My 91 325i track car

[kts]

I'm over by Arundel Mills so not too far way from you.

I picked the roll bar up from a R3V member in NJ who was selling it. We ended up meeting just north of Philly so it was a nice little day trip. $325 picked up.

It's a Kirk bar which are usually like $600 or so after options and freight so I felt it was a pretty good deal.

The Kirk bar fitment is excellent, it went right in and was a very easy install other than having to hammer the ever living crap out of the back stay spreader plates and the backing plates to contour to the wheel arches. (Still the hammering was pretty easy.) If you are looking for a roll bar I highly recommend it.

[dnick]

oh yeah thats not far at all! and dang you did get a good deal. I def think I will go with the kirk bar soon. Stupid question... i assume the rear seats arent usable what so ever?

[kts]

Correct, with a roll bar installed the rear sears are not usable for hauling people around. You can still use them to transport stuff in the back seat but getting stuff in/out of there is a lot more limited.

Most people would leave the rear seats out to save some weight but I like the look of the rear interior still in the car even if is not usable anymore so I'm planning to stuff it all back in there. I've seen it done so I know it is doable.

[dnick]

gotcha, damn no bitches in the rear lol. but yeah, id like to see it with the seat! i think thatd look clean

[kts]

gotcha, damn no bitches in the rear lol. but yeah, id like to see it with the seat! i think thatd look clean

Photo of a Kirk bar with the rear seat installed in one of the Vorshlag $201X Challenge team member's cars:


(near the bottom of this thread: http://www.r3vlimited.com/board/show...light=vorshlag)

Looks pretty good and looks like it will fit in without even having to mangle the rear seat.

Looking at the Vorshlag $201X car which also has a Kirk bar installed it looks like they hammered the wheel arch flat where the backstays mount vs hammering/shaping the backstay spreader plate + backing plate. Wow that would have been a much smarter thing to do. Doh!

Angles are a little hard to see but you can see hammering done of the wheel arches in these. Big files so I'm just linking to them instead:

http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Projects/E30-V8/DSC0064/886177642_2xeRB-O.jpg

http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Projects/E30-V8/DSC0339/895650205_ULRQ8-O.jpg

http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Projects/E30-V8/DSC0062/886177138_3zzJu-O.jpg

Oh well.

[leegf]

looks great! i would have loved to buy this car, but you beat me to the punch by about a month ;)

[kts]

looks great! i would have loved to buy this car, but you beat me to the punch by about a month ;)

I have to admit I'm beyond happy I was able pick up this car before anyone else did. It had exactly what I wanted. A few years back a guy local to me had the nearly the same thing, nearly a Spec E30 car he was selling for a heck of a deal but at the time I didn't have the money. He sold it in a day and I have been kicking myself ever since for letting it slip though my hands, especially when I ended up having the money a few weeks later. Took me 3 years but finally I found exactly what I was looking for. Yay!

Sorry to nab it out from under you though. Hopefully you found/will find one just like it.

[kts]

Work in the past week:

Cleaned the driver's side carpet and went at installing the VAC floor/side mounts and the Sparco seat.

Carpet is far from perfect but SO much better than the coffee stained crime scene it was originally. You can also see the crappy multicolored socket set I used for pulling stuff at the junkyard. It was in the trunk so I grabbed it for these installs. $15 from Costco a few months back and they have held up well to a lot of abuse.



Crappy photo since I couldn't find my compact camera w macro mode. Both bolts are from VAC. The one on the right is for their anti-sub harnesses and it is the wrong thread pitch. Pretty lame that they include bolts with the wrong thread pitch. I picked up properly threaded class 10.9 bolts from Fastenal along with bolts for mounting the harnesses on the sides.

Sparco seat test fit 1 of 3214324233


Finally got the Sparco all lined up where I wanted it and bolted in but I had to remove it this morning to reinstall the stock seat for now. Taking it to a local meet to have a local R3V member help me look at the wiring in the car. I figured actually being able to get into the rear of the car may help a bit, thus the stock seat going back in. I marked off on the floor mounts where to bolt the side mounts so the Sparco and mounts should go back in easily.

Getting the car back on the road meant I needed to close up the blower motor area. I took some aggression out on the shackle that holds the blower motor down a while back and grabbed a shackle from the junkyard, one that I had also mangled getting the junkyard blower motor out.

Anger management issues?


The junkyard one works for now but it's loose. I'm still waiting for the new one I ordered to arrive from Germany. This will teach me to chill out and come back to something later. I was trying to reinstall the shackle wrong when I got pissed. Doing it right = easy. Oh well.

Having a working blower motor is so nice. Now I just need a new resistor set so the "1" setting actually works.


I also painted the faded wiper cowls. I did a crappy job of painting them but from a foot or more away they don't look too bad.

Before:


After:


Reinstalled the wipers as-is without having swapped the linkage. Both wipers moved when I was tightening down the passenger side one which is the weak one. It never did that before. Hopefully what is left of the splines will keep the passenger side going a bit longer. I've heard of people putting copper or other metal in there to "shim" it. I plan to do this but I just don't have anything on hand for now.

Helping a friend move tomorrow and then either hopefully installing a stereo so I can have some tunes. Once the stereo is in I can put the rear interior back in the car and then the Sparcos.

[leegf]

I have to admit I'm beyond happy I was able pick up this car before anyone else did. It had exactly what I wanted. A few years back a guy local to me had the nearly the same thing, nearly a Spec E30 car he was selling for a heck of a deal but at the time I didn't have the money. He sold it in a day and I have been kicking myself ever since for letting it slip though my hands, especially when I ended up having the money a few weeks later. Took me 3 years but finally I found exactly what I was looking for. Yay!

