Diamantschwarz Forever: An E30 Love Story. Re-shell & Restomod

[freeride53]

Haven't posted here in a little while so here are some updates. Did a lot of maintenance back in May.

Started with my cruddy old fuel filter and old lines:



Replaced and on car (not pictured, replaced line on other end)



Also not pictured: new OEM MAF boot and air filter from FCP (both free lifetime replacements, woo!)

Replaced the old rubber exhaust hangers (only front one pictured)



Installed Garagistic 80A Poly front CABs



Julien took a funny photo of my aggression on the CABs.



A little spring cleaning...



Dirt/grime cleaned out, corrosion sanded off, neutralized and piece repainted



She's been serving as my weekend bike mobile all spring.



Installed Garagistic adjustable clutch stop (old stop & keys pictured for scale)



And on its own



Garagistic fire extinguisher bracket installed with Kidde extinguisher. Safety first :-)



Got some lower profile hardware and Velcro straps from the local hardware store. Zero rattles.



Nice and snuggle



And then Julien driving my car down the twisties in the Berkeley & Oakland hills as I chased in his Abarth 500



Replaced an old cooked o2 sensor with fresh Bosch unit from FCP.



Needed to get rid of the horrible understeer I had since installing my front 25mm IE adjustable front sway bar (with e30 m3 end links). To counter, got a 19mm IE adjustable rear sway bar. Twas' a long day and Julien lend a friendly hand.



Billet mounts installed



And through the trunk floor



Also, managed to get my driver side rear window to work after ~5 years of being non-op. PO mentioned it hadn't been working for 2 years or so and I bought the car 3 years ago. The regulator was getting power and faintly clicking. Banged the regulator a few times and must have freed up one of the cogs because it works beautifully now.



Then went to the exhaust shop yesterday to get my Stromung catback installed. Upon dropping the old exhaust, had a look at my destroyed original cat. Yuck. Can't help but think it's plugging and restricting things up. Still need to get a new one, hopefully next week.



Cat-back installed with standard 3.5" straight exit tip. Wasn't really a fan.



Scott at Stromung luckily gave me a spare slanted OE-style 3" polished tip. So I had the awesome guys at Scott's muffler in Dublin whip together a custom angled/slanted exit.



Here's a terrible pic - but they also kindly welded on the gussets that IE gave me to reinforce my rear trailing arm sway bar tabs. Painted it black right after. Will get a better pic later.



Really happy with the final look of the exhaust tip.



From underneath



And up close.



Big thanks again to Mike on here for organizing the group-buy and Scott at Stromung for accommodating my special request.

[2mAn]

... Persian salesman was an added plus as my dad went full Persian haggler on him...

Watched my Dad do this when he bought his E92 Convertible a few years back. Its quite the show, especially when he haggled & haggled and then pulled out $$$$$ in cash that I didnt even know he had on him :rofl:

[freeride53]

Beautiful steering wheel! I am jealous.

Also, this explains why Jordan @ Stitched never replied to my recent emails.

LOL and thank you. I think there’s someone back east doing a similar service now, and I might check him out to do my e-brake handle.

Oh man, Jerry gotta be sick of fixing cooling issues in our M42s by now

I’m equally as bummed that I didn’t get to see your 318 before moving. It looks so good! I’ll be at Bimmerfest in 2020, so we’ll have to meet up while I’m on the west coast.

Hahaha yeah I think a lot of buddies are sick of the M42 by now

And sounds good! Let’s see if I can’t beat you to that and drag my ass to VT before that :D

[chriso]

Oh man, Jerry gotta be sick of fixing cooling issues in our M42s by now

I’m equally as bummed that I didn’t get to see your 318 before moving. It looks so good! I’ll be at Bimmerfest in 2020, so we’ll have to meet up while I’m on the west coast.

[mike.bmw]

Beautiful steering wheel! I am jealous.

Also, this explains why Jordan @ Stitched never replied to my recent emails.

[freeride53]

Hey party people. Not much to post from the last month and half but here's some. The car had been intermittently reeking of fuel for the past year or so. Julien came over one day and we poked around in different places, initially not finding anything that jumped out to us. Our initial finding was that the smell was due to a bad top seal on the main fuel pump. So ordered the seal from FCP and tackled it a couple of weeks later.



