Friend of mine has been looking for an e30 for a while. found a nice 325is with 92k, but its auto. i dont have time to attempt it, but anyone want to do a tranny swap on it? for $ of course. I’d source all the parts first. A bunch of people have done the swap and said it’s prettys traightforward
turn around time?
ugh - seems like a hassle - esp since there are tons of nice e30’s available with manuals cheep out here in the West/Southwest. Why doesn’t your friend just find a manual and drop the money for shipping rather than trying to do a tranny swap?
Good point^^^^^
As easy as something sounds is not always the case. I know someone who did a 5 speed swap in a MKIII Golf. He said he would never do it again PITA…
as easily as it sounds, finding an e30 with 92k on it is pretty darn impossible. especially for 3500. hell, especially for 5 grand. mine had 99k on it when i bought it, and i paid double that.
3500 for the car and $1k in labor is pretty nice to have an 89 325is 5 sp
hes been looking on the west coast too, and hasnt come up with anything out there, so this option seems pretty viable
ttt
how hard could it be, ide be down to help, even use my garage if some guys that are more familiar with beemers wanna do it.
Me and my roomate can do it pretty quickly i would assume, depending on how smooth the transition is, and if anything needs to be fab’d to accomplish it. We have 1 open bay in the garage (Firebird shell is not possibly moving out of the nice bay), and if he already has the parts, I am not doing anything for the rest of this week, and weekend into next week if needed.
I as you may know was the GM for aamco trans. so i do know a thing or two about R&R as well as the trans itself.
Are there any specific writeups on the BMW forums from guys that have done this so that we have an idea of the complications/tricks to do it the easiest/fastest?
no fabbing necessary. supposed to be pretty straight forward.
i just searched it on an e30 forum and found this;
It seems like a good bit of labor, but nothing over the top. Send me a PM with how much he is offering and we can work something out. My only concern is that he provides the parts and necessary bolts etc… for the conversion so i dont have to spend a lot of my time searching. I know your love for BMW’s, and especially if he shares the same passion, i am more than happy to help.
tpgsr, just watch out for the “hell” torx on the top of the trans 
It’s not actually THAT bad.
its not that bad. mine had a ton of torx around the block to the bellhousing. wasn’t too bad.
i had the torx headbolts on one of my m20’s too
the only thing that really pissed me off was the “tube of death.”
Good e30’s are becoming harder and harder to find for reasonable prices. One day I shall own one though
blahhh… I just sold my e30 with a perfect trans and clutch for 500 bucks this morning. 