Another Boring E36 318i Touring....... Or Is It???

225 POUNDS!Now that is a bargain. Well done .

Good luck with the racing. Bookmarked

straight looking car , i have a 320i auto estate that we converted to 325 tds with manual box

Don't know what happened to the original post!

Evening

For the last few months I haven't owned a (running) car. I've been using my Mums old TDi Polo as my daily driver for about 3 months but it's been a hateful thing to drive and I decided to eBay it for her last week. I figured it would take at least a week to sell but it sold within 10 minutes of me advertising it and was collected the next day! That wasn't too much of an issue as I own an old van too so I used that for the rest of the week. I also have a Mini One D that I'm in the process of sprucing up - www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=47&t=1541431&mid=156857&nmt=My+Very+Cheap+Mini+One+D+Dooer+Upper%2E%2E%2E

Now, for the last 5 years a mate of mine has been racing in the Kumho BMW Championship in Class D 318is. After the first season the badgering started whenever I saw him that I should build a car and come racing. I have always wanted to go racing but just haven't had the money to build a car. Last year he came 2nd in the championship and once again tried to coerce me into going racing. Well, the idea just got stuck in my head this time and I hatched a plan to start building a car at some point this year to race next year.

Originally the plan was to buy a nice 318i saloon later this year, swap the motor for an M44 16v and then spend the rest of the year turning it into a race car. That was of course, until I decided to sell the Polo last week. Seeing as the Mini isn't ready yet I thought I may as well see what was out there in my very low price range that was E36 shaped. Now there are plenty of E36's out there still but plenty of them are rotten and plenty of them have been turned into the poniest looking "drift cars" you've ever seen! I didn't want anything that fell into either of those categories which significantly narrowed my search results. Now something that had been discussed when my mate was trying to convince me a couple of years ago was to turn my 318i Touring into a race car. There weren't (and still aren't) any Tourers in the Kumho Championship, so being one to try and buck the trend whenever I can I decided to extend my search to Tourers as well. As it turns out that doesn't really make much difference when your max budget is £500 hehe! However I persisted and eventually something caught my eye. It was solid. It was local. It had 24 hours left on its eBay auction but most importantly it had only been bid to £60 so far! I saved the auction into my watch list and awaited the last 10 seconds of the auction where I would pounce and (hopefully) win the car! Now annoyingly the last 10 seconds occurred at 16.17 on Wednesday, while I was at work and really busy. I'd done as much forward planning as I could and pre warned my Boss that I would have eBay open and might become preoccupied for a few minutes in the afternoon. He was fine with that so at 16.15 I stopped working and proceeded to watch the end of the auction. In the last 10 seconds I put in my maximum bid and then sat back to see what was going to happen. Good news! I won! I managed to pick it up for £225! Bargain! Now all I needed to do was collect it

Oh, now something I forgot to mention was that this car was cheap for a reason. It was a non runner! The seller had been driving it when the water pump curse word out its bearing and the aux belt fell off. He didn't have the first clue how to replace the pump and didn't have the money to get it fixed so decided to sell it. I went out running on Wednesday evening and then went to the guys house to pay him for the car. I let him know that my mate (who's a recovery driver) would call him on Thursday morning to arrange collection Thursday evening and that was that. The next I knew about the car was when my mate called me on Thursday evening to say he was outside. I wandered out and this is what greeted me.



We unloaded it and pushed it up to the back of my van. I had a quick wander round it and then left it there. Fast forward to today and my Sister was looking after my Daughter so I went out and changed the water pump. Thankfully it's pretty simple to do and it didn't put up too much of a fight so I was all done in just over an hour. After that I took it out for its first drive. I can honestly say it drives really nicely! You would never know it had done 134,000 miles and I can only assume that it's had most of its suspension and steering components replaced at some stage.

It's now 11pm and I'm off to bed. I'll leave you with the pictures from the eBay advert but I'm going to be back out there tomorrow fitting a stereo to the car so I'll take some better pics and then I'll go into more details on what's going to be happening.







If you've made it this far then thanks for reading

Sammo

I'll look forward to seeing what mods you do to the m44. I've struggled to find much info on tuning the 4 pot bmw engines. All the forums just say drop a 6 pot in!

How easy is it to put a 16v motor in place of an 8v? I've a 318i cabrio summer car that's a bit slow and nobody will give me anything for!

It's not too bad. The rear arches are going to start requiring attention at some point soon and the paint has various scratches and dents. Apart from the arches though there is no real corrosion anywhere.

It's funny, I never saw any point in dropping in a 6 pot, when you can buy one ready built by BMW. I had an early e36 325 and whilst it was nice having close on 200 bhp and that lovely 6 pot soundtrack, averaging around 26mpg wasn't so great!
The next e36 was a 316 so completely the other end of the spectrum in terms of power! I.e. it didn't have any and as such I only managed 30 mpg out of it!
My current car is a 318is and I have to say it's a nice compromise between achieving reasonable fuel economy and not being dog slow.

Just a quick update.

The Style 33 rims that are currently fitted seem to have some flat spots that I didn't notice when fitting them to the car. Not the end of the world as I paid very little for them, however the vibration that I'm getting through the car is getting a little tiresome.

These ones.



Luckily I bought these not long ago. They're Style 16's and from an E34 5 Series. They're the same size and offset as the Style 33's so I know they fit the car, however I don't know what tyre size to go for.



They're 7x16 and ET20. The tyres on the Style 33's are 205/45/16 and look completely lost. Can anyone offer some advice on suitable sizes so I can get tyres ordered ASAP?

Snapped this on my way to work this morning. 205/55r16 front, 225/50r16 rear, both on 16 x 7.5 et20 wheels. Not sure if they're the look you're after, but I don't think they look too bad, and with it being my daily and seeing a lot of rough country roads, the balloons do have their advantages.