Road Trip Accomplished

Late last week we made the road trip to get the 323. I tacked it onto a business meeting and that extended the time out by about 3 hours, but the car is home. I arrived at the dealership, spent about 10 minutes and hopped in and drove off in a car I have only seen on the internets... Jason was nice and took care of me.

Of course in true E21 style, the cursed 4-way switch broke just 2 miles from the pick up!!! I managed to wedge a piece of paper into the switch to get it to shut off and still let me use the signal lights and that's the way it went on the drive home. I have to say that for a 27 year old car it drove great! For a new car it drove great!

The exhaust system has been replaced with a "custom" one that's just too loud for me. I like high-flow, but this is just short of having nothing on the car. Every time I get in this car I'm upshifting to just keep it quiet. My wife is convinced the exhaust is broken. I can't blame her.

I think that the 320's days are numbered. This 323i has just about everything except the LSD, the higher limit speedo, the original center console, euro headlights (Hella H4/H1), and a few other minor items. The 320 has them. The 320 has a lot more rust under her. The entire back panel is rotted out. Yep, this may be the end of the 320 I fear. It's been a good car, but between the spousal pressure and no time to work on it, that may just spell the end for it.

It's hard to argue when you have a euro M20 under the hood the turns right over and has no big issues. This car would be a daily driver without much work.

The trip back certainly provided a good shakedown for evaluating the car. The blower is non-working (fan), there's no A/C (euro car), the engine needs a good valve adjustment, the trunk gasket is shot (moisture in the trunk!), no spare, driver side mirror is cracked, high beams don't work and the rear defogger doesn't work. That's about it.



The car drove just fine at highway speed. I can say that while passing someone it is annoying to not be able to know how fast you're going.
Yeah, that's it. Nothing like those mid 80's speedos that only go up to 85 mph. Hey! I'm still in the green zone! The 14" Toyos on BBS rims made the speed off by about 3-4 mph.

I could so just swap the LSD and calibrated speedo out of the 320i and fix that issue.

As always, more later!