Rebuilding a BMW intake: S52 to M50 manifold conversion, day 4

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.

Started this morning off searching for a new stud. Tried all sorts of body shops, junkyards, and the like, but no luck!

With things slowly going back together, we realized everything was not going to fit. So we started off “manufacturing” our own oil dipstick mount, cutting some sheet metal, drilling some holes, and painting it black. Worked really well!

The one thing we noticed was that positioning everything between the 2 major manifold mounts was key—nothing, not the idle control valve nor the oil separator should be on the outside, it won’t fit otherwise, I should know, we tried for an hour or so :-)

Almost finished today, but mounting is going very slow. Taking time to figure out what is what and what connects to what has really slowed things down. The Bentley manual, E36 performance book, and searching RealOEM.com for pictures all helped.

At the end of today the manifold was back on, most things were connected and we were in much better shape.

Still need to finish putting the throttle and intake back in, along with finding that stud… sigh