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Considering how much it costs to be a member here I think Josh and James are doing a damn good job! Perhaps if you don't like it so much he can refund you your membership fee?

There are a number of guys running Subaru EE20 diesels off aftermarket ECU's in old VW vans :-) It's about US$2000+ for the Ecu's, last I looked! It's very expensive, time consuming and easy to make them go BANG (and other expensive noises) if you do it wrong! Go electric.

Have also been playing round with a couple of ideas for pedal boxes as the wilwood floor mount won't fit by my measurements and the others are too expensive. So have thrown this together on my architectural software, and some ideas around a short shifter, and even a hydro handbrake.

Thats actually one of the upgrades.

Hi Guys, I've decided that I need another E30 in my life, and this time I planning to do it right. Rewind to 6 weeks ago, some friends and I are having a few drinks on a Friday evening. One friend was browsing facebook and mentioned that he found a '96 328i factory manual for sale. Only $1000 he said. This sounded too good to be true....and it was...sorta... The car was water damaged - I'm not 100% on the details, but something something Dunedin floods. Surely if it's a factory manual, the manual parts alone would be worth the money and effort. I thought about it for a while, and then tried to convince myself that it was a stupid idea and to forget about it...I failed. I called the guy, and told him I would take the car and pick it up tomorrow. The car was located in a wreckers yard in Dunedin. I managed to persuade a friend of mine with access to a car trailer and shop to make the trek from Christchurch down to Dunedin with me the next morning. Jumping forward a couple of days and this is my view: After decoding the VIN number of the car, it turned out the car was actually a factory automatic and must've been converted at some point. We started tearing into the car, and it quickly be came evident that, yes, this car was very water damaged. A thin layer of silt covered everything. As we dug deeper, things started to look worse (not unexpectedly). We found water sitting atop cylinder 1's intake valves, but 2-6 all looked perfectly fine. Draining the sump resulted in roughly 10L of water with mixed about 6L of chocolate milk...not great. Further investigation found that the car has a ZF 310 5 speed transmission, an OEM 328i dual-mass flywheel + clutch. Cool, at least the conversion looks like it was done properly. At this point I still hadn't decided what I wanted with to the parts from this car, But I'd been looking for a project car, and I felt I needed another E30 in my life. As it turned out, my friend's father has this little beauty that he's willing to sell. It's by no means perfect, but it's a straight, rust free, registered, '89 318i automatic coupe in my favourite colour (Delphin grey). A good starting point for my project E30. Jumping back to the present, I've pulled the engine and drivetrain out of the 328. The engine is sitting on a stand, and I intend on stripping it down and rebuilding it. Once it's ready, I plan to swap it into the E30 with the manual transmission. From there I plan to do new suspension, med-case LSD, wheels + tyres, and general tidying up. Eventually I would like to have the car's paint redone as it's a little rough in places. Looking at the task at hand, I know I have a fair bit of work ahead of me. But I'm ready for the challenge! Any help finding the various 24v swap components would be great. I know I need the sump, oil pickup, dipstick, and throttle cable from a 525i E34. Not 100% on what to do about the brake booster, although moving it over a bit seems like the easiest solution. The water-damaged ECU is toast, so I need a new one. I would like to keep OBD2. Thinking of getting a (red-label?) ECU and having it flashed (EWS delete, rear O2 delete, M50 manifold, maybe even a higher redline?) E28 535i engine mounts seem to be the way to go, although I've read mentions of an additional spacer is required? Subframe reinforcement is also something I want to do. I would like to use as much of the 328i's factory exhaust as possible as it's still in good condition. Not sure how much of a plain it would be to chop it up. I want to use the E36 radiator and do an electric puller fan conversion.

looking pretty badass ... nice one

thats what made the series one mx5 so much fun, you could beat the death out of it but still be not really endangering anyones lives on public roads. it could be screaming its lungs out on nearly two wheels and still be comfortably inside your lane of the road.later models just got heavier and tamer even tho they had power upgrades. but for long trips to come out feeling fresh you can't beat having some 3.5 ltr+ power on tap,like others have said they actually drive slowly so well its uncanny,hills are just blips and passing idiots is less cumbersome What gets me now is I have 245bhp v6 and some blooming great 2 story high 4 wheel diesels rangers,toyotas etc seem to pull hills and corner like I'm in a bus

It's astronomical how much power and torque so many modern cars have, especially considering their common family car uses in many cases. Figures that were once reserved for highly exclusive supercars or racecars 20 years ago. I think less is more though, for me anyway. I enjoy a road car where you can rev it right out and know it's potential while being sensible on the road.

Yeah I know what you mean. I was working at Shelly's when I had to do a recall that required the removal of a brand new E36 dash. While it was quite cool to take it all apart and get it back together you never know if you going to end up with any nasty rattles or squeaks! Actually that one was a breeze, I must have been the dash specialist as the next one I got was a Citroen - if you've ever had one of those out you'll know what I mean by "how many green wires does this thing have!" The French must have been colour blind.

what

It would of mattered not. The way the software is designed can't be changed and unfortunately means one of us with the ability to change it needs to spend a lot of time bringing it back to something similar to before. (Me) Between work and family my time is very limited so it will get done when I can do it. In the mean time probably stop worrying g about how the site looks and concentrate on the content.

Lol! We did that at work, when I was in the UK. With a website for Her Majesty's Government. It was supposed to be a test site, and the live one would be hosted from the DC, but somehow the DNS got messed up and the doggy POS on the desktop ended up being the live server.

I drove an Integra with VTEC once.