E30 Zone

howdy,

i've just got the itch for getting in to BMW's. i've been into vw's for around 5 years and currently have a 01 GTi 1.8T. great car, fun, fast, but im stuck on old school Euro. i've been looking around for a while on a project, new car, ideas for things, basically anything and found the E30 M3 platform as a nasty looking car (good nasty).

now im sure tons of posts have been created asking about M3's vs other models and am im searching the archives but thought i would ask while introducing.

M3's are not cheap, what are say the top 5 things to look for while searching for one to buy? also some good links? sites? anything to help a noob out. maybe there is a noob info faq.

Thanks again,
-andy

Hi & welcome!

Sorry can't help your quest for an M3, the only thing I can say is make sure it has plenty of history as these are fragile engines and you need to be 99.9% that it's been looked after.

very true, also whats the deal with the 2.5 conversion that i saw Turner selling for a large chunk of change?

any website out there with the M3's specs?

Thanks!

hi mate and welcome

try s14.net for everything related to the s14 engine and e30 m3 for that matter too.

good luck

thanks man! im used to vwvortex.com being the majority of what i needed for research.

any ideas on price range that i would be looking at? i've seen 15k-20k cars.

anyways thanks again!
-andy

8)HI M8 WELCOME TO THE ZONE

THERES A NICE MACAU BLUE CECCOTO M3 ON EBAY AT THE MO

Hi mate

Are you in the UK?

You can get a nice E30 M3, late 215bhp model for about 7-8k, 15-20k are normally special editions that are totally mint.

Main things to check are

1. Rust, all the usual places, arches, rear panel around lights and number plate, inside and out, scuttle panel underneath the windscreen.

2. History, don't worry about mileage, condition and history are far more important.

With these checked, all the usual checks apply, as for the engines being fragile, that's bollocks, they're tuned pretty highly in standard form, with some of the DTM cars pushing 360bhp, but to get that sort of power, it's serious money. They are very well built engines, and with the correct maintenance, as with any other engine, it will go on and on. If you read anything about the timing chain needing replacing at 100k, ignore it, it's just a rumour a certain specialist has started, noisy chain slap from startup can be cured by fitting an E36 tensioner, actually, I think BMW have actually superceded the part number with the E36 part!