88' Zinno M3 (Progress Thread)

[jhaurimn]

Alright, we finally have some solid results.

This weekend, I went ahead and pulled the intake and itb's to replace a bunch of stuff. Whats the first thing I notice? There was a intake gasket missing...


Went ahead and pulled the intake and itb's. The whole time Im thinking "It cant be this easy" but it was. Just tried to keep a good memory of how all the hoses/wires were routed. There isnt much, though.


I took this opportunity to clean the itb's. Here you can see the left side cleaned, right side still dirty.


New intake gaskets


Pulled the icv, cleaned it, and replaced all the hoses that were attached to it.


Was pretty dirty, cleaned it out with throttle body cleaner.


I replaced the original vacuum hose with some hose I still had laying around from my e46 m3. It has heat protection on the outside and is overall, a lot nicer.


The s38 uses paper gaskets with the intake gaskets which help prolong their life...or something. Anyways, I used them.


Also opted to replace all the airbox gaskets here, despite the previous owners assumption that 3/4 would do. ;) You can see here that I am missing the mount for the icv, so I had to ziptie it down for now. I will get that part and replace next time Im in there.


My oil had been reading low lately, so I replaced the oil temperature sensor in the thermostat housing while I had the room. Oil temp is reading correctly again. :)


I had a new ground cable for the alternator laying around, again taking advantage of having the airbox out.



Decided to paint the intake while I had it out. I didn't have a grinder for the letters....so I had to slowly mask it off like I did for the valve cover. Worked just fine.


Three coats, one vertical, one horizontal, then lastly diagonal. Used VHT black wrinkle paint, same as the valve cover.




Curing the paint in the oven.


New TPS. Probably didn't need this, but figured why not. Super easy to get to without removing anything.


Heres that new vacuum hose. You can see, if the old hose oriented itself against the head, it would melt. Dont have to worry about that now.


When removing the itb, these vacuum hose connections were not even sealed anymore. Used blue rtv to seal them again.




So with everything back together, the engine is running better than ever. It was so down on power before, so I'm very pleased after replacing everything. My idle is a little high now, (1k when warm) so I will need to adjust that.

Next up, radiator and water pump. Maybe a new alternator too. Need to fix my daily a bit too though ... heh :D

[bradnic]

sooner or later every wear item gets replaced..

[jhaurimn]

Gotta love e30s. Fix one thing, and there will be something new to fix the next day. ;)

Stepped into my garage saturday to the smell of gear oil. Hmm...lets take a peek under the car.


Thankfully, the rear cover can be removed with the diff in the car. *phew*


New oem gasket. I filled the diff with Mobil 1 75-90 gear oil.


And shout out to the parts guy at the bmw dealer for accidentally giving me the rest of their stock of diff gaskets. ;)

[jhaurimn]

Awesome, good to see she's coming back to life :)

Thanks!

I'm a little curious are you planning on keeping it the stock base m3 or are you going to get the Evo styling?

Maybe some day, but right now my priority is getting it running and driving as it should. Just dont have the money left over to drop on evo body parts and paint.

and that statement right there is why you are a winner :ST1G:

edit: Did you replace the regular E30 control arms with the M3 aluminum ones? Do you know how much of a weight difference it was?

Thanks man! I was nearly falling asleep at my desk yesterday. As far as the weights, I dont have exact measurements. I was curious of this too but it completely slipped my mind. But yes there were regular steel control arms in the car, and I replaced them with new oem aluminum arms. :)

Very surprised that it had an open diff to be honest
Did the PO do a dodgy on you?

I do not blame the previous owner who I bought it from. I DO however blame the mother fucker who owned the car before him.

The person I bought the car from was a rich guy who doesnt really work on his own cars, and had little e30 background knowledge. Theres no way he would of known of all the crap done to this car. I bought the car sight un-seen, no ppi.

[econti]

Very surprised that it had an open diff to be honest
Did the PO do a dodgy on you?

