When last we saw my FrankenThirty, the odd salvage-titled 325is whose back section appears to be post-facelift but whose nose and engine compartment appears to be pre-facelift and whose engine is unfortunately the low-revving eta motor, I’d finished installing the new timing belt and water pump (knowing that they hadn’t been replaced since 2001, wouldn’t you?), and even made a good pass at abating the fairly extensive mouse contamination that graced the climate control box. It was time to reassemble it, drive it, and see what it actually was.
When I began pulling it apart after purchase, I noticed a trail of oil running across the bottom of the pan. It turned out that pan was cracked; an impact in the center of a small divot had a hairline fissure in it. A few years back, I’d successfully used J-B Weld to repair a crack in the top part of Louie’s (the Ran When Parked car) head, so I tried the same technique here. After draining the oil and letting the car sit for several weeks, I used a torch to heat up the crack and burn off any remaining oil in it, roughed up the area with a stone on a Dremel tool, cleaned everything up with brake cleaner, then slathered J-B Weld into the divot. 24 hours later, I filled the crankcase with fresh oil.
I was initially livid when I found this, but once I learned about the car’s larger issues, it faded into the background.
Once again, J-B Weld for the win.
Normally, when reassembling a cooling system on which I’ve replaced the water pump and main coolant hoses, I’d go the extra mile and replace the fan and viscous clutch. Plus, on this car, the pre-facelift radiator had substantial circular smush marks from the fan hitting it, so it was crying to be renewed. However, since I don’t know whether I’ll keep the car or bail out of it, the objective is to get it running as inexpensively as possible. I reused the radiator, smush marks and all. There’s oodles of room between it and the fan, and the engine mounts look fine, so it’s possible the marks occurred when the ’87 325e that was the donor car for the salvage reconstruction got rear-ended.
This went back in. Don’t judge me. Okay, judge me. I don’t really care.
I put the heater and evaporator cores back in the climate control box, hooked the heater hoses, filled it with coolant, and checked for leaks. It all looked good.
Next, I dealt with the fuel system. I replaced the under-hood fuel send and return rubber lines, as both were pillow-y soft. It was unclear to me how long the car had been sitting, so I wanted to drain the old gas out of the tank. It looked like there was only a small amount of gas in it, but I wasn’t certain that the fuel gauge was working, so when I filled up one of two 2 1/2 gallon containers, I stopped. I installed a new fuel filter, took the other 2 1/2 gallon gas can down to the station, and dumped fresh gas int it. I guess I wasn’t surprised when the car started right up—after all, it was a running car that I drove right onto the rented U-Haul trailer—but the ease of it certainly made me happy. I gingerly pulled it out of the garage where it had been sitting for nearly a month and let it idle in my driveway.
I was about to give the car its first spin when it began idling badly, then died. I restarted it, and it happened again. I hadn’t owned an E30 in almost a decade, but I daily-drove several back in the day, and the neuron that made me think “idle control valve” fired. I pulled it out, cleaned it with spray solvent, and put it back in. The problem appeared to lessen, then largely went away.
Okay, so around the block it is. The car was still sitting on the pockmarked bottlecaps and ancient cracked dry-rotted tires it came with, so despite the fact that it was legally plated and insured, I didn’t want to drive it far or fast. Just a quick trip around the neighborhood to test the major systems. It ran and drove and shifted and stopped fine. I pulled back into the driveway, checked for leaks, and found none, so I did twice around the block. All good.
The next step was to get more gas. I almost threw the gas can back into the E39 to pick up another 2.5 gallons, but instead I went for it and drove the E30 the mile or so to the gas station and filled it up. On this longer drive, I heard and felt a cornucopia of rattles coming from under the dash, but the ease with which the car ran and drove (no oil smoke in the mirror, no temperature gauge climbing toward the red, no obvious pulling to one side on braking) surprised me. I took out my phone and shot this short video. Suddenly, the cloud of “I can’t believe I made this colossal mistake buying this car” seemed to swing around to “Yeah, I now see why I bought this.” I wanted an affordable rust-free running knock-around sport-package E30 (e.g., 325is) that wasn’t some cut-up sitting-on-coilovers boy-racered drift missile. This car was booged up in other ways, and I never would’ve pulled the trigger on it had I sniffed out its Franken-car lineage, but it was, in fact, the things I’d been looking for.
Maybe not so bad after all.
I pulled the car back into the driveway, washed it, and looked closer at the paint. The roof and sunroof panel have dents in them from a tree-branch fall, and the trunk lid is badly sun-damaged, but what I thought was clear-coat delamination on the hood turned out to be tree sap. I cleaned it off with isopropyl alcohol, and marveled at the impression the car gave as whole and intact.
Next, tires. I’d already pushed envelope far enough by driving the car around the neighborhood. I’d been looking for a set of well-priced wheels and rubber but hadn’t found anything cheap enough, so I pulled the trigger on the zero-cost option that had been on my mind—I put the E30 up on the mid-rise lift, pulled the bottlecaps off, threw them a small floor jack in the back of the E39, drove pri out to Monson, and swapped the ‘caps for the gold E30 basketweaves that Bertha’s been wearing for six years. These wheels, originally off a ’91 E30 convertible, have been on half a dozen 2002s over the years. On the one hand, Bertha has been sitting in the Monson warehouse with very little use due to a rough-running issue, and making it sit on tires on which it basically can’t be driven safely seems like consigning it to slumber until spring, but it made sense from a cost-containment standpoint, and its 195/60R14 tires are close enough to work on the E30. They’re also much older than I remembered (2008), but I see no dry-rot or cracking, so they’re good enough for now.
When I let the car down off the mid-rise and pulled it out into the sun, I smiled ear to ear. Gold weaves on a red German car is so 1980s, and beat-up gold weaves on a beat-up red German car is so, well, me. I did the swap for cost reasons, but it’s a great look. They’ll likely stay with the car forever.
Ya gotta admit that’s fly.
And, with that, I thought… inspection. I addressed a couple of lighting issues by replacing bulbs and cleaning connectors. Unfortunately, the car’s brake lining light was on, and an inspection station can fail you for that. The pads looked fine. I bypassed the sensors, but the light stayed on. I read up on pulling the instrument cluster and either re-flowing the solder or replacing the resistor for the brake lining light, but when I got the cluster out, I saw that the bulb can simply be withdrawn from the back.
Duh.
I drove the car down to the inspection station… and it failed due to a bad left front ball joint, which I’m astonished I didn’t catch when I swapped wheels. I did give each wheel a 3-and-9-o’clock and 6-and-12-o’clock push-pull to check for play, but apparently didn’t push-pull hard enough. So I’m about to deal with that.
High and dry and awaiting lower control arms and ball joints.
So we’re close. By next week the FrankenThirty’s around-the-block tether of tire, ball joint, and inspection sticker issues should be removed, and we should be swingin’. And then we’ll see what this thing really is and get a sense of whether we have a future together.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newest book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic, is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.