The oldest, lightest, slowest e30 - not an e30 rally build this time, just a budget build.

The other day I saw a good cheap engine candidate for this thing and went to check it out today. I figured it was just a scrapper or part-er, but as it turns out it was the production HQ for Sikky, a known company that makes a bunch of custom parts primarily for LS swaps and drift cars, but also other stuff. The guy gave me a tour of the facility and noted that they build 100% of their products right there (in Baltimore), and there were several guys busy machining things on huge CNC mills. Also racks full of brand-new custom subframes, mounts, arms, and various other neat parts I can't afford. 

They also had a bunch of cool cars there (like, 50 of them total I'd say, some on lifts, some on racks, some on the ultra-clean work floor). There were two FC RX-7s (one had an LS6 swap), a few different Skylines, a 323GTX, a few BMWs, and some other stuff.

Each of the cars getting swaps had a palleted box of stuff next to them (several of which were brand-new LS's and transmissions). It's an extremely organized, clean, and professional shop from what I can see - doing both production of parts and also building some pretty cool cars. 

Anyhow, the reason I was there is that with all these swaps, they pull the original engines and generally just sell them for cheap. They had a few dozen engines on shelves and pallets. The BMW engines I saw a couple M60 (?) V8s, an M50 with some stuff missing, an M40, and a couple M42s - one from an e36 and one from an e30. So for THIS project car I picked up the drop-out M42 from an e30 vert sitting nearby halfway through an LS swap, including all accessories and the G240 transmission. I also pulled the G250 transmission from the e36 engine, which will go in the rally car.

In case you're wondering, that Corvette is a kit car built on a C4 chassis. But it did look good under the hood (apparntly 600hp)

Since I didn't bring the trailer we used a forklift and a few guys to wrangle the stuff into the Sequoia, no problemo

When I got home, had to get it out myself....

All in all, for $400 or so (not gonna count the cost of the G250 here), It's a full engine and transmission, with AC, PS, and alternator, wiring harness, etc. The only things I can see that are obviously not there:

- slave cylinder (no worries, I have spares of those)

- the coil block (though I found the cover for it on the pallet, but shouldn't be too hard to find one).

- looks like they coudldn't get the coil clips off the plugs and cut two of the coil plugs off, which is annoying. Shoudln't be to ohard to find a spare pigtail, but still annoying.

- no radiator, but I'll see if my M3 spare one will work

- looks like there's a water pump leak based on the residue around the front, but we'll see.

In any case, I probably won't touch this until later in the winter or spring once the rest of the car is mostly done. The M10 in it is still good to move it around until I pull it at some point in the future. I've built a few M42s before, so shoudln't be any real surprises.

Cost: $400, give or take

Total Cost to date: $1100.00

Nice score! I picked up the m42 for my truck for 400 a few years ago (engine/trans/harness/dme). I'm still surprised 4cyls go for that much.

Why not go COP? Those wires are EXPENSIVE.

iansane said:

Nice score! I picked up the m42 for my truck for 400 a few years ago (engine/trans/harness/dme). I'm still surprised 4cyls go for that much.

Why not go COP? Those wires are EXPENSIVE.

That's another option, though over the years I've heard of the early COP coils going bad more quickly due to the engine vibration on the M42 (as opposed to being mounted on the chassis as they are stock). May or may not be true.

It's not the plug wires I'm missing, it's the coil pigtail, so I'll have to replace it either way. 

Yeah Sikky is pretty awesome, they're the sister shop for JE Import Performance, who are the guys who tuned my Infiniti.  They do a lot of cool work there.

No promises but I scrapped an M44 and I might have saved the harness. I will check Monday as I had it at work. Hopefully I kept that harness and its the same, if so you can have it. 

Slippery said:

No promises but I scrapped an M44 and I might have saved the harness. I will check Monday as I had it at work. Hopefully I kept that harness and its the same, if so you can have it. 

Sweet. I actually thought I had saved one of my many M42 harnesses from the earlier iteration of the rally car, but after digging around, apparently the only remaining e30 harness I have is the original M10 harness from the rally car, ironically. 

Note for myself: I also need the J-boot, AFM, and intake box for the M42. 

So moving on with the driver's floor. I suppose it's time to actually weld stuff. I cleaned and recleaned all the common metal on the car that I'll have to weld to, as well as the lips on the frame rail, and then painted the inside of the frame rail to keep any future rust at bay. Also finished plating the inner rocker (no pics), trying to give it good structural strength so it doesn't end up smushed from jacking like every other e30......