There definitely was some small fuel leakage there, so this fixed that. However, the smell persisted and one day while poking under the hood, found a little drip of fuel near the fuel rail under the intake manifold. Another couple of weeks passed, went to Julien's house one Sunday afternoon. Got swept away with some work BS so Julien replaced both fuel lines to the fuel rail while I worked off my laptop on the roof of the car.

No photos, but it turns out that I had used low-pressure fuel hose (for non-FI cars, d'oh) a couple of years back whilst tackling the "mess under the intake"... and the two pieces of fuel line were totally destroyed with holes. Whoops. Stupid mistake that was sorta dangerous.

Next we tackled the trunk breather vent leaking. Back in March (as covered above), we replaced the trunk breather vents and gaskets entirely with new OEM pieces, but the car still leaked. Before busting open the silicone tube, Julien realized that it was my quarter panel. (One of the P.O.s had damaged the driver rear quarter with A/V equipment shifting in the trunk). This will be fixed properly when the car goes in for body & paint, but we grabbed a block of wood and mallet and banged it out.



Some miscellaneous rubber/boots replaced with the new OE parts from FCP....



Next, back in January, I sent my M-Tech 2 wheel and E36 leather e-brake handle to Jordan at Stitched Wheels. I'll save the rant, but shortly after paying/shipping my parts over to him, he announced that he was closing up shop. I somehow never received the memo, which was frustrating. Despite the issues in communication, I think the wheel came out really nice. He redid the wheel, gave it extra padding (like modern BMW's), used tri-color "M" stitching and installed the new M badge I provided.



Close-up of the stitching. I also revived the horn pad with the Aerospace 303 that I had laying around in my garage.



Installed in the cockpit



And this evening...



My E30 has been hogging up my parents' garage since we sold my mom's 1992 Mercedes 300E (W124). That car was in our family since new (and pampered) but if you know the Merc's of the era, you'd know of the common electrical gremlins, oil leaks and other faults that begin to occur around ~200k miles / after 27 years. The Mercedes quickly became a source of frustration for us so it had to go. I was able to get a decent stack of cash for my parents so away it went.



We were also passively/actively looking for a replacement since late 2018. Mom was pretty set on an X5 (her last car was a Volvo Cross Country)

Mom had been pretty dead set on an X5 for the last year or so. So we did our hunting, and today, ended up getting a sweet deal. CPO 2016 X5 x3.5i (N55 Turbo) with 26K miles and tons of bells and whistles. We saw this car when it first came into stock back in December. Needless to say, we were able to get a good chunk off out the door ... Persian salesman was an added plus as my dad went full Persian haggler on him. Not Diamantschwarz... but close enough :-) Dark Graphite Metallic on Mocha Leather.We plan on surprising mom this weekend with this early Mother's Day gift.

[Julien]

aw man! hit me up next time you go drive the oakland hills. I'm just down the hill from grizz peak

nioce, i currently live right off grizz peak

[wworm]

aw man! hit me up next time you go drive the oakland hills. I'm just down the hill from grizz peak

[freeride53]

Very impressive build. Keep it coming!

Thank you! It isn't much, but your words motivate me.

The best thing in those pictures is the Persian rugs lol

I'm rug, you're a rug, we're all just rugs at end of day. ;D


Today was a good day and I am exhausted.



Started out with a nice cycling ride.






Saw this sleepy E28 M5





Saw this gorgeous 99 Turbo




Recovered for a few hours then drove back to Oakland and met up with the two J's: Jerry & Julien for pizza, brews, and me slacking around/distracted.




Broke out the party favors




Some more of the favors




Old vs. New




Rear bumper off, cleaned up the valence a bit to replace the breather vents.




Were replacing the trunk gasket and found a rusty surprise. So we ground all the rust off, neutralized it just in case, then hit it with paint




New old stock?





Spring cleaning!




Then we eventually put it back together, slid the rear bumpers into the DMs and went romping about on Skyline and Grizzly Peak in the Oakland and Berkeley hills.




Jerry's Laguna is meaty ville USA.

[2mAn]

The best thing in those pictures is the Persian rugs lol

[e30RS]

Very impressive build. Keep it coming!

[freeride53]

That plug is for the rear portion of the floor. The plug you are missing is metal/aluminium I think. It's seamsealed into the floor.

