2 Reasons Why the E36 is an ALMOST PERFECT Project Car

when you think about the bmw 3 series your mind probably goes straight to the e30 the e46 or maybe even the e90 those are some of the most legendary cars that bmw has ever made but there's one bmw that's been overlooked for decades and that's the e36 [Music] so today i'm going to talk about some of the german engineering that makes the e36 such a great platform for enthusiasts like yourself and specifically we're going to look at the engine and the chassis so buckle up bimmer boys and gals because we're going b to b on this bmv while you're probably on the toilet taking a bm [Music] big thanks to omaze for partnering with us so we could bring you another episode of bumper to bumper if you don't know already omaze is this really cool company that offers you the chance to win once in a lifetime experiences all while supporting amazing causes like the ronald reagan medical center at ucla the same center that helped save james's life when he had a heart attack we love him over there have you seen james lately he's freaking svelte man he's a healthy boy thanks to ucla but when you donate at omaze you're not just supporting great causes you're also entered for a chance to win amazing experiences ranging from dream vacations all across the world to hanging out with your favorite celebrities you can also donate for the chance to win super sweet dream cars like the 2020 corvette stingray z51 the porsche 911 cabriolet the ferrari gtc4 lusso the list goes on and on it's ton of cars you can check out all those cars at omaze.com cars and while you're there enter for a chance to win one thank you omaze for sponsoring this episode and thank you for supporting the companies that support donut we love you now inline sixes are exactly what they sound like they are six cylinders arranged in a lot and compared to smaller four bangers for example six cylinders are pretty long and generally they're too long to be mounted transversely that's this way so they need to be placed longitudinally that's the length of the car which requires a much longer hood line now that might be a great look for sports cars but most manufacturers tend to use the same engines across various 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 very small front hood car now let's get 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 gasoline powered straight 6 engine options it's a lot of engines if looking at all 10 of those engines makes your brain just turn into mush a little bit not alone my friend but it's not that confusing when you break down those engine codes you mean you we're going to be the allen turing of deciphering engine codes right 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 does it makes that it's a performance engine so they used s engines in m cars like the m3 but the m engines and non-m cars like the 330 ci off to totally non-confusing start thank you bmw engineers i told you i keep telling you guys engineers don't know how to name stuff now the second digit tells you which cylinder configuration it uses and in this case five indicates it's an inline six cylinder and you might think hey you should probably use number six to designate this but apparently bmw decided six should represent v8 cars i'm telling you right now an engineer did this and he 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 that's the diesel one i was talking about and m52 is the second variation now most e36s are either gonna have an m50 or an m52 now moving on to the fourth digit in this case b tells us that it's a gasoline engine why didn't bmw use the letter g to designate their gas engine well because the german word for gas is benzene how did i pronounce that my german friends i hope i did good now the next two digits are pretty easy they tell you the displacement so 30 means it is a 3.0 liter engine and lastly tu is bmw's special designation to let you know there was a technical update or in german technicians update my deutsche is tricera nailed that and finally the u.s means it was only sold in the united states pretty simple now all this confusing jargon aside these engines all share the same basic architecture a dual overhead camshaft with four valves per cylinder that's 24 valves total which is double what you got in the e30s single cam six cylinder engine so what's the benefit of having twin cams well you're more efficient and you get more power now 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 that improves the flow of exhaust gases through the engine and this extra valve distance also means the spark plug can be placed in a more ideal position for sparking up all that free flowing air fuel mixture to get sucking in your intake valve now a cool benefit to dual overhead cans is less valve noise have you ever heard a bmw e30 before here's actually a clip of one of our editors max's e30 listen to this listen this sucker tick away real stinky but the 24 valve engines on the other hand quiet as a little mouse so compared to the e30 the e36 engines are more efficient they're more powerful and they are lighter but that's not the only thing they've got cooking it's time we talk about the real meat and potatoes of the e36's sexy sixes that's right i'm talking about bmw's legendary legendary thanos and thanos stands for variable knocking vellum sterom i hope i hope that and that word is german for variable cam timing and it's the same