Rebuilding a BMW intake: S52 to M50 manifold conversion, day 2

Coming to you live from my parents garage in this 7 part series, are the chronicled adventures my dad and myself had converting an S52 intake manifold to the larger M50 intake manifold.

This Saturday I came back to my parents with a few extra parts in hand–what I thought was a new stud for the valve cover and a new heater hose (decided against the other 3 ones, they were over $50 each, very expensive hoses, doh!).

My dad and I started off this morning tending to the valve cover. Unfort the stud I had was not going to fit, doh again! Looking at the broken one, we realized there were a few threads left and because the torque that was needed was so low, it might work! We decided to pick up some high-temp fastener adhesive to help too. But alas, that wasn’t enough, as we were tightening it down, it just snapped–a new stud was indeed what I needed to find (and only BMW shops carry these). Looks like I’ll be ordering one of these this week, hopefully it arrives by next weekend.

So with the car obviously not running again today, we took our time and went back to the M50 manifold kit. We started off by cleaning the refurbished M50 manifold (for a refurbished part, this thing was very dirty inside) with some throttle bottle air intake cleaner. Also cleaned the rest of the throttle bottle pieces as well.

After the cleaning, we started cutting the tubes and putting the kit to together. Going back between directions, comparing the S52 to the M50 manifolds, and looking in both books, we were able to identify a number of parts the directions never labeled, again, such horrible directions!

With everything finally identified and a clear re-build procedure laid out, we started piecing together a few parts and related.

One of the rubber hoses that connects to the oil/air separator just would not go on! It was 3/8” tube they provided but that sucker was not going on, lousy tubing to go with lousy directions. Luckily my dad had some extra tubing and we were able to find a better fit for that piece and for the oil line drain.

We also had some more trouble–the threaded brass purge valve adapter—it seems to be lacking the “adapter” part, guess another call to KO is in order for Monday.

Without a new stud or this adapter, there wasn’t going to be much more progress today.

So I decided to switch to something a bit easier: installing some brand new ZKW fog lights & protective film covers. My fog lights keep braking from rocks so hopefully these protective film covers stop this.

And some brand new OEM M3 floormats to replace the crappy UUC ones that the car came with when I bought it, the interior looks so much better now!

So it looks like this Monday I’ll be back on the phone ordering some more parts. Hopefully next week things go a bit more smoother.