I have no idea for the part number though. You might find a regular rubber grommet at your local hardware store that also fits

Good lookin'. I ended up returning the plugs I bought (as you note, they were way larger than what I needed. I bought another few plugs (plastic/rubber composite) which do fit the hole. However, I then realized that I hadn't lost my plugs all along.


They have 4 metal prongs and they were just pushed up a bit (on both sides of the car). I carefully pulled them down, and sealed them tight, bending each of the 4 prongs as so:



Around that same time, I removed my M-Tech 2 wheel and E36 leather e-brake handle that were both very tired. I sent them out to Stitched wheels to get redone with //M tri-color stitching and extra padding in the wheel. I sent them out in January so hopefully will receive them back within the next few weeks...



Back on went the original SRS wheel that came from my original car (but hadn't been used in 5+ years).



Around that same time, I took a trip to Mexico City with a few friends.



Saw a lot of cool BMW's that aren't available in the United States.



Saw that one and was intrigued.

[IMG][/IMG]

Did some investigating at the local BMW dealership near our Air BNB in the Polanco neighborhood.



Low and behold, BMW builds a front wheel drive 118i made in China.



Luckily they had some much cooler BMW's there to save face.



Also while in Mexico, I banged up my knee pretty bad. So bad that I wasn't able to drive a manual for about 6 weeks after I got back to the States. So the E30 sat dormant for a month and a half. Picked it up a few weeks ago, then this happened while idling...



Started pissing coolant from what appeared to be the timing case, with coolant puddling up behind the oil filter housing. Jerry (McGyver) came over one Saturday and we discovered that it was likely from my Thermostat housing. So I ordered a bunch of parts FCP ASAP. Since we didn't have any parts, we did the next best thing and went out for drinks. Jerry also taught me how to play pool. That was sick.



Julien (Julien) came over the following Saturday and gave me a hand. Then we had some great sushi. Then we had a few drinks and discovered that there weren't too many pretty ladies in downtown Oakland that night.









Car runs purrrfectly now, with no coolant leaks to be found. Hooray! Now some less hooray. Discovered that while the car had been sitting for a month outside in the rain, both taillights had filled with water (literally slushing around). No surprise, my trunk was all damp and shit. So I removed the taillights, carpeting, and dried things up.





What's shitty is that I had already sanded/treated/painted the rust under my battery tray 2 years ago. Here's a nice little surprise I had.



But I also forgot to replace my breather vents and trunk seals. So I bought those along with new taillight gaskets (again).



Also received this lovely package from Blunt. New E82 (1-series) all-weather floor mats (my second set, last set was tired after 3 years and these only cost me $35 new); set of 4 inner window scrapers (mine are torn); and...



yeah, that's right - a brand new genuine BMW front bumper cover.



Expecting more parts deliveries tomorrow and Friday. Will check back then.

[D.Martijn]

I think we might try and get together there next Saturday to tackle a euro headlight retrofit on my Volvo - I'll text you. :)





This is what I bought from FCP Euro (clip below taken from ECS) ... look right?

BMW P/N # 41128200462






Side note, I have an odd grounding issue that I need to diagnose. Whenever I step on the brake pedal, my radio gets static. When I left off, it goes away. I wonder if this is somehow related my 2 year old OEM BMW Hirschmann Power antenna that has suddenly stopped working, and is "frozen" halfway up.

That plug is for the rear portion of the floor. The plug you are missing is metal/aluminium I think. It's seamsealed into the floor.

I have no idea for the part number though. You might find a regular rubber grommet at your local hardware store that also fits

[freeride53]

Dude. Garrett's garage is dope.

I think we might try and get together there next Saturday to tackle a euro headlight retrofit on my Volvo - I'll text you. :)

yeah you are, there's supposed to be a plug.

This is what I bought from FCP Euro (clip below taken from ECS) ... look right?

BMW P/N # 41128200462






Side note, I have an odd grounding issue that I need to diagnose. Whenever I step on the brake pedal, my radio gets static. When I left off, it goes away. I wonder if this is somehow related my 2 year old OEM BMW Hirschmann Power antenna that has suddenly stopped working, and is "frozen" halfway up.

[lambo]

I'd feel sorry for the poor bastard that would have to steam clean the bottom of my car...