principle as honda's vtec toyota's vvt-i or nissan's vtc that we talked about in the 300zx episode now if you want to learn more about variable timing i'll slip the link in the description below but in a nutshell the engine's timing which is when the valves open and close it can change dynamically depending on driving conditions you get the benefit of having a very sensible economical engine at lower rpms but at higher rpms the timing is advanced to allow more air and fuel into the combustion chamber now say it with me now kids you got more air you got more fuel and james what do we have are you serious dude come on now vanoss isn't exactly like variable cam timing used in other cars in a typical bmw fashion it's slightly more complicated because it wouldn't be a bmw if it wasn't just a little bit 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 higher efficiency at lower rpms and the high profile gives you a little squirt of power in the high rpm range thanos on the other hand does what's called cam phasing where the camshaft itself is rotated to adjust the lobe angle now depending on the engine's load the ecu will send a signal to the solenoid that sends pressurized oil to a helical gear and that pushes into the camshaft and that's what causes the camshaft to rotate and that rotation either 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 engages to advance the timing you get a slight overlap between the intake and exhaust valves now this allows for exhaust gas recirculation or egr now because of that slight overlap not all of the exhaust gases are allowed to escape through the valves so some of it gets sucked back into the cylinder and the recycled exhaust gas dilutes the oxygen in the air coming into the cylinder which helps absorb some of that heat from combustion now less heat means less pollutants into the atmosphere so a big part of egr has to do with emissions and i know saint jerry what the heck that sounds kind of counterintuitive why would you want less oxygen in your combustion chamber but when you're just cruising around town egr helps keep your engine running more efficiently and efficiency is something those german engineers happen to absolutely love well hold up okay you're in a bmw you're late for your latte appointment and you need to get across town fast without using any blinkers in typical bmw fashion so you put the pedal to the floor and your e36 brain decides it's vano's time the helical gear retracts back into its little hole and your intake cam pivots back in place no more stinky exhaust gas in the chamber now we need more air so we can get more boom boom so we can get more power so we can get to our latte appointment because you know if you show up late dylan's going to order your latte with oat milk and then you're gonna 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 heck can almonds have milk it should be called almond juice i stand by that okay so today in 2020 you can find a running and driving e36 that uses this fancy smanshi technology for like four thousand dollars and that's one of the reasons why this car is so common with the drifters and other enthusiasts who like to get their knuckles a little greasy i'm talking to you d-list fans you greasy freaking knuckle freaks so now that we've got the basics of how these engines work out of the way it's time to talk about the chassis but why am i italian that makes sense let's test that there you go [Music] 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 touring car platform of all time so how do you take something that's already the best and make it better well just like when taco bell released the nacho cheese doritos loco taco supreme the e36 was beefier it's stronger and it's packed full of delicious crunchy flavor and that all starts at the chassis and yes our sponsor for this episode is not taco bell but if you're to work at taco bell and you want to sponsor us we would love that now for one the wheelbase is five inches longer than the e30 that's about this long okay and what that five inches meant for bmw owners in the 90s was more legroom and more trunk space but what does that five inches mean for you the dollar store drift rat in the year 2020 well it means this boy is easier to get a little sideways so let's do a little imagination okay say you're in your catfish camaro you got t-tops open you got your cd blasting from your 6 cd changer all of a sudden the road gets a little twisty so naturally give the steering wheel a nice little yank you dump the clutch and you start to oversteer or as youngsters call it entering a hectic skid now there is a lot of physics going on while this happens but what we care about right now is rotational inertia and more specifically the force required to rotate the vehicle now a longer wheelbase means a longer distribution of a vehicle's mass and longer distribution means it takes a lot more centripetal force to rotate the vehicle and in a shorter car the vehicle's mass is condensed so it has less rotational inertia meaning not as much force is needed to rotate it you want to see how you can put rotational inertia to the test well come on let's hop in the old little hop in the old jerry bus and let's take a trip over to my sports lab come on let's go so i want to talk about polar moment of inertia and that's how difficult it is to get an object to rotate around its axis so to demonstrate this i have a basketball and i have