davintosh

2    Remove old thermostat faceplate and leave wires connected.

      2a    Take a picture of the wire connections for later reference.

I don’t ordinarily gravitate toward e30s, but this one is quite special, and I would certainly make an exception. If money were no object.

An e30 M3 in Hennarot, with a European S50B32 motor in place of the original 4-cylinder. Don’t get me wrong, a car like this with the original 4-cylinder is no slouch, with 192 hp behind a ~2,800 car. But that S50 engine puts out in the neighborhood of 320 hp, which would make this car a rocket. The purists might will most definitely freak out about the departure from the original configuration, but even the most diehard purist would have a tough time finding fault with the quality of this swap.

88′ Hennarot M3 with a S50B32 Euro motor.
191,0xx miles on the chassis, approx 79k miles on the motor/transmission.

I purchased this car in the spring of 2013 from a gentleman in CA who had done most of the mechanical work on the car, and really made it into the wonderful driving car that it currently is. From my understanding the car was largely stock when he bought it several years before my ownership, from that point he focused on maintenance that the car needed. I have a binder containing some of the documentation from the previous owner.

The motor swap is obviously the biggest change over stock. I’ve been told by two separate and independent shops, that the swap was very well done. The engine is very strong, and runs extremely well, I had a compression/leak down done on the car before my purchase and all cylinders checked out perfectly. In fact, the company that sold him the motor wrote ‘superb engine’ on the valve cover while they were testing it. I’d estimate that engine has been in the car for about 6000 miles. When I took delivery of the car I drove it home 1300 miles, it was a great drive, and the car didn’t miss a beat. About half of the miles that I’ve put on the car since I’ve owned it where driving it home, I just don’t get a chance to drive it much. I never had any intention of selling this car this quickly, but I’ve started a E28/LS1 project, and have an E30 touring project lined up behind that. I’m in no hurry to sell it, but I need it needs to be driven and an enjoyed more than I am able to do.

$26,500

Exterior Modifications:
– OEM Evo2 front splitter with replica Evo3 splitter
– Evo3 rear spoiler and carbon fiber flap
– BMW Motorsport door handles
– Euro smilies

Drivetrain/Engine Modifications:
– Genuine carbon fiber airbox with OETuning tune
– AKG S50/S52 E30 motor mounts (less than 2000 miles old)
– Z3 steering rack
– E28 M5 coding plug (so the stock RPM gauge is accurate)
– Sparco strut bar
– E36 Euro M3 radiator
– ZF 5sp transmission (less than 2500 miles old)
– Autosolution SSK
– Treehouse control arm bushing
– E36 M3 Eisenmann muffler with catless custom exhaust
– Massive Rally BBK (6 pistons front, 4 pistons rear)
– Ground Control S/A coilovers
– Ground Control camber plates
– Ground Control rear shock mounts
– Ground Control 650#/400# springs (less than 1000 miles old)
– E28 3.25 LSD (rebuilt by Diffs Online about 2500 miles ago)
– 17” OZ Superleggera wheels (no curb rash)
– Dunlop Direzza Sport Z1 215/40/17 (less than 5000 miles old)

Recent Maintenance (oil changed every 3000 miles):
– Brake fluid flush (less than 7000 miles old)
– New spark plugs (less than 5000 miles old)
– E36 ’96+ offset front control arm (less than 4000 miles old)
– New front wheel bearings (less than 4000 miles old)
– Various belts and gaskets replaced (less than 4000 miles old)
– New battery (less than 4000 miles old)
– New fuel tank and fuel pump (less than 2000 miles old)
– New thermostat (less than 500 miles old)
– New sway bar end links (less than 500 miles old)

Interior Modifications:
– NRG quick release hub – thin version
– Momo Champion steering wheel
– Recaro SR3 seats (new less than 1000 miles old)
– VDO cluster gauges (oil temp, oil pressure, water temp)
– BMP instrument console (for the VDO gauges)
– Custom ///M floor mats (less than 500 miles old)
– Alpine head unit (note: there are no cracks in the dash)
– ZHP weighted shift knob

Considerations:
– Dot-r front left fender…..parking lot mishap with a previous owner
– The rear bumper was painted at one time
– There is a small amount of rust repaired below the windshield on the driver side (see photo)
– The driver side E-brake shoe assembly is missing (e-brake still works fine)
– No a/c, heater core (note: the lines are still intact)
– Corners of the bumpers stick out slightly (common)
– The spare tire well is riveted shut
– I personally like the patina on the front bumper, others may think it needs a repaint.
– The exhaust is slightly crooked, and if desired could be rehung

There isn’t much to nit pick on this car, you can get in and drive it across the country, or to work everyday. It has major and expensive upgrades that arguably make it a better car. Better in the sense that it has a power train that is more reliable than the S14, it creates more power, brakes harder, and turns faster.

As you can see from the pictures the paint is in fantastic condition for a 25+ year old car. If you have never seen hennarot in person, it’s a gorgeous color, and also quite rare, I believe only about 300 M3’s were produced in this color. I am happy to answer any questions serious buyers have, I’ve tried to be as thorough and forthright with the condition as possible.

