Williamsonspnz

That would be pretty damn cool to have all the beam team out at a track day. Its good fun to be on track with jerry in his e30, he has alot more power then me but i still try get up on his car when ever i can. been slow on my e30 since the track day, i was throwing around ideas on how to extract more power from the 3800, put the running set up on trademe to see if anyone would bite and buy it but no dice thus far. A buddy of mine had a large turbo and wastegate he had purchased a while ago for a simmilar engine combo, i had a huge amount of Na engine parts so we did a trade. I also impulse brought a 4g63 after i found a guy makes bellhousings to suit almost any rwd gearbox so the e30 will be getting evo power some stage but for now im lookong at fitting a large turbo. Will keep updated as i go!!

Cheers dude, they worked pretty damn well, i think version two will have a little less castor in them, aim around 10-11 degrees and i think the car will be even better. I have to admitt i did bend one of them on the friday in taupo. Took them both to a friends dads place and straightend it to match the other and put gussests on.. bet you cant pick where it bent tho!!. Some sweet pictures coming through now tho, had a bit of time on the track with jery in his e30 which is 1jz powered so now im on the hunt for more power. Stay tuned!

Just finnished unloading my e30 after a weekend in taupo, while im sitting down relaxing for a few moments. VID (vehicle imports direct) held a 2 day invite only day drifting track 3 and 2 at taupo, ive been part of the crew for this drift season so i took the e30 down. I got a wheel align on thursday with my new arms, e36 hubs ect. Everything worked out pretty damn good, the car handles like a nissan now when its sliding which is good as it was pretty average to use the last time i took it to taupo.

After a buisy weekend cutting and shutting i got my e30 on the ground. Pretty damn happy with how it worked out, slightly more castor then stock, wider track width but with the camber braket in the 0 position the car looks to have no more camber then i originaly ran. The spindle has got a pretty decent amount of angle in it which pitches the steering arm up rather high but not high enough to cause any bind or clashing issues. But yeah pretty damn happy, working on what steering to use now (rack ends tie rods ect) as the wider track has set me with a large amount of toe in naturaly. Few people have said to clear coat the arms but will probly just paint them!. Will add more photos as i go, drifting in a weeks time so straight into testing. Cheers

Rather productive day today, will jot down a quick update and then one once the whole lot is (hopefully) together on monday. I decided that using the stock ball joint style pick up for the arm was going to be to hard to replicate with rod ends and high misalignment spacers. I did set my rod ends on and have a moment of self doubt about changing the mount but a quick check with a straight edge showed the rod and and cap screw would hang lower then the crossmember.. less then ideal with a low car. I cut some sections out of some shs and stitched them together to resize to what i needed and measured some reference marks into the subframe to try keep everything within spec come wheel align time. When i added the brackets to the subframe i ground down the factory pick up points and made sure to weld the bracket to them, seeing as they are strong enough from the factory they will make good reinforcing for my mounts (i hope). The rest is fairly straight foreward, doublers around the bolt holes, flat bar from one mount to the other, welded to the middle of the subframe and mounts which kind of fixes the middle of the subframe which had been sqished a little at some stage in its life. Anyways just a quick update, arms should go together tomorrow going to plan so exciting times aheads. cheers.

Spent a little time in the shed tonight, will spend the whole long weekend in it getting everything sorted hopefully!. before my last track day (summer matsuri) i decided to put a e36 ti rear sub frame in my e30, all my rear bushes were pretty well shot and id stumbled across a bunch of e34 alloy 15 inch rims. The e34 having a 20 offset they fit the e30 pretty nicely, little closer to the guard and while not the best looking wheel they are tidy enough (type 2 i think?). I freshened up the subframe, delrin bushes and ajustible bushes in the rear arms. Fitted it all up and was happy with the car, other then the bc golds which were far to soft in spring rate for my liking but i have swapped them now. Anyway my work in on the car for the last week has been around putting e36 front hubs into my e30. Ive hunted high and low for different blogs and videos even parts lists but none of them seem to give me the answer to the castor issues around the e36 conversion. Now i know the propper way is to use m3 parts and lists say m3 arms and z3 this evo that. The only true measured answer I can find is wisefab or slr. Lets be honnest if i was going to spend that much on the car in one purchase it would be on a bent 8 but thats for a later date. I took a measurement of the stock e30 spindle centre (wheel bearing, stub call it what you want) then i loosely assembled the e36 hub on a coil over so its at the same full extention height and took another measurement. On the stock e30 arms with the e36 hubs the centre worked out roughly 35mm further back in the car. Alot of caster lost!. I took my tape into work and measured up the e30 which has e30 evo arms, slr c.a.b's and lock blocks. It still measures up 15mm back from stock e30 hubs.. which may explain the excessive fire wall rub. So tube arms it is. I sorced some 3/4 by 5/8 rod ends and 3/4 by 3/4 rod ends from cardwells, at around $21 each they are worth getting. I sorced some high misalignment bushes from waikato bearings for the outer rod ends, the angles a hub goes through with camber castor and high amounts of lock i figured better safe then sorry. Jimmy from my old work spun up some weld in spuds for me, hes machining a few spacers and doublers for me which will come into play later in my story. Now the tube im using is 38mm roll cage tube, easy to work with and a roll cage is next on my list (being bent up currently) I took some measurements from the old arms and changed them to suit the e30 factory castor measurement. My biggest concern now is the spindle has alot of angle in it which wont afect the lower arm but the steering end being factory for the moment but i will work on that this weekend. Amyway if anyone has gone down a simmilar route with their e30s or other bmw chassis drop a message with what you have done, i hope to make a great amount of progress this weekend so will update as i go!. cheers