a broom pole and they weigh roughly the same let's just say they have the exact same mask now if i want to go and i want to rotate this basketball around its center of mass it's pretty easy to do that right right it has a low polar moment of inertia now if i take this broom pole and i try to get to rotate around its center of axis it's a lot harder it takes a lot more effort to get it to spin just as fast as that basketball and as many times it has a high polar moment of inertia so just like a car this has a higher polar moment of inertia it's harder to get it to rotate around x-axis and like uh like imagine this being a long front-end car and this being a little of being a little smart car there you go but if a longer wheelbase needs more force to go sideways why would anyone prefer that in motorsports well mainly because it gives the driver more control over the car sure a shorter car will rotate faster but also be a lot more squirrely i mean think about what would happen if you yank the wheel in a smart car i mean you'd probably flip it but you'd also probably have a real hard time keeping it under control if it wasn't flipping it would be extremely difficult to link your drifts together if you were trying to drape your smart car but what a longer wheelbase does is the drift will be more smooth and predictable the e36's wheelbase is a good compromise between short and squirrely and long and slow now like i said before there are a ton of other factors that are going to affect how a car behaves when it's getting sideways but this is the main reason longer cars are generally preferred in drifting now aside from having a slightly longer wheelbase the e36's suspension also makes it favorable to modern day car modders now just like the e30 the e36 uses an independent mcpherson strut front end this is the same type of front suspension found in most modern cars today you have a telescopic strut that is mounted vertically between the top of the wheel hub and the lower strut tower this is your classic coil over shock absorber aka a coil over this technology has been around since the 50s and is still used today because one is simple two it's beefy and three it is cheap to produce but unlike its elder brethren the e36 came equipped with a z axle multi-link rear suspension and what is a z-axle multi-link rear suspension jerry well put simply the rear suspension uses multiple links and it looks like a z now bmw used multiple rear control arms that allow suspension geometry to stay the same even under heavy cornering see before multi-link rear ends bmw used what's called a rear semi-trailing arm suspension where each wheel connects to a single a-arm that pivots at the body and semi-trailing arms are not horrible but they don't allow you to adjust toe or camber and that's should i get a wheel i'll get a wheel here i got a tire i got a tire from uh for my dirt bike here so camber is this that's this angle that's how much there the tire is rotated this way and toe is this how much it toes and on a track car you want all the suspension fine tuning that you can get so this can be a pretty major drawback when you're trying to tune your suspension now another problem with rear trailing arms is that as the wheels travel under suspension load camber changes which affects the car's handling totally throws off your balance like a ballerina with the wrong shoes and drifters are actually just like ballerinas they're precise and delicate they're full of power so the e36's multi-link suspension eliminates most of the drawbacks from a trailing arm setup your wheels make better contact with the ground you get more adjustability and there's less noise and vibration traveling to the body again bmw was going for comfort here but what's the main benefit nowadays well you get lots of aftermarket opportunities you could throw some nasty coil overs on the front stiff rear springs and shocks and maybe some poly bushings to replace your old worn out multi-link rubbers i love aftermarket people they support aftermarket is what makes the business go round and round now between the easily customizable suspension and the beefy yet reliable engine options the e36 chassis is set up really well for people who want a cheap entry point into motorsports it might not have the cult status of the e30 or the fancy technology of the newer cars but it's a great value when you consider the engineering that went into these things thank you guys so much for watching this episode of bb i love making this show i thank you guys for watching i hope you learned some stuff hope you laughed a little bit you want to know more about the e30 james breaks it down follow me at jeremiah burton hit me up send me a dm i'll try to get back to you i get i try to get through all of them so bye for now

Channel: Donut Media

Views: 1,522,160

Rating: 4.9281707 out of 5

Keywords: BMW E36, E36, BMW E30, E30, BMW E46, E46, BMW E90, E90, E30 M3, 316i, 318i, 320i, 323i, 325i, 328i, E30 316i, E30 320i, E30 323i, E30 325i, s50, s52, m50, m52, s50swap, s52swap, VANOS, BMW VANOS, Z-link, BMW Z-link, Retro Engineering, Car Technology, Auto Engineering, Donut Media, donut, Cars, Automotive Engineering, Automotive technology, B2B, Bumper 2 Bumper, Bumper to Bumper, doughnut media, Automotive, Car Tech, Best Cars, automotive history, drifting, project car, e36 suspension, vtec

Id: 0eNfAW1n_-c

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020