The Frankenstein Touring: My 1995 525it/5

[danespann]

I’ve been looking for a decent white touring for a while. With little luck and finding nothing remotely local, I’ve mostly given up. Last weekend, I went to the junkyard to look at a freshly arrived 535i that was limited slip equipped. I struck out as someone had already taken that.

Afterwards, I stopped by an older bmw friend’s place who lives down the road from the junkyard to help him diagnose why the A/C on his 6-speed e53 wasn’t working. After figuring out the issue there, he told me he’s decided to part with his wagon and said I’d be a good home for it if I wanted to buy it.

I’d last really seen the car regularly in 2020, here’s a picture of it on the e38 style 5s he always had on it. They were 17” but strangely had a 72.56 hub bore.


He bought it in 2004 with 100k miles and promptly manual swapped it after getting it home. It’s getting harder for him to keep up with all the vehicle maintenance as he gets older, so with this wagon having many problems, it was time to let it go…

Now, onto the main problems. They are numerous but one stands out and was the reason for sale. It’s been sitting in the previous owner’s shop for around the past year as he poked away at it, putting some new headlights in and trying to figure out some engine smoking and running issues. It currently leaks an enormous amount of oil and gets abysmal gas mileage while almost rolling coal it smokes so much. It runs quite bad and billows smoke at cold start but clears up considerably once warmed up. I bought it knowing it may need an engine.

The manual swap and reason for this thread’s name: it was 2004 when this was swapped so parts availability may have been limited when working with junkyard cars back then. So, it has an m20 g260 with a modified crossmember and shift linkage. It also has what seems to be an e30 or e28 driveshaft with a custom machined adapter spacer at the rear of the driveshaft CV to attach it to the differential. All of that is attached to a S3.64 medium case out of an e32 735i/5. It also has either an m20 or m30 single mass flywheel and clutch. I’d like to revisit the shift linkage because the shifter almost touches the ashtray in 1/3/5 and 4th is where neutral should be. The car is sitting at over 230k so clearly this all functions fine.

Following it home. Only lost a quart of oil and consumed/leaked 1/3 tank of fuel in 45 miles.



Rear seat bottom was out and seats were stuck down. Got them up and everything back together.



I noticed the rear sunshade was just rattling around and wouldn’t lock in on the sides. Upon further inspection, the metal clips the shade locks into were installed upside down. Fixed those and now the shade locks in.



Previous owner started installing Depo smileys. Only one low beam works and they’re all aimed in different directions so I’ll either have to fix these or install some US ellipsoids.



Here’s the interior. Driver seat is an early pre-93 seat that’s heated for some reason and is stuck all the way up so I don't fit well. The shifter is in neutral here. Minimal dash warping and decent headliner. Sunroof supposedly has never been opened in 20 years so I’ll continue that.





I need to compression test it and see where to go from here. More updates to come I’m sure as I’d like to get this fixed before summer hits and my motivation evaporates.

[Pink120]

Touring content, hell yeah

[BleedsBlue]

Touring time! You'll get it sorted, I'm confident of that. So the whole "motivation evaporates in summer" thing is not just me, eh?

[danespann]

Pulled the car up the other day for a compression test, billowing smoke. Seems to be the worst at cold start. I wasn’t expecting great results.





Car returned great results across the board on the cheapest compression tester ever. Dead even with no variance between cylinders.

So, the car was just running incredibly rich. The exhaust smells like fuel, the oil smells like fuel, the plugs are fouled and smell like fuel. Danny noticed that the injectors looked strange. Indeed, they were wrong and said ford on the side with a ford part number that revealed they were around 24lb injectors. The regulator looked a little bit too fresh as well. Danny grabbed a spare m50 fuel rail with injectors from his storage unit to try and I swapped them out in quick order.



Initially, the car wouldn’t start at all, almost trying but not quite firing over. I let it sit an hour with the battery disconnected, then after much cranking it barely started. However, it was misfiring horribly. Started unplugging coils to reveal 4,5, and 6 made no difference. Tested spark and all of them had spark. Pulled those injectors out and tested them, only half even clicked on the bench and no amount of cleaning or smacking them got them working.

Another day, Danny brought over some more injectors I thought might work. They are m62 non-vanos injectors and there’s a massive number of these lying around. Same impedance as the m50 injectors, but these are 19 lbs and red. Same 60mm length. Should be close enough. Out of the first set of 8, 6 worked and seemed to flow well. 2 seized ones in this set that had only sat a couple years. Definitely a good idea to get injectors cleaned and flow tested on cars that sit long-term. I took no pictures except this one with Danny’s car in hovercraft mode as he replaced his brakes.



