My wife Maire Anne and I have a history of going up to Vermont on Indigenous People’s Weekend and visiting our friends Jon and Eileen in Manchester. Unfortunately, this is usually the same weekend as Vintage at Saratoga. Some years I’ve done both, shooting out to Saratoga for the day and then zipping east, but this year it was Vermont only.
The happy problem to have was which of the “fun” cars to take. Several in the stable have made the trip over the years. The red E9 has been up there twice, including a few years ago when I filled the trunk with a guitar amp and two instruments and joined Jon and his band at a gig outside Orvis (the fly-fishing and outdoors-wear store). The Bavaria went up there sometime in the pre-COVID years. Two years ago I drove Hampton, the (then) sub-50k survivor 2002. This year I was angling to take the E9 again, as it hasn’t seen a road trip this year, but rainy weather scotched that plan. (As ‘CCA and Nor’East 02er member Scott Sislane famously quoted, “Aren’t the E9’s inner fenders made from confectioners sugar?”)
Because Sharkie (the 1979 Euro 635CSi) was still at the house from when I’d flirted with selling it this summer, the honor fell to it, even if somewhat by default. It wasn’t that I’d decided not to sell it—it was more that I’d floated the car for sale on Facebook Marketplace for $15k, got oohs and aahs but no serious interest, and just never gotten around to bringing the car back out to the Monson warehouse. Besides, the combination of rainy weather keeping the E9 grounded and the fact that Sharkie is a long-legged fast smooth comfortable road-trip car made it an easy decision. Plus, subjecting Sharkie to the scrutiny of two sides of the same coin—side A being that, if I don’t road-trip the car, I shouldn’t own it, and side B being that maybe I should take one more road trip in it before I sell it (or talk myself out of it)—sealed the deal.
I gave Sharkie a quick once-over the day before leaving. Although it’s a generally well-sorted car, it has had cooling system issues throw a wrench into its works twice on trips to The Vintage. On the way home in 2018, the cooling fan detonated, and since it was the old-style no-longer-available fan, replacing it required updating the water pump, fan clutch, and pulley, which my friends Luther Brefo and Paul Muskopf pulled together for me. Then, in 2021, after I prophylactically replaced a bulging heater hose before the trip, the replacement hose failed on I-78. Fortunately, I had a spare with me.
There’s also the closely related issue of the car’s cabin heat. As is the case with my E9, BMW designed Sharkie’s heater box so it’s plumbed always-on. That is, unlike on a 2002 that has a shut-off valve in line with the heater core, on Sharkie and the E9, there’s always hot coolant circulating through the core, and the heater slider control just opens and closes a flap on the heater box to let the hot air into the car. From an air conditioning standpoint, this is just awful, because it means that a) there’s a little steaming hot radiator sitting right next to the thing that’s trying to get the car cold, and b) even when the flaps are closed, a lot of heat still gets into the passenger compartment. When I retrofitted a/c into Sharkie in 2017, I rebuilt the heater box and relined the flaps with new closed-cell foam, but that didn’t solve the problem of heat pouring out into the footwells. To fix this on the E9, I installed a servo-controlled valve that allows you either to bypass the heater core completely, run the normal volume of coolant through it, or open the valve just a crack when you need heat, and then close the valve when you don’t. I never implemented this complete solution on Sharkie. Instead, for several years, I simply bypassed the heater core (connected the input and output hoses to each other) when I used the car in the summer. A few years ago I installed Version 2—a 2002 heater valve that I could rotate closed to block off the heater core in the summer and bring it into play in the fall by opening up the hood and rotating the valve open.
The simple solution of the 2002 heater block-off valve in Sharkie that was now leaking.
While checking out Sharkie prior to the trip, I saw that the coolant level in the expansion tank was very low. That led me to look at the valve. Good thing that I did, because as soon as I rotated from the “off” to the “on” setting, it began leaking coolant, and didn’t stop when I turned it back to “off.” Since the weather report was cool and rainy, I figured that I’d want the ability to have heat, so I removed the block-off valve and returned the car to its stock heater-core-always-plumbed condition.
Manchester VT is only about 150 miles from Newton MA, so this barely qualifies as a road trip. Still, you don’t venture forth in a 46-year-old car without backup. At least I don’t. Several years ago I put together a road-trip tool box that I toss in the trunk of any vintage car even if I’m running to Home Depot, so the tools part was easy. As far as spares go, Sharkie, the E9, and the Bavaria all have an M30 six-cylinder engine, but the ignition and cooling systems are slightly different. I found the box with spare belts, plugs, and an assortment of distributor caps, rotors, belts, and hoses, and threw it in the trunk.
