Cheers Aitor
Saturday, March 15, 2008
New Pictures
Just a picture update, I am sure you can tell the difference in between the old and new pictures!
Cheers Aitor
Cheers Aitor
Monday, March 3, 2008
Engine Considerations
As you would imagine we don’t plan on keeping the weedy 1.8 engine and automatic transmission. The first thing that was decided was that we would keep it a BMW engined car. BMWs are famous for their smooth and sporty engines and we weren’t about to go against this conventional wisdom, and stick some gutless engine in it. There also isn’t any commonly available high performance engine that is designed for a RWD layout, is cheap and would provide the power we want in our part of the world (England). If we were in the states we would have gone to the nearest junkyard for the biggest V8, and we would have figured something out! So we started thinking about BMW engines, now sadly every engine under the sun has already been put into an E30, with the possible exception of the new 35 diesel and gas engine (the twin turbo ones) and a couple of other which are way out of our price league, so its hard to be original.
We then decided that we wanted a strait six, not only because this is BMW trademark engine but also because they are so smooth (all the primary and secondary forces balance out) and sound beautiful. Then there were several options, the E30 came with a 20i and 25i in our part of the world, now they both are 12 valvers the first with 2 litres of displacement and the second with 2.5. However they had a significant difference in power output, the 20i put out around 125hp and the 25i about 170hp, our 18i has 114hp. So the choice of the 20i fell rather sharply, not only does it only have about 10hp more than the 18i it has a fuel consumption that is nearer to that of the 25i than the 18i. Basically it was the runt of the litter when it comes to engine options in the E30.
We then also thought about the E36s 24 valve inline sixes, these deliver more power up to 200hp depending on the model, are smother and have better driveability. However we decided not to go down this route, as it is too expensive for us. After some initial research we found that we would need, a list as long as your arm of OEM BMW parts for the conversion, a custom made exhaust manifold to clear the steering column (only a problem on RHD cars), and a new brake servo and matching cylinder would be needed as well as the stock one does not clear the 24 valve engine These are only some of the problems we would have to solve, as well as creating a new wiring loom. Now most of this has been documented on various forums so it wouldn’t cause too much of a problem, it’s just that the money involved would be quite high. This and the fact that with a good exhaust manifold, cold air intake a boost in fuel pressure and a remap we could probably gain the same amount of power if not a little more from a 25i for much less, means that this option was dropped.
So for now we have decided that we want a 25i from an E30. Although we have thought of turbo or supercharging our current 18i engine, we did drop this idea rather quickly after we saw the state the engine was in after running it for a bit though. So for now we want the 25i engine and manual transmission, and in the future we are thinking of turbo or supercharging it!
We then decided that we wanted a strait six, not only because this is BMW trademark engine but also because they are so smooth (all the primary and secondary forces balance out) and sound beautiful. Then there were several options, the E30 came with a 20i and 25i in our part of the world, now they both are 12 valvers the first with 2 litres of displacement and the second with 2.5. However they had a significant difference in power output, the 20i put out around 125hp and the 25i about 170hp, our 18i has 114hp. So the choice of the 20i fell rather sharply, not only does it only have about 10hp more than the 18i it has a fuel consumption that is nearer to that of the 25i than the 18i. Basically it was the runt of the litter when it comes to engine options in the E30.
We then also thought about the E36s 24 valve inline sixes, these deliver more power up to 200hp depending on the model, are smother and have better driveability. However we decided not to go down this route, as it is too expensive for us. After some initial research we found that we would need, a list as long as your arm of OEM BMW parts for the conversion, a custom made exhaust manifold to clear the steering column (only a problem on RHD cars), and a new brake servo and matching cylinder would be needed as well as the stock one does not clear the 24 valve engine These are only some of the problems we would have to solve, as well as creating a new wiring loom. Now most of this has been documented on various forums so it wouldn’t cause too much of a problem, it’s just that the money involved would be quite high. This and the fact that with a good exhaust manifold, cold air intake a boost in fuel pressure and a remap we could probably gain the same amount of power if not a little more from a 25i for much less, means that this option was dropped.
So for now we have decided that we want a 25i from an E30. Although we have thought of turbo or supercharging our current 18i engine, we did drop this idea rather quickly after we saw the state the engine was in after running it for a bit though. So for now we want the 25i engine and manual transmission, and in the future we are thinking of turbo or supercharging it!
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