Sorry to nab it out from under you though. Hopefully you found/will find one just like it.

no worries, what i meant to say was that i had entered the market about a month (i think) after this car sold. i ended up picking up the car in my sig (the one on the right) in early january of this year. i'm quite pleased with it so it worked out alright ;)

[kts]

ah, sorry re-reading it, you made perfect sense, i've been staring at Excel files all freaking day and my mind has turned into mush. i picked up my car mid-December, so looks like you found yours pretty quick. also looks like you've been having fun with it out on the track. specs?

[leegf]

hah, no worries -- i certainly know what that's like.

yes, i did manage to get it out on the track at the tail end of this season. 1989 325i, stock m20, e30 m3 5-lug swap, IE stage 3 and bilsteins, and a few other goodies. spent most of the year just enjoying tooling around town and sorting out maintenance issues, although i did take it on a 2000 mile road trip, issue-free, which was the highlight of the summer. hope to get a lot more track miles on it next year.

and yes, i was fortunate enough to find it very early on in my search! i'm grateful for how that turned out.

[kts]

Kickball was cancelled due to rain the other day so had a bit of time to work on the car. I was bummed since it was the last game of the season and our theme was Winter Wonderland. Nothing like a bunch of drunk 20 and 30 year olds dressed up as santas drinking and trying to play kickball.

I poured on out for the cancelled game and got to work.


^ one of the old kind with caffeine in it. I forgot how nasty these are but I have a few of them still in my fridge from a party and I need to get rid of them. As you can see it's a little bigger than my koozie.

Cleaned the passenger side up with some Resolv. I wish I had a true carpet cleaner to really clean them up.

Before:

After:



Went overboard with the plastic epoxy on my cigarette lighter. Did the same on the broken plastic clips on the cheap ass Depo lights on my E36. (not pictured.


Set up the shoulder harnesses for both passenger and driver


Mocked up and loosely connected the whole floor/seat mounts for the car. I need to get the damn stereo wiring run so I can finally mount the seats in and be finished with this. Pictured are the floor mounts, side mounts, side belt mounts, anti-sub mount, anti-sub belts, and the side belts. Tape is marking the approximate locations of where the side mounts need to be for the seats to slide in and fit in well.


Picked up some undercoating spray to cover up the rollbar backing plates and nuts to keep the elements out from getting into the car. Also had to touch up a spot or two of the OEM undercoating that came off when putting the bar in. Was tempted to redo all of the wheel wells but remembered this is a track car and not a show car.

Wheel well before:


After


Floor pan before


Floor pan after


Floor pan looks like crap since I only had ~8 inches of space and the instructions say to give 12-16 inches. Guess I should have jacked the car up more. I cleaned it up a bit after I looked at this photo and how nasty it was. Also cleaned up the threads on all the bolts to make removal easier should I ever need to remove the roll bar.

Also found a small hole in the trunk by where the jack goes. Instead of properly fixing it (and the rust spot you see in the photo) I just put a crap load of seam sealer in there.


My friend @ the local BMW dealer also called me to let me know some stuff came in for me which I picked up the other day. Yay!

(new shackle for the blower motor, blower motor resistor, and an antenna grommet.)

Hopefully this week I'll get to wiring the stereo up so I can finally have some tunes/radio in the car and then I can finish the seat installs.

[325ix]

Did you ever find out what car your door molding came from?

[kts]

Did you ever find out what car your door molding came from?

Heh, funny you ask that. I e-mailed the previous owner and someone previous to him installed them. It looks like they are some kind of commercial wall molding or something of the sort. Looking at them close they are slightly textured. Whoever installed them shaved down the sides a bit where they meet the door edges. It looks to be some kind of hard rubber, poly, or nylon.

The PO and I are thinking whoever did this used contact cement or something to glue these to the car. :evil: Doing some research I've heard good stuff about 3M Adhesive Remover to remove the cement. I couldn't find it locally so I'm going to order it online and see if that helps remove them. They PO wanted to remove them but didn't want to bother with the work that it will probably be to remove these. Joy.

Update:

Photo of the "trim"



Flash in the camera removed a lot of the detail so I over sharpened the crap out of it so you can see the texture of the material. You can also see where someone crudely trimmed it down. I guess I should have looked at this closer when I bought it. Oh well. I ordered some 3M adhesive remover online last night which should be here in a few days and hopefully will remove the adhesive behind it that is holding it on.

Oh and ya, the car is really dirty. :(

[kts]

I didn't like my rusty calipers so I decided to paint them. I'm trying not to be a ricer but I thought they deserved to look a bit better then they currently did. I went for silver since I thought a bit of contrast with the black wheels would look good. (Ok, maybe there is a little bit of a ricer in me...) The silver came out a lot more silvery when what I remembered they looked like on a friend's car when we used the same kit a few years ago. :( I think I'll live with it for a while and if I really grow to hate them I'll repaint them black.

Before


After


How it looks with the wheel back on


I realized after I took this photo I forgot to reinstall the anti-rattle clip. D'oh! I put it back on and the paint didn't scratch from the rattle clip reinstall which surprised me since the paint was very watery and not thick.

Didn't bother to cover the rotor thinking I'll quickly wear off any over spray and the pads since they are nearing the end of their useful life as well.

While I waited for those to dry I finished up the blower motor.

New resistor. Got it from my friend at the dealer. The price he charged me was less than what Pelican, etc would have been once shipping was added in. Yay!


Installed the new shackle to hold it all in as well


End result? blower works. The 1 setting is still pathetic. I guess the 1 setting is just that weak on the car and I didn't need to get a new resistor after all. Oh well.

I also learned that to remove the shackle if you slip a screw driver at the bottom of the little oval cut out in the center of it and push out it will easily remove compared to the total mayhem I caused removing it originally.