Hey, Isn't that my car?????

The previous owner was nice enough to send me a link to the YouTube video of D-Fest 2009, a meet for BMW owners. About 17 seconds into the video, you get a short shot of the 320is on a back road (sans rear bumper!) doing some tail wagging.

HA! Nice to see her in amongst those newer bimmers! Thanks S.D.!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3kis54wYQs

;-)

Vin points to past body repairs

As I was doing further body work on the 320i this evening I decided to run the VIN # on the left front strut panel (driver side). The VIN there was "07970597" and on either end was a stamp version of the BMW logo. This is a mark for a euro car. Turns out that this part of the car came from a 316 dated 9/82 also noted to have right hand drive.

Use this link to decode your BMW. It works great for older Bimmers. It asks you to input the last eight digits of your vin. US and Euro models work on it.

www.bmw-z1.com/VIN/VINdecode-e.cg

This car must have had some rebuilding after an accident sometime after 9/82 and acquired a panel from the 316 donor car. That would explain the minor misfitment of my two new wing panels. The driver side panel has too much gap between the door and the wing. The other side fits just fine, except that the grille doesn't fit as tight as it should. This spells out a slight misalignment of the two front strut panels. Not much I can do except adjust the wing panels to fit or get the frame straightened. I never noticed a driving issue with the car so I may just need to make the 3-5mm adjustment to make it work.

If it weren't for the euro VIN, you couldn't tell the car had work done on it.

I test clear-coated the front valance and wing panels. They look great! The mettalic paint definitely deepens with the coating and brings out a wonderful luster. The panels look like a shop did them. I can't wait to buff them out.

If this is the way the Toredor Red looks, I'm keeping it instead of going back to the Chestnut Red. Ford paint or not, the color looks hot on the E21.

Going back to Chestnut

Well, after struggling with the Toreador Red Mettalic on this car and also finding out it's a FORD color (oh no!) I've located a site that will provide aerosol cans of the matching color so it's back to the Chestnut red for me.

I also managed to remove the rear bumper and I am not looking forward (or rearward!) to rebuilding that rear panel. The donor car appears to have a better panel. Time to break out the sawsall, too bad mine broke. In the next two weeks I'll post pics of the donor being cut up. I figure that's the best way to get at that M10 engine and transmission...

The New Addition....

80 MPH?? WHAT?
Oh, that's gotta go!

Here are some pics of the 323i I picked up this week. The car is the type that I am working towards with the 320i (euro mods). It has the euro bumpers, that damn rear license plate mount (!@*#&), and euro gauges (except the 80mph speedo). I'll likely swap out the speedo for a original one, so begins the search....

For the road trip, I'm debating taking one of my sons along and spending the day with him and making it into a good bonding event. I know some places along the way we could visit.

EBay is the Devil: Part II

The restoration of the 320i is going slower and deeper than I wanted to, but I'm willing to stick it out to get a nice result. One evening while browsing the EBay site back in May, I spotted a 1982 323i (yes, the imported type) for sale. I thought: "wow, would I like to have that one." saw the price and moved on. Turns out the buyer of the car bailed on the seller and a couple of months later the car was returned for sale with a lowered reserve.

Well, now I've done it. I saw it back on the listing and followed it right up to about the end of the auction. Now, please understand the circumstances: 1) I was sleep deprived from awaiting the delivery of our #4 child, 2) the 320i restoration was taking much longer, 3) this was a car that I first saw and wrote off as unattainable.

I watched the auction and even started bidding in an attempt to find the reserve price. On the last day, I wound up accompaning my 3 year old to the doctor to check on a swing set injury he developed from the day before. The appointment was right when the auction ended and I missed the close. I figured that if it was meant to be, I would have won it. Sai la vie (sp??). It turned out that on my EBay message board was a second chance offer. DAMN IT!

So here's the latest addition to the garage. G-d help my wife! ;-)

A 1982 323i imported in 1983 with all the euro options. Jason at G. Stone Motors in VT has been most gratious in entertaining my questions and I will let everyone know the road trip details once we get there.

Stay tuned!

