2 Reasons Why the E36 is an ALMOST PERFECT Project Car

When you think of the BMW 3 Series, your mind probably goes straight to the E30, the E46, or maybe even the E90. These are some of the most legendary cars BMW has ever made, but there is one BMW that has been overlooked for decades and that is the E36. Today I'm going to talk about some of the German engineering that makes the e36 such a great platform for enthusiasts like you and specifically we're going to look at the engine and chassis, so buckle up guys and gals because we're going from b in b in this bmv while you're probably in the bathroom having a big bm thanks to omaze for partnering with us so we can bring you another bumper to bumper episode if you don't already know, omaze is a really cool company. which offers you the opportunity to gain once-in-a-lifetime experiences while supporting incredible causes like the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at UCLA, the same center that helped save James' life when he had a heart attack.

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We love you now. Six in a row is exactly what it sounds like. There are six cylinders arranged in a lot. and compared to the smaller four engines for example, the six cylinders are quite long and are generally too long to be mounted transversely, so they must be placed longitudinally, that is the length of the car, which requires a line much longer hood. It will be a great look for sports cars, but most manufacturers tend to use the same engines on multiple platforms and a super long block just isn't very practical in other cars like a minivan or an SUV or, I don't know, a hood. very small front. car now let's go back to the e36 and what makes it six cylinder engine. uh so good and by six-cylinder engine I really mean six-cylinder engines because in the 10 or so years that BMW produced the e36 they offered 10 inline six-cylinder engine options with a gasoline engine.

That's a lot of engines, if looking at 10 of those engines makes your brain turn a little mush, you're not alone my friend, but it's not that confusing when you break down those engine codes, you mean, let's be the Allens. While we're cracking the engine codes now, let's get into it. Okay, so the first digit tells you the engine family, so m means it was the standard engine produced until 2001. And the s means it's a high performance engine, so they used s engines in the m cars like the m3 but m engines and non-m cars like the 330 ci have a totally non-confusing start thanks bmw engineers i told them i keep telling them engineers don't know how to name things now the second digit tells you what cylinder configuration uses and in this case five indicates that it's a straight six and you might think that you should probably use the number six to designate this, but apparently BMW decided that six should represent v8 cars, I'm telling you right now, an engineer. did this and it was bad now the third digit represents the variation of the engine now these engines evolved over the years so the zero in m50 means it is the original design m51 would have been the first variation it is the diesel of which I was talking and m52 is the second variation.

Now most e36s will have an m50 or an m52. Now we move on to the fourth digit. In this case, b tells us that it is a gasoline engine. Why didn't BMW use the letter g to properly designate its gasoline engine? because the German word for gasoline is benzene, how did I pronounce it? My German friends. I hope I did well. Now the next two digits are pretty easy. They tell you the displacement. So, 30 means it's a 3.0-liter engine and lastly, tu is BMW's special designation. to inform you that there was a technical update or an update from the German technicians, my German is tricera, it made it and finally, USA means it was only sold in the United States.

It's pretty simple now, aside from all this confusing jargon, these engines share the same basic architecture. Double overhead camshaft with four valves per cylinder, that is, 24 valves in total, which is double what you have in the six-cylinder engine and single cams of the e30. So what is the benefit of having twin cams? Well, you are more efficient and you get more power now that one cam regulates the engine's intake valves and the other regulates the exhaust valves and the distance between those two cams means that the valves can be placed further apart, which is great because it improves the flow of exhaust gases through the engine and this additional distance from the valves also means the spark plug. it can be placed in a more ideal position to generate all that free-flowing air/fuel mixture to suck up the intake valve.

Now, a big benefit of the two top cans is that there is less valve noise. Have you ever heard a bmw e30 before? Here's a clip from one of our editors Max's e30 listen to this listen to this sucker it ticks very stinky, but 24 valve engines on the other hand are quiet as a little mouse, so compared to the e30, the engines of the e36 are more efficient, more powerful and lighter. but that's not the only thing they have cooking, it's time we talk about the real meat and potatoes of the e36's sexy six, that's right, I'm talking about BMW's legendary thanos and thanos means variable stroke scroll sterom, I hope, I hope and that word in German means variable cam timing and it is the same principle as the Honda VTEC, the Toyota VVT-I or the Nissan VTC that we talked about in the 300zx episode.

