Click me - A long drive but we got our kit home in one piece. This just left us with sorting of all the bits and finding somewhere to put them!

The engine is slowly coming together bit by bit. Taken the inlet manifold off, cleaned up the throttle body with Carb/Injector cleaner - Click me

When your taking your donor to bits, be careful not to damage the clutch hose that goes between the slave and master cylinder its quite expensive to replace (£33+VAT).

Also ordered new bushes for the rear swing arms, new links for the rear anti roll bar and a gasket for the throttle butterfly.

Need more carb cleaner for the intake manifold as well!

Still need to decided if I am going to replace the water pump or not.

Should be getting more stuff from Frost soon as well.

3 new pictures today! One very shiny rocker cover, now polished and painted black. Inlet manifold slowly cleaning up. Not sure how much more I will do on this one. Click me

The restoration of old parts and generally making them look nice continued today. Also installed the new clutch. New pictures are up (paint is still wet though) Click me

The Magnecor HT leads turned up today. Very nice looking set of leads. They didn't cost much more than the OE set. The old leads had started to crack and needed replacing. The engines also getting new plugs, distro cap and rotor arm. Click me

Marlin have sent me over a set of 10 bushes for the diff mount and front wishbones. After a bit of experimentation and lots of washing up liquid I had 10 bushes in place. 4 more BMW bushes went into the rear swing arms after the old ones were removed.

Today I've done first proper elements of construction. Fitting of the rear swing arms and the differential. These didn't quite fit properly and need the help of the mallet to move them to their final place.

The spring seats don't line up - going to have to talk to Marlin about this.

New gallery to go with the start of construction: Click me

Rear suspension test fit. Although the rear spring seats dont align properly the springs seem to go in ok. I'm not 100% happy with this but for the moment it will do. I installed new suspension top mounts from an E46 Cabrio, an E30zone recommendation. Please see new pictures in the gallery: Click me

The AVO rear dampers are working very well. Although I had to use the standard plastic covers as the ones that came with the dampers were not quite long enough.

After waiting on missing ball joints, it turns out they're not part of the kit. So ball joints ordered from Marlin.

Steering Wheel should be here soon, all that is needed now is the steering rack and front shocks to test fit the front and get everything in the right place.

Having some issues with the brake lines. I have finally figured out where all the braided hoses are supposed to go, but none of the copper tubes seem to have the correct connectors on them. That means I will need a joiner, if such a thing exists, or get new pipes made up.

The steering wheel arrived. It's a nice size, smaller than the stock wheel but not tiny.

I've put a picture up in the parts section: Click me

And a comparison picture in the construction section: Click me

The pedal box is close to complete now. I decided to use the ball bearings from the donor car. This needed a bit of work on the pedals to make them fit. The tubes that they pivot on needed drilling out to 20mm to allow the BMW bearings to fit in. Got there in the end, pictures can be seen here:

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Don't have any pictures yet but after getting some male/male adapters I was finally able to get on with installing the rear brake pipes and hoses. Looks pretty good. I may invest in a pipe flaring tool to do it properly.

Excellent! I got big funny shaped box from Marlin today. Quite a lot more bits, specifically ball joints and shocks. Click me

Front suspension is together! Just need the steering rack now for final test fit. I've put pictures up of the progress. Also test fitted the front anti roll bar. I still need to fabricate brackets for them.Click me

Thank you to pacerpete on www.E30Zone.co.uk I now have a 3.91 ratio LSD for the Sportster! Went to collect it today. Now it needs to be cleaned - de rusted and painted ready to go in the car. - Anyone need a 3.91 open diff?

New pictures in the gallery showing the cleaned up and de-rusted limited slip differential fitted to the Sportster.

More new pictures of the front with the brake calliper and wheel test fitted: Click me

Test fit of engine. Got bored waiting for steering rack so we thought we'd "chuck" the engine in and see how it fits - very nicely from the look of it. The gearbox mount bracket is a bit off so its being held up with a jack until that's bent in to the right shape and had one hole moved a bit.
Pictures here:


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Due to having a full set of E36/46 wheels sitting in the garage with almost new Bridgestone RE720 rubber it seemed a shame not use it. We've sourced a set of 4 to 5 stud adapters from eBay to allow fitment to the E30 hubs.


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I've had a few questions on where I got the adapters from. I purchased them off eBay, however the original seller bought them off someone in the states who had them made by: http://www.motorsport-tech.com/

Woohoo delivery from Marlin including the steering rack, track rod ends, electric fan, brake servo and master cylinder.
Electric was needed because the viscose fan wouldn't fit in with the radiator in place. The donor radiator was a bit too big as well so we are waiting for a new one those too.
Track rod ends are not part of the kit-in-a-box so those need to be ordered seprately.