Vard66

This afternoon I am not feeling terrific. This may or may not have been caused by Rum. Work will be slow today.

Update! First day is over, and we're pretty much ready to pull the engine out. Left to do before we can are the following; Remove gearbox bolts (already loosened) Remove PAS pump and figure out how we can hold it out of the way so as not to kill it and drain the SLS. Remove Alternator and pop it onto the new lump. God save us. :-\ Left to right; my mate Ian, a fellow petrolhead, and Alex - unaware of how he looks wearing my tea-cosy beanie. This is what we discovered upon unearthing the DME (ECU) - it appears to already be a 4.0 automatic box... Curious, but possibly a contributor to the abysmal fuel economy, and constant smell of unburnt fuel.... Plus some completely redundant wires - this is 90% of the contents of the O/S bank's wiring box. Mildly unsettling, this. We reckoned it was all the wiring that would've gone to the plug on the slushbox. This photo was taken at about five to nine, the frost had been on the cars for a good two and a bit hours at this point;

"Purr"? You're thinking too small in feline terms.

, Joe, I think we're dodging the Gloucester diff, there's a man in Calne, fewer than 5 miles from me with a whole 5er rear beam, he's gonna double check it's still there and ring me tomorrow, at which point I'll make a cheeky offer on the diff. What time on Monday are you hoping to be here, and are you crashing here?

Actually no. It's still an M60 going in.

No, I mean disappear from here, for a short shift once or twice. Time off is now provisionally all sorted - it's awwwwn.

I wouldn't. Sure, I'd love a 260SE, but that's a pretty car you have there, and the build quality on the 260s is reported to be the worst of all the Zeds.

Quite possibly, yuh. I need to book it off yet, but tbh I've had four shifts this week, I can't see it being the end of the world, despite being a bit short notice. Abject worst case, I can't get the whole week off and I disappear for two and a half hours three times over the course of the week.

Joe, you're welcome to come up and crash here if you'd like. I will be confiscating alcohol at the door, mind.

But... they're ugly little POS chavwagons... You could literally not pay me enough money to own a ZR.

Nice choice of wheels on an Escort of that year. That's about it though.

...the Desmosedici is supposed to have 200hp... And sounds like an F1 car with the exhaust less than a foot behind your head and pointing more or less straight upwards. Scary bugger.

Not that you ever pick up or reply to texts... :-P

Maybe. But then again, it's a LOT more work to convert it to M62 power. Also, any engines that were bound to suffer nikasil issues, pretty much have by now, so it's less of a concern than it otherwise might be.

Hush Joe, you're being an arrogant, insulting cock. Also I don't like the E39.

http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/sh ... 713&page=5 Seems to suggest it's a bit of a hotchpotch of which bits we'll need to take from the M60B30 onto the B44 to make it work, but beyond that it looks like it's mostly going to be plug and play, just with a bit of part swapping to contend with.

Well, logically if the block is the same, just further bored, the box should fit by default.

Find us a manual Touring!

But not before we've done some more research into fitting the M62...

Neg, Anj. Fix, strip, drop, DRIFT. In that order.

Plan, incidentally, is to take the heads off, investigate if they're gonna be alright (and I'm expecting they will be fine, as it overpressured, but never actually overheated the system), and put a couple of new gaskets in. I reckon, worst case, the heads may need a skim, but I really can't see that they'd be fecked. That said, I haven't contemplated the thought that the previous owner had let it overheat at any point. Either way, it's going to cost nowt to have the heads off and have a look-see, so that's the plan. Anj, there isn't really a lot of oil ingress into the coolant, just a mild haze of rainbow on the surface. The issue seems to be that it's breached between cylinder and a coolant channel somewhere, so is losing compression into the coolant, and pressurising it like a mad bastard. Quoting up how much it'll cost, so far we're looking at <£60 for the head gaskets, plus the PCV for ~£30, and Alex is thinking we might as well do the inlet manifold gaskets, so ~£60.

Maybe, but he's more likely to be unbearable about being right. Joe, when you get to this, we want to know, lest the 30 should be fecked; what is the procedure for dropping in a 40 or better yet, an M62? I seem to recall talking to someone with a conversion - 40 in an E30 316, who iirc was saying something about just needing the lump and the management to go, plug and play, but maybe that's selective memory.

It's remarkable, yuh. Especially if the plates were looking a little tired or were cracked or had run, it just makes a world of difference. TBH, Gary, what I really wanted was just the dark green backing on the normal GB letters/ring of stars. My options however were Union flag or St. George's Cross, so I figured I'd take the more specific of the two..

New plates arrived a couple of days ago, found a few moments to put them on this afternoon. So off with the old AND the awful, broken number plate mount; And on with the new! Back one too, ofc. Mildly disappointed that I have managed to put the front one on just a tiiiiny bit on the piss, but pretty pleased with the site Paul linked to, so happy out.

New cap and arm yesterday, solved my intermittent missfire, very gratifying.