The FREe30: A brief history.

[F34R]

Looks great.

[delatlanta1281]

Will this car be at V@V this year? I would love to see it in person. Cool progress!

[brahbarian]

beautiful. cant wait to restore my cabrio.

[Nsquared97]

Love the wheel/tire setup. Car looks leagues better than it did when you got it, great work!

[e30shmobberr]

damn love the wrap! you didnt do the quarter panels and roof and a pillars all one piece huh? alway thought about a wrap

[MT325is]

Love the wrap!!! Wow! its amazing!

[Court M3]

Nice progress so far, good to see something other than "poke and stretch".

[willworkfore30s]

Will this car be at V@V this year? I would love to see it in person. Cool progress!

Yeah I plan to be up there with it at least on Saturday. If I can come up with a place to stay I may be up there Friday afternoon/evening.

damn love the wrap! you didnt do the quarter panels and roof and a pillars all one piece huh? alway thought about a wrap

Can't wrap all those in one piece. The best I could have done would have been to eliminate the seams at the bottoms of the C-pillars. To do that, all of the area of the the side windows would have been wasted vinyl. Since there is a hard body line there I just used it to mask the seam and saved a lot of vinyl. This vinyl is the same color all the way through unlike traditional printed vinyl, so the seams really don't show up much.

I'm glad you guys are liking the progress. Major progress on the rest of the car will be slow because I am starting to save for a down payment on my first home but I will post some small updates in this thread from time to time. Overall plans for the car are to rebuild/recover the sport seats. Replace the cracked dash. Either build up another m42 with a turbo and put it in or an S5X swap. There is a slight possibility I will do a 5.0 swap since I've just recently built one of those for another project but it really all depends on how I feel when the money becomes available.

So far this car has been a super low budget project. I think at this point I am around $3500 into this car total, including purchase price and all the work I've done to it. It still needs some mechanical work but its been surprisingly reliable. I put the "new" motor in and changed the fluids and the oil filter housing gasket and oring. I had to put a different AFM on it and did the mess under the intake. But other than that I haven't done a thing to the motor. I am going to drive it 5 hours to Charleston here in a couple weeks for its longest trip since I've owned it. I love driving this thing and don't think I could beat it for the money.

[fronton]

very nice save.

[kalib0y]

car has definitely come a long way. Looks fantastic.

[Vtec?lol]

I absolutely hate ESM wheels. I say that to say this, your car and one other (J's v8 swappped) look absolutely great with them. That's how much I like it. Good job man!

[willworkfore30s]

I absolutely hate ESM wheels. I say that to say this, your car and one other (J's v8 swappped) look absolutely great with them. That's how much I like it. Good job man!

Haha thanks man. I have to say I was a little annoyed when I found a post on here with a link to where I could have gotten brand new legitimate Ronal LS's for the same price I had just paid for these ESM's but oh well. I like the color matchiness?? of this set up and I'll be putting some BMW Roundels over the ESM logos once I can put my center caps on. They may be reps but their fit and finish is solid. Better than I expected.

[willworkfore30s]

Very small update. I forgot to paint the back edges that face the tires. I'll fix that soon. I also have my fog lights waiting to go on but one of the cheap gaskets from ebay ripped and I am missing the factory mounting hardware. I am waiting on a gasket and figuring out how I want to ghetto mount them.















and the screw up


p.s. Thanks Blunt!

[travish325]

I love using that trim paint. Best paint in an aresol can by far imho

[Nick_S]

Wow that's a hell of a turn around. Car looks fantastic. Love the wrap color.