Even though I havent even put 7,000 miles on my first motor install I purchased a cheap S14 2.3- liter motor from the first M3. In combination with my other parts lying around, I am going to build a 2-liter M3 motor with the bottom end (M10) from the 2002. Actually, the blocks are identical except for displacement but machining will probably be required to get all the oil and coolant passages to line up. The M10 block has been in production for over 20 years. My friend and mechanic JP Cadoux will be teaching me how to hand build my first motor and I will be teaching him to control fuel and spark delivery with MegaSquirt open-source software.

I dont want to reveal too many details yet because I am not sure what is possible but I have some very exciting ideas. This motor will be completely custom from the machine work to get everything to mate up to the pistons and rods. For what I am trying to build I dont think I’m going to find anything off the shelf. I am going to attempt to use the same camshafts and valve train as well as the M10 2.0 crank of course. Once the machinist has his hands on it I will know more.

I have never blogged about Burning Man before so I figured I may as well start now as I did found a theme camp and have helped to run it for the past two years. Our name is the Duck Pond, named for the night when myself and the other founders met and stuck together for a long night keeping “all of our ducks in a row”. Anyway, this year, one of my many projects was signage. Last year people had a hard time finding us so this year I made sure that wouldn’t happen. Turns out you could see this thing from a mile away! Problem solved. Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen from the seamstresses to the tower builders.

Here is a photo of it at night. It really was tremendously bright, especially considering it was powered by only three 75-watt compact fluorescent bulbs.