After bleeding the clutch, I realized that even though it was disengaging properly and at the right height. It plain felt like crap. So I did some digging, and threw myself and a friend into another 5am project!
First thing I did was recall smacking myself in the face with the M3's brake pedal when the assembly was out of the car. The thing has a spring mounted on the pedal that has an "Over-the-center" type of actuation. In other words, before the pedal starts pressing against the clutch's springs, the driver is fighting against the pedal return spring. However, at the point where the clutch spring starts also fighting the driver, the pedal spring goes over it's center and starts extending again. This gives the effect of assisting the driver in pressing the clutch in the rest of the way, it also makes for an extremely snappy clutch feel and an all around better driving experience.
Ti clutch pedal in the car:
Since the pedal was the same as the M3, I was hoping for the ability to just swap the spring over, unfortunately, that wasn't the case... The carrier itself is slightly different...
So off came the carrier, which was way way easier said than done. Those master cylinder bolts took longer to remove than the whole M44!
M3 Clutch pedal's super spring:
Look right where the super spring is supposed to sit in the carrier. The ti carrier is simply flat where there is supposed to be an indention!
After another couple hours, we got the m3 carrier in, and boy what a difference! I recommend to anyone doing a swap to get an M3 pedal set up.
Next up was to swap in the 1990 325i axles I bought remanufactured from O'Reilly. This was the hardest part of the ENTIRE SWAP!
Rusted hub nuts made for a tough removal, even with a 450 ftLb impact wrench.
Comparison of the axles. I found that I didn't have the right hardware, since the Ti diff uses smaller bolts to hold the axles to it. I used the reverse Torx bolts off of the M3 large case and they worked perfectly.
The passenger axle took a little more work than the driver's to get out.
After trying to get the axles in twice. We succeeded only in pounding on them until they were flush with the nut's machined surface. Not far enough in to start any threads, so we pulled em out and filed down every single spline, then threw them in a deep freezer for 45 minutes.
Eventually, we decided to bust out the sledge. With one person holding against the hub to prevent the suspension from absorbing the impact, as well as holding the end of a 2x4 in place on the flange, another person holding everything together, and using his foot to position the other end of the board as parallel to the axle as possible, and me swinging a 12Lb sledge hammer over 40 times, we got the axle in far enough to start the threads. Then, using the impact wrench to constantly provide angular wacks at the same time as me slamming the drive flange, we got the axles all the way in and torqued em to 250Nm. What a job...
