[maddjack]

Hey guys, in November last year i went and bought a 2006 325xi that was broken and it turned out to be way more broken than i thought. It was advertised as just an oil pan tuned out to be an oil pan a diff an engine and now a trans. I know its stupid to continue this project I'm going to anyway. When I learned yesterday that my auto trans was totally gone (a layer of metal shavings in the pan 2 mill thick along with some bigger pieces) I decided that I wanna get rid of the awd and go rwd with a manual transmission . My questions are as following will i be able to use the awd sub frame, will i be able to use the rwd drive shaft, I wanna use a 335i transmission because it is stronger and will open up things for swaps down the road, is there any issues with that? What other potential problems do you guys forsee?.

P.S. Ive never had any use for bmw forums please prove me wrong and provide useful information instead of nothing or discouraging comments from guys who have never touched a wrench.

[fastboatster]

I’ve seen mt conversion done to some rwd 328i or 325i, sorry I can’t quite find it here. You might need an oil pan from the mt n52 car. As for the transmissions, I think 325/328/330i should suffice. I don’t think what you trying to do is a bad idea. Kind of makes sense to replace shot awd oil pan with rwd mt and replace dead at with good mt trans. Hopefully somebody else will chime in, too

[maddjack]

thank you for replying, I have already replaced the oil pan with another awd oil pan. I might switch to a rwd pan anyway because the awd pans are much more valuable and I should be able to sell it and buy a rwd pan and make a little money. I agree that a trans that was meant to go on an n52 would work, but I would rather have a stronger one in case i do a n54 (maybe ls ) swap in the future.

[e90yyc]

Originally Posted by maddjack

P.S. Ive never had any use for bmw forums please prove me wrong and provide useful information instead of nothing or discouraging comments from guys who have never touched a wrench.

+1 on not needing to swap in a 335 transmission. If you’re serious about doing an N54/55 swap, you may end up with a thread full of people telling you that’s a terrible idea, and that generally an N52 to N54/55 swap is called selling your car and buying a 335. I know other people have done the manual swap so I don’t have much else to add there, but if you want to switch to RWD you’re much better off just removing your front driveshaft, using xDelete, or otherwise making modifications to take the front wheels out of the system.

I say this because you won’t be able to remove your CV axles upfront unless you want to swap in RWD steering knuckles and I’m sure other bits to go along with it. I may be wrong, but I don’t think I am. If money is no object whatsoever then I’m sure you can do a full-on RWD conversion and save some weight, but given your comment about selling the AWD oil pan for a profit, I’m guessing you aren’t looking to spend money if you don’t have to.

As for your comment though, I’m not sure what ricebucket forums you’ve been on before, but the absolute majority of people here actually have value to add. Sooo, asking for help and then saying you generally have no use for the people who you’re asking for help from and telling them to prove themselves worthy to help you... probably not the most effective strategy. That said, welcome. You’ll find lots of help here!

[maddjack]

Thanks, I was planning on taking out the transfer case and front diff probably figuring something out with the front axles. Does anyone know of any issues with using the 335i transmission, It seems to be priced very well and id rather use the superior trans if there is no issue.

[MadJoe]

You do not need to swap in RWD steering knuckles, you just have to disassemble the CVs on both sides and just reinstall the ends with the reluctor rings on them. It's messy because of all the grease, but if you're going full monty on the conversion without any chance you'll go back, do that.

Yes, you can use the AWD sub frame. Yes you can use the RWD driveshaft. You may want to replace the rear diff because the FDR is different in auto and manual cars due to the diff. You'll get spunkier acceleration with the diff in the car, but you'll be shifting a lot more often and not get as good economy. If you don't care about that, then it's fine to leave the auto diff in too. Just something to consider.

If you decide to change out the front hubs to eliminate the need to use parts of your CVs, you will need to change the sub frame and the steering rack iirc. Someone else may know differently, but I believe that to be true.

The cut and run approach is my suggestion, though. You seem to be falling into the sunk cost fallacy, here. You've already sunk a bunch of money into this car and that seems to be making you feel like you need to see this through in order to recoup your investment. That is never going to happen. For the money you will pay for all these parts, never mind the effort to get it done, you will still end up with an inferior car to a factory RWD car that you could just buy with that money instead. The AWD ruins more than weight distribution, and drive train loss, it changes a bunch of things up front that make the suspension suck compared to the RWD car, and you can't swap in M3 parts like you can on RWD cars. Not to mention it changes the steering ratio making it slower. I seriously hate XDrive.

[maddjack]

Ok, thanks madjoe for the info. I agree that ill never get my money out of it, but i want to finish it anyway and drive around a working car. I'm planning on gutting out the cv axles and using the ends on the knuckles, but I'm doing away with the front diff so there will be no place for the other side will go.

[E92William]

The proper way to do this is to get a rwd subframe with struts control arms and all that good stuff and bolt it up to your car with a rwd oil pan ofc this is probably way too expensive to do, there's a guy here that has done it. I believe his name is 303bmw

So only do the cv joint gutting trick with it being bolted to the hub and that's it, you can get rid of most of the cv joint and also the awd front diff and you'll have shed a lot of weight off. For the transmission I believe the mounts between the rwd and awd are different and if you do go for a rwd transmission you will need a different driveshaft probably only the part past the split center point that goes between the transfer case and center support bearing.

I can't say I haven't considered this conversion a thousand times as I fight to do services that would be a piece of cake on my car if it was rwd but are super time consuming because of xdrive

[MadJoe]

Originally Posted by maddjack

I'm planning on gutting out the cv axles and using the ends on the knuckles, but I'm doing away with the front diff so there will be no place for the other side will go.

This is why you need to take them apart. The only thing holding the ends to the rest of the axle is the boot and compression from being installed. Take them out and remove the boot, clean up all the grease and you should have just the ends that go back into the hub. This video shows what I'm talking about:

[maddjack]

I shouldn't have to worry about 4wd stuff should I, I am probably gonna get a rwd ecu will that work with my harness?

[rothwem]

One of the issues you'll run into is the transmission mount, the floor pan on the AWD cars is bumped out to make room for the transfer case. There's a fairly clever solution that Redshift did to make the adaptation:

https://www.e90post.com/forums/showp...&postcount=130



One of the other things is that the DSC module is different, and so are the lines that go to it. On the xDrive cars, the DSC module connects with the transfer case module to engage the clutches in the TC. If you go without the TC/Module, you'll have a dash light on. I'm not sure if you can code it out, maybe xDelete can help with that though.

Anyways, good luck with the swap. I'm assuming the car was way cheap, and its surely not worth a whole lot right now with a bad transmission, so don't listen to the haters telling you to get a whole new car. With that said, there were manual X-Drive cars made, so if you want to just do a manual swap, there are oem parts in the junkyard that will interface with a lot less work.

[maddjack]

Does anyone know what I need as far as electronics go do I need a TCM does the ECU go manual or Auto and what kind of a harness do I need?

[maddjack]

Does anybody have a clutch flywheel and pressure plate that they want to sell?