91 brilliantrot coupe

[Caperix]

This e30 was purchased from another member here on r3vlimited.com about 8 years ago now as a weekend car for my wife.


It was in need of some TLC but overall a good example of a late e30 coupe. The first project was a good tune up and replacing the worn suspension. I went with the standard bilstein b8 h&r combo with ground control street camber plates.




This was a big improvement to how the car ran and drove, but being in south Georgia the none working ac had to be addressed. The front seal on the compressor was leaking & the system had been empty for who knows how long so i replaced everything except for the evaporator. I also installed a spal 16" pusher fan wired into the factory 2 stage resistor. After a r134a conversion the ac works, though idle performance is not great so ì may do a sandon conversation later on.

[2mAn]

Was that done 8 years ago?!.. or are we now up to date haha

[Caperix]

Was that done 8 years ago?!.. or are we now up to date haha

Just the start, I'll post more later this week.

[Caperix]

With the car running better from a tune up, the suspension sorted and a/c fixed we just enjoyed the car. Driving at night was horrible with the later sealed beam headlights so I installed some depo headlights with squared adapters for morimoto mini h1 xenon headlights. This was a huge improvement in night driving even if it did involve cutting up brand new parts.


That picture of the front of the car is actually from after having it repainted, which lead to its own adventure. The 30 year old paint was getting very thin in some areas and the car had been hit in the left rear at some point in its life, so we had it repainted in the factory color but in a 3 stage to hopefully help stand up to the southeast sun better. The car came back looking great but no longer started. I found the crank sensor had failed, so a new one went in and the car would run but was obviously misfiring. A compression test showed low compression on cylinder number 4, but leak down was pretty even with the other cylinders. I pulled the valve cover to find this.


A broken intake rocker thankfully the other half had not gotten into anything else. I replaced all the rocker arms with Ireland engineering heavy duty rocker arms, that was a chore with the head still on the car. After a valve adjustment I put everything back together and it idled perfectly again, when driving was a different story. After the car would come up to temp it would start breaking up around 2500 rpm. I'll get into what I found in the next post.

[Caperix]

I chased the running issue for what felt like months. I have a scan tool that will communicate with the DME but the sample rate was to slow to catch anything and no faults where stored. It felt like ignition so I checked everything for signs of an issue, replaced the coil, plugs & wires but no change. I pulled the fuel rail & checked the spray patern of the injectors, not great but they all flowed. I put in a set of e36 injectors just to see.


Still no change in running. Finally I picked up a cheap oscilloscope and started checking signals. My new crank sensor looked like this.


So another crank sensor was installed & now the E30 was finally running correctly again. After dropping the exhaust during diagnosis the muffer cracked at some rust and the front rubber exhaust mount was falling apart. BMW does not sell the insert separate from the mount but some measuring led to a polly mount that worked. Part number in the picture if anyone needs it. I replaced the leaking muffler with a stainless muffler from Ireland engineering, it is my wife's car & she didn't want anything too loud.