Once that was done, I put the floor pan in, aligned my holes with the frame rail in the middle, and plug-welded it all the way down the frame rail. I am not very good at plug-welding, so it took a good while and took me a while to get my welder settings right. I initially used .023 wire but also used .030 because I wanted to practice a bit with different wire sizes, since nobody will ever see this part of the car once carpet is back in. Then spent an hour or two with a ball-peen hammer shaping all the sides and plug-welding them to the transmission tunnel, inner rocker, rear floor, and firewall.....

(not done in this pic, but it was mostly done at this point). 

For the front outside corner, I had to first put an outside plate in the area I cut out:

Then another plate, made out of another piece of Raider hood...

After a good bit or grinding, etc. time to apply a generous amount of seam sealant. I didn't have a wire brush so just did it by hand, basically. It should do, and I'll reapply in any areas needed later, after I do some additional work down there. 

In any case, there's a floor there now, and there are no holes in it. Still some things to do on the outer rocker and reinforce the jacking point, but mostly done with sheet metal on THIS part of the car for the moment.

Incidentally, I pulled out all this old junk from the front left, just to have more room to work. This early 318 stuff is teeny tiny.

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Every time I see this or your other thread pop up, I start looking on our local Gumtree for E30's to run around on the gravel rounds near town, but with all of the "spinners" buying and abusing them, even an E36 M3ty example is over R50k (+-US$3150), in a country where you can, and I just did, buy a running, decent condition GWM H5 SUV..... (Pic below, photo taken middel of Oct, the night we bought it)

StripesSA1 said:

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Every time I see this or your other thread pop up, I start looking on our local Gumtree for E30's to run around on the gravel rounds near town, but with all of the "spinners" buying and abusing them, even an E36 M3ty example is over R50k (+-US$3150), in a country where you can, and I just did, buy a running, decent condition GWM H5 SUV..... (Pic below, photo taken middel of Oct, the night we bought it)

I would say that $3k+ in general is the low end of the e30 price spectrum here these days as well. This one being an early M10 car (and bought from a friend) is the only reason i gor it thia cheap, honestly. Most nice/rust free/mechanically good e30s here are probably closer to $5k. 

So thats a Chinese SUV, right? Looks kind of like a Mitsubishi Outlander or something. Interesting 

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Chinese? Yes.

Mitsubishi? Almost.

It's a body on frame design, with the front suspension and brakes taken from the D-Max Isuzu series, while the rear is the same as the 2006-2016 Toyota Fortuner.

Engine is the SOHC 16v 4G69 Mitsibushi and 5speed MT. 

irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:

StripesSA1 said:

In reply to irish44j (Forum Supporter) :

Every time I see this or your other thread pop up, I start looking on our local Gumtree for E30's to run around on the gravel rounds near town, but with all of the "spinners" buying and abusing them, even an E36 M3ty example is over R50k (+-US$3150), in a country where you can, and I just did, buy a running, decent condition GWM H5 SUV..... (Pic below, photo taken middel of Oct, the night we bought it)

I would say that $3k+ in general is the low end of the e30 price spectrum here these days as well. This one being an early M10 car (and bought from a friend) is the only reason i gor it thia cheap, honestly. Most nice/rust free/mechanically good e30s here are probably closer to $5k. 

So thats a Chinese SUV, right? Looks kind of like a Mitsubishi Outlander or something. Interesting 

 $5k!!! That's ridiculous!! 

But I just checked as well on Gumtree and Autotrader, that seems about what the upper spectrum the E30's are going for here.

Until they are not hit by the "spinner" tax, I will keep driving my FOX and the GWM. 

Decided that it'll be easier to do the rest of the rust repair with the engine out of the car, so started taking stuff apart today so I can pull it out over the weekend.  Pulled off the Red46 skidplate (Red46 built my much larger skidplate on the rally car, incidentally), which is a nice thing to have for later, and one less thing I have to spend time/money on.

Yup, there's the mighty M10. 

drained the coolant while making a mess on my garage floor, it's pretty funny how tiny this radiator is. Probably half the capacity of the 3-row one I use on the rally e30

and pulled the driveshaft and most of the central drivetrain stuff so the transmission can come off first. I may just lift it all out as one unit, but it's less of a hassle to move things around without the trans on the engine, so may just pull it out first.