[2mAn]

I had work at 7am, but priority goes to the m3 ;)

and that statement right there is why you are a winner :ST1G:

edit: Did you replace the regular E30 control arms with the M3 aluminum ones? Do you know how much of a weight difference it was?

[Bimmer_man]

I'm a little curious are you planning on keeping it the stock base m3 or are you going to get the Evo styling?

[CorvallisBMW]

Awesome, good to see she's coming back to life :)

[jhaurimn]

OEM floor mats or where did you get those?

Yes, oem floor mats.




Made some good progress this week. :)

Earlier this week I started swapping out ignition parts to try and get my engine running well again. I started with a lightly used spare set I had laying around.


No change. So I called up a friend ;)


Thankfully I knew someone with an s14, so I swapped his spark plug wires to see if that made a difference. Which it didn't. At this point I'm starting to think possibly low fuel pressure or a vacuum leak was to blame for the poor running. So I replaced the fpr and the fuel hose attached to it.


You can see the fuel line was in rough shape.


This didn't make a noticeable difference either, but I got a good deal on it and it was easy enough to replace.


Fast forward to yesterday. Now, a huge thank you to my friend Erik, who makes a lot of the more trickier stuff possible. I went over to his shop expecting to just replace a steering knuckle and fuel pump. However, plans changed a bit.

The first thing we did was pull the rear seat and inspect the fuel pump. When we pulled the cover on it, we saw a very nice looking pump. When we plugged some power into it, it ran and sounded healthy. To make sure, we measured fuel pressure, which came out correct.


So then we started decided to try and swap the coil as thats the last ignition part I haven't changed out yet. Again no difference. So Erik starts poking around when he pulls out a vacuum cap from the throttle bodies. And to our confusion, the engine ran better. So at this point we are thinking vacuum leak and or dirty icv. I have intake gaskets and icv hoses on order, so hopefully I can get those replaced next week.

Next on the list was the steering knuckle. Why did I have to replace it? Well take a look at this piece of work.


The knuckle had to be shortened to fit the z3 rack I replaced last year. Someone thought it would be a good idea to just stack a bunch of washers on top of each other....So, I had to order one of these.


Thats better. The steering feels much more solid as the knuckle fits over the steering rack and column splines properly now.


Because the knuckle job went smoothly, and I brought all my parts with me, we decided to swap the new aluminum control arms, ca bushings, and sway end links out. Everything went smoothly with that as well, but for the life of us we couldn't get the new ca bushings onto the control arms. Lazy solution? Install treehouse control arm bushings that happened to be laying around.


So, we are about to be done for the night when Erik went to the back of the car and turned the rear wheel. Guess what happened....the other rear wheel didnt turn.....




So yeah....more pleasant surprises. But whats nice about working in a bmw recyling shop is that there just happened to be a 104k mile, 4.10 lsd available to save the day. :D


The diff did not go quietly into the night however, and we ended up working until 1am that night. I had work at 7am, but priority goes to the m3 ;)

[TimeMachinE30]

OEM floor mats or where did you get those?

[jhaurimn]

Replaced fluid with mt90 today. No difference. Hope to have all parts in by next weekend to pull the transmission.

[The Dark Side of Will]

I've read about Metric Mechanic Getrag 265 overhauls replacing some stamped components of the shift linkage inside the transmission with billet versions, making the transmission much more tolerant of hard shifting abuse.

[CorvallisBMW]

Awesome work! I agree the pilot bearing should have dust seals, I've never seen one without them.

[Bimmer_man]

Dude I love your build. Imo one of the cleanest e30 m3s on r3v. Keep it up man. Beautiful work.

[jhaurimn]

Enjoying this thread, wishing I had kept mine:).
jm

Thank you!

Great pics. You've got your priorities straight I think :-)
If you're doing bearings I assume synchros too..
Nothing like a rebuilt shift linkage.

There are no issues with the synchros right now, so I would probably leave those be.

Looking good man. Can't wait to get mine looking more like a car and less like a pile of parts


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks! At least youll have everything covered. Im discovering something new every week ;)