Last summer my trusty 2012 135 spun a rod bearing, likely due to constant track use. This left me with a hard decision on what to do with it, rebuild the N55, get a "new" N55, or other. Looking at the financials, and goals for the car being a 90% track car with some cars and coffee use, with the approval of the wife (also a track junkie) I decided to just shelf the car and save my pennies to buy a wrecked donor M3 and do "the swap." By the time I fixed the N55, addressed oiling issues, sorted out the massive cooling requirements, I may as well just spend the money on a silky smooth NA S65.
I decided that this project needed to be complete this winter since I didn't want to spend another track season without it. I have several other fun cars but nothing that performs like the 135 and track days just wern't the same.
So a couple weeks ago I finally pulled the trigger and brought home a 52k mile 2013 E92 M3 DCT.
Got the thing home and I really don't understand how it was totaled out. The only thing really wrong with it was the DCT cooler was bent. It ran and drove perfectly once I peeled some damaged panels off. I really almost didn't have the heart to tear it down as a donor. I wanted to fix it and drive it, but then I'm even deeper in the project and still have a useless 1 series shell. Onward we go.
The 135 is already almost completely stripped. The plan is to strip both cars into individual piles of parts and then reassemble using the best of both worlds. It's really staggering how similar the two cars are. No one is ever going to convince me they didn't intent to put the S65 in the 1M.
My goal for this thread is to document the "hard" parts. I'm not going to post much about the tear down, or the things that simply bolt on. If there's anything specific you're curious about fire away and I'll try to document it as I go. I'm going to make three posts below this and just update them as I go to create a continuous historical record that people can reference. Hopefully I can document all the small things that other builds have skipped so more people can make this happen!
I decided that this project needed to be complete this winter since I didn't want to spend another track season without it. I have several other fun cars but nothing that performs like the 135 and track days just wern't the same.
So a couple weeks ago I finally pulled the trigger and brought home a 52k mile 2013 E92 M3 DCT.
Got the thing home and I really don't understand how it was totaled out. The only thing really wrong with it was the DCT cooler was bent. It ran and drove perfectly once I peeled some damaged panels off. I really almost didn't have the heart to tear it down as a donor. I wanted to fix it and drive it, but then I'm even deeper in the project and still have a useless 1 series shell. Onward we go.
The 135 is already almost completely stripped. The plan is to strip both cars into individual piles of parts and then reassemble using the best of both worlds. It's really staggering how similar the two cars are. No one is ever going to convince me they didn't intent to put the S65 in the 1M.
My goal for this thread is to document the "hard" parts. I'm not going to post much about the tear down, or the things that simply bolt on. If there's anything specific you're curious about fire away and I'll try to document it as I go. I'm going to make three posts below this and just update them as I go to create a continuous historical record that people can reference. Hopefully I can document all the small things that other builds have skipped so more people can make this happen!
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