The 524td on the left and the 528e on the right. The roof racks were free and are kind of just a joke, but they don't look half ass.
While I was away at school for the first semester I put a ton of time and research into doing this swap. I went all the way to Greensboro SC to go and pick up the oil pan conversion/related parts. I also spent hours looking at various pin-out charts and wiring diagrams from forums and both the e36/e28 Bentley manuals. Luckily for me the first semester of the NC BMW ADP curriculum happened to be body electronics 1 which helped me with building the harness. I didn't drive the car again until thanksgiving break, I only drove it around to get a few good pictures of it and to diagnose some of the suspension issue the car had. I was also able to get a few nice shots of it while driving one of my favorite NJ back roads.
When Winter break finally came along I got a total of 4 weeks off until I had to come back down to NC. The first week and a half was spent helping my dad out with cleaning the shop up and fixing some of the other BMWs that he had gotten in. Midway through the second week I was finally able to go with my Good Friend Steven (Thanks again Steve if you ever read this) and go pick up my free donor car. The car wasn't totally free but since the motor and drive-train had 306,000 miles on it my Dad's friend Bob made a deal with me. If I pulled all the parts out of the car that he wanted for his other e36 I could have the motor and anything else he didn't need.
The actual process of me swapping the car and getting everything done I didn't get many pictures of since i only had a window of about a week and a half to actually pull this off. So in two days I had the e36 and the e28 completely taken apart and the m52 on a stand ready to get prepped to go in. I decided just to get the gaskets that most commonly go bad on these motors and call it a day there. I also put the obd1 valve cover on and all the obd1 sensors that I bought in the summer. I plan on putting a lower mileage m52 into the car but I figured this motor should last until I can snatch up another m52. The car ran so well I would never believe it had 300k on it.
The install of the motor was really rather interesting. I had gotten e34 525i motor mounts after reading a build thread about extending the tabs on the sub-frame and mounting the motor with those arms and 525i mounts. My goal with this project was to try to use the stock trans and driveshaft so I mounted the motor around them. While the motor was out of the car I put a modified 944 brake booster in to get more clearance since I knew it was going to be a little tight. When the motor was actually in the car we were actually able to get the factory m20 mounts to work with the m52. With the pro of this being no need for custom motor mounts or anything of that sort you run into several issues. The first issue is the obd1 manifold will not fit at all. To me this isn't a big issue but I know someone will still comment below and question my use of a modified m52 obd2 manifold on a obd1 setup. I am VERY aware of the benefits of the obd1 manifold and if I could have ran it with my setup I would have. That leads me to the second problem I had with this setup, that you can only use an obd2 manifold that's modified to clear the booster and the harness,or run something totally custom. Another issue I ran into is the oil pan doesn't sit flat. The m5X motors sit at a totally different angle then the m20 so now the oil pan sits at a different angle instead of the motor. This is only an issue to me because it sits much lower in one spot which holds a higher risk of getting damaged especially if i plan on lowering the car slightly. My last issue is that there is really no room to work on the drivers side of the car. Ive found ways to work around it but it would be nice if I had a little more clearance. That all being said If I did this again I would probably do It much differently, but I feel it was a very neat experience non the less and I want to put a ton of miles on the car this spring to see if I run into any other issues with this setup. I may or may not re-do the entire mounting setup on this car. It depends on how long this motor lasts and if i can find a better solution to the intake/oil-pan scenario. Overall I maybe have $2000 into the entire project which I think is kind of a high estimate, so I would say its a win for me since the car runs and drives well around the parking lot. The only thing left to do now is wait until spring break when me and my friend Wyatt will build a custom exhaust for it so I can finally take it on a road test.
As you can probably see in the top picture the fan is missing, there is no intake, the manifold is not painted yet, and the coolant line for the expansion tank is running over the engine. Im going to fix all of these things when I get back in march but just so I could move the car around to where it can be stored I just did that temporarily. Also while I'm away for these 8 weeks I will also be trying to build an obd2 harness for the car with working EWS just for the added challenge. That's really all the progress Ive been able to make for now. I'm hoping you guys will enjoy this thread. I want to apologize ahead of time for the cellphone pictures and some of the ghetto corner cutting that was done to get this to the point it is right now.
(To all the friends and family who may read this thread I couldn't have done this without all of you so thank you so much)
That's all for now guys...until march at least
Jon