it. in the longer term I'm thinking I'll pull the M20 and it's drivetrain and either part it out or sell it to fund a new motor. It would be dangerous for me to make it non-driveable in the short term, so I'm just going to leave the M20 for now and focus on reconditioning parts of the car like the roof, the windshield cowl, and the seats.

the long term plan is still the same, but none of that will happen until the M20 is gone.

[Northern]

New daily? I sense something big is going down on the iX, and I think we all have a good idea of what it is.

[Nisse Järnet]

Nice!

Donor for 6 spd awd E30? ;D

[ForcedFirebird]

Is it AWD too?

[LJ851]

E30 Garage Queen has arrived.

Hope you love the new car too, looks good in silver.

[nando]

uh oh ;)

[nando]

very impressed with drivegear.com.. they even put in a new selector rod joint and reverse switch!






when I'm not so busy it'll be mock up time, can't wait to finally start piecing some of this together!

[ForcedFirebird]

If I sell like 40 more 24v swap adapters maybe I can finally buy the motor. :p

I lol'd.

[nando]

yeah - I'm sticking to paying for it out of my paypal account, so it hasn't really hurt my wallet. If I sell like 40 more 24v swap adapters maybe I can finally buy the motor. :p

[LJ851]

^ That's nearing '80's porsche transaxle money, lol.

[nando]

no oil pan solution yet, but I do have a one of a kind 24v ix Getrag 260 transmission in my trunk! drivegear.com pretty much replaced everything inside it with new parts, and Gutenparts helped me get it here from Germany. it wasn't cheap but having a new transmission is going to be sooo nice!

I bought it on ebay.de last year in August for $160. drivegear.com sourced me an ix core to build it with as well. I still need to paypal them another $100 for shipping. I'm still into it for under $2k.. lol

[The Dark Side of Will]

Cool. I didn't realize there was that much static camber available. Obviously with 2.5" ID springs, there's a lot more room to move the strut around inside the strut tower.

Stiff bars increase weight transfer. They're used to make the end with lower contact pressure have less grip to match the end with higher contact pressure.

BMW has to put their steering racks under their engines.
The inner ball joints have to be located close to the inner tie rod ends to minimize bump steer.
The knuckles have to fit inside wheels of a certain size.

These packaging requirements mean that BMW strut front suspensions end up with low roll centers.
This means that they don't get camber gain from the roll center and instead need to use a lot of kingpin inclination to get camber gain. The E46's have something like 17 degrees of steering axis inclination (SAI)
Using a lot of kingpin angle means that there's no caster-induced camber gain available, and the tire actually loses camber at higher steering angles. In order to have caster induced camber gain, caster angle has to be greater than SAI.

All of this means that BMW strut front ends do a horrible job at maintaining camber and making good use of tires.
That means that BMW strut front ends need to be very very stiff in order to minimize body roll... which is why really stiff bars help almost no matter what.

E46 Xi's end up with 5-6 degrees of caster stock, so I guess BMW rethought their understanding of how caster and AWD interact... Or maybe they just didn't want to build an AWD-specific body anymore.

[nando]

what do you mean? you can add plenty of camber with camber plates (more than -3 degrees) and enough caster with the plates and offset bushings. I don't think you'd want the strut towers totally upright, there's got to be a reason the ix only comes with 1* of caster stock.

I really don't think there's a point to different tires. seriously - I went through a lot of A6's in my day. All it will mean is you can't rotate them so they will wear out faster.

[The Dark Side of Will]

as far as front heaviness, it's not really that front heavy - it's still really close to 50/50 (52/48 or something like that). it's not an audi either.

Lol, funny you mention that... My girlfriend's '02 A6 is 60/40, as was my Pontiac 6000 AWD. The Audi never lets you forget it, either.

I thought the iX would be worse than that... I thought a regular RWD E30 had worse weight dist than that, for that matter...

I kept a log of my tire temps that I took with a pyrometer. if you are overheating the outside edges of your front tires then the car will understeer. the most obvious way to fix that is more camber, caster, and more roll stiffness.

Lol, only one of the three is available in an iX! ;)
I used to think that Adem Ergen's AWD M3 build was barking up the wrong tree by keeping the M3 strut towers and caster, but now I'm thinking he may have arrived at a good answer for the wrong reasons.

with a bit more power the car will throttle steer too.

Interesting...
The aforementioned A6 theoretically has a 40/60 power split, but only understeers when I apply power in a corner.

to be honest all you're going to do is reduce the car's overall grip and make snap oversteer more likely.

My experience with the Fiero is the opposite... you're more likely to end up with a car that's hard to handle and has snap oversteer if you're fighting the tires and weight dist than if you're working with them.

I'll give the 225/50 & 205/55 combo a go if I can find an economical wheel swap to put 8's on the front and keep 7's on the back.

Don't forget that stiff bars on both ends ALSO reduces overall grip.