Ive got a few spare minutes up my sleeve, so I will continue will my jibberish to try get my little rant up to date. now this will be where people will hate or rate my car, being one to like cars that stand out a little ive gone down a route that not many would choose. There is method to my madness so dont jump on the hate too quickly. As said before the stock m20 was utterly sh*t, id always liled the look of m50s in e30s so i jumped right into getting all the gear together. Trying to keep the costs right down the hunt began for a parts list and some sort of plan to put the engine in. I found myself down at Mosen's yarning to kerry and aquired the best part of a e34 520. As the car was always destined to be a drift car i wasnt worried about the engine being a 2.0, the idea of putting a turbo on it was natural coming from a range of nissan engines (sr, rb, fj20 and a cupple more.) cutting through the sh*t i had basicly the whole drive train sitting on a workshop floor and i started spinning numbers on how to get the old girl boosted.. having been down this road a few times i scribbled down a list on a pad. And there was the straw that broke it for me. the 10 grand list of parts to add to the engine, computer, turbo, manifold, wastegate, cooler, pipework, fuel, tune the list goes on!. And yes you can cut that cost down by shopping around, getting used parts ect but after 3 or 4 set ups its just sometimes simpler to buy what you need and not spend time trying to make things work. so that was it, parted out the m50 swap.. onto something with more cubes. now this engine will seem rather random to most but ive had a fair bit to do with them for various reasons.. and to be honnest the cost was what got me in the end!. a quick trademe search and i had myself a 3800 ecotec v6 manual conversion for a lazy $350. Now while these are known here as a holden v6, they are actualy a buick engine, and buick being american they have aftermarket parts for next to no cost, plus they are tough when it comes to hard use so for a drift engine it ticked the right boxes for me. I sorced a series 1 computer, it uses a map sensor instead of the air flow the series two stock computer uses and one weekend we had the thing hung and bolted onto my poor e30. The fit was pretty good right from the get go, gear stick fits through the stock hole in the tunnel and the sump clears the rack and sump perfectly. It was ment to be!. I even got to weigh the m20 and the ecotec before they swapped places the ecotec coming in at a solid 40kgs lighter then the stock engine and the manual trans (t5) almost the same weight savings compared to the auto. Anyways thats my time spent for tonight.. next update will be on changes im actualy doing instead of have done. Cheers

Pretty new to all of this so i figure i will dive right in, do my best to make this half interesting to read! I brought this e30 from a work mate about 5 years ago, was tidy enough for a project base and id always had a soft spot for a e30 coupe. In its factory form its a 320 auto full of all the good faults from a poor service history and plenty of abuse. I daily drove it for about a year before I signed up for a summer in the usa working at a camp, a job that i did for another 2 years ( saw plenty of the usa while there) Getting on with the car, as is the case more often then not the poor old m20 was tired and noisey, the trans fluid was black with sparkles so i started shopping around for engine swaps. A friend of mine had purchased a 4 door e30 by this time with pure track use in mind so we ordered bc gold ajustibles at the same time knocking some $ off the list plus i got in and tig welded his cage so he chipped in a bit more towards my set of suspention. Thats about all I did to the old girl for a while, I will post up more soon (have to find some photos i have somewhere) cheers

Whats up everyone. Names Adrian! Thought id finaly join up to bimmersport, have had my e30 for about 5 years now but have only recently started doing any real work to it. I will start up a bit of a build thread, for anyone whos interested, mostly track use and drift abuse but still aimed at being road legal. Cheers!