My First Project: an '86 Arktisblau Metallic 325e

[2mAn]

Nice use of the lift, great learning experience for the right price!

Not sure how you'll feel about all the poly long-term, but you're young Im sure it will be fine... Also, if the rear isnt as low as you want, you can try "adjusting" it with the spring pads. They offer them in different thicknesses or you can remove them completely.

A set of Hartges would've been wonderful, are they sold?

[zwill23]

Whatever you do, don't watch any M20 turbo videos

[rudy]

You certainly made the most out of that shop class opportunity - well done. Stance looks great and I'm sure it feels so much better now...it is amazing how a few parts makes such a big difference.

I'd certainly recommend putting many miles on the car before thinking too hard about an engine swap...every swap has its pro's and con's. The M20 is a great engine, super reliable, and the torque of the 'e' makes it fun at lower speeds. A logical next step for you might be a 15" wheel and tire combo, the Yokohama Flevia is available in the right size and not too spendy.

Keep the updates coming.

Thanks for the comments and advice. I really do love the m20 and have a lot of fun driving it, it's more so just a desire to keep working on the car that makes me wanna do an engine swap lol. I've been looking for wheels locally and came across some 15" Hartges in LA that I sadly couldn't travel to get. I'll keep an eye out though as that is quite a reasonable next step.

[mjweimer]

You certainly made the most out of that shop class opportunity - well done. Stance looks great and I'm sure it feels so much better now...it is amazing how a few parts makes such a big difference.

I'd certainly recommend putting many miles on the car before thinking too hard about an engine swap...every swap has its pro's and con's. The M20 is a great engine, super reliable, and the torque of the 'e' makes it fun at lower speeds. A logical next step for you might be a 15" wheel and tire combo, the Yokohama Flevia is available in the right size and not too spendy.

Keep the updates coming.

[rudy]

Update! I began to take an auto shop class at Palomar College since enrollment is free for high schoolers. Typically this class has students doing work on cars local people bring in, but due to covid we got to work on our own cars or our family's cars. Since I now had access to a lift and every tool imaginable, I went to work on my suspension. Here's a list of everything that I replaced during this job:

-Rear subframe, trailing arm, and control arm bushings replaced with 95a garagistic poly bushings
-Front and rear end links
-Control arms
-Strut mounts
-Rear shock mounts
-Strut and shocks replaced with Koni Sports
-Springs replaced with H&R Sports
-Purple tag rack swap (new e36 outers, kept the e46 inners)
-Power steering return hoses
-Front sway bar replaced with 22mm garagistic sway bar
-O2 sensor replaced with a 1997 Ford 5.4 liter V8 one that I spliced in
-Garagistic stainless steel hoses minus the clutch hose (in retrospect I should have just replaced the clutch hose while the system was empty, but it looks very new anyways)
-CV Boot replacement

I went with 95a poly all around besides the engine mounts, tranny mounts, and diff because I don't mind a decrease in comfort, but the added noise from changing those parts to poly was something I did not want, so I let them be. I did end up ordering the chassis reinforcements, but due to the short timespan of the class I simply didn't have time to get them welded on while everything was off, so I'll just hang onto them for now. I also found out that the tranny mounts, giubo, csb, slave cylinder, and clutch line had been replaced quite recently which was a nice surprise. Overall everything went quite well and I'm really happy with how it rides now. I had my teacher help me bleed the brakes since I had never done it before and some classmates help me with the heavy lifting, but besides that I torqued every nut and bolt myself which I'm quite proud of. After finishing it, I performed a smoke test and found a leak on the bitch tube, so I'll try and fix that soon. I just need to perform an alignment tomorrow and the suspension will be complete, but I've been driving it around today anyways. Now for the photos! (Excuse my lack of front photos, I was in a rush)

New Parts


Her New Home For A While


Rear End Out




Burned Them Out


New Bushings


Back In!


