Will people ever stop molesting E30s en masse?

[hkv]

To stop this we should create an E30 molester registry or something.

https://www.r3vlimited.com/board/sguncategorized/shameless-e30-molesters

way ahead of you.

theres purists in every community. I dealt with them so much in the HK community, funny enough I usually knew much more about the guns they obsessed over the tinyest detail over than they did. usually I ignore them but sometimes I cant help but rub my abuse in their face.

[ZeKahr]

did someone say molest e30s??? mhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmhhhmmmmmmmmm




you must have never felt the pleasure of taking a nice rust free and pure example with a complete maintenance history as thick as a book and getting your grimey hands all over it and just f****ing its whole reality up. Its the cleanest, best pleasure. ABS? for pussies who want to remove skill from racing. brake booster? lol I can lock up my brakes just find with my scrawny legs thankyou very much. power steering? HAH! next thing you know a stick shift will be too much too handle.

if I want to see pure I go to the bmw museum in Munich, but dang! turns out BMW had andy Warhol molest quite a few BMWs with god knows what kind of paint. it sure aint automotive. WHY MUST PEOPLE DO THINGS I DONT LIKE TO CARS I LOVE?!?!

In all seriousness; IMO stock cars are with few exceptions I don't want to say boring but lacking is probably appropriate. OEMS build cars for the masses, not for die hard car enthusiasts much less yourself. Exhaust is usually quiet and lame af, car usually is too high and the wheels too deep into the wheel wells. that's usually the tip of the iceberg. my 135i had some stupid valve in the clutch line to smooth clutch use because like I said they build cars for the masses. the last thing I want to do is keep a stupid valve in my clutch line that was put there for people who don't know how to drive. staying stock is for grannies.

On the spectrum between mass market consumer and enthusiast, I'm somewhere in the middle, with leanings towards mass market consumer. The reason I went with an E30 is because

• newer cars have shitty visibility and are large as fuck (which makes it a pain in the ass to keep them in lane and to park), lack any character in their engines and driving characteristics (this is one of the reasons I prefer my M20 over any 24-valve garbage), and they look terrible compared to the E30
• I love old-school BMW driving characteristics like the heavy steering/gas/brake pedal and taut ride (don't care about high revving engines though) and the E30 was the smallest BMW I could get in the USA with a standard engine that's decently torquey for street use (I define "decently torquey" as 170 ft-lb at 3250 RPM, and yes I have a calculator shoved up my ass about this stuff)
• The E30 represents the ideal point in car complexity to me. You have all of the essential creature comforts (AC, heat, power steering, torquey engine able to work an auto tranny). The fuel injection system and associated electronics aren't too complicated to repair. My M20B27 also makes a crap ton of low end torque and doesn't resort to any stupid shit like VANOS and DISA to do it; just super long intake runners and that's it.

Don't get me wrong, I like some exhaust noise, but the shit I've listened to on my friend's E30 with a Magnaflow muffler (I think that's what it was) is obnoxious (which is what I figure most E30s with aftermarket exhausts sound like). Hell, even my friend himself said he gets annoyed with the noise sometimes. I think it's better to just let the stock muffler rot out a little bit over time; I've listened to worn 20 year old mufflers and each of them produce a nice deep bassy tone that's not super loud. In the case of the E30, I do agree that the car is a little too high with the stock non-sport suspension. A small drop (0.5"-1.0") actually does make it look better. Any more and you run into problems with inner tire wear from what I've heard. As for the wheels being too deep into the wells, never noticed it. I'm not a total purist, more like a 80-90% purist.

First one must define car molestation. Is tasteful modification molestation?

