With the Alpina pretty much a garage queen and being tired of setting money on fire with the PRO3 racecar, I needed something to tinker with. This thing kinda just became the project to fill that void..
Backstory:
My close friend had been wanting to put a cardinal interior in his diamond schwartz 318i. He had acquired a full coupe cardinal interior, but he needed sedan door cards. Low and behold, an ad pops up on Craigslist for a Delphin Grey 325e sedan for dirt cheap.
The photos hinted at a full Cardinal interior, so we drove out to the middle of nowhere to check it out.
Even though it was getting dark, and rain was falling, we could see the interior was in really good shape; you just had to look under the trash and odors. We plopped down a couple Franklins, gathered up the keys and title and headed home, all the while wondering how the hell we were going to fish this heap out of a muddy field.
After suckering a poor tow truck driver into retrieving the beast out of the back forty, we got it to the shop and began to take stock of what we got.
It was not pretty.
In fact, my buddy said he puked twice when he had to get inside just to assist in unloading it. So it got stuck outside with the windows cracked until I could come down after work and check it out.
When I got there, I did notice a couple distinct odors emitting from the car and figured it was a good idea to start the clean out. After removing several dollars worth of change, woman's clothing, shoes, feminine products (still wrapped thank gawd), a bunch of moldy dvds and many kids toys and a microwave, I was able to make some sense of the interior. It was smelly, wet in the foot wells and some mold on various parts. I did some more cleaning of the interior surfaces with Super Clean and vacuumed as much of the loose stuff as possible and got it looking at least more sanitary.
We threw the ozone machine in to the back seat and let that do it's thing for several days. This helped get rid of the majority of the smell so we could at least sit in the car enough to get it down in one of the bays for the next big change.
This car had managed to travel 350k+ miles in the three decades, and even though the stock M20 eta had snapped its timing belt, the chassis was mostly straight and relatively rust free. After swapping out the red interior for the black vinyl in my buddies DS 318i, we yanked the dead eta lump out of the car as well.
...and it just so happened I had a M20B27 that had the whole i conversion done with the 885 head, a mild cam and SSSquid chip sitting in the corner of the shop. It was decided that the following Saturday would be spent stabbing it in to the newly christened Rat Trap.
I'd like to say the motor install went flawlessly, but I did a really dumb thing, and believed the tags that some previous owner had put on the various leads, which led to me connecting the engine harness ground to battery positive.
Exit magic smoke!
Don't ask.
But we did manage to get it started and I was able to drive it home with the partially fried harness. Unfortunately, the leads to some of the injectors grounded out on the way home and held 3 injectors at full duty/flow for half the journey. In the end, I had calculated 7.5 gallons of raw fuel was dumped out the exhaust. Not a safe or good smelling situation to have. So after dissection of the harness I decided to just find another from good ole Austin.
Eventually, it got a quick trip to the car wash, and decided this car wasn't all that bad off and could be a fun project.
The next few days was spent cleaning more of the interior and drying the floors out. I pulled the stock bottlecaps off and threw on a set of spares from one of our race cars and took the Rat Trap out for test commute to work.
Despite it being crazy hot that day (90+) and no ac, it performed better than expected, and reminded me just how well built the E30 was. Not a squeak or rattle could be heard and it drove fairly well.
So now, it's going to be just a matter of making it look cooler.
My buddy and I have been acquiring a lot of cool E30 bits here and there (thanks a lot Ebay...) and this will be a decent platform to install them on.. so the plan is euro bumpers/valance, maybe the spare Alpina front spoiler I have, a diff swap, and what ever else we got kicking around in our spare parts bin. I'll try to keep this first post updated with the progress and post some of the small stuff in later posts.
In the meantime, anyone need a microwave?
Backstory:
My close friend had been wanting to put a cardinal interior in his diamond schwartz 318i. He had acquired a full coupe cardinal interior, but he needed sedan door cards. Low and behold, an ad pops up on Craigslist for a Delphin Grey 325e sedan for dirt cheap.
The photos hinted at a full Cardinal interior, so we drove out to the middle of nowhere to check it out.
Even though it was getting dark, and rain was falling, we could see the interior was in really good shape; you just had to look under the trash and odors. We plopped down a couple Franklins, gathered up the keys and title and headed home, all the while wondering how the hell we were going to fish this heap out of a muddy field.
After suckering a poor tow truck driver into retrieving the beast out of the back forty, we got it to the shop and began to take stock of what we got.
It was not pretty.
In fact, my buddy said he puked twice when he had to get inside just to assist in unloading it. So it got stuck outside with the windows cracked until I could come down after work and check it out.
When I got there, I did notice a couple distinct odors emitting from the car and figured it was a good idea to start the clean out. After removing several dollars worth of change, woman's clothing, shoes, feminine products (still wrapped thank gawd), a bunch of moldy dvds and many kids toys and a microwave, I was able to make some sense of the interior. It was smelly, wet in the foot wells and some mold on various parts. I did some more cleaning of the interior surfaces with Super Clean and vacuumed as much of the loose stuff as possible and got it looking at least more sanitary.
We threw the ozone machine in to the back seat and let that do it's thing for several days. This helped get rid of the majority of the smell so we could at least sit in the car enough to get it down in one of the bays for the next big change.
This car had managed to travel 350k+ miles in the three decades, and even though the stock M20 eta had snapped its timing belt, the chassis was mostly straight and relatively rust free. After swapping out the red interior for the black vinyl in my buddies DS 318i, we yanked the dead eta lump out of the car as well.
...and it just so happened I had a M20B27 that had the whole i conversion done with the 885 head, a mild cam and SSSquid chip sitting in the corner of the shop. It was decided that the following Saturday would be spent stabbing it in to the newly christened Rat Trap.
I'd like to say the motor install went flawlessly, but I did a really dumb thing, and believed the tags that some previous owner had put on the various leads, which led to me connecting the engine harness ground to battery positive.
Exit magic smoke!
Don't ask.
But we did manage to get it started and I was able to drive it home with the partially fried harness. Unfortunately, the leads to some of the injectors grounded out on the way home and held 3 injectors at full duty/flow for half the journey. In the end, I had calculated 7.5 gallons of raw fuel was dumped out the exhaust. Not a safe or good smelling situation to have. So after dissection of the harness I decided to just find another from good ole Austin.
Eventually, it got a quick trip to the car wash, and decided this car wasn't all that bad off and could be a fun project.
The next few days was spent cleaning more of the interior and drying the floors out. I pulled the stock bottlecaps off and threw on a set of spares from one of our race cars and took the Rat Trap out for test commute to work.
Despite it being crazy hot that day (90+) and no ac, it performed better than expected, and reminded me just how well built the E30 was. Not a squeak or rattle could be heard and it drove fairly well.
So now, it's going to be just a matter of making it look cooler.
My buddy and I have been acquiring a lot of cool E30 bits here and there (thanks a lot Ebay...) and this will be a decent platform to install them on.. so the plan is euro bumpers/valance, maybe the spare Alpina front spoiler I have, a diff swap, and what ever else we got kicking around in our spare parts bin. I'll try to keep this first post updated with the progress and post some of the small stuff in later posts.
In the meantime, anyone need a microwave?
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