Originally Posted by Henn28

The engine arrived today and I got it off the truck, into the garage and unpacked enough to see what I had bought and would be dealing with. I can say with certainty that a motor listed as a "short block" in RealOEM is actually what we would consider a long block here in the us.

Its a brand new, super shiny M62TUB46, which made it over from Germany in one piece as best as I can tell, with a forest of cardboard around it. $120 in shipping expense gets you a flight across the Atlantic on United and a truck from Maryland to New Orleans, in my case. The whole process from order to opening the box was about 2 months.

It includes:
- Heads and valve covers
- Rear main and cover
- crank hub installed (this surprised me because the picture didn't have the hub installed)
- Water pump installed but no pully on it
- Valley pan installed, but no coolant pipes or rear x-pipe/accumulator.
- I think I can feel an E53 oil pan set-up at the bottom of the box.

It comes with a tiny bag of goodies, including the hardware to install the dipstick (which presumably is somewhere in the box) and some locating dowels which I think are to align the transmission on the block.

Beyond that there is one paragraph of instructions in 20 different languages, with helpful hints like "read the instructions", "fill with approved oil", and other tidbits.

Finally, tucked inside is what I think is a build ticket and if Google translate is to be believed, lists the production day (27May2020), the employees and BMW office involved in building it. Based on this, I suspect they build out of production motors, one at a time, to replace inventory, until they run out of parts.

I'm hopeful that all the big ticket fasteners are witness marked, which will allow me to sleep better knowing everything is torqued. I can't imagine that they, for example, install a crank hub or valve cover, but don't torque it fully. Witness marks would make me sleep better.