Start of Build - August 25, 2010: Matt bought this 1995 BMW M3 a while ago as a rolling chassis. The stock motor was long gone, and some of the interior was as well. This was a no sunroof, black car (diamond schwartz) in fairly good shape.
There were some dings in the hood, holes in the trunk from an old factory rear spoler, and bubbles in the paint on the doors where a plasma cutter (facepalm) was used to remove about 2 pounds of door bar reinforcement (facepalm, again), and... ok, the body isn't perfect. But it had AP big brakes in front, some Kosei K1 wheels and Falken RT615 tires (which were the hot ticket back in... 2005?).
Matt had ridden in our E36 LS1 Alpha car years ago and was smitten - he bought the LS1 swap kit and a set of AST 4100s from us after finding this donor chassis. He had Dallas Performance build a nice 4-point "street cage" that also had some bits that tied the rear shock towers together and to the subframe mounts, but still had plenty of room for the front seats and people could ride up there safely without helmets. Dallas Performance took the junkyard 5.7L aluminum LS1 engine and T56 trans Matt had sourced and rebuilt everything, and installed ported heads and a larger camshaft in the process.
Then the car sat... and sat... and was moved 3 times, and became a storage container on wheels. In the meantime Matt started working for Vorshlag back in early 2008, and somehow in 2010 the car migrated into our shop. What the...??
We'll be doing the swap here in-house soon (starting after the 2010 Solo Nationals and GRM Challenge events), and developing some additional parts to go along with our LS1 swap kits. We will be taking photos and videos of the installaiton steps as well. Recently Matt rolled the car outside and washed all the years of dust off, and now it sits under a car cover in our shop awaiting some installaiton work.
Here's the 4-point roll bar/cage structure added to the car:
Stay tuned for more.
There were some dings in the hood, holes in the trunk from an old factory rear spoler, and bubbles in the paint on the doors where a plasma cutter (facepalm) was used to remove about 2 pounds of door bar reinforcement (facepalm, again), and... ok, the body isn't perfect. But it had AP big brakes in front, some Kosei K1 wheels and Falken RT615 tires (which were the hot ticket back in... 2005?).
Matt had ridden in our E36 LS1 Alpha car years ago and was smitten - he bought the LS1 swap kit and a set of AST 4100s from us after finding this donor chassis. He had Dallas Performance build a nice 4-point "street cage" that also had some bits that tied the rear shock towers together and to the subframe mounts, but still had plenty of room for the front seats and people could ride up there safely without helmets. Dallas Performance took the junkyard 5.7L aluminum LS1 engine and T56 trans Matt had sourced and rebuilt everything, and installed ported heads and a larger camshaft in the process.
Then the car sat... and sat... and was moved 3 times, and became a storage container on wheels. In the meantime Matt started working for Vorshlag back in early 2008, and somehow in 2010 the car migrated into our shop. What the...??
We'll be doing the swap here in-house soon (starting after the 2010 Solo Nationals and GRM Challenge events), and developing some additional parts to go along with our LS1 swap kits. We will be taking photos and videos of the installaiton steps as well. Recently Matt rolled the car outside and washed all the years of dust off, and now it sits under a car cover in our shop awaiting some installaiton work.
Here's the 4-point roll bar/cage structure added to the car:
Stay tuned for more.
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