More updates = more fun!

You know it Ced! Haha.

So after pulling the M44 it was easy to remove all of the transmission bolts and disconnect the shift linkage. With everything going on I forgot to take detailed pictures of stuff.

We finished up the day by getting the M52 in place and ready to bolt the new flywheel and clutch package on.

Fun note, it started raining and I had the windows down on the ti because it had been in the garage. Of course the entire engine wiring harness was removed at this point but I was able to use the battery and put power to the fuse box and ground to the chassis and roll the windows up.

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Since the M52 had been on the engine stand I wasn't able to easily get to the rear main seal to replace it. That was the first thing to do the next morning. I got a Corteco seal and it came with the special installation tool. Before installing the seal I made sure the crank had no raised ridges that could have prevented the new seal from...sealing. lol

The installation tool made changing the seal super easy, remember to use a new crush gasket and RTV where the oil pan and rear seal carrier meet. Also don't forget the big sheet metal plate that sandwiches between the engine and transmission, I almost did!

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I took a few minutes to clean all the grime off the transmission and out of the engine bay. It was amazing to see all the built up dirt and sand and how clean it got.

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At this point I forgot to take pictures of most of what was going on.

Bolted the gripforce flywheel on using the supplied bolts. No issues there. The only confusion came with installing the clutch disc and it's orientation in the assembly. If you follow the gripforce instructions you will be probably be using some colorful language when you start the car. After much googling it was obvious that the clutch disc needs to be flipped from what the terrible instructions indicate.

I also replaced all the parts inside the transmission bell housing, my throw out bearing literally fell apart when it was removed. (I did not use the throw out bearing that came with the gripforce kit.) 211k on the car and plenty of clutch material left, pretty surprising.

Got everything together and hoisted it up and into the engine bay. With a little maneuvering the motor went right in and sat right on the motor mounts. I put the transmission brace on and it was bolted in!

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We put the M44 on the engine stand so that it can be parted out more easily. (I'll make a thread.) Cleaned up the garage and rolled the ti back inside to finish up the plumbing and wiring.

With the motor and transmission in all that was left was too clutter up the engine bay with hoses and wires. I forgot to mention in the last update that while the engine bay was pretty open I mounted the rear euro expansion tank bracket to the firewall.

This is the only one (of two) brackets currently available to us in the US. The strut tower bracket is euro blocked by BMW. The rear bracket was put on US M3 convertibles for some reason so it is available for purchase in the US.

It's a good idea to position the expansion tank with the data link connector and battery terminal block mounted so that you can see what space is available for the expansion tank. I was able to mount the bracket with the battery shelf still installed and the hood can close with about 1/4" clearance to the top of the expansion tank cap. For the front of the tank I fabbed up a small piece of aluminum to hold the clip for the tank. It doesn't look all that substantial but I've taken the cap off over and over and the tank hasn't moved yet.

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The main DIY I used for the expansion tank was on bimmerforums by wanganstyle. He opts to run a soft hose around the back of the engine in place of the Euro hardpipe, which is not meant to be installed on the M/S52 engines but rather the S50B32.

There are many options available to run a hose to the expansion tank but I wanted to delete the throttle body heater and retain the heater core. I chose to stick with the stock M52 hard pipe and use the connections I needed.

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It doesn't look fantastic, I'll admit, but with everything (intake manifold, TB, intake boot, etc) installed I can easily inspect the hose connections and see if anything is leaking.

I added a spacer block to the oil filter housing so I could run an oil temperature sender. I have to say I don't really recommend this cheapie spacer block. It was inexpensive and it does the job but I needed a T to get the sender installed the way I wanted.

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The water pressure sender was a bit easier to setup. Some pressure senders are easily killed by engine vibrations so I used a short piece of hose to remove the sender from being hard-mounted to the motor. I just ran the hose off the TB heater barb.

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The rest of the wiring was daunting at first. The automatic harness has some extra connectors but I simply coiled them up and zip tied them out of the way for now. Eventually, I'd like to remove those wires from the harness but for now I just want to get the car running.

This thread (http://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/sh...wiring-harness) was a huge help in identifying connectors.

The only mods I definitely need to make to the harness are adding a pin to the X20 for the reverse light switch and rerouting the aux fan normal speed relay wiring. Haven't tackled that yet though.

Nice swap! I'm getting ready to do a S52 into my 98 Ti and will use the car 95 percent of the time on the track.

