An old saw horse and some wood fit perfectly under the deck of the 4.4 and allowed me to release the two attachment point on the rear engine stand, that were bolted into the oil pan portion of the bell housing flange.
After the 732 internal and external oil pan bolts came out, the pan lifted off easily. The lower pan cover showed a lot of nasty mud, which I guess is just the end result of 24 years of accumulated crap, including macerated guide rail plastic. No chunks however and the pump looks pristine. The rear bearing seal carrier/plate also has a lot of this crap baked onto it, but the block looks really, really good to my eye.
The pump internals looked very clean, or at least as much of them as I could see when I pulled the pickup off and unbolted the pump itself:
The block itself and the crank look very clean, and I rotated the motor to look, as best I could at the bottom of each cylinder, especially on the piston skirt sides where it seems bore score tends to happen. Tough to see every inch of the bores with the rods and crank in the way, but what I did see looked good thankfully.
Next job was to pull the bearing caps, one at a time for a quick look. The bearings looked worn but the crank journals look like they are in excellent shape with no scoring or other signs of visible damage or wear. The only one I couldn't pop off was number 5 (rear most bearing cap) because there just isn't any wiggle room with the rear main seal carrier still on. I should have taken this off before putting it on the stand, but whaddaya going do to. The motor had 153,079 miles on it when I pulled it and it had never overheated or otherwise been abused (Was my wife's dailly from 2002 to 2015). However, it did have low compression in 2 cylinders which I was hoping wasn't due to bore problems. I'm pretty happily confident now that I've seen 90% of the bores that the compression issue was in the heads or maybe rings.
I was out of time so put the pans back with a couple bolts to protect the motor and brought the oil pump assembly home to my (small) shop. My plan currently is to go with the Cybul E36 - M62 swap kit, which entails modifying the oil pump in some way so that it will fit into their modified oil pan arrangement. Not sure if I need to send it to them, or if I can do it myself, but that is somewhere down the road in terms of the to-do list. I've been trading some emails with them and they are working on modifying their engine mount to accommodate an AC compressor with the M62 motor.
Figuring out replacement bearing shell sizes, colors, etc. is a bit of a challenge for my one brain cell. I'm sure the idea of colors, grid stages, etc. makes sense to some German engineer, but not to your (below) average econ major. TIS says to ignore the different colors now and just go with yellow bearing shells on all the main bearings, so my current understanding is that the crank will come out of the factory with one of three "grinds": Standard, stage 1, stage 2 or "Undersize 3". A marking on the crank itself will indicate which of the above sizes applies, and allow for a cray super computer to work out which sizes of yellow shells should be used on each journal to bring the play into a tolerance of 0.020 to 0.050mm. My working theory right now is to plastigage each journal with the original bearings, and note the result. This "gap", plus the nominal journal size as denoted by the grind stage mark on the crank, should sum up to a number that is within the size and tolerance in TIS for the OE crank stage grind. If it is off (too much of a gap), then a more undersized yellow bearing size will be needed to bring the play into tolerance. I'd put a micrometer on the journals as well, but I don't think mine will measure out to a thousandth of a mm and TIS specifically notes that plastigage is the only "special tool" needed to replace main and rod bearings.
Somewhat ironically, the X5 crossed 170k on the drive home from working on its origial motor. That means the 4.6 I put into it now has 16,921 miles on it.
Its running strong, but always has a to-do list. Aside from some long term upgrade/nice to have stuff, currently on that list are a new master cylinder and booster and ECS Tuning monoball lower control arms to replace my worn rubber bushing arms (so far the monoball upper arms I put on have worked out great), and most of all I need to pre-emptively rebuild the Xfer case with a new chain. Its a non-x drive tcase so I'd rather do it pre-emptively than get stranded. Unfortunately its the lessor used tcas, which may limit my options for finding a donor case to rebuild at my leisure.