I dug up some pictures from the last time this wagon was on the lift. Here’s the reason for the thread title:











I’ll leave it at this for now. Going to try to drive this for a while and see what really needs to happen with the driveline. The most ideal thing would be a ZF 310z and a 3.23 limited slip, but the 3.64 in the car and the fact I have a spare m30 g260 gives me ideas.

[atl530i]

That's an interesting swap but the fact that it has worked for 20 years is pretty cool. Welcome to the touring club also

[Finessin]

whatever happened with your slicktop 318i build?

[danespann]

whatever happened with your slicktop 318i build?

The black 318i I sold to a friend of a friend in Tucson who daily drove it and last I heard it had crossed 250k without much issue. It was back on the hubcaps and remained totally stock besides the shift knob. Last I messaged him he didn't want to sell it back.

- - - Updated - - -

That's an interesting swap but the fact that it has worked for 20 years is pretty cool. Welcome to the touring club also

Honestly there's so many more-terrifying things to address on this car before the actually very well-working manual swap needs to be "made right"

[danespann]

Long time no update, the usual for me…

I’ve accomplished quite a lot on this thing and it’s become one of my most-driven cars for the last month.

-First, I had to lower the car since it looked and rode horrible. It was way too high in the front and somewhat low in the rear. The car had V8 car front mounts and Bilstein HD’s all around which probably came off a junkyard sedan. That’s my only explanation for the weird stance, pictured below.



Wagon does a great job of carrying things:



For suspension, I’m using the set of eibach springs I’ve had on a couple sedans and really enjoyed. I don’t enjoy Bilsteins, so I bought the Koni yellows that came on Danny’s 540i. Compressed and removed the stock springs from those and swapped on the eibach front springs:



Threw the new struts, springs, and strut housings on the car the next day and I really liked how it was sitting on the style 9s, even with the stock sedan rear springs. I made sure to retorque all the control arms at ride height and toe-plate align the car:



On a recent trip to California to see some friends, I also picked up a set of wheels that I thought would go really nicely on this ‘95 with all the bulk the white side skirts add to the car. These late cars pull off 18s pretty well:



All rear 9.5” M parallels are great on e34s. I’m not a huge fan of staggered wheels or tires, so I’m running the same exact tires and wheels as I had on the 535i long ago. A 15mm front spacer gets the wheel to barely clear the strut tube and it still clears the fenders with no rubbing issues so far.

-Now that the car looked the business, it was time to make it drive the business. I had picked up a full 5 speed swap from another car, but taking a shot at fixing what this car already had seemed fun. Plus I might need that 5 speed stuff for something else now…

Purchased a “scratch and dent” steel v1 garagistic 24v swap crossmember for e30 to see if it could be used on this as well as some e30 g260 trans mounts. A bit of grinding and wouldn’t you know, it barely works:



When we took the old crossmember out, we discovered that it wasn’t really doing anything. The transmission was just hanging and the cylinder head was sitting against the firewall. Explains the crazy vibrations this thing had. It probably did something at some point but the motor mounts that used to support everything under the trans were just too far gone. After jacking the back of the transmission up a few inches, we were able to bolt up the new crossmember and mounts. The driveshaft is now at a much happier angle. Besides a lot of blown out shift bushings, the car drives pretty well. Finished up this day on the lift by changing the fluid in the g260 out for some fresh Redline MT90.

-For the next week, I drove the car every day. But as the weather was cooling off, I couldn’t keep the AC on to recirculate any longer to mask the oil smell. The valve cover on this thing was leaking pretty heavily and the smell was wafting into the cabin off the exhaust. But, the valve cover itself was looking pretty rough on this. Normally, I’d just clean everything up and throw a new gasket set on, but I had a new genuine valve cover laying around, so on it went with a new genuine gasket and grommets:



To close this out for now, I’ve really been enjoying this thing. The overdrive seems to help keep the highway mpg’s high, despite the wide sticky tires

[dannyzabolotny]

I love seeing all the work that's been done to this touring, it's really made a comeback in the last month or so. The last time I drove this was under the previous owner when I had done some work on it, and it was not a good driving vehicle back then. I drove it yesterday and it's a massive improvement, though I will say the G260 gearing attached to an M50 always throws me off, particularly when going 2-3. The all-rear M-Pars look great too, though they definitely need some camber to tuck in properly in the front.