If you want to learn more about variable timing, I'll slide the link into the description below, but in a nutshell, engine timing, which is when the valves open and close, can change dynamically depending on driving conditions. You will get the benefit of having a very responsive economical engine at lower revs, but at higher revs the timing is advanced to allow more air and fuel into the combustion chamber now say it with me now kids, you have more air, you have more fuel and James, what do we have? Are you serious? Come on, Vanoss isn't exactly like the variable cam timing used in other cars in a typical BMW fashion it's a little more complicated because it wouldn't be a BMW if it weren't a little more complicated.

I'm going to compare it to VTEC which changes the engine's valve timing by hydraulically switching between a high lift and a low lift cam lobe now the low lift profile gives you better efficiency at low rpm and the high profile gives you a little bit of power in the high rpm range. Thanos, on the other hand, does what is called cam phasing, where the camshaft rotates to adjust. the lobe angle now depending on the engine load the ecu will send a signal to the solenoid which sends pressurized oil to a worm gear and that pushes towards the camshaft and that is what makes the camshaft rotate and that rotation advances or retards the timing of when the valves open now, most e36s had a single vanos meaning it only affects the intake cam, so when that helical gear is engaged to advance the timing, it you get a slight overlap between the intake and exhaust valves, now this allows for exhaust gas recirculation or egr now because because of that slight overlap, not all of the exhaust gases can escape through the valves, so some of it is absorbed back into the cylinder and the recycled exhaust gas dilutes the oxygen in the air entering the cylinder, which helps absorb some of that heat.

Combustion now, less heat means less pollutants in the atmosphere so a big part of egr is about emissions and I know Saint Jerry what the heck that sounds a bit contradictory why would you want less oxygen in your combustion chamber, but when you're alone? Navigating around town EGR helps keep the engine running more efficiently and efficiency is something German engineers love. Well, wait, okay, you're in a BMW, you're late for your latte date, and you need to get across town fast without using it. any flicker in typical BMW style, so you step on the pedal and your e36 brain decides it's time for the worm gear to retract back into its little hole and the intake cam spins back into place.

No more stinky exhaust in the chamber, now we need more air so we can get more boom boom so we can get more power so we can make it to our latte date because you know if you're late Dylan will order your coffee with milk with oat milk and then you'll want to punch them. in the face because you don't like oat milk you like almond milk would you call it almond juice? because how the hell can almonds have milk? It should be called almond juice. I stand by it okay so today in 2020 you can find a race and drive an e36 that uses this fancy smanshi technology for about four thousand dollars and that's one of the

reasons

why this car is so common among drifters and others enthusiasts who like to grease their knuckles a little.

I'm talking to you D-list fans. You greasy knuckleheads, so now that we have the basics of how these engines work, it's time to talk about the chassis, but why am I Italian? That makes sense, let's try that, there you have it when the e36 debuted in 1990. it had a lot to live up to, I mean it's older bro, the e30 is supposedly the most successful passenger car platform of all time, so how do you Take something that's already the best and make it better, like when Taco Bell launched nacho cheese? doritos loco taco supreme the e36 was meatier, stronger and is full of delicious crunchy flavor and it all starts in the chassis and yes our sponsor for this episode is not taco bell but if you are going to work at taco bell and want to sponsor us , we would love for now, for example, the wheelbase to be five inches longer than the e30, which is that long, okay, and what those five inches meant to BMW owners in the '90s was more legroom and more trunk space, but what do those five inches mean to you, the dollar store drift rat in the year 2020, well, it means it's easier to put this guy up a little sideways, so let's do a little imagination, okay, let's say you're in your camaro catfish, you've got your shirts open, you've got the CD blaring from your 6 suddenly the road gets a little twisty, so naturally , give the steering wheel a little tug, release the clutch and start to oversteer or as the young people call it, go into a frantic drift, there's a lot of physics going on now.

