I'm Yaroslav,
and I've Always
Loved the 3 Series

A Crashed 318 Coupe & a Hard Lesson

When I finally started earning enough, I bought my first E30 — a 318 coupe with an M50B25 swap and a manual. It was crashed and damaged, and honestly, with no real experience wrenching at the time, it wasn't a sensible first project.

The rear of the car was beyond saving, so I tracked down a complete rear section from a donor and a friend welded the car together from two halves. Once that was done, I discovered the front was in just as rough a shape. After adding it all up, selling it was the only choice that made financial sense. A painful first lesson — but one that taught me more than any easy car would have.

An E30 320 Built to Slide

A couple of months later I bought an E30 320 sedan from a friend — already swapped to an M50B25, with bucket seats, a limited-slip diff and a nice set of wheels. It had a damaged oil pan from being badly maintained, so I fixed the pan, worked through all the maintenance it had been missing, and got it running properly again.

I had it for about five or six months. Then I came off my motorcycle, and I sold the E30 to put the bike right. That's the way it goes sometimes.

The 318 I Built to Drive

A couple of years later I came back for another E30 — a 318 with the M50B25 — and this time I built it the way I'd always wanted. Koni shocks and Eibach springs, an E36 steering rack, a custom exhaust, a welded diff, and a long list of smaller touches.

It was the one that just clicked. I had an enormous amount of fun behind the wheel of that car — exactly what an E30 is supposed to be.

A Bone-Stock F30 320i, Slowly Made Mine

After the E30s I switched to a modern daily: a completely stock F30 320i — the lowest spec, with the cheap cloth interior. So I made it mine. I retrofitted the full leather interior with heated, electric seats, fitted an M steering wheel, and put in an NBT Evo head unit with CarPlay.

It turned out to be a genuinely reliable daily driver. Beyond routine oil changes, the only real work it asked for was a timing chain and oil-pump chain — and then it just got on with the job.

Why This Site Exists

Then everything changed. When war came to my country, I had to sell what I had and leave home. The cars went with everything else.

So I'm saving up for the next project — and building this site in the meantime.

3 Series Guy is my hobby and my way of staying close to the cars I love while I rebuild. Everything here comes from time actually spent under these cars — the swaps, the maintenance, the buying mistakes and the fixes. If it helps one more person keep their 3 Series on the road, it's done its job.