All Buttoned Up












How It Sat Before


How It Sits Now


That's it for the suspension! Before this I had also reflowed the solder joints on my speedometer and it now works intermittently, but I'd like a working one so if anybody in SD has one let me know please. I'm not too sure what's next for this car. A full brake job is probably in store soon, but after that it's pretty much all cosmetic stuff I wanna do that I probably don't have enough money for, like new paint and an mtech1 kit. m30, m50, and m60 swaps all sound very cool, with an m30 swap being my favorite option, but it feels wrong wanting to swap the engine after having done all that work to it and barely driving it so far. Hope you guys enjoy the update and thanks for reading.

[rudy]

Well I finally got it smogged. Some higher power must have been looking down upon me because the max NO is 977 and Blu measured at 976. I'm pretty damn thankful it passed and can get new tags now.



On Monday, I took advantage of that garagistic memorial day sale and ordered the reinforcement kit, 95a centered cabs, and a 22mm front sway bar. Right now I'm putting together an order to refresh the suspension, including upgrading to konis and h&r's. I also got a z3 shifter from mjweimer, so I'll get around to installing that soon.

I don't really want to bend the subframe to do the steering rack swap, so I'm planning to drop it and refresh everything down there along with the rack swap. Hopefully that'll happen soon enough since summer's going to be begin for me next week.

[rudy]

Nice man! Love the arktisblau on tan combo. Looks like a perfect candidate to learn how to wrench on your own car without too much down time between drives. I like that you jumped right in and did the timing belt service and valve adjustment, which are pretty involved. You will like the purple tag steering rack, it is a great upgrade. Would be worth looking into replacing the 3 hoses and reservoir while you're there. You might enjoy an Mtech 1 steering wheel and Z3 shifter as well, both can be had fairly cheap and really improve the driving experience in my opinion. It's a slippery slope haha keep it up dude.

I'll make sure to replace those things while doing the rack swap, especially considering that I'm already leaking ps fluid lol. I've also been hoping to get a z3 shifter and an Mtech 1 wheel in here soon enough but have had trouble finding em. Thanks for the advice man!

[CubbyChowder]

Nice man! Love the arktisblau on tan combo. Looks like a perfect candidate to learn how to wrench on your own car without too much down time between drives. I like that you jumped right in and did the timing belt service and valve adjustment, which are pretty involved. You will like the purple tag steering rack, it is a great upgrade. Would be worth looking into replacing the 3 hoses and reservoir while you're there. You might enjoy an Mtech 1 steering wheel and Z3 shifter as well, both can be had fairly cheap and really improve the driving experience in my opinion. It's a slippery slope haha keep it up dude.

[rudy]

With the early model you can easily just lift the reservoir... its the later style thats a bit worse because the reservoir isnt quite the highest point on the cars and that ones not as easily lifted.

As far as the name goes its ArtikBlau so why not something along those lines or Old Blue? Who knows, you could just call it the OLD POS as many others do lol ... I dont try to force a name, my wife named my Orient Blau E46 wagon Blueberry

Its coming along quite nicely, Im excited to see you progress with this thing.

Thanks man! I did actually try lifting the reservoir originally but just couldn't get it to flow for some reason. I was more than likely doing something wrong though. Hopefully I'm able to give you guys some more interesting updates soon.

[2mAn]

With the early model you can easily just lift the reservoir... its the later style thats a bit worse because the reservoir isnt quite the highest point on the cars and that ones not as easily lifted.

As far as the name goes its ArtikBlau so why not something along those lines or Old Blue? Who knows, you could just call it the OLD POS as many others do lol ... I dont try to force a name, my wife named my Orient Blau E46 wagon Blueberry

Its coming along quite nicely, Im excited to see you progress with this thing.

[rudy]

I ended up starting it up for the first time in a while earlier this week. My battery is pretty bad after sitting for so long since all I did was disconnect it, but after a charge and jumper cables, it started right up. Initially it had a steady idle of 1k, then the next day had a surging idle starting at 800 and getting up to around 1300 after I messed around with the screw on the ICV. Today I cleaned the ICV again and messed with the screw a bit more so it's idling around 700 with no surging anymore thankfully. I'm going to hope that it stays like this but I guess I'll find that out tomorrow.

