My first engine swap - M30b35 into 89' 320i build thread

[Jean]

Nice progress ! This brings back memories of me doing my first m30b35 swap :)

Write in notepad first , then paste into forum when ready , less chances to lose a post.

Cheers !

[lukeADE335i]

Great work Simmie - good to see some life in your post!

Did the engine need a rebuild? Mine has done 390,000km and is showing no signs of trouble. The M30 is near indestructible providing you don't over heat it, and keep oil in it. Yours should last a lifetime!

When I did my swap, I replaced some gaskets, replaced the water pump for peace of mind, and tightened the oil spray bar bolts, then threw the beast in there.

[Simmie]

Nice progress ! This brings back memories of me doing my first m30b35 swap :)

Write in notepad first , then paste into forum when ready , less chances to lose a post.

Cheers !

That notepad tip is mint, will be doing that in the future. I had at look at your thread. It's a shame most of the photos are gone. Victims of the Photobucket diaster?

[Simmie]

Great work Simmie - good to see some life in your post!

Did the engine need a rebuild? Mine has done 390,000km and is showing no signs of trouble. The M30 is near indestructible providing you don't over heat it, and keep oil in it. Yours should last a lifetime!

When I did my swap, I replaced some gaskets, replaced the water pump for peace of mind, and tightened the oil spray bar bolts, then threw the beast in there.

Thanks Luke! More to come soon

I think even if the cylinder walls didn't have a little oxidation on it, it probably would've been a good idea to rebuild due to the stuck rings and also how dramatically two of the cam lobes were worn. I suspect that the oilspray bar bolts were misaligned at some point. An expensive mistake that one.

It looked like it had probably had its head gasket replaced at some point as the deck looked like it had been machined. So now that I've done the piston rings and rebuild the head I suspect the engine should tick along happily towards half a million km unless I have crank issues

[lukeADE335i]

Nice - yes, it sounds like a rebuild was definitely the way to go in your case.

[Simmie]

Having just wasted another half hour writing this part and accidently losing it.... i'm writing this using Notepad.

Anyway, at this point of the build it was starting to feel like a bit of a job and the lack of pictures I was taking reflected it.

One of the first things I did in reassembly was to paint the intake manifold. The factory finish was peeling badly so I spent ~3-4 hours prepping for a fresh coat of paint. I'm pretty happy with the results. Only reason I used black was because I had left over paint from the valve cover and I was running out of funds pretty bad by this point, lol.



and here it is mounted



I've typed out this next part in detail twice and lost it both times so i'm not going to bother this time and keep it short.

When I was installing the new fuel injector o-rings I was having trouble fitting the new rings over the sprayer side of the injector. The process I used was to overcome this was to heat the new o-rings with a heat gun, oil them lightly, and push the ring on with an appropriately sized socket, easy.

Here's a picture of the technique to get them off, just wedge a thin screwdriver underneath and use sidecutters to get it off.



At this point there are a lot of holes in the photos so i'll just add the random pics I took during the process.

Why buy a new intake hose when you can spend two hours cleaning the old one?



In the interest of preserving my life my parents bought me a 3.91 Limited Slip Diff as a late Christmas present. It has new seals and bolts. I would've perferred one with a better ratio (3.46, 3.64) but I needed a medium case diff and this was pretty much all that was available without getting a specialist to make a custom ratio. No more one wheel peels for me.



Oh yeah, the other thing I did was buy Koni Yellow Shocks and H&R Race Springs which required a conversion to 51mm struts but f*** was it a great idea. It's unbelieveable how planted the car feels with these installed vs stock. WORTH. EVERY. PENNY



People aren't joking when they say Race Springs aren't particularly uncomfortable. I don't have experience with H&R Sport springs but I can definatly recommend the Race Springs having driven them around the suburbs a fair bit. I can even drive over speed bumps easy, at least for now.

Sitting pretty on new Shocks and springs



More to come!

[Simmie]

Alrighty gents, time to get into the actual swap.

Firstly, there was no space for me in the garage so I had to set up outside. I would like to recommend to anyone reading to always get help when assembling a gazebo because it's a real c*** of a job solo... not sure if gazebo is an international term actually but you'll see what i'm talking about in the pictures.

I finally got the thing put together for the first time since a new year boozer from quite a while ago.



