Restoration Gearheads
THIS has to go into THAT.
Me E21 project now involves an engine swap at some undetermined time in the future. How did I get here? I blame my fellow restoration gearheads.
First a little detour…. My best friend Nick Ellis grew up with me in Oak Lawn, IL. I met him in the 2nd grade and also got to know his father and one of the coolest things I can tell you about Nick’s old man Mr. Ellis was his passion for “old cars”. Old cars for Nick and I but these cars were the cool rides of Mr Ellis’ youth. His dream car was a 1950s Mercury coupe. I remember when he finally bought one and brought it home and boy did this car need help. It was in very sad shape. Mr. Ellis’ sent it off to some far away shop and it took years for it to come back. But it eventually did come back and fully restored. It was a revelation to me that something like this was possible and I think somehow I internalized that experience. What I love about the photo below is the visible joy on Mr. Ellis’ face standing next to his pride and joy. As a postscript to this photo, both Nick and his father later opened up a restoration shop and did all the work on their own, never letting one of their cars leave their hands again. They became true Restoration Gearheads. My kind of people. I am sorry to share that Mr. Ellis recently passed and this photo reminded me about how I want to live my life now that I am getting older. Just like Mr. Ellis did.
I met my friend Jason because he owns a Mercedes 500E, the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, a late 80s Mercedes sedan, where the engineers in Stuttgart, Germany decided to stuff a big V8 into their mid-size sedan with manufacturing and chassis tuning help from Porsche. My father owned this sedan, but not the V8 monster with the flared fenders, but rather the more pedestrian diesel model. I eventually purchased this beast of 90s nostalgia in 2015 and joined the community of fellow 500E fanatics. Thanks to the community building power of the internet, I was soon neck deep among my fellow restoration gearheads at 500eboard.co to get my 1994 E500 into tip top shape. You trade parts with your fellow gearheads, share How-To advice, and in some cases genuine bonds of friendship are developed through a shared passion for doing cool stuff together on your free weekends. Jason and I still help each other out all the time, learning and growing our restoration skills together.
Ok, so back to Ricardo’s E21 project and this engine swap idea. Well I blame my fellow E21 restoration gearheads. Shortly after purchasing my E21 I joined the E21 CCA group on Facebook because Joel Palmer, who owns the group, sent a comment to me at the Bring-A-Trailer auction where I purchased my car. Facebook is the last place I expected to find a helpful owner community based upon my experience with more traditional auto forums in the past. However, Joel runs an amazing group and shortly after joining, a local E21 owner reached out to me, as we realized we lived close to one another. That is how I met Joshua, who also has a really cool restoration blog about his 1982 BMW/ALPINA C1 2.3. His blog inspired mine as it was a cool to follow his journey and learn from it. A few Facebook messages turned into a few emails and next thing you know we agreed to meet at a local car show. Joshua is a gold mine of E21 information, and being such a newbie to the E21 platform, he quickly turned into my E21 mentor. Joshua’s super cool Alpine E21 is the blue one in the photo below. Alpina started out in Germany as a BMW hot rod shop in 1960s but due to the quality and craftsmanship of their builds they remain an official partner of BMW to this day.
Josh is subtle. In one early email exchange about restoring the 4 cylinder engine, code named M10, that is in my car (which is painfully slow at maybe 90hp right now), he says “my personal preference is to swap in a M20 with Motronics from a e30 325i.” I didn’t really understand when he first mentioned it to me but as I researched more and more into what is possible for my car, it turned out he was right. (time and again, Josh’s wisdom gathered during years & years of restoring BMW 2002s and now E21s means he has a wealth of knowledge to share, you just have to ask).
What Josh was trying to tell me is to take the 6 cylinder engine from the license plate “SENNA 3” BMW in the picture above, and to drop that into my car. The reason to do this is because the M20 6 cylinder motor was originally offered in Europe on the E21 platform as a 323i which was never sold in the USA. What that means is if you can gather a somewhat small collection of Europe only BMW E21 parts you can bolt in a M20 6 cylinder engine into my 1982 USA BMW 320i. BMW kept developing the BMW M20 into the 90s, culminating in a 170hp USA version with the more modern Bosch computer engine management system called Motronic. Specifically, Josh was telling me to find an M20B25 motor and start there. It just took me another few weeks of my own research to figure that out. (BTW, Josh’s Alpina started out as a Euro BMW 323i and then got modified by Alpina into a C1 2.3).
So that is why on December 3rd, 2023 I found myself in Elk Grove, California meeting yet another couple of amazing gearheads, Alex & Andrew, who set me up with a great donor M20B25 motor to prepare for restoration. They are BMW E30 junkies who not only understood what I was trying to do, but helped me gather the right collection of bits based upon their experience. They are now a part of my E21 network.
Finally, another restoration gearhead, my neighbor Layne helped me borrow his engine hoist and unload the engine from my truck. Layne is so generous with his time and we have formed a real bond by sharing tools and garage talk visits as we catch up on each other’s projects. See the extra photo of Layne’s latest project, an Austin-Healey Sprite, which is now back on the road.