While this is happening, what we care about right now is rotational inertia and more specifically the force required to turn the vehicle. Now a longer wheelbase means a longer spread of a vehicle's mass and a longer spread means a lot more centripetal force is needed to turn the vehicle. and in a shorter car, the mass of the vehicle is condensed, so it has less rotational inertia, meaning it doesn't take as much force to rotate it. You want to see how you can test rotational inertia. Well, come on, let's jump to the old jump. the old jerry bus and let's take a trip to my sports lab, come on, come on, I want to talk about the polar moment of inertia and that's how difficult it is to make an object rotate around its axis, so to demonstrate this I have a basketball and I have a broomstick and they weigh about the same, let's say now they have the exact same mask, if I want to go and I want to rotate this basketball around its center of mass, it's pretty easy to do it right, right? a low polar moment of inertia Now, if I take this broomstick and try to spin it around its center axis, it's a lot harder, it takes a lot more effort to get it to spin as fast as that basketball and so many times it has a high polar moment of inertia, so like a car, it has a higher polar moment of inertia, it's harder to get it to rotate around the x-axis and, like, imagine this is a car with a long front end and this is a bit of being a smart little car, there you go, but if a longer wheelbase needs more strength to go sideways, why would anyone prefer that in motorsports, mainly because it gives the driver more controlabout the car?

Sure a shorter car will turn faster, but it will also be a lot more jittery, I mean, think about what would happen if you pulled on the steering wheel of a smart car, I mean, you'd probably flip it, but you'd probably also have a really hard time holding it. under control if I didn't turn it over. It would be extremely difficult to link your drifts if you were trying to cover your smart car, but what a longer wheelbase does is that the drift will be smoother and more predictable. The wheelbase of the e36 is a good compromise between short and long and slow, like me now.

As I said before, there are many other factors that will affect how a car behaves when turned on its side, but this is the main reason why longer cars are generally preferred for drifting now, apart from having a slightly longer wheelbase. longer, the e36's suspension also makes it favorable. For modern car modders, now like the e30, the e36 uses a Mcpherson independent front strut. This is the same type of front suspension found on most modern cars today. It has a telescopic strut that mounts vertically between the top of the wheel hub and the lower strut tower, this is your classic coil over shock absorber, also known as coil over this technology, it has been around since the 50's and is still used today nowadays because one is simple, two is robust and three, it is cheap to produce, but unlike its older brothers, the e36.

It came equipped with a z-axis multi-link rear suspension and what is a z-axis multi-link rear suspension, well in a nutshell the rear suspension uses multiple links and it looks like now bmw used multiple rear control arms which allow the geometry of the suspension stay the same even low in difficult corners, see before the multi-link rear ends. BMW used what is called a rear semi-trailing arm suspension where each wheel connects to a single arm that rotates in the body and the semi-trailing arms aren't horrible, but they don't allow for it. to adjust toe or camber and that's what a wheel should achieve.

I'll get a wheel here. I have a tire. I have a uh tire for my dirt bike here. Steering and toe is the amount of toe, and in a track car you want all the fine tuning of the suspension you can get, so this can be a pretty major drawback when you're trying to tune the suspension. Now, another problem with rear trailing arms is that as the wheels travel under suspension load, the camber changes that affect the car's handling throw you completely off balance like a ballerina with the wrong shoes and bums are actually like dancers, they are precise and delicate, packed with power, which is why the e36 is multi-link suspension eliminates most of the drawbacks of a trailing arm setup.

The wheels make better contact with the ground. You get more adjustability and there is less noise and vibration traveling to the body. BMW was looking for comfort here, but what is the main benefit today? Get plenty of aftermarket opportunities, you could put some nasty coils on the front rigid rear springs and shocks and maybe some poly bushings to replace your old worn out multi-link rubbers. I love the aftermarket people supporting the aftermarket is what makes the business work and Now, between the easily customizable suspension and the robust but reliable engine options, the e36 chassis is very well set up for people who want an affordable entry point into motorsports.

It may not have the cult status of the e30 or the sophisticated technology of newer cars. but it's a great value considering the engineering that went into these things. Thank you all very much for watching this episode of bb. I love doing this program. I thank you all for watching it. I hope you learned a few things. I hope you laughed a little. i want to know more about the e30 james breaks it down follow me on jeremiah burton contact me send me a dm i will try to get back to you i understand, i try to read them all so bye for now