Ah s***



No more flying away thanks



Anyway...

I followed the guide in FrankM's swap PDF for engine removal.

Always nice to have my dad and a mate around to do the dirty work while I take pictures, eh?



Sorry if you didn't want your face on the internet Xavier



Don't really have much to say about the engine removal other than many hands makes light work. Also worth noting that I removed it without an engine load leveler with the autotragic still attached pretty easily granted there were three of us working on it.

put the engine down beside the house. Once i'm done with it i'll probably offer it to anyone that does 2L cup racing as a spare engine. No-one else wants the M20b20 unfortunatly, too hard to try get money for it. Maybe i'll get a box of beers.




One of the perks of a 165,000km car (100,000 miles) is that everything is still just about mint.

Just about all the paint in the engine bay was undamaged. The picture I took was before I did any cleaning at all.



And just for future refernce for anyone else pulling their engine without a leveler, this chain length with the shorter side attached to the front made removal pretty easy with the M20



More to come

[Simmie]

I'm dedicating this post mostly to the E36 steering rack swap

Before I put the new rack on I got the subframe reinforcment kit from Garagistic welded in and gave it a quick paint, sorry for the crappy photo



The first thing to do was to remove the bus driver steering rack from the subframe and install the E36 one. I again used a Garagistic product for the install. Their steering rack conversion kit comes with aluminium spacers for the conversion as the newer racks are shorter than stock.

I inserted the spacers on the top of the rack as that seems to be the best option from the breif research I did.



The next step was to modify the steering linkage. I don't think the process for this is the same between RHD and LHD conversions so the rest of Garagistic's conversion kit was useless to me, lol.



The shortening of the linkage is done basically by eliminating the rubber guibo and bolting the ends together.

I used a grinding wheel to take the heads off of the rivets holding the guibo in. Oh yeah, I got rid of the shield with the grinder too.



In the picture you can see the two circles under the rivet head. On the E30Zone guide to the swap they say the two halves will pull apart but it wasn't quite that easy (is it ever?) I had to use a hammer and a punch (I think) in a vice to start pushing the two halves apart.

Once I had the guibo removed to get the two halves to butt up against eachother I used the bench grinder to reduce the diameter of the middle rod and shortened it too to prevent interference in the universal joint. Bit of a lack of pictures here too :/

Here's a picture of the two halves before bolting them together.



Also used a wire wheel to clean the splines before putting it in the car.



I then mounted the subframe again, I used a jack to offer it up to the holes in the frame rails



And then torqued the 4 bolts down to spec.



Here's the linkage fitted



Here's a picture of the clearence to the exhaust manifold, bit of a crap picture.



The clearence may need work, we'll see how it fits once the exhaust is bolted on.

I also installed new Lemforder outer tie rods. Make sure they're painted before you install them. A couple days after install there was a little surface rust already which i'll have to take care of.




Alrighty, i'll post pictures of the M30 install in the next couple days.

[Simmie]

And here we are, 10 monthes and 8 days after I bought the engine it is finally engine installation day.

Firstly, new rear main seal. I cleaned the housing and then lubricated the housing and the seal. It was a little bit fiddly pushing it in because if you push one side in a little bit too much you then can't get the other side in so you have to pull it out and start again.



Once the whole thing was partly seated inside the housing a just tapped it in with the handle of a mallet going around in a cirular pattern until it was seated.


Once the seal is in it's clutch time. At this point I realised I don't have any pressure plate bolts since I bought my transmission without its clutch and the engine came with an autotragic box.

So.... the solution was to find a couple left over bolts and steal a couple from each old engine mount from the M20. An hour later I had these.



Bolted the flywheel on and torqued it down.



Had the clutch shop remove the old timing thing when they resurfaced the M10 wheel



Held the clutch plate on with the allignment tool and torqued the pressure plate on with my newly shortened bolts.

[lukeADE335i]

Great work Simmie!

With the spacers for the steering rack, depending on how low your car is, you might find you need to flip them to underneath to adjust the angle of the tie rods if you end up with excessive bump steer.

Looks like there's plenty of clearance between the linkage and the exhaust - have you tried fitting the front manifold? I'd heard that there were clearance issues between the pinion and the front manifold, but maybe this is not correct (in which case I may go for an e46 rack in mine :D )

Which ACS clutch kit did you go for? A stage 1 (like mine, which I've had no problems with) or a stage 2 or 3?

