Bronze Bimmer - E28 with S52 power

4 minute(s) of a 23 minute read

8-27-20
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New update! The car is wired up, just a handful of easy things left.

Bad news is the guy who did the exhaust didn’t do the best job as you can see in the pic below, welds are really scraggly and incomplete. Also the steering arm hits the headers so you can only go a quarter turn to the left.

The hope is Charbel will figure out something with the headers so it’s at least drivable and I can pick it up this weekend. We will see.

Not great welding, you can see there is a hole where the pipe wasn’t welded all the way around, some weld wire sticking out there too.

E36 M3 headers interfering with the steering. Supposedly E34 work better? But it has to be remedied.

Will I ever get this car back? It’s seeming more likely.

9-5-20
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New update! We had to figure out the header situation so we can take it to an exhaust shop to get the downpipes made. One of the reasons the E28 swap is more difficult than an E30 is the different steering setup, less room to work with.

These were the headers done by the last shop. Not only did they not notice the steering interference, but certain parts aren’t completely welded. The stuff that was welded isn’t pretty.

We pulled those headers which required pulling the engine mount and jacking up the engine. Some E30 headers were laying around but they don’t give much room for the exhaust shop to work with, exiting right by the steering center link. Someone online said E34 headers give you more room. Thankfully we were at a BMW parts yard, which had a couple E34s to choose from.

Pulled those headers and lo and behold, they are shorter than the E30 by about an inch or 2, as you can see in the below pics. E30 headers are on top of the E34.

We installed the E34 ones. Still tight but much more manageable than the E30s. There are 24 studs per header so it felt like I was pulling and removing exhaust bolts all day. The downpipes bolts were pretty stuck so they needed some heat to remove. We left some pipe on there for the exhaust shop to work with.

We got the radiator installed as well. Exhaust shop are closed until Tuesday due to Memorial Day so it will be towed over next week to get that all hooked up. After that it’s just plugging the computer in and putting various trim back on.