And basically have everything else disconnected in the bay, so the engine can pretty much be lifted right out. 

That m10 rad is so dinky. Even compared to the rest of the factory e30 rads. I always presumed it was just left over from e21/2002 stuff.

Good progress!

And just like that, one very oily transmission and one very dirty engine are out.

Took me a couple minutes to remember that in addition to the engine mounts, the M10 has a little mini hydraulic strut thingy out of sight under the exhaust manifold that I guess absorbs shock from the engine moving or someting. In any case, I tried to hoist it out twice before I finally rememberd it was there, and it was holding the engine from rising any higher. Thinking back, I definitely did the exact same thing when I took the M10 out of the rally car a decade ago lol.......

But once detached, an easy lift. DIdn't even have to take the hood offf.

Nothing too bad in there, but will need a lot of cleaning........amazingly the battery tray actually isn't rusted (just surface rust). The rally car had a giant hole there. Kind of important, since on the 4-cylinder e30s the battery goes there. On 6-cylinder cars it went in the trunk. I'll probably leave it up front on this one just to avoid having to run all the heavy wiring to the back (the rally car I did move it back there). 

Did the baseball bat come out after the first failed lift or the second?

adam525i said:

Did the baseball bat come out after the first failed lift or the second?

Lol good eye. It was just there to hold up the hood until I decided to use a strap instead

This evening I drained the power steering so I could get all that stuff out of the engine bay, and also removed the AC compressor and the AC lines at the connectors (AC will go back in when I put everything back together). Then took out the AC radiator, fan, grill , headlights, and bumper.  Basically, the goal was to get as much out of there as easily possible so I can pull the car outside this weekend and power-wash the entire bay, so I can clean it up and repaint it before I start putting stuff back in.

I'm pretty please the firewall insulation is in really excellent shape, and the drain "trunk" is still there (when it's gone, water drains behind the insulation and rusts everything out, like it did on the rally car). I'll peek underneath to make sure everything looks ok, but hopefully won't have to pull the insulation off since that's hard to do without breaking it, and I'd like to keep it on the car. 

I'll likely pull the brake booster as well at some point, but not at the moment since I don't really need to . Dfinitely won't pull the fuse box. I did cut off the M10 wiring pigtail to the C101 (main harness) plug, so I have enough wiring to splice the M42's C101 round connector to the M10's square, smaller connector wires. I did this on the rally car when I did this swap, so hopefully I documented my wiring notes in my other thread!

So I can move the car, I slapped the front suspension back on with minimal bolts. Couldn't find the nuts for the LBJ or tie rod, so improvised. It's only going 20 feet.....

These pics are only for my future reference, so I can remember where the AC stuff goes (I can't reference the rally car, since all that stuff is long-gone)

Dragged the car out of the garage today and gave the engine bay a good power-washing

While I was doing that, Santa came by on a fire truck

Anyhow, the bay is cleaned up a good bit, and that allowed me to spend some time locating all the rust spots I'm going to need to fix. As expected, there are quite a few. So I dragged the car back into the garage and took off the front valence panel and the fenders to get a good look at everything. Before I really dig into it, tomorrow I"m going to finish taking apart the front suspension and steering so I can pull the front subframe out. That will make doing rust repair on the firewall area a lot easier - far preferable to do this stuff on the engine bay side than trying to do it from inside down in the footwell!

So here are some of the trouble spots, for posterity:

This is the front of the wheel well behind the headlights. It's like this on both sides (car must have been parked nose-up on a slope and collected water there - the rally car doesn't have any rust in this spot. Should be pretty easy to fix, once I pull the A/C lines out of the way.

The big hole is where the A/C drier sits, in case you're wondering.

Then I peeled back the thick rubberized soundproofing from the firewall. I already knew there were some spots under there visible through the footwell, so no shock here. IDK why BMW thought it was a good idea to put a rubber mat over metal that easily traps water , but they did. And the long-term results are exactly what you'd think they'd be. This is down next to the frame rails. Again, should be a very easy patch job. The nice thing about patching in the engine bay is "who cares if it looks good" - a plus since bodywork isn't my strong suit.

