1983 Henna Red 323i

[kdevitt]

A good news / bad news kind of day. Still trying to decide which one is in the ascendancy. Either way, the curse of the early production E30 struck again.

So the picture below if what would greet you inside the boot of 99% of all E30's - in a 6 cylinder car the battery sits in here. A 4 pot car still has the battery up front, but its a popular mod to shift it to the rear. Very early 6 pot cars such as mine also have the battery up front. Given the amount of space the M30 engine is taking up in my engine bay, there's no real space for it, plus there's already too much weight up there, AND the washer reservoir needs to sit where the battery currently is. Hence it being moved to the boot.



Spot the difference! I will say, its not immediately obvious -



If you haven't managed to spot it - take a look again at where the wheel arch is in each picture. So it turns out that there is no room for a standard battery in the boot. Given that I'd only recently invested in a brand new battery from BMW, its a bit of a pain. Need to source a racing battery now.

Its not the end of the world - and there was plenty of other progress today.

Pilot hole and outline for the bulkhead hole needed to feed the battery wiring -



Cut out -



Cable fed through and positive terminal mounted -



The other end of the cable in the boot - again my car resists the change! The trims for the boot don't fit over the cable, so will need to source later model versions



Quick check of the scuttle panel showed up no rust though - which is rather excellent news given E30's propensity to rust here





Few more bits going in now too - a new E34 throttle cable was bought from BMW - the original E30 one is quite a bit shorter in comparison



Engine work is all scheduled to be complete next week - so that can start going back together then.

[kdevitt]

Second update of the evening -

Its pretty easy to look at the engine bay empty and think that we're almost finished, which is quite obviously not the case. Given this is such an early production date car, even some simple jobs are causing problems.

Case in point - relocating the battery to the boot. Firstly - theres no hole in the bulkhead for it! (although if I leave that rust long enough there will be)



And with the carpet stripped back to access the wiring - instead of seeing something like this:



There was some very odd sticky stuff -



It was pretty brittle, so could be removed in big enough chunks -





With that getting closer to be sorted - time to kick off the manual conversion in earnest - pedal box is now out



Some wiring to be tidied up -



Really getting places now.

[kdevitt]

The majority of parts still needed arrived yesterday, so had a chance to look through them today. For such an expensive order, I did expect a larger box. Arrived in a package no bigger than a shoe box. I know there's no correlation between cost of products and size of the packaging, but still :D

Anyway - this is what €50 worth of nuts (12) look like!



Lots of gaskets (yes, I have club thumbs!)







M3 shifter



Lots of other bits, but ultimately nothing exciting. Still waiting on a cylinder head gasket, am also order a slimline steering linkage from Ergen Motorsport, and still need to figure out something with the prop and guibo as well as the diff. Ideally looking for a 3.46 medium case, have heard even a 3.64 is a bit nuts in them, so will hopefully get something sorted.

[kdevitt]

You can definitely have both AC and PS if you want, it all bolts right up.

Thats what I initially thought alright. From what I know, BMW SA only offered the 333i with power steering or AC - and as a result people thought that you couldn't have both.

[CorvallisBMW]

You can definitely have both AC and PS if you want, it all bolts right up.

[henryki]

Just spent the last hour of my class time reading through all of this. Impressive. Beautiful car. Good luck with the swap!!

[Javier h]

333i

From what I read, the 333s came with either air or power steering but not both because of the space.

You can definitely keep the power steering. I wasn't aware the car had no AC.

Javier

[kdevitt]

Cheers. Theres no aircon so thats one less problem - power steering will be staying, although I'm not doing the work. Haven't read of anyone having to ditch it though.

[Javier h]

Nice

Are you ditching the power steering or the AC unit? Not enough room for both I am told. Congrats on the car.

[JCarp90]

This is going to be cool. I want to M30 swap my next E30.

[kdevitt]

Car is looking pretty sorry for itself at this stage -



Engine bay was given a bit of a scrub down - looks a lot better already -



The expansion tank needs to be shifted from the drivers side to the passenger side for the engine swap - didn't want to be putting a discoloured second hand piece in, so as you'll begin to see - almost everything going in is brand new.

Needed a new bracket put in place to support it -





Alarm siren needed to move as well -



My engine man also got the rad test fitted - and its a perfect fit, so one less thing to worry about.

[kdevitt]

This is probably whats normally referred to at the point of no return!

Bonnet off and the engine being prepped for removal.





More or less everything unplugged at this stage



Out she comes -



It doesn't quite match the M30 for size -



Needs a bit of a clean -



Only a handful of parts left to source now. Need to get some of the various parts over for vapour blasting before the M30 gets put back together. Also turns out that I have a pretty rare small case limited slip diff - which is worth a bit, but pretty much useless for the M30 - wouldn't last very long by all accounts. So now need to source a decent medium cased diff.

[kdevitt]

As the song goes - if I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all...

Pretty apt on this occasion. Machine shop had a look at the block and head - there was bad news on both fronts. Firstly, as expected, the head needed a full rebuild - two valve seats and at least two new valves. To make matters worse, cylinder 5 was oversized - so the block needed to be rebored.Apart from the cost of actually carrying out that work, or any other parts - the pistons alone would have worked out at EUR1800 or so. So that idea was knocked on the head and it was time for some head scratching and a few tears at the thought of my new engine now being only good for use as a paper weight.

Given the amount of parts sourced at this stage for the M30 swap, there was no chance I was going for anything different. Turns out that there was an M30B35 from an E32 sitting in the corner of the shed which hadn't seen action in a while.

Decided to go for a leak down test on this - which had healthy results. Head came off the check the block, all looks reasonably ok. Going for a re-hone on the cylinders, new piston rings and a refresh of the head.

Few pics of the new engine -

Sump was looking a bit dirty



Came up well -



As did the head - one stud snapped, another two are sitting tight though - so these will need to be persuaded to come out.

[kdevitt]

So, about that M3 Touring...

Yeah - its going to be pretty special when its finished.

[CorvallisBMW]

So, about that M3 Touring...