The following photos were taken by Brian Lewis of SpeedFreak Detailing after he did a complete paint correction to the car in November. The car has primarily been stored away since.

We’ve all heard of a Bad Hair Day™… Well today is A Bad Windows Day™.

So far today, among the 35 Windows XP desktops, eight servers and a dozen or so Macs, I’ve had two virus infections, three BSOD’s, and have had to chase down at least fifteen other miscellaneous issues with the Windows desktops. It’s Monday, without a doubt, and I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail all. day. long.

The funny — but altogether unsurprising — thing is that I haven’t set foot in the Graphics department (where all the Macs are located) since last Thursday, and that was only to get the page count from the printer they use. Macs make up about 25% of the computers here, but there is no doubt that I spend about 99% of my time on the Windows machines. I guess one could make the case that the Windows machines keep me employed, but for crying out loud… There has got to be a better way.

The media guys played this at the beginning of our church service this morning; it’s a hoot! (YouTube link.)

“He once counted to infinity… Twice!” “He’s both left-handed, and right-handed…” “He uses Tabasco Sauce instead of Visine.” “He is not afraid of the dark; the dark is afraid of him.” Yeah; that pretty much describes me.

One of the desktop machines at work had an alert come up a while back — Disk in Predictive Failure — so I made preparations to replace it. From what I’d read, when the SMART status on a disk tells you something like that, the drive will be toast; it could be an hour or it could be a year, but sooner or later it’s gonna bite the dust.

Having done this numerous times on Macs, the process of replacing a drive ought to be the same, right? So first things first, I installed Retrospect Client on it (we use Retrospect for backing up the company servers, and have unlimited licenses for clients) and backed up the whole drive, then bought a replacement drive. The machine is a Dell Dimension, and it had the original Seagate 160GB SATA drive; I didn’t think it was important to replace it with an identical drive, so I bought a Hitachi replacement of the same size. I wasn’t excited about the whole reinstall-from-scratch prospect, so I asked around for recommendations for a good Windows disk cloning solution — Norton’s Ghost is probably the industry leader, but I heard good recommendations for Acronis as well, so I downloaded a copy of their Migrate Easy software to try out.

The first go didn’t go well; Migrate Easy seemed to clone the disk alright, but when I pulled out the original drive and tried booting from the new it errored on something or other. I tried it again, varying the settings a bit to see if I could work through the problem; same result. One more try; ditto. I checked the Acronis support page, but found no help there other than an email submission form. I filled it out, describing my problem, then put the machine back together with the original drive, and left it as is; I didn’t have any more time to mess with it that day. I still haven’t heard anything back from Acronis.

Things got really busy at work after that, plus the machine’s user seems to be there every day but weekends (I hate working Saturdays, and won’t work Sundays) so procrastination set in. Thankfully the drive kept humming along, and I was able to work on it when I chose. I wanted to be able to set aside at least a couple of hours so that if I had some success I could make sure the job was complete and everything was working. Well, days turned into weeks, and before I knew it more than a month had gone by, and my trial version expired before I got back to it. Wanting to see if I could work out the issues I had with Acronis, I spent the $40 or so to buy a license and took another stab at it a week ago, but got much the same results. I went through the clone procedure a number of different ways and still came up with the blue screen when it was booting up. Crud. If it’s duplicating the disk block-for-block as I’m assuming it does, why is it that there is something obviously wrong with the OS on the new disk that keeps it from booting properly?

Last weekend — another Saturday, of course — I jumped on the project again, and finally completed it. What ended up working was to use Acronis to duplicate the disk, then boot up from the OEM installer CD and reinstall the OS. I was hoping the installer could just repair the installation, but nope… so I just had it install a clean OS (which was of course XP Pro SP 2, whereas the machine had been running SP 3.) Once I tracked down the NIC drivers & got them installed, I was able to get on the network and install the Retrospect Client software. When that was done I configured the machine as a client on the server that did the backup, and told it to restore the disk. In spite of some warnings from Retrospect against restoring an OS that’s newer than what’s running, everything went great.

After Retrospect finished, I rebooted the client, and Retrospect did a little housecleaning, then automatically rebooted again and ran its cleanup utility, again. But it sure seemed to be a solid running machine. It still had the second Windows install folder, so that got trashed, then I ran a defrag on the hard drive… So far, so good.

But I’m still left wondering why the whole procedure had to be so difficult… On it’s own, Acronis failed. I read something online about Acronis not being fond of cloning to a different type of disk; maybe I’d have had better luck if the replacement disk was the same brand/size. I dunno. I probably should’ve done the whole thing with Retrospect and saved myself some hassle; it still would’ve involved installing an operating system the new drive, but it wouldn’t have duplicated the two hidden partitions on the drive. I guess I won’t know if Norton would’ve done the job without getting Retrospect involved unless another machine gives the same problem and I try it, or I test it just for fun.

What I do know is that the same job on a Mac would’ve been much more straightforward; using Carbon Copy Cloner, the job would’ve been done the first time around. And if it were in OS 9… No 3rd-party utilities needed; just hook up the new drive to the machine, format the drive & let the Finder copy everything over. So much easier. But like cockroaches, Windows boxes are pretty well entrenched, and they aren’t going away any time soon. Sigh.