'88 Cirrus M30B35 sedan

[lukeADE335i]

For sure - even the small diesels are similar to your F350, where right off idle they don't have the throttle response of petrol, but once wound up it's excellent.

Anyway, maybe my previous post was a bit prophetic...



Got hit in the side by someone turning across 3 lanes of traffic. I was in the last of the 3 lanes and they didn't look properly! Considering they hit right in the driver's door, thankfully I wasn't hurt too bad (you can see in the damage that the side intrusion bar in the door did it's job!) - just a bit of annoying whiplash & and I'm feeling a bit sore and sorry for myself!

Insurance is just looking at it to see what they'll do - but I'm thinking maybe the e30 gods have spoken! Back to daily driving the e30 for the next few weeks at least.

[Motheye99]

For sure - even the small diesels are similar to your F350, where right off idle they don't have the throttle response of petrol, but once wound up it's excellent.

Anyway, maybe my previous post was a bit prophetic...



Got hit in the side by someone turning across 3 lanes of traffic. I was in the last of the 3 lanes and they didn't look properly! Considering they hit right in the driver's door, thankfully I wasn't hurt too bad (you can see in the damage that the side intrusion bar in the door did it's job!) - just a bit of annoying whiplash & and I'm feeling a bit sore and sorry for myself!

Insurance is just looking at it to see what they'll do - but I'm thinking maybe the e30 gods have spoken! Back to daily driving the e30 for the next few weeks at least.

Holly crap, the E30 gods really have spoken.

Sorry about your car good thing your alright.


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[lukeADE335i]

Thanks - modern high strength steel is a good thing!

Had I been driving my e30 at the time my injuries no doubt would have been much worse. My Dad is encouraging me to buy the wreck if it is written off and another e30 shell to swap. No idea how the electronics might work out on that though + there's the rear sump to contend with...

Went to the specialist BMW repairer today (recommended by the dealer) and they said it's fixable. Just waiting on the insurance company's response. The insurance nominated panel shop took one look at it and said they couldn't fix it due to the tear in the rear 3/4.

[lukeADE335i]

Seeing as I'm back daily driving the e30 for a few weeks while the e92 gets repaired, I decided it was time for some new tyres! Driving around on ancient Good Years in the stock size and the M30 is a scary experience, the car has no grip at all & I shudder to think what it would be like in the wet!

Anyway - to keep costs down, fitted a set of Hankook K-415s. While they're not as grippy as the Yokohama R1s I have been running with the Alpina reps, they're actually pretty good! I'd say actually very close to the Michelins on my wife's car, and far better than some of the other cheap tyres I've tried over the years.



The car has also just clocked up its 7th birthday since being swapped this week, with the M30 still running strong and reliable as always. The fuel economy is a bit sobering after running the diesel most of the time for a few months, but with fresh tyres and a wheel alignment, the car is a joy to drive!

[Anthony B]

The e30 is looking mint & im mildly jealous. I wish I could daily my e30 it’s been in the shed for too many months now.

The e92 looks pretty repairable, in nsw it would need to be bent in half to be a write off these days

[lukeADE335i]

Thanks Anthony! Yours is going to be an absolute weapon though once it's finished. Looking forward to the engine bay shot with the ITBs once you fit it!

I've been sorting a few more minor maintenance things seeing as I'm driving it regularly again - just fitted a new electric aerial today as the old one had snapped off in the car wash. But with a few minor jobs ticked off it is getting back to being pretty mint. I'm really appreciating the better ride quality on the 14s over the 16s. Perhaps I'm getting old!

Since I've had it out the front of the house driving it, I've had multiple people knock on my front door asking whether I'd sell it, but thus far I've resisted.

The crash repairer called about the e92 today to say it has just gone in to the paint shop, so I can pick it up Friday week. Curious to see the bill, as it won't have been cheap!

[lukeADE335i]

Got my e92 back today - the crash repairer has done a great job, good as new! :D The N47 sounds a bit agricultural after driving God's engine for a few weeks, but the fuel economy will be a bit of a relief!