So in the previous post I said that it seemed like the battery tray was pretty solid. Yeah, about that......it's not. It has the same rot the rallycar did, from water sitting there with the car sitting nose-up on a slope. BMW would have done well to put some kind of drain there. Maybe all parking spots in Germany are flat, IDK. 

Anyhow, there are multiple problem areas here, which will take a bit more work than the other places.

This is the outside rear of the battery tray at the firewall, it may be a hassle. Incidentally, this is likely why the floor was all rusted out, from water leaking through here under the carpet padding. 

And this is the other side toward the transmission tunnel. Oddly it's rusted out underneath more than on top. It's mostly flat sheet so probably not all that tough, but we'll see. The center of the tray is not rusty and it's still structurally sound, so that's good at least. 

So, I'll see if I get around to cutting some of that out tomorrow. I also haven't checked much on the driver's side yet. I'll have a better view on things once the brake booster is out of the way. I'm quite certain there's a hole SOMEPLACE over there since the driver's floor was completely rusted through, and I suspect I know where it is, at the seam of the wheel well and firewall down under the booster (this spot is hard to see on the inside, and I only found it on the rally car after I already had the engine back in - so that spot is my only real leak on the rallycar since I can't fix it without pulling the engine (not gonna happen!). But I'll make sure to fix it on THIS one. 

Also, got a laugh out of one of the old tires on this thing. Here's a brand I hadn't previously heard of. Wonder what marketing genius thought that people buying tires would want to get the "Negotiator" model. Wonder if the price was at least negotiable.

I know, I know....old rusty stuff and sheel metal work isn't very interesting. But still, in the interest of documenting stuff I hope you humor me for a while until I get into more interesting (and prettier) stuff...

Today I pulled all the front suspension, brakes, steering, and front subframe. Not all that difficult, but I couldn't for the life of me get one of the inner control arm balljoint nuts to come off the subframe (had to cut it off) OR the other balljoint on that control arm to the knuckle. No amount of OTC balljoint tool, BFH, heat, and lubricant would do it. So just took it off as one unit. 

The steering ujoint also really, really didn't want to come loose and I was a bit too aggressive with a hammer and cracked off one of the rack feed lines from the upper rack housing. That's annoying, but I have a spare parts rack so can probalby just replace the whole housing, since it looks like it bolts on. Or I may not bother, since my prefernce is to put an e36 rack in here to quicken up the steering. TBD for later. 

Meanwhile, I started cutting out some rust spots and making templates (out of cardboard) for patch panels.

So here's that part at the front of the passenger wheel well. 

Here's the various holes on the firewall and part of the battery tray

I didn't cut out the outer battery tray portion yet. Can't really get a cutting wheel in there, so may fire up the plasma cutter to take care of that when I get a chance. 

Oh, and it's getting crowded in the other bay. Luckily, the M10 will go to a new home after Christmas.

Yea...tire brand names and model names are quite often WTF were they thinking material

Had a few minutes to welded in some patch panels and rebuilt the inside edge of the battery tray. Turned out pretty decent, considering my marginal sheet-metal skills. Once I smooth things out with the flap wheel I'll use a generous amount of seam sealer on all this and then hit it with bedliner or something.

still need to do some work on the area around the wiring loom pass-through. 

More hood material? Nice!

Unless somebody has put an e30 on a Raider chassis, I think you're well on your way to a record for the most Raider/Montero content in an e30.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

Unless somebody has put an e30 on a Raider chassis, I think you're well on your way to a record for the most Raider/Montero content in an e30.

oh don't worry, I still have the passenger floor to do, and likely enough remaining Raider hood material :) I do also have the original rally car hood that's been sitting under my deck for a few years, but I don't think I'm ready to cut that up just yet. 

I also plan to use a rusty e30 fender for a few other sections as well. Overall, the goal is to use exactly NO "new" sheet metal on any part of this vehicle. 

Figured the easiest way to deal with the rusty corner section on the battery box was with the plasma cutter. Fortunately, because of where my 220 outlet is, I just barely had enough extra slack in the cords to actually reach lol...

So, managed to get it all cut out and made some cardboard templates for my patches. This will need some creative bending if I want to have that same "lip" that I guess is used to hold down the battery (not sure if modern batteries have a thin enough lip to fit in there anyhow). But I'll give it a go...

And cut out some more rusty parts of the passenger floor. and cleaned up the inner rocker. It looks bad but I think side will be easier than the driver's side was since the rocker is in much better shape.