My m50 budget ti

[Tumiljones]

So I started this project a little over a year ago when I wrecked my 325i convertible. I've always wanted to do a build thread on my car just never took the time to document it.

The car is a 1998 BMW 318ti automatic that I picked up not running in Wisconsin for $1000 unfortunately I don't have pictures of the car before I started taking it apart.

The plan was to swap the motor from my wrecked 1994 325i with the manual transmission into the 318ti




This first photo is the oldest I could find dropped out the 4 banger





Just dropped the motor out on the cradle because I was swapping everything over from the other car



New motor

Motor in the car

Sorry I didn't take many photos during the swap.


First day out of the garage

Some where in there I put a 3.73 medium case LSD in it

Broke a reman axle from orielly life time warranty with no questions got a new one for free.

Within an hour of getting the car out of the garage with the new axel in I decided to take the car up to Cordova to see what she could do on the strip with skinny hard all season tires.
The power went out in town we sat for 3 hours we didn't get to run until 2am

Waiting in line to go down the track

Car had Wheel spin though third gear.
Half way down the track the motor started to over heat.
That when I found out the m50 water pump is plastic from the factory. It exploded at some point down the track. We had a friend drive up and get us around 4 in the morning. The people at the track were nice enough to let me leave my car there for a day so I could come back up with a trailer.



Rented a trailer and went and picked it up.

Next on the list was redo the entire cooling system
She got a new 3row aluminum radiator new metal water pump mishimoto radiator hoses. Already had done the TMS clutch fan delete. Flushed it and filled with factory bmw coolant.
Again she was ready to rip!


Saw my old car at Niels a few months later

I'd done several odds and end improvements at this point the next big project I did was the rear suspension and bushings.

I modified the rear cradle so I can adjust the rear camber and toe. I also installed urethane control arm and rear subframe. And some bilstine sport shocks.

The front had been done on the old car so I just swapped everything over. Koni yellow struts, offset m3 lower control arm bushings. New Lowe control arms. More recently I did beefy tie rods.
Still factory ride height for now.

[Tumiljones]

That kinda brings you guys up to date to the current project.
The paint job!

This is probably the best picture I have of the car before I started prepping it for paint.
I didn't really like taking pictures of my car because it had a lot of imperfections in the body.
Front bumper is un painted
The grill is new from BMW primer black
And someone got Bondo happy on the pass rear quarter.


I wish I had a before picture of the fender but I literally sanded 5/8" of Bondo off of that gender it was very surprised to see it was all in tacked.



This is really my first Time using Bondo.
The car dose not need 5/8" for sure. Just a nice skim coat to get the ripples out.





I got most of the spots fixed and hit the whole car with 320



Spot primed and ready for some block sanding.

More updates soon!