Obviously I had to bleed the coolant on this start-up as well. I initially had some trouble and didn't have the means for techniques like jacking the front of the car up or using a special funnel, but Nando's post in this thread (https://www.r3vlimited.com/board/for...coolant-in-m20) turned out to be all I needed. The simplest methods really are the most efficient usually.

In terms of simpler stuff, I replaced a snapped seat cable, the passenger-side brake light bulb, sunroof crank, and finally got the stereo unlocked! I don't have an antenna but tested with a cassette and my speakers still seem to work. This was great news for me because I had tried the code a helpless amount of times and it just decided to work randomly.

After running again, I was throwing some names for my car around that I was considering with my girlfriend. She suggested Blu and I like the name quite a bit despite the e-cig brand. Probably gonna get a lot of groans for going with her suggestion but I thought it was more fitting than my ideas and can kinda care less. Since the coolant leak that started all of this happened on the day before Blu was supposed to get smogged, I still have to schedule that so I can begin to drive her legally again. I also wanna get a new battery since this current one is only holding 11.9 volts before starting. I'm honestly not sure how it's even turning over but it's managing to.

Below is an Imgur link to the video of her running. If anybody can attest to whether she sounds healthy or not please do so, I'd appreciate it. There's a slight whine that gets louder when on the driver side, so I suspect it's the alternator since my alternator bushings are completely gone and it's positioned angled right now. I'm ordering the bushings to fix that soon.

https://imgur.com/7GeA55M

[rudy]

Well, life got in the way and it ended up being a while before I could find the time to complete everything. On top of the timing belt job I decided to pull the intake manifold and valve cover so I could clean and paint them, as well as replace their gaskets. Cleaning stuff as it came off was what ate most of my time away and was definitely the most boring part of it in my opinion. Some of the gaskets like the old valve cover and throttle body gaskets were especially a pain to clean (the rocker plugs had literally melted to the valve cover gasket lol). Thankfully everything was way easier to put back on than it was to take off though! I also did a valve adjustment while the valve cover was off which took me forever, but it was good to learn how to do it. Now for the photos!

Grime, grime everywhere


Everything was just absolutely caked in it


All back in!



Recently I went down to the Pick Your Part in Chula Vista because a z3 and an e46 330i had arrived recently. I was hoping to score a z3 rack or a yellow tag rack from the 330i, but both were pulled already. I looked around a bit and ended up pulling a pretty good condition purple tag rack from a 325ic. So I'll be swapping that in soon enough, I just have to get the garagistic kit ordered. I also went to the Pick Your Part in Oceanside and managed to pull the tool box and some taillights with only hairline cracks from a 318. I have new gaskets in hand so hopefully this solves my trunk leak. That's all for now! I'm really looking forward to swapping in this rack next.

[mike.bmw]

Welcome! Great work on those seats.

[rudy]

Thank you guys for the compliments and advice! I went ahead and ordered the fuel hoses, engine+trans mounts, giubo, cs bearing, tail light gaskets, and those o-rings for the side-trunk area. I'm gonna read more into the process of replacing brake lines before ordering them though. I'll get to replacing the aforementioned parts after all the current stuff.

I ended up finishing the odometer when I woke up this morning, but also decided to swap the tachometer and fuel gauge from what I assume to be the original cluster that was left in the trunk. My fuel gauge hadn't worked properly since when I bought the car, but after some reading I realized that it was because the po had failed to swap the fuel gauge from the original cluster when he did the cluster swap. I swapped over the original tachometer solely for the sake of having the appropriate one for the engine.

New Odometer Gears


An Appropriate Cluster

[Tzantushka]

Welcome!
Cool project and glad to see you're not afraid of tackling jobs yourself.

Love how the seats came-up.