[lukeADE335i]

I did some work on the e30 this weekend as the battery had decided to die from sitting around too long - the battery was about 8 years old so I can't really complain. Following the battery replacement another problem surfaced where the car would run fine cold, but once warm would run terribly - really rich and with a bad miss fire.

Looking at the Motronic troubleshooting list, the fuel pressure regulator seemed the likely culprit so seeing it was a cheap part, I picked up a new one and fitted it which made the cold running smoother but didn't fix the problem. The old FPR did have a slight internal leak. Fortunately I have a stash of Motronic parts in the shed, so working through the troubleshooting list I swapped the idle control valve for a known good one, which made no difference and then fixed a couple of minor vacuum leaks which still didn't solve it. Last item on the list was replace DME so I bit the bullet and put the M30 Miller chip into my old M20 172 DME. I had a couple of spare 179s there, but the 172 was the latest, freshest looking DME I had. The chip swap worked fine & voila problem solved! :)

I think the DME has been on the way out for a while as the car had been running rich at WOT when warm, there has been a slight stutter when transitioning from idle sometimes which I had been thinking was the injectors getting a bit past it, but the car's running great now.

[lukeADE335i]

Continued with some more small jobs on the car this weekend. My drivers seat had become pretty saggy (ie. it has started to feel like I was sitting on the carpet), so I ordered a set of replacement Recaro base straps from Aardvark Racing. Good improvement over the 30 year old straps, which had gone brittle and lost their stretch!

[lukeADE335i]

Unfortunately the original build thread of my car was lost on a now dead forum. I stumbled on to a text based version of a summary post of my build on an old hard drive tonight so I thought I'd repost it to the thread here so it remains on the web. This was from back in 2012 when I first did my swap. Of course, now the M30 swap is very well documented, not least through Frank's guide & many other threads here, but this summarised my experiences swapping my RHD car. There's some nostalgic build shots of the swap that might be of interest + a few comments on what I changed over time. The digital photos from back then are laughably small vs. pics now!

My initial parts list was:

M30B35 from an '89 535is with ECU
e30.de type 2 engine mounts with new rubber mounts
e30 M3 clutch kit
e21 323i starter and flywheel (NOTE - this approach failed within a month, now there's the RHD flywheel that would make the M3 clutch work and it's a great option, but I ended up with a HD 315mm M10 clutch as mentioned in the first post here).
Getrag 240 O/D 5 speed with urethane mounts to restrict fore / aft movement of the motor (later replaced with e21 rubber mounts and enforcer cups for NVH reasons)
3.73 medium case diff (later a 3.45 for something different and then a 3.25 LSD)
e28 535i radiator
e32 top radiator hose, e28 535i bottom
e32 electric fan
e32 throttle cable
e32 washer bottle
Modified exhaust manifold with flange turned 90 degrees. e34 down pipes into standard twin 1.75 inch M20 exhaust (worked well, but was later swapped for a 2.5 inch single exhaust - kind of regretted the drone of the 2.5 inch).



Engine waiting patiently to be dropped in - note - no 3.5L on the inlet in meeting my ultimate sleeper aims. At a car show I attended some years ago, many BMW enthusiasts wandered past it multiple times before noticing the engine was not an M20 ;-)



M20 Flywheel and Starter on M30. I tried to defeat the internets here and failed. Initially I ran into problems with the slave cylinder over-extending with the e30 M3 clutch, so lengthened the rod on the slave cylinder slightly to solve it. After a month the starter chewed the teeth off the ring gear, and I swapped the flywheel out for an M10 single mass flywheel and a HD 215mm clutch - it's just a "Stage 1" with 50% uprated pressure plate and has held the torque of the more or less stock M30 fine.



Here's the engine being dropped in to position 3 on the e30.de mounts - it went in easily, the RHD steering linkage being the only real hurdle.



Firewall clearance was tight - I did pry the firewall back about 5mm after this photo with a bar to help with clearance. With the sound deadening removed, the engine ended up with roughly the same firewall clearance as the M20 had previously. Due to the RHD brake linkage on the other side of the firewall, you have to be careful not to bash the firewall too much!



