After getting the car in the garage on Weds I decided to wait until the weekend to work on the car. My plan for the bank holiday weekend was simple: Remove boot/contents of boot, remove bonnet, remove interior, maybe do a little bit of work on the engine.
With that in mind I decided to take things slow...
Day One - 05/05/2012
I removed the contents of the boot (carpets and all) to find that my suspicions of the boot's gas strut being about 10mm too long when closed did indeed result in rust in the boot! Luckily though the rust was not the car, it was in fact a handful of old screws and bolts that someone decided to leave in the jack/tool well on the passenger side. Panic over I removed the strut and closed the boot which confirmed that it was the strut causing the boot to remain slightly higher on the passenger side than on the driver's side. The boot lid then got removed, spoiler taken off and apart, all bits cleaned, dried and stored safely away. The rubber part of the spoiler is going to need treating with some black revival stuff, but for now whilst it is sat in the dry it can stay as it is.
Clean
Next up on my list was the bonnet, whilst the design is cool it gets in the way when working on an engine (as do all bonnets in fairness) so I pulled that off and again, stored it out of the way. The paintwork on the bonnet is very good so I want to avoid it getting damaged. I'd been told the car has had a respray shortly before it stopped working and this was evident when inspecting the bonnet. No stone chips or anything.
Mad Max?
Next up: Interior. Rear seat base is very easy to remove, the back however proved problematic if I followed guides on how to do it. They all said "the bolts are by the wing or they may be towards the centre near the seatbelt anchor mounts" which is fine...if someone prior to you hasn't been a complete imbecile and installed a third seat belt into the wrong positions!
They had used the seat back mount bolts to 'secure' the seat belt anchors and the lap belt, this meant that in the event of an accident with someone in the back they would likely have been caused serious injury either from the width of the lap section of the harness or by the bolts used to anchor the belts having failed.
All of that is ignoring the fact that the seat base (and back) are only designed for
two people to be sat in the back and the third person in the middle would be rather uncomfortable sat on the dividing spine.
Below is an image of the mounting points with the belt anchor points in the
correct position for the car. You can see the two points where the belts were anchored previously ~6inches either side of the current/correct point.
Once the rears were out it was time for the fronts to come out, not like I'll be driving it anywhere for a while, so out they go.
No seats.
Just to make it look a bit neater (and for me to clean up the parts/fabricate some new bits) I removed the handbrake console area. This had a lovely tape selector in it still, how 80s! I've got some plans for where the tape unit went but we'll just have to see if they work out at some other stage. I also removed the soft top cover as it was partially in my way but also due to some of the opening/closing mechanisms having failed it was causing damage to car.
Naked.
Next up, engine!
Well, just before the engine I actually stripped off the front grille and lights to avoid damaging them and to get them out of my way when working on the engine. No pictures of that stage though.
I then started to remove parts from the engine, first item to come out was the airbox and associated parts that go with it. Once I pulled it out I was greeted with this:
Post airbox/MAF, pre throttle body.
MAF.
Ok, so I found some gunk/mayo in there. This got me intrigued as to just what was in the engine and what had happened to it. The next easy to remove item was the top radiator hose which provided me with:
Mayo hand.
Mayo radiator.
Next was the pipe on the water pump, this gave me a real surprise!
Oil.
I was surprised about the oil as I expected mayo...the oil came out, all over the garage floor and my foot.
Another water pipe, this time from the thermostat housing:
Thermomayo.
Throttle body time! It looked innocent enough...
Throttle body inlet.
...then I opened it!
Throttle mayo.
I removed the throttle body from the inlet and mayo went everywhere.
Throttle body sludge.
I cleaned up all of the mayo and stopped it from going into other parts of the engine or ancileries.
Engine.
I then hauled the plenum off (wow that is a pain to do)! I then inspected the cylinders, 1-5 were dry pretty much (slight dampness/mayo on a couple valves) but 6 contained mayo, this could get interesting.
Engine without plenum.
No. 6.
No. 4, No. 5 & No. 6.
No. 2, No. 3 & No. 4.
No. 1 & No. 2.
Inlet plenum, engine-side.
Inlet plenum breather pipe.
I also removed the radiator, viscous van and a couple other bits, but those aren't that interesting (at least not compared to the mayo etc.
).
That pretty much wraps up Sat's work at about 21:30.
So in about 10hrs I did everything I'd planned to do over the whole three days pretty much! Good thing about this means that I've got the rest of the weekend to do as much or little as I want on the car. Unfortunately I'm unable to remove the engine currently because a friend is borrowing our engine crane but it should be returned some point next week, which gives me next weekend's task of engine removal. The annoying thing about the E30 compared to the E36 is that to remove the engine you
have to hoist it out of the engine bay. On the E36 you can remove the front end crash bars etc. and pretty much just pull the engine from the car without much lift on it. I always dislike having to hoist an engine in/out of a car because it always takes longer than you think. Anyway, got a bit of time before I have to worry about that.
