Recently I was visiting with a friend of mine at Turbo Charging Dynamics who manufactures BMW turbos and other performance accessories, mostly for BMWs from the 80’s and 90’s. He has a great job basically playing with cars all day and make insane horsepower with turbo systems they designs. He had an interesting project in the shop, a customer with an older M3 that was getting it striped and putting in a GM LS motor (corvette engine). TCD wasn’t actually putting the motor in, just doing some of the other BMW specific performance work but it seemed like an odd paring to have a GM motor replace a BMW motor. I wonder if this is probably fround upon by other hardcore BMW enthusiasts (TCD forum). However if you are going to put a new engine in an older vehicle of any kind these aluminum small block LS series motors seem to be a very viable option. They are relatively small, light weight, easy to install and rather cheap. They even make plastic engine templates the exact size of the motor so you can fit everything in place without constantly using an engine crane and knocking around any other components. (more on this project soon)
This was the best Crate Motor site I found with LS2 engines 400hp under $6,000 and a LS7 engines 505hp just over $13,000. These engines are used in everything including some planes because they are so light weight and compact. Hopefully in the not to distant future we can put together a project car using one of these engines which will give us plenty of opportunity to demonstrate some of our Automotive Power Tools and I can play mechanic on company time. Let me know if you have any links to interesting project car sites.
