I've had a saved search on eBay Europe for 2.35 and 2.47 BMW front diffs for liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiterally a few years now. They'd come up every now and then for 600-700 Euro, but mostly the E90 chassis version, which I don't think I can use. I already acquired an E46 2.47 front a while back, but had also snagged a 2.35 rear (188mm unit). The rear 2.35s & 2.47s are WAY more common. I paid more to ship mine than I did for the unit. An E46 2.35 front finally popped up recently in Vilnius, Lithuania for 200£... not sure why he priced it in £ instead of Euro, but whatevs. Shipping from the Baltics is always surprisingly cheap as well, so I jumped on it. It arrived yesterday.
So now I have the 2.35 front and rear gearsets. Yeah, that's really tall, but the 5 liter S62 makes more low RPM torque than the 6 liter LS2 and the E30 is a REALLY light car compared to an E39 M5--which I've heard also runs GREAT with 2.65 gears (210mm unit), so I think the taller gearing will work great with my application. Also, E30's use short tires.
I also have a Euro market E53 3.07 front diff. It appears actually to use the same case as the numerically higher ratios, so I that was an expensive piece of knowledge to gain.
My plan is to put the E46 2.35 gears into the E53 3.07 case with a Quaife for a Z3 1.9 in order to have the most expensive front diff ever installed into an AWD BMW.
Search string, since I actually had to read eBay's documentation to set it up:
Code: Select all
bmw (2.35,2.47) (vorder,vorderachsgetriebe,vorderachsegetriebe,front differential), Europa
And here is an article on boolean searching on eBay, since their documentation on it sucks donkey balls:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Buying/Ho ... p/29941476