The plan for the engine is to strip it down and see how much damage has been caused, if it is just mayo in/around the engine then I can clean out all the gunk and rebuild the engine. If there is damage to internals (pistons, sump contains metal fragments etc.) then I shall source a new engine. A new/replacement engine is more what I'd like to do because it is fairly simple, but I would also like to strip and rebuild this one so I know every cm of the block and it's internal history. If I do source a new engine I have various options, these options put me into a bit of a dilemma because instantly the child in me says 'do a swap' so that I can have a bigger, more powerful engine sat up front. The options are a replacement M20 or an M50 or M52 from the E36 (these require some modification to the bay, but fairly minor). Those are the sensible options to go for, I'm leaning towards the M50 from the 325i because it is a close match to the original engine whilst also being quite fun. There are of course (as with everything) the silly/fun options which are E36 M3 engines, V8s etc. these require a substantial amount more work to get them to fit but could well prove to be utterly amazing fun (fitting and driving). Something I need to factor in on top of the ease of fitting etc. is the cost of an engine (and gearbox if not a standard engine) which goes from cheap (for an M20) to utterly silly (for an M3 engine + box). An annoyingly sensible middle ground is the V8 (surprisingly) as they are ~£500 for an engine + box, which is also what you're looking at for the M50/M52 engines. Another option with regards to sourcing the engine and gearbox from another car is to buy a running car with the gear I need already in it and pull it out. This can cost more (obviously) but also provides the ability to sell of parts from the car to recoup some of the costs.
I will be researching everything required for all of the engine options I might wish to pursue if this engine is beyond repair so I'll know just what needs doing to the engine bay etc. before I buy anything. I don't want to buy an engine (and 'box) only to find out it'll cost me £1k in parts to fit it. Another thing to consider with the larger powered engines is of course stopping power, which would need to be addressed for most of the power increase options. I certainly won't be making any hasty decisions, it is all going to be planned out properly so that I can get the best for my time and money.
Day Two - 06/05/2012
I decided today that I wanted to have a fairly relaxed one, so in the morning I 'popped' to Halfords (50 miles away) and picked up some leather feed (Mer Leather Cleaner) and I then spent the afternoon feeding the rear seats and the front passenger seat. I decided against feeding the driver's side for now because of the hole in the side it'll need a retrim (which means I'll probably also retrim the passenger seat to make them match).
I've never used leather feed etc. before so was unsure as to how well this would actually work on the seats due to the sheer number and size of the cracks in the leather. I needn't have worried as it appears to have brought them up a treat, although I shall feed them again tomorrow or sometime after work next week as I'm sure they can get much better than they are.
Whilst dismantling the passenger seat I found out something interesting (geek mode enabled), the Sports seats in the E30 only rely on cables for the flip forward function, the rest of the adjustment abilities are done using pneumatic gas struts (like you have to hold a car boot open) to provide the resistance when you're moving the seat back/base into the desired position/height.
This is a brilliant design and works well, unless of course these items are 24 years old and have also been damaged at some point in their life. Upon removing the seat back I was greeted with this:
Pneumatic gas strut.
Now it doesn't take a genius to work out that this strut is not quite in shape, especially when you compared it to the strut on the other side of the seat:
The reason for this damage is because someone has previously taken the seat apart due to snapping the flip forward cable and then lost the correct bolt to hold the back on so replaced it with one of similar length. I say similar, I don't mean that at all, it is about 5-10mm longer than the original bolt and it is threaded up to the bolt head, the original is threaded about two thirds of the way up the shaft only. Someone proceeded to then do this replacement bolt up until the head was flush against the socket which meant the back didn't wobble about, this also meant that they drove the bolt into the strut and destroyed it. Unfortunately this affects the angle adjustment of the back of the seat because it stops the struts from being able to force the seat forwards if it is set all the way back. It doesn't actually stop it from being adjusted however, so I'm likely going to leave it as-is for now. I ran some part numbers through BMW-Cooper Parts online check and
ONE strut will set me back between £25 and £40 (three different part numbers for the same item), each seat has four of these struts which means to return the seats to the former glory, in pneumatic adjustment only, will cost me a few hundred pounds which seems excessive when they do work (just not as silky smooth as originally intended).
Here you can see the 'new' bolt (only done up gently to that position).
Here you can see the old bolt, done up to it's full extent.
Just a slight difference between the two I think you'll agree.
I'll need to source myself a few new bolts for the car anyway so these will be added to the list of new bolts required (I'll get a few as the original bolt on this seat is in fact bent). After my discoveries I then actually did treat the leather and think it has come out rather well.
Various photos of the interior, for the most part, before and after shots:
Rear Bench Before:
Rear Bench After:
Front Seat Back Before:
Front Seat Back After:
Front Seat Base Before:
Front Seat Base After:
Headrest Before:
Headrest After:
Over all I think the leather feed has worked wonders on the seats. It is harder to tell in the pictures due to the flash and stuff but originally the seats were very cracked looking and now they look a
huge amount better and make me not want to bother retrimming any of these seats. The top of the rear bench does have a rip in it on a seam so I'm going to have to do something about that. I'm thinking that if I am retrimming the front driver's seat then what I can do is create a patch from the old front seat leather an use that to sort out the hole. This I feel is the easiest and most friendly option to my wallet and, if done right, shouldn't make it look like it is patched up but who knows, I may just get a full set of leather covers made up and retrim them all, depends how flush I'm feeling later on in the process of fixing up this car.
That's it for the past couple days on the car but I suspect I'll be working on it again tomorrow so should have another update ready by the end of the bank holiday. Hope you guys have enjoyed reading so far.