Ghost in the Machine....

I managed to reinstall some of the front end and found some annoying electrical issues. To start, the car had a bad battery as a result of freezing over the winter. The battery would not hold a charge and I changed 2 not just 1 battery to find this out. When reinstalling the headlights (the euro conversion Hella ones) I must be plugging in the leads wrong on the low beams because I get all sorts of relays clicking when I start the car and turn on the lights. It's bad enough that the engine actually died when I clicked on the headlights, WTF! I don't want to fry the electronics, so I have to be VERY careful on how I fix it.

Thank goodness I have a multimeter to test all of the circuits. I tried to see if there was a grounded circuit that was draining the battery (no luck) and then the headlight thing reared it's ugly head. I haven't even tackled the euro signal lights! I hate electrical issues, but this is just forcing me to read diagrams and figure out what's going on.

Upgrades: Part One

I made a visit to the local welding supply company to upgrade the TopEnd battery cable. The one they provided (a 4 gauge cable by the same company) was big enough, but after purchasing an "Ubercable" ground, I felt it necessary to upgrade to a 1/0 cable (the next size smaller than the ground at 2/0).

You can certainly see the difference in cable size and understand that the better the cable, the better to conduction of electrical energy (lower resistance). This helps your alternator work a bit better and the claim by Ubercable is that is results in a reduction in loading (more HP back to the engine). The first photo shows the #4 against the 1/0 cable (4 times the size!).

The second photo shows (from left to right) the original BMW ground cable, the Ubercable, the #4 Topend cable and my 1/0 cable upgrade. That OEM cable looks postively sickly compared to the others!

Stripping the Donor Car

My two oldest sons and I started to really take the donor car apart today. What I found was a bunch of rigged electrical and mechanical parts on this poor E21. First off, the stripping of the engine bay resulted in a fuse block that has about 5 jumpers on it. The first runs the auxiliary fan. This is because they removed the belt driven one. There is also a GM!!! radiator in this car, but that's not all! The hood was dented from the INSIDE. Why? Because the filler cap off this GM radiator was too high. They fixed that by literally warping the radiator (making it into a parallelogram to fit). No wonder this car was always overheating.

The coil was also rigged and who knows what else. This car was an electrical time-bomb just waiting to go off.

In the next couple of weeks I'm going to be listing this stuff on EBay for cheap, just to get rid of it and remove this car, piece by piece, from my backyard. Mechanical parts, body parts, anything that can be removed.

I bet I can salvage the rack-and-pinion unit from this car, but is it worth it? I also noticed after stripping some parts that the clutch pedal is now WAY up. Wonder what did that...

Putting parts back on

The next couple of pics show the new W&N wing panels on the E21. I will need to tweak the right panel to fit for the gap is a bit too wide. It looks as if the car may have taken a hit early in it's life, but I can't see any seam work. The left panel fits PERFECTLY.

The next part I am attempting to aquire is a 1977 front valance to replace the existing one. I hope I can install fog lights behind the grilles in the '77 valence and avoid installing them on the new euro bumpers. With the current valence (air dam) you have to bolt the fog lights onto the underside of the US bumper.

Once the front end is complete, the results should be a combination of the euro signals, bumper and '77 valance with fog lights hidden behind the two lower grilles.

Some new parts (in more ways than one...)

Our first daughter showed up on the scene on Tuesday, 9 pounds 5 ounces. Hailey is back home with us and everyone's adjusting. No posting of baby pics, I have to draw the line somewhere.....

Back on the E21 subject, I received my Topend kit for the battery and air intake a day early (go UPS!) and have started removing the portions of the battery tray to find a complete tear in the steering rack boot. Hopefully that's just a new boot kit to fix. Good thing I'm not driving this car all over the place. The tray is all rusted and I see where I need to do some further grinding to remove all those little rust spots.

The Topend air kit is very simple and well built. It consists of a K&N filter and a welded 3" diameter steel tube that provides for a nearly direct path for air. No up, over, through, down and over as with the old airbox. The side benefit is that you can easily get to the oil filter (as mentioned in their site).