Engine wiring - I only had to solder 3 wires - for the rest I just unwrapped the M20 loom, routed the wires where they needed to go and then re-wrapped the loom. The 3 wires to solder were two injector wires that were too short in the injector loom, and as I was running an old style starter I had to splice the power for the unloader relay (green black) into the Black/Yellow wire for the starter. Later I swapped to a late style motronic starter replaced the whole black/yellow wire from the ignition and rewired the unloader relay circuit back to stock.



Radiator clearance - actually pretty good compared to some other conversions I've seen. I can fit my fingers between the distributor cap and the radiator. I run an e32 electric fan to keep things cool. It moves plenty of air, and is very quiet due to the curved blades.



Exhaust - I rotated the flange 90 degrees to increase the steering linkage clearance. This has worked fine, but clearance is still fairly tight.

Overall, the conversion took about 6 weeks - working on it a bit at a time - and has been more than worthwhile. Strangely, in some respects the M30 fits in the engine bay better than the M20, and is easier to work on as far as servicing etc. goes due to the inlet crossing over to the exhaust side of the engine, and the oil filter being easily accessible on the inlet side. Front / rear clearance is obviously tight, but then again - with the late M20 having the radiator hose crossing over in front of the engine, it isn't actually that much worse!

Anyway - if anyone is thinking of a RHD conversion hopefully this helps. I know this conversion is documented a bazzillion times here and elsewhere on the web, so these are more nostalgic for me than anything :)

[gnmzl]

Thanks for posting the writeup, I have been wondering about how you did the swap on your car.
Slight edit proposal - the m10 clutch is 215mm if I recall correctly.
Out of curiosity - why does the m20 flywheel/starter combo fail on an m30?

[lukeADE335i]

Thanks gnmzl! I've updated the post with the flywheel information - you've remembered correctly, it was an M10 single mass flywheel I used in the end.

The M20 flywheel and starter fails on the M30 for two reasons:

Firstly, the M20 flywheel is slightly larger in diameter than the M10 / M30 flywheel. This means the offset of the starter is wrong on the M30 block & makes it difficult for the starter bendix to mesh properly with the ring gear of the flywheel. While it works, the starter tries to bind and it puts a lot of pressure on the starter as the teeth are a really tight fit. It's tricky because the external diameter of the ring gear is the same for both (which is why I thought I could defeat the internet!) but after it failed and I put the M10 and M20 flywheels side by side I realised that it's the depth of the teeth on the ring gear that is different. See the pic below - M10 is top, M20 is bottom.


Secondly, the bendix on the M20 starter has less travel than the M10 / M30 starter. This causes the bendix to only engage about 1/3rd of the ring gear when the M20 starter and flywheel are fitted to the M30.

Between these two things, the ring gear failed - here's the M10 and the failed M20 flywheels side by side - you can see that the starter wasn't engaging the ring gear properly:

[325isman]

Great looking car.

[lukeADE335i]

Thanks 325isman!
Had the tractor out towing the trailer today Was 43C (109F) and the car was still fine in the heat as always - suffice to say with no AC I was dying, but the job had to be done before we get potential storms tomorrow. Before towing I fixed a couple of small things - the speedo sensor plug had decided to fill with water somehow, causing the speedo not to work, and one of the exhaust mounts had broken so I replaced that. Seems our cars really don't like sitting around that much. After the hard work, I gave it decent run & a wash tonight before putting it back under its cover.

[lukeADE335i]

Out towing again and realised I'd missed the obligatory birthday of my swap post! The car has clocked up 8 years now swapped and still going strong. Much less to report this year now that I don't daily drive the car, but still enjoying it in full sleeper mode & the COVID crisis might put paid to further mods planned for this year. I had been hoping to have another exhaust made based around an e46 rear muffler to quieten my exhaust back to stock levels & have my Alpina reps repaired + refurbished & add some Alpina parts, but will have to see what happens with work.



... and the cliche carwash / service station shot. Forgot to push the mirrors back out before taking the photo :)