That's cool, what groups do you run with?

I've run with trackdaze in the past, and I really liked the organization, lots of seat time. I've run VIR, and Summit Point. My old track car was a 97 M3 sedan with a LS2/T56, 6 speed in it. That car was just sold and shipped to Dubai in April. I need another track car and I had the 318ti sitting around engineless, along with a S52, so here we go.

Cool, I haven't run with trackdaze yet but I'll try to get out to one of their events this year.

I've never really worked on an M52 before so the intake manifold seemed to have lots of vacuum ports and features that I wasn't completely sure about. After reading several forum threads and looking at lots of realoem diagrams I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to hook up vacuum-wise.

Under the manifold, I deleted the muffler flap canister and SAP vacuum hoses. The FPR then went directly to one of the small ports under the manifold.

I installed a new PCV/hoses and replaced the ICV grommet. That left the brake booster hookup, the large vacuum port for the fuel purge valve, and one small port. I capped the small port and set the manifold in place to get a better understanding of how everything would be positioned.

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After that, I replaced all of the low pressure side PS hoses and filled the system with ATF.

I then decided to get under the car and tackle the driveshaft and shift linkage. I quickly discovered that I had purchased the shift carrier and selector rod from a pre-9/94 325is. Below is a picture of the shift lever in neutral...not good.

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I took this as a sign that I needed to finally order a fancy selector rod. AKG has options for almost every configuration of BMW and I've never had issues with their parts.

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9mm difference between the pre and post 9/94 selector rods. Makes a big difference.

Of course, the AKG rod is designed to be a precise fit. It requires the plastic on the rod joint and shift lever to be sanded down until the selector rod just fits in place by hand. This process took some time and getting the holes lined up for the pins was...frustrating...to say the least.

The final product is amazing though, shifts are much more precise, I was surprised that it made such a nice difference. I plan to order the AKG race shifter eventually as I've heard great things about it.

The driveshaft. I stuck with the stock 318ti driveshaft and it does physically fit. I had to compress it as much as possible and drop the center support bearing to get the shaft to slip into place on the trans output flange. I wasn't super thrilled with how tight it felt but it does work.

As for the rest of the drive train, I am already running a 3.73 Medium case diff and using the stock 318ti axles. I plan to rebuild the pair of E30 axles I have and swap them in. I'd like to eventually get a 3.46 diff since that will work better with the short tires I run.

My current gearing/diff/tire setup should be good for the speeds I'll see at VIR. I'm not sure what to expect at the end of the back straight though.

Got the core support back in place so I could mount the radiator. The S54 Z3 rad drops in place nicely, just make sure to swap the lower radiator mount and move the top clip over a few inches.

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Around this point I discovered that the throttle body that came with the engine had been damaged upon removal. The clips that hold the cables in place were both damaged and the cruise control plastic was severely missing. Found a replacement on ebay for $30 shipped and it was delivered a few days later, clean and complete.

Got the intake manifold, vacuum hoses, fuel rail, and throttle body installed.

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It's starting to look like a real car. At this point there wasn't much left. I remounted the bumper, headlights, and nose panel. Make sure to get all of the plastic ducting in place behind the bumper, it is very important to adequately force the air through the radiator.

Hoses to the radiator were straightforward. I used 5/16" heater hose to run from the rad to the expansion tank. Then I used a small hose routed down behind the front wheel to vent the expansion tank.

Next up was the exhaust. This proved to be more of a pain than I initially expected. I'm using the stock M52 headers, to the stock midpipe, to a Z3 3.0 catback. Dear lord, that midpipe is heavy. The hangers bolt right on under the heat shield brace near the ti fuel tank. Then the two rubber mounts hold the midpipe in place very nicely.

The fun part is that the Z3 exhaust is two 50mm pipes and the 328 midpipe is two 48mm pipes. Otherwise known as 2" and 1 7/8".

Here's a picture of the amount of Z3 exhaust that I got. I cut the midpipe back to be a couple inches from the rear hanger. This length was almost perfect, just hanging both the midpipe and muffler section, there was maybe a 2" gap. Easily able to close that up with some adjustments.

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I planned to use 50mm clamps that is a BMW part for the Z3s. However, the clamp tightens to just under 50mm. 48mm slips right out. Pic below.

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I ended up ordering two exhaust adapters that go from 1 7/8" ID to 2" ID. I will weld the adapter to the midpipe and will clamp the muffler side with torc tite clamps.