As soon as Maire Anne and I were underway on the highway, I found that hooking up the original heater box plumbing was a bad idea—the amount of heat pouring out the closed footwell vents was oppressive. Fortunately, I’d brought a backup plan—a hose block-off clamp. This is a rod with two 90-degree bends in it and threads on the end, and with a swinging-gate-style clamp across it and a big knob you can use to tighten the clamp and pinch off a hose. I often use the little versions of this clamp to pinch rubber fuel lines before pulling them off so gas doesn’t spill everywhere. Although I have concern that leaving a rubber coolant hose pinched for long periods of time will weaken it, I didn’t think it would pose danger in the short term. With some tweaking of the knob, I found a setting where just enough coolant flowed into the heater core that, if I wanted heat, I had it when I opened up the flaps, and if I didn’t, it wasn’t overpowering. Not a long-term solution for sure, but it did the trick.
The block-off clamp to the rescue.
The other funny bit of kit in the trip was the stereo. I used to be heavily into car audio, but about ten years ago I began drifting away from listening to music when I road-trip. The sound system in the E39 is great, but in the vintage cars, the wind and engine noise makes it so that the sound system, even if it’s a good one, needs to be turned up to fatiguingly-high levels. This time, though, for a number of reasons, I did want to have the car tune-enabled, but I had a problem. Sharkie’s sound system was installed in the late 80s; it uses a Blaupunkt Lexington 46 cassette deck (in a Benzi Box!), and that’s from the era when there was no aux jack (and don’t even mention Bluetooth; the car will look at you funny). I know that I have one of those cassette-aux adapters somewhere in my house, but I couldn’t find it. I remembered that the deck in the departed Winnebago Rialta RV had the same issue (it was a CD player, but one old enough that it also had no aux port), and I’d solved it with one of those radio adapters that plugs into your phone or iPod’s aux jack and transmits it on a frequency that the radio can pick up. I found it in a box with other leftovers from the Rialta and pressed it into service. And yes, I still have an active iPod.
1986, meet 2005. You’re both obsolete, and both still useful.
Other than tweaking the heat, the drive up was flawless. Even when compared with the E9 and the Bavaria, the E24 is a big car, and while it eats up interstate and is more stable at speeds above 80 than the other vintage BMWs, ]its length and bulk combined with its aftermarket 17-inchBBS RC090 wheels make it feel a bit leaden on the smaller twisty roads which comprise a good portion of the drive from suburban Boston to Manchester VT (only about ten miles of it is interstate). It was, however, still a fine drive.
Not bad, Sharkie.
Since the weather on the day we arrived was spectacular but was forecast to change to overcast and then to rain, I quickly scouted a few photo shoot locations. Sharkie’s silver doesn’t complement the fall colors like the E9’s Signal Red does, but the car’s arresting shape made for some nice contrasting shots.
Yeah, some jerk in a BMW was blocking the road for a shot (seriously, this was a gravel road a ways out of town).
Wait, is that garage space?
Although they’re not as visible in the photo as they were in person, trust me, the tractor and pumpkins in the background were quintessential Vermont October.
Forgive me for subjecting you to one of one of Paul Bracq’s design elements, along with rain and vegetation, rendered through Lunapic’s smoke filter.
The drive home was rainy but uneventful. Given the age of Sharkie’s tires, I was actually happy to be driving slowly behind a pickup towing a camping trailer and thus not tempted to carry more speed through wet curves than I should.
Other than the heat needing a better solution than a block-off clamp, the only things that jumped out were that a bent rear wheel I’ve long known about generates a vibration in a certain range of speeds, and the blower fan sometimes gets slightly chirpy. That was it. I never opened the tool box or the box of spares. Well done, Sharkie.
So, was this Sharkie’s farewell road trip or an “I love this car I can’t sell it” reprieve? I’m really right on the fence. As they say, not to decide is to decide, so if I drive it out to the Monson warehouse to get the FrankenThirty back (which is likely), that’ll likely mean it’ll be here through the winter.
What a shame :^)
—Rob Siegel
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All eight of Rob’s books are available here on Amazon. Signed personally-inscribed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.
