1990 325is - Restoring the Smiles

[benyen soljax]

03/12/2013

Made some progress on the transmission swap this week. It is spring break for my after work Master's program, so I feel like I have endless amounts of time.


This came out with some fuss and wiggling. I forgot to account for the height of the transmission jack when calculating whether I would be able to remove this while the car was only on jackstands, but it's out and we will leave it there.




This almost landed on my face, but halfway through trying to wiggle this off, I thought it might be better to lay off to the side.




This was all that was left of the tranny mounts.




Finally getting rid of the last remnants...




To finish the night, I cleaned up the gunk on the engine where the tranny mounts and cleaned the closeout plate for the clutch and then torqued this guy into place with some fresh new bolts.




I should have more updates as the week goes on, and then back to not having any time to work on it. While I wait for the little bits and pieces to replace on the G260, I'll be fixing up the electricals and pedal stuff. It also looks like I need to replace the seals on the master cylinder since there are little droplets of brake fluid on the bottom of it. There is plenty of fluid in the reservoir though, and I have owned the car for a few months now...I think that's a good sign that it's just the seals.

[pacmanE30]

i like the progress. glad you took out that AuTotragic!

[benyen soljax]

03/16/13

Another update for the week. In order to make the install for the manual go a little bit smoother, I added some additional height to my jack stands...




Also, some parts came in the mail:




I ordered all this because of a few things I noticed and wanted to take care of while the car was down already.



Lots of gunk everywhere, there are probably lots of rubber pieces I need to replace, so I started here:









Still waiting on the O ring to come in for the interface between the MC and the booster.


Moving on down the car to a "repair" that someone had made.



Then I had to take a trip to sears to get this guy






Looks like I forgot to get a picture of the new lines in, but they are fresh. Also, however much I spent on my pressure bleeder was 100% worth it.

[benyen soljax]

03/17/13

Saint Patrick's Day update. Since I am waiting for more parts to come in for the transmission and shift linkage, I decided to try my hand at the interior work today. I was using the wiring thread here to remove the auto harness completely. It's mostly straightforward, but I didn't really comprehend how stupid it is to pull up the carpet. The other hard part was figuring out which wires were which. I am an engineer by trade, but electrical stuff is not my strong point.

While I was up there, I decided to take out this guy since I no longer had an airbag in the car. Also, the space it frees up behind the dash is nice.





After I got that wiring stuff done, I tried to tackle the pedals while I was already upside down under the dash.

In another thread, someone had the issue that they are trying to put an airbag pedal assembly in a non airbag car. Mine is the opposite. The pedal assembly in there right now is for airbag, and the one I have to swap is non-airbag. I couldn't get the assembly out yet so I am not sure how this will play out. Worse case is I have to buy a different pedal mount.

The other bad thing about the airbag pedals though is how they're mounted. There are two mounting bolts above the steering column, and I can't figure out how to get them out for the life of me. My last resort is to get a swivel head box end wrench or maybe an offset box end wrench to try and get those things out. I was so close to having the pedals out today too!

This is one of the painful bolts:




And I remembered to take pics of the new brake lines, they are OEM, but I'm documenting everything else, so here they are...







That's it for today, and probably another week or so. Classes resume this week :(

If anyone has a suggestion on how to get those pedal assembly bolts out I am all ears!

[benyen soljax]

Found a thread here where the "removal of airbag pedal box" questions came up. It still isn't exactly clear to me what they were talking about, I don't see anything that looks like a shear bolt on the pedal box itself. There are two on the steering column, but that's all I see.

In any case, I am going to try to swap only the pedals, because the consensus seems to be the airbag cars didn't have a tab for the pedal return spring that my donor pedals have.

[benyen soljax]

I would rather not do an airbag car again.

[benyen soljax]

03/23/13

Today I took a detour from the transmission stuff a little bit, mostly because I am waiting on parts/the budget to buy them.

I had the headlight trim rings sandblasted a while ago, and I thought it was time to start making them look decent again.


The supplies:




Trim ring after sandblasting:




Trim ring after steel wooling:



So I put a number of coats of primer on those and will let them dry so I can sand and repeat. I picked up a "stainless steel" paint to finish them off. The original color on there was a metallic gray. I thought about doing black too, but I will run with this for now.


Second thing on the list was the ellipsoids I have compiled together. I made a complete set of US stuff using two sets of broken junk. The lenses have seen better days, but they aren't horrible. I had to remove one of the lenses to fix one of the projectors, and the reflector dish inside looked spotless.