[Simmie]

Great work Simmie!

With the spacers for the steering rack, depending on how low your car is, you might find you need to flip them to underneath to adjust the angle of the tie rods if you end up with excessive bump steer.

Looks like there's plenty of clearance between the linkage and the exhaust - have you tried fitting the front manifold? I'd heard that there were clearance issues between the pinion and the front manifold, but maybe this is not correct (in which case I may go for an e46 rack in mine :D )

Which ACS clutch kit did you go for? A stage 1 (like mine, which I've had no problems with) or a stage 2 or 3?

I got the one you recommended, the Stage 1.

I am a bit worried about the exhaust clearance on the rear manifold but there's probably 0.5cm of aluminium I can file off. I haven't been able to put the front manifold yet because the A/C compressor is cable tied in the way right now. I'll be trying to mount the A/C this weekend and i'll then be able to check the clearances to the pinion.

I was asking if you were putting an E36 rack on your car on your thread in hopes that i'd be able to see how you did it! But, it looks like i'll be the pioneer this time, lol

Nice tip in regards to the rack spacers, i'll keep it in mind!

[Simmie]

Had a few more things to do before dropping the engine in.

The bolts for the intake side engine mount were too long for the new engine mount position so I had to shorten them down a bit.



Original vs shortened



And engine mount fastened with the shortened bolts




I also used rust converter and some black paint to fix up the radiator support



Forgot to take a picture after I painted it.

I also used a grinder to remove the old radiator supports to allow for the E28 radiator to fit.



Again, no after photo. Opps.

[Simmie]

It's happening!



The Getrag 240 is comically small on the "Big Six"



Yeah.... fairly tight fit



Ended up pulling it out again and removing the crank pulleys and intake parts. I then reattached the chain to hold the engine at a more aggressive angle and got to this point



Hard to see as I took this at 10pm, but this is the clearance at the back of the head.



I didn't manage to get both engine mounts bolted onto the subframe that night so I came out the next morning and got it done



Alrighty, some tips and tricks for getting the bastard in.

- Loosen the engine mount bolts a little so that the mounts can slide side to side. Every millimeter helps. (There was no way I was getting both sides on the sub-frame until I did this)

- Use a jack on the transmission cross-member to lift the transmission to nearly flat so you can get the engine butted up against the firewall as much as you can.

- You don't need to bash the firewall to fit the engine with the Garagistic mounts if you're using an M10 (Getrag 240) transmission.

- Although I cut out a small amount of sound deadening out from behind the cylinder head I realised once the engine was in that I could've gotten away without doing it

It probably took me 3-5 hours to get the engine in and that was with help too, although i'm sure I could do it in an hour or so with what I learnt.

[Simmie]

Bolted the intake, pulleys, and alternator on



Snorkel?



Alrighty, sat down and wrote down what I have to do and taped it to the wall



So the photos from now on will pretty much be me ticking jobs off the list.

Starting with painting the outer tie rods.

I replaced the old outer tie rods with Lemforder ones and they came from the factory without a finish on them and so they started rusting a day or two after I put them on. So, I took them off again, removed the oxidation with the wire wheel on the bench grinder.

Primed



Painted



I also got under the car and had a helper tell me when the shifter was vertical and marked where the shifter would want to be attached the the shifter arm.

I then measured the difference in length (70mm)



And took both arms to be shortened by 70mm. One of the arms is hollow steel and the other is solid aluminium (I think)

Anyway, I won't really have much time to work on it during the week so updates will be a bit slow. Especially since I feel like i'm going to freeze up when it comes to trying to wire it since both the car and the engine were automatic but are now 5 speed.

We're now fully up to date with the work I've done up to the 6th of February.

[lukeADE335i]

Quick question Simmie (with reference to my reply to your wiring question in my thread) - are you going to use the engine harness from the M20, or the M30?

I used the 320i harness in my swap so that it was virtually plug and play - so my advice on wrapping and re-wrapping were if using the M20 harness. You can use the M30 harness, but there are a few issues - from memory, mostly to do with grounding the relays correctly. This might be explained in Frank's guide?

Ultimately re-routing the M20 harness is easier than adapting the M30 harness, but either is doable without too many problems.