I define molestation as the following:

• Cosmetically modifying the car in a way that doesn't look factory. Examples include the piss yellow headlights, putting on aftermarket wheels (esp ones bigger than 15"), poke, halo headlights, bodykits, painting the intake manifold/valve color/body weird colors (i.e. all the "artsy" stuff, most race/drift cars fall into this category, this shit makes my eyeballs throw up). Some of these are easy to undo, others a PITA
• Swapping in a motor that didn't come from the factory, especially if it's a non-BMW motor; this requires so much custom fabrication and I'm pretty sure certain maintenance tasks will be a PITA since there is no official documentation on this kind of stuff. If I were to ever buy a swapped E30, I'd be spending $$$$ reverting it back a the factory engine (don't have a garage, will need a mechanic to do it).
• "Performance" mods that make the car obnoxious to daily and appear to be done more for looks/attention as opposed to actually improving the car. Thankfully most of these are easy to take off and I can recuperate some of the cost involved in removal by selling these.

Might be missing some stuff, but that's off the top of my head.

[e30davie]

Would you also like all of the e30 owners to get off your lawn?

[roguetoaster]

On the spectrum ... that's off the top of my head.

Says the person who wants to remove stuff from an E30 that would definitely make it worse for no real improvement and who wants to spray paint over rust with our blessing.

[ZeKahr]

Says the person who wants to remove stuff from an E30 that would definitely make it worse for no real improvement and who wants to spray paint over rust with our blessing.

At least I consulted you guys before even attempting to do all of that. I'm sure most people who molest E30s just do whatever they do before coming on here asking if it's a good idea. I thought over it and decided to leave all of the stuff on the car. As for the chassis paint, it looked like it could blend in with the gloss black paint on my car and from what I read it helps eliminate rust. Now I'm thinking that I'll probably just grind the surface rust away, apply POR15 over that, and then and apply the factory paint over that; but I'll to reassess that situation once my car is mechanically sorted.

[e30davie]

So its OK to "molest" an e30 if you consult a random website and get the blessing of a bunch of anonymous posters. Ok cool, ill keep that in mind.

[roguetoaster]

So its OK to "molest" an e30 if you consult a random website and get the blessing of a bunch of anonymous posters. Ok cool, ill keep that in mind.

You have to argue with them first, and then just do whatever you were going to do in the beginning, it's the rule.

[varg]

Any mod which improves the car is fair game imo. Improving is partially subjective but the objective outlook is that stuff like stance and mono wipers or hacking fenders and quarters up to screw pandem body kits on do nothing to improve the car in any way and are ricer-tier, I would love to see that type of thing stop just to reduce the attrition. Undoing a swap you don't like is trivial compared to restoring a car that has had holes scraped in its underbody or the wheel arches hacked out.

Engine swaps are a blessed modification, they frequently improve the car a great deal and are always at least interesting. As long as you don't do something silly, putting a boat anchor like a 2JZ or an all iron V8 in an E30 I'm game. I don't see the point of an M50 swap (a lot of work for barely any improvement in power) or an M6X swap (why go through all of the trouble to put a V8 in your car only to choose a performance dead end like the M6X family?) but if it floats your boat it didn't exactly ruin the car. Drop a 600lb engine in the front of a car that came with a 400lb one though, kinda ruins the point of owning a light car that handles well. If you wanted to build a drag car you should have bought a G body or something. But an LS (real LS not an iron block truck motor which is an LQ/LM/LR) for example is no heavier than an S54 and sits further back and BMW guys lap S54 swaps up so what's the big deal? Even I4 swaps; Honda (F series, K series) and Toyota (3S-GE) made some NA I4s which compare favorably to any BMW I4 in every respect from the factory so swap away. Nissan made a couple of decent turbo I4s which make good swaps.

If you play your cards right you might wind up with a car that is a fine handling machine and quite fast while remaining comfortable, like mine

[Melon]

[lukeADE335i]

Engine swaps are a blessed modification, they frequently improve the car a great deal and are always at least interesting.

