E46 Sedan M3 style attempt build

No problem. Sorry, cannot help you much with the answer because I am noob in this stuff but like to have unique appearance of the car. My friend is doing all bodywork. Fiberglass is pain in the ass material once it breaks it's almost impossible to get it repaired right and to not break later again + it's hard to find people who repair fiberglass for cars at least in my country Serbia if you have fiberglass and carbon fiber as option for car parts go with carbon fiber without a doubt or oem.

If I could start all over again, I would get real E46 M3 and just get all parts from it and it would be way easier to implement compared to custom aftermarket parts. But, I got too far with this one now and don't have nerves to be honest to go through process all over again.

Zimo32 said:

You cant make it look like that and not put a S54 in there.
I painted mine topaz blue but wish i went lighter in color afterwards. I vote laguna or like a long beach blue.

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What's the realistic price for S54 engine? I see them on Ebay for $6000-15,000 in my opinion $15,000 for just engine is ridiculous I could import from UK then whole car for that money and even less.

m3jala said:

Ambitious project. Since you're going this far, consider putting an s62 or s65 in there. If you don't care about retaining the m, put an ls2 in there. From my research, the last is ironically the easiest with kit support and quite a few that have done it. The s62 and s65 are more intensive but there are some on these boards that have done it. In my mind, you're not ripping apart a m motorsport classic - part of the benefit of starting from a non-m. Make it even better.

One question: any reason you didn't just go with m3 fenders (which are bolt ons) up front and the m3 side panels (require welding and paint) in the back? I have been researching this and if I pull the trigger, this is my current path rather than a full on custom molded fiberglass solution like what you're doing.

For what it's worth, I have m54b30 with a 330 and planning to AA stage 2 supercharge. Was looking into the s62 swap but decided to retain the inline 6 for this car. Your car will sound great with schmiedman headers and that dual exhaust setup.

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I didn't do my research right and I was in a hurry when I started 2 years ago thought for some reason people were getting aftermarket parts instead of the whole E46 M3 and then converting everything from it to Sedan.

In reality that's the only proper way to do it who wants to do a conversion of sedan or touring, getting each part separately can add up very quickly so it's more cost-effective to just buy the cheapest E46 M3 that you can find and then transfer everything from it to a sedan.

M3 fenders are longer and sedan have shorter fenders + E46 M3 headlights and blinkers are bigger and sedan have them smaller so they still need to be modified in order to fit. There is some Hungarian guy on Instagram that is producing now front M3 fenders for sedan and touring in carbon fiber but you must have all front end from M3 and not replica style that look just visually like M3 but it's created to fit sedan version.

I wanted to have GTR style fenders and to make things worse I bought these from eBay but they didn't fit because I didn't have the front end from M3 originally but aftermarket parts that only fit sedan and visually look like M3 parts. So, I had to modify stock original fender from sedan to look like this one in picture below.









Regarding rear archs my friend used I think Sika glue and on CSL spoiler as well so it's really strong.


Anyone knows for example how this guy managed to fit M3 headlights and the fender looks like sedan to me but just modified a little bit, like it's not wide like M3 fender and mine fender as well.