As I’ve spooled down my car business (closing the service shop and moving the dealership to a small office and showroom), I’ve slowly whittled down the fleet of hangar queens. These cars don’t meet the typical description of “garage queens” that live in hermetically sealed bubbles only to be driven on fair weather days. No, these long-timers were hangar queens because they refused to leave!
The 525iX Touring taking up residence on the far lift next to another Euro E34 wagon.
The 1992 Granite silver over Anthracite cloth 525iX Touring was in the running for one of the most extended stays, most money spent, and least money earned. It first showed up in May of 2021. A friend had imported the all-wheel-drive Swiss-Market Touring from the Netherlands and sent it to me for some rust repairs and to potentially sell. After several trips between Kansas and Colorado due to reluctance to let it go, it finally landed at the hangar for me to sell. Then, I went down the rabbit hole of making it better, an exercise of lost toil and treasure that I would never get back. If I’m honest, I was also probably a little reluctant to let it go as well.
The 525iX Touring out in the wild hunting the Fenn Treasure in Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
The trade-off was that I got to spend a few years enjoying it between bouts of disassembly and could feature it on an episode of Life’s Too Short for Boring Cars. For that episode, Jeremy and I took it on a 2,200-mile adventure retracing the steps of the Fenn Treasure. It was the most epic road trip and the longest episode we had filmed to date. You can see the behind-the-scenes story of that trip in my related BimmerLife article last year.
Fast forward to this month, and the film has been released—and with it, I put the 525iX Touring up for a no-reserve auction on Cars and Bids. Before it was ready, we had to fix a few more things that we broke on the trip. Notably, the driver’s side window regulator had died a slow death, which made the lack of air conditioning and the inoperative rear windows even worse. The window regulator had likely failed due to the door striker bending the forward guide rail. Fortunately, someone had already been in there once and drilled out the rivets, so replacing the regulator was easy. The guide rail, not so much…
Replacing the driver’s window regulator and the bent guide rail compared to the correct one.
I like to replace a Roundel by carefully drilling a hole in the old one, prying it out, and replacing the grommets if necessary.
Once I finished the window regulator, I replaced the Roundel, and it would be ready for auction, right? Not so fast; it refused to leave without doing one more “BMW thing.” I noticed a faint smell of coolant on a lap around the airport and found a tiny crack in the radiator. A quick visit to FCP Euro’s website and some expedited shipping, and I had a new radiator in before the auction ended.
A last-minute radiator from FCP Euro saved the day!
With the radiator done, the 525iX Touring found its new home on Cars and Bids.
The auction went well, with lots of praise for the wagon, and the owner sounds like a perfect fit. His family is growing out of their E30 325iX coupe. What better car to do that in than an E34 all-wheel-drive wagon? I’ll be sad to see it go, but life is nothing but a collection of moments in time, and my time with this wagon has come to an end.–Alex McCulloch
Tags: 525iX Touring car sale restoration