Before:




After:




And I fit up the IS lip (haven't done that since owning the car) and closed the hood to get a look at her face:



I can't wait to get it back on the road.

The other thing I have been working on is finding new stalks. As I found out earlier, this was an airbag car, so whenever I turn the steering wheel, I noticed that my turn signals and wipers were always in the way. After doing some digging, I found that the stalks are longer for airbag cars. If this isn't news to you, no biggie, I am documenting it for my own purposes.

Airbag:




Non-Airbag:




Much better. Well that is all for today. Let's hope the Fedex fairy brings more gifts this week.

[kingston]

Great work so far, Ben! I love to see people address all the little things, as well as the big stuff!

Keep up the good work :)

[e30edward]

Awesome work so far! I plan on ditching my auto trans soon too.

[benyen soljax]

03/25/13

Did some more light work over the past couple days. I degreased the areas where the brake fluid was leaking from my MC, to try and stop the paint loss. just took some paint off the subframe, nothing a little spray paint won't fix for the time being.

I also started pulling out the input and output shaft seals from the trans....the last thing I need to do to it before mounting up the manual. What I ended up finding on the input shaft cover plate thing wasn't good I don't think. I know I caused some of the marring from trying to get the seal out, but the stuff on the outside was already there.
















For the inside marring, I am thinking to take it to a machinist to see if I can't just machine a mil off the top and clear that up. For the outside gouges, I'm not sure if that really matters as that isn't exactly a critical surface. Anyone have some input? I would appreciate the second opinion.

[Mastrcruse]

Any updates? Looking good.

[benyen soljax]

It's been a while since I was able to spend some serious time with the car, but I've made small chunks of progress that have ended up adding up to a decent size update.

The clutch master went in without major issues, but those stupid grommets are more trouble to put in than they should be.




I filed down the outside surface of this input shaft cover to make it smooth enough for the throw out bearing to slide on. Then I went on a witch hunt to find the right permatex sealant for the flange that matched the loctite number in the book. Hope I got it right!




Clutch on.




The next picture shows the result of a lot of stupid work I had to do because of my "garage" setup.

1. Pull transmission under car
2. Pull transmission jack under car
3. Lift edge of transmission onto jack
4. Slide jack forward while pulling transmission up and back
5. Take a break and realize how much it sucks that I have to do this laying down
6. Yell at it, seems to get more power that way
7. Celebrate transmission being on the jack by laying on your back by 5 mins
8. Realize you put it on the jack the wrong way and figure out some way to rotate the transmission 90 degrees on the jack
9. Celebrate for real and take a picture




After some more work tonight, we have this:







Before I put the transmission back in, I did replace all the seals, and install the clutch line. I did the clutch hard line on my first try. It's not pretty but it works, and the stainless line looks great which is cool since nobody will ever see it.

Then I sat inside the car for about 15 minutes running through the gears. I can't wait to get those tires on the road. Thanks for reading.

[JinormusJ]

Good work on ya Ben. Really excited for your swap to be done. It's almost there!
I think I'll finally sub this cause you're such a coolbro

(BTW, do you still have that old busted passenger side foglight? Lol)

[benyen soljax]

Actually the swap is done about a week ago after finishing up some little stuff. I have been bad about updating because the car is so damn fun. Getting back into the DD is such a bore with its electronically assisted everything and without the fear that at any point the fuel lines could give up on life.


I don't have the fog though, the body shop kept all the goodies that they replaced and I wasn't too worried since the insurance took care of everything.

I have noticed some bugs that I need to work out before the car is really solid, namely a valve adjustment and new fuel lines around the filter and new suspension. Now I just need to buckle down at work so I can pay for all that crap.

Ill try to get some pictures uploaded since those are all that anyone looks at anyways.

[benyen soljax]

I finished up the swap without any major issues. One of the previous owners had not vented the battery properly so I had to do some wire brushing and POR-15-ing of the battery tray before I got it back on the road.

Also, I have found that the driver's side rear quarterpanel has been replaced at some point and the welds are terrible. The driver's side of the trunk has a leak around the trunk opening and possibly around the wheel well so I have some more wire-brushing, seam-sealing and POR-15-ing to do around that side.

After having it on the road for a week it is back on stands, however. I was surprised by how easy it was to get the diff out, and it was filthy from what must have been a CV boot failure at some point.

I cannot thank Mastercruse enough for sending me the Texas car. I thank some high power every day when I can just decide to remove things and nothing is seized up with rust and all fasteners and metal parts are re-usable.






Parking lot shot from work to prove it actually drove itself out of my garage and didn't kill me!