One thing I discovered, I bought the cheap version of the exhaust hangers and not the OE BMW hangers. There is a huge difference. cheap hangers are cheap for a reason, the rubber is much less resilient and allows too much play so you get the exhaust swinging around. OE BMW hangers actually keep the muffler fairly rigidly mounted under the car. They do cost more but I found it worth it.

The last thing on my checklist before I attempted to start the car was installing a SPAL fan. I chose the 16" medium profile puller fan. It fit nicely on the radiator with plenty of room to clear the water pump.

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Here's a shot of my mount idea. I wanted to keep it easy to remove in case I needed to work on something at the track.

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The primary support is the lower 1/8" aluminum. This strip easily supports the weight of the fan and fits in the tabs for the stock fan shroud. Then the brackets on top hook over the radiator but are there as more of a backup in case something happens and the lower mount were to fail. Two screws into the upper radiator lip keeps it in contact with the radiator core.

To wire it, I cut the connector off the stock aux fan (my fan was all busted up so I didn't feel too bad) with a few inches of the stock 3-wires. The SPAL fan only has one speed so I twisted the high and low speed wires together on the factory connector and crimped them to the power wire on the SPAL wiring. Then just connected the ground wires together. This way the fan can be unplugged and easily removed.

One of the discrepancies in the engine harnesses makes it so that the normal aux fan speed will not work with the M52 engine harness. This is because on the M52 cars the double temp switch goes to the relays and then to the DME. On the M44 cars the double temp switch goes to the DME before heading to the normal speed relay. Without updating the chassis-side wiring the normal fan speed will not come on automatically in a M/S52 swap.

However, on both M44 and M52 configurations the double temp switch goes directly to the high speed relay. Stock M52 double temp switch is 91/99C and the M44 switch is 81/88C. So by using the M44 double temp switch and not touching the chassis-side wiring my SPAL will turn on at 88C, lower than the factory M52 setting.

Since doing this I have run the car and let it idle long enough to kick the fan on. By only wiring up the SPAL through the stock AUX connector and using the M44 double temp switch my fan kicks on and lowers the radiator temperature just as the stock fan would. The only difference is that my SPAL only has one speed. So it comes on at the "high" temp of 88C on the exit side of the radiator.

Hey Dave this is wicked cool and I'm following along the best that I can, as your skills exceed mine. I'm totally jealous about your engine work. Few questions though:

Is that overflow in the battery box area coolant? if so, what is the difference between the normal overflow located on the radiator? ie. why did you do that?

Also, I'm assuming that is the TI tranny, correct?

Keep up the good work and thanks again for posting this build. It is coming along nicely, great pace dude!

Yeah...I'm not great at posting up right after I work on it. The car is all back together and driving already, I'm just going through my pictures and updating the thread as I have time.

The tank in the battery area is coolant, it is the "euro expansion tank" and came on M3's with the S50B32 motor and the same tank was used on E30s in the USA, so it is available to purchase through US dealers. Really though, you could put any expansion tank up there.

I chose to use that style expansion tank because it then becomes the highest point in the cooling system which makes the system self-bleeding.

I also didn't want to have to retain the stock fan shroud, to hold the rad mounted tank, with a spal fan installed.

It also moves a small bit of weight behind the front axle instead of in front of the axle. Probably not noticeable but every little bit helps.

Yes, that is the stock 318ti transmission. We'll see how it holds up on track, I've found threads saying the getrag 250s are made of glass and do not hold up and others who have run crazy power with no problems.

Been driving it for the past few weeks. Quick video of how it sounds, few more odds and ends to complete but it runs great.

Dave;

Well done, looks and sounds great!

A note on the Getrag 250 trans... I have been running the original trans for 6 years now on the swapped M50 with cams, and it has been very solid. I've worn out 2 diffs, but the trans is fine. Just my experience, yours may differ...

i did the same conversion with my compact, the 328i is a lovely engine and was only slightly heavier than the steel m44. did you have to change the spigot bearing in the crank for the smaller one from the m44? i have been abusing the 318ti gearbox for ages and it still seems to be holding together.

That's good to hear, I had to add the pilot bearing since the donor motor was attached to an automatic, pilot bearing is the same size for all e36 motors I believe.

Awesome James, I'm sure you're making more power with those cams than I am. What happened to the diffs? Bearings went or something else?

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