I've been taking a bit of a break from the engine build, plan on resuming that here shortly.

Changed up my plan of action and decided I wanted a cleaner chassis to swap this engine into instead of having to basically rebuild one. May still do it just for the sake of learning how to work with metal but it won't be used for this project. Ended up picking up a 99 M3, southern car, no rust. Needs some TLC but in general the exterior is very clean.

I've been spending some time shaking the suspension/brakes/clutch on this thing down and plan on enjoying it in its current form for the time being. (Sorry for the large picture).

 

very nice. Looks great.

I can hear all the bimmer-heads now.... They'll crucify you LOL!

My last daily driver was a 540i/6. I've had my fill of those morons...

 

Thanks man

Lol let them, I don't care. I'm a car fan first that just happens to drive old bmws. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that your money is better spent on things other than $2500 cam / intake / tune kits that result in little more than a 20 whp improvement at peak on these engines -- and you still have no bottom end. Unless you're going F/I, any mods are a waste of time if you're looking for power. Given that I wasn't interested in F/I my choice was pretty obvious. The stock engines in these things are awesome for what they are though - with a chip they redline at 7.5k and sound glorious the whole way there

 

I agree, let the bimmer heads bitch all they want, you'll take them to the cleaners in the performance category.

Your setup clearly has advantages. BMW engines are unreliable, underpowered, have a weak aftermarket, and are difficult to work on.

Does the M3 engine still run? Is it worth anything?

 

M3s have one of the best straight 6 on the market. The only one I've had better is a 2J.

 

The engines in my experience are extremely reliable - it's just that they're really sensitive to maintenance. You can't miss oil changes / tuneups if you want the thing to run right. Definitely not cars that you can just hop in and go. But to offer a data point, my old M50 in my 325 had 230k on it, only changed the oil and spark plugs and it ran extremely well, didn't burn any oil. I changed the OEM clutch out in that car after 214k miles because of a worn throw-out bearing - the clutch disc itself had less than a mm of wear on it as compared to the new replacement disc. Granted it was an underpowered car and I'm not dragracing it, but I surely wasn't easy on it either.

But the engine in the M3 still runs like a pissed off ape. Honestly not sure what condition its in but I could probably get $2k or so from it as a dropout. A lot of non-m E36 and E30 guys like to swap these motors into their cars.

A lot of guys do the 2J swaps as well, though they aren't as popular as LS swaps.

 

I'm guilty of such a swap, in a (get this) 66 Nova Station Wagon that ran 9s in the 1/4.
That is one of the very few rides that scared me in my life.

 

wow talk about a sleeper! lol. still have it?

 

Fair enough, I'm glad that you've had good experience with them.

At least this sweet new ride is getting a significant upgrade

 

No, that was about 6 years ago and I sold it when I bought my C6. The new owner took the 2J out, threw that in an old Supra he had and installed a SBC stroker in.

 

Any updates to this project?

 

Updates coming shortly, I'll be getting back on the motor this week. Been busy working on the new car, reorganizing my garage, and trying to sell a car and a half's worth of spare parts.

Picking back up with verifying lifter preload with the sample pushrods.

 

Finally!! Tuned in for the rest man.

 

The build looks AMAZING. Keep at it bro, you're almost there.

 

So after a 3 month hiatus I'm back to working on the engine. I've been working on the car, selling parts in hopes of financing other conversion parts, picking up tig welding, etc etc. I'm hoping to make some noise this winter here - get the engine finished up, get a baseline tune, and break her in on an engine dyno.

Today I picked up where I left off last time with pushrod length / preload. Initially I was having problems getting repeatable measurements, just double checking what I got last time. It might be obvious, but it was a lesson for me - you're wasting your time if you don't fully torque the heads down before measuring. I had them "snugged" before not wanting to fully torque down on new gaskets, not thinking there would be a big difference, but boy was I was wrong. The results changed significantly, so I measured all over again.

Here are the new measurements if anyone cares - you can compare them to the ones I posted previously and see the difference for yourself.



With that out of the way I moved on to lifter preload. Last time I was having issues with indicator drift as I was tightening the rockers down. The tip would kind of float around and cause measurement error / prevent me from getting anything reliable or repeatable. A very touchy process to say the least. To try and fix it I bought another indicator tip and ground / polished it to more of a point. The tip would nest into the oiling hole on the pushrod side of the rocker and (hopefully) prevent it from drifting around as I tightened things down.





I only got to measure one valve tonight, but did the #2 intake with the 7.700 pushrod from Trend I have. From my measurements, it needs a 7.664 for zero lash in this spot - so theoretically putting a 7.700 in there should give me 0.036" of lifter preload IF my measurements are comparable to the way Trend measures their stuff.



Repeated multiple times and got between 0.036-0.038". With all the stackup and potential sources of error going on I'm pretty happy with that. Note that this is not my desired preload, however - I want between 0.025-0.030"....I'm simply using the Trend pushrod as a "witness" to my methodology. I just hope the rest of them that I can check with this pushrod follow that closely.

Thanks for tuning in...more to come soon.

-Chuck

 

Glad to see you update this man. That was neat what you did to the indicator to keep it from walking around. Hope you can get this thing started over the winter like you plan. In for the next update bro!

 

So I finished measuring my preload on the passenger side intake valves with my sample push rod, and my results were all over the place. My "expected" preload values are simply the test push rod length (7.700) - my measured length at zero lash.

Cyl 2 intake: Expected - .037. Measured - .038.
Cyl 4 intake: Expected - .030. Measured - .020.
Cyl 6 intake: Expected - .040. Measured - .023.
Cyl 8 intake: Expected - .022. Measured - .015.

I'm suspecting that maybe my fixturing might be causing me some error.... the indicator tip may not be inline with the pushrod completely but I'm doing my best to make it that way with what I have. For those of you who have measured lifter preload, how did you afix your indicator and how close were your measured values to what you were expecting?

 

Got a pic of the fixture you are using now?

 

see above.

 

Ha! Wow.. I knew that it just didn't register in my small *** brain. Sorry bro lol