M30 OEM Turbo project

[CorvallisBMW]

Hey R3v, what's up :)

Little fun fact about myself: I love to tinker.

I tinkered when I first bought my POS:






I tinkered when I got bored with the m20:






And now, I'm tinkering because I'm bored with the m30:




:twisted:

Stay tuned...

[CorvallisBMW]

For those of you unaware of the awesome things that Europeans get and we don't, in the early 80s BMW had a turbo'd 7-series called the 745i. It featured 1 of 2 different motors, either the L-Jetronic m102, or later the Motronic 1.1 m106. Both were based on the m30 and made roughly 300-ish horsepower.






Now as most of you know the e23 7-series was, at the time, considered a very large car. It also had a large engine bay, which meant you could fit a large engine. However the e30 is a small car, and it has a small engine bay. You can see how this might complicate things... Essentially this project involved trying to fit this:




In to this:




My engine bay isn't exactly spacious as-is:




And now I'm going to try to fit all of this (massive German words included) in there as well:




Now it's certainly not impossible. Upon searching the interwebz I found an old photo of a car belonging to none other than our own resident motor-swapping expert Frank Malusco (FrankM E30). So yes, it can be done. however I'm working with an m30b35 which is a different animal than the m106, so there will be some bushwhacking involved as blaze a new trail. Stay tuned!

[CorvallisBMW]

The first thing you need when tackling a project like this is a good space to work in. For those of you lucky enough to have a big double-car garage, congrats... I fucking hate you.

I have a pretty small 1-car garage with barely enough room to walk around the car. But it's all I have, so I've got to make due with it. Since my wife and I bought the house about 1.5 years ago, I've been planning on building a nice little workbench in the back corner so I would have some space to tinker. A couple weeks ago I finally got around to building it.

Nothing fancy, but it will do. 3/4" plywood supported by 2x4, with 4x4 legs anchored in to the concrete and a 7" vise anchored in to the steel-und-concrete post. Technically it's a 3-legged bench, but with all 3 legs being anchored in concrete, it's solid as fuck. I cannot budge it an inch.




Now it's time for the fun stuff! I bought a complete m106 turbo system from Tom up in WA. Chris was awesome enough to drive it down to me one weekend when he was here crewing for one of JParker's enduro races.

Tom mnetioned that the turbo could use a rebuild as there was a small amount of shaft play (giggle) so this was step #1. I've never rebuilt a turbo before, so these videos came in handy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iNZK4jeRSI

Step one: remove exhaust housing. Reality: harder than expected. In order to get the exhaust housing off, you have to remove the little flanges on either side of the center section. The bolts that hold those flanges on were obviously quite corroded and stubborn after who-knows-how-many-miles of crazy heat cycles. So every day for a week I sprayed them down with PB Blaster and then them soak. 7 days later I went to start removing them, and...


Fuck. One snapped clean off, and the other 3 stripped. So $60 and a trip to the machine shop later, all 4 were out and the threads chased. I probably could have bought $50 worth of drills and extractors, wrestled for hours, and generally busted my ass to get these out, but it was easier to have a real shop take care of it. Done!




Next step: remove compressor housing



FUCK! Kick table, hurt foot, drink beer, decide to deal with it another day....


Continue tearing apart turbo:




No signs of contact between compressor wheel and housing, so that's very good!




Now to remove the shaft:




Yep, definitely due for new seals:




The good news is that the shaft itself has no scoring or wear whatsoever, so it won't need to be machined. Still, super nasty though. I think I'll pick up a gallon bucket of carb cleaner with one of those parts soaking trays.




While disassembling I noticed that by BFH method for removing the exhaust housing was... imprecise. Oops.




No worries. Just give it a little tap-tap-taparoo:

[LJ851]

Hello.

[tak7]

keep on tinkering...

[e30austin]

:up:

[ck_taft325is]

I'm kind of in love with this idea.

[dirty30]

Awesome, but please don't take this the wrong way... why not just turbo the M30 with new aftermarket parts and not that ancient BMW factory turbo stuff? Again, just a question. It will be awesome either way.

[CorvallisBMW]

Awesome, but please don't take this the wrong way... why not just turbo the M30 with new aftermarket parts and not that ancient BMW factory turbo stuff? Again, just a question. It will be awesome either way.

Honestly I just love the idea of OEM+

Yes I definitely could have gone the aftermarket route with one of Otis' manifolds, FMIC, MS, etc... but I wanted to do this differently. There are lots of people out there with aftermarket turbo setups, I wanted to try it with an OEM setup. Most powerful? No. Unique? Yes :)

[Wh33lhop]

Keep it up Darin!

[Farbin Kaiber]

You can do it, if someone can stuff it all into an e21, you can in an e30.

http://www.supercars.net/cars/4643.html

[Wh33lhop]

If I had a penny for every time I've done this...

[Dj Buttchug]

im watching

[e30m3s54turbo]

Sub'd!

If remember bmw made the early m102 with low compression and later one with a slight higher compression. The m106 produced 256hp from the factory. It been while since I seen a KKK turbo.

[88SuperETABD]

Kudos. Love the oem+ angle

Some girl has that turbo 7series here in san jose. Its her dads, but she drives it.