If you play your cards right you might wind up with a car that is a fine handling machine and quite fast while remaining comfortable, like mine

Have to agree - I enjoy my e30 far more with the M30 in it that I did the M20 - sounds like a bigger, less softly spoken M20 & the torque under the curve makes for a great road car. Sure - at 10/10ths on the track it's going to understeer slightly more than an M20 or M42, but on the street the extra weight is barely noticeable - even while enjoying some "spirited driving" as the Germans would say.

[roguetoaster]

[majdomo]

People gonna people... hah that’s my line! I think, it’s your money and your car, do what you want to it but don’t be a bitch if no one else likes your velour interior or stanced out wheels and don’t complain if you can’t get your money back out of the car later. That shouldn’t matter, as long as you like it who gives a rat’s ass. This goes for any car, btw...Porsche, VW, BMW, muscle car, whatever. Also, I’m OEM+ all day, jfyi. Not that it matters. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Melon]

Let it be known Roguetoaster knows how to meme.

[ForcedFirebird]

People who hate on the m42 must have been born in the late 80's or early 90's, and not been driving when these cars were new. Sure, by today's standards, it's weak, but modern cars weigh over 2 tons and need 400hp just to get any kind of acceleration.

Cars were painfully under powered at that time, the m42 was actually a powerful engine for it's size in the day when compared with like-kinding. In 1989/90 you had the likes of turbo 2.2 Dodges with 170hp, IROC-Z had 220, SHO with 220, Fiero with 140, Prelude 140, Legend 200 (after 1990), 944 200, even the all mighty Corvette only had 240, Mustang GT 225, and the list goes on. So, in 1990 when you bought a brand new 318is, you really weren't being left far behind - especially if it's not straight line racing.

A friend of mine has a 318 endurance car, and even though the m42 has less power, the lap times were not that far off our car when it was all bone stock. He managed to get the car down to just over 2klb where we are about 600lb more.

Now, the fun cars back then were the likes of the TTA and T-Types and GN's. My pops' friend bought a new GN, was hacking the ECM right away and that thing was an animal. That was in Mass so he had to reverse everything he did for the yearly inspections. The TTA's were even faster as GM had to re-design the heads to fit in the f-body strut towers, and had an unintended benefit of promoting flow (ever try and source a set of TTA heads?, I did before just slapping turbo(s) on the 3.1/3.4).

[Motheye99]

Any mod which improves the car is fair game imo. Improving is partially subjective but the objective outlook is that stuff like stance and mono wipers or hacking fenders and quarters up to screw pandem body kits on do nothing to improve the car in any way and are ricer-tier, I would love to see that type of thing stop just to reduce the attrition. Undoing a swap you don't like is trivial compared to restoring a car that has had holes scraped in its underbody or the wheel arches hacked out.

Engine swaps are a blessed modification, they frequently improve the car a great deal and are always at least interesting. As long as you don't do something silly, putting a boat anchor like a 2JZ or an all iron V8 in an E30 I'm game. I don't see the point of an M50 swap (a lot of work for barely any improvement in power) or an M6X swap (why go through all of the trouble to put a V8 in your car only to choose a performance dead end like the M6X family?) but if it floats your boat it didn't exactly ruin the car. Drop a 600lb engine in the front of a car that came with a 400lb one though, kinda ruins the point of owning a light car that handles well. If you wanted to build a drag car you should have bought a G body or something. But an LS (real LS not an iron block truck motor which is an LQ/LM/LR) for example is no heavier than an S54 and sits further back and BMW guys lap S54 swaps up so what's the big deal? Even I4 swaps; Honda (F series, K series) and Toyota (3S-GE) made some NA I4s which compare favorably to any BMW I4 in every respect from the factory so swap away. Nissan made a couple of decent turbo I4s which make good swaps.

If you play your cards right you might wind up with a car that is a fine handling machine and quite fast while remaining comfortable, like mine

x2

Swapping in anything that weighs significantly more than a M20 is a bad move. The S54 has the cool factor but it weights to damn much. Leave it for the E36/E46 they can handle it. Now we just need a good N52 swap right up..