87 325i preturbo build...rear ended, TOTALED

[kyleconstantine]

Yo, this is my 1987 325i. I've had her for about a year now and I'm slowly building her up. She came from an employee at a bmw shop nearby was sold to a friend of mine. The guy claimed to have completely rebuilt the engine right before selling it. That was the first time id noticed and e30 and i loved them instantly.

A few months later the car wasnt making good power and my friend thought he got ripped off and sold me the car for almost nothing. everything was breaking apparently. The first saturday I had the car. I removed the broken key from the drivers door and soldered the central locking fuse to get the locks back. the car did seem slower than i had remembered so i opened the hood for 2 minutes and realized the throttle cable had slipped. my friend wasnt even getting to half throttle when he floored it...I almost felt bad buying the car from him for so cheap but he had no intention of taking care of it anyway.

[kyleconstantine]

Ignore the trash i was in north philly for that pic haha.
anyway, I tackled the timing belt next and it looked brand new but at least im sure its good. I have a wondering idle so i cleaned the ICV and replaced the CTS, TPS, o2 sensor and a bunch of vacuum hoses.....then checked the valves but they were perfect...it actually looked brand new under the valve cover so im pretty sure it was actually rebuilt. Idle still wanders all over.

[kyleconstantine]

Im getting too long winded....TLDR; Im going for a turbo set up eventually but I wanna do as much as i can to prepare. ive,
replaced the drive shaft, csb, guibo
keyless entry
condor speed shop motor mounts...had a broken mount when i got her
illegal r12 from ebay worked great
sub in the trunk...for better weight distribution
140 amp alternator from 92 7 series something or other
ebay chip and 19lb injectors(ebay chip jsut to hold me over, megasquirt coming soon)
on my 4th dead speedometer...they work for a month then die again.

[AWDBOB]

Yo

[kyleconstantine]

since august Ive been collecting parts for a suspension refresh and I started yesterday...snows got me all fucked up, I should be working on it now....but I have
H&r race
bilstein sport
new control arms
condor speed shop offset CABs, RTABs, subframe riser bushings, I have his motor mounts and loved them.
new sway bar links
new tie rods
Bav auto adjustable camber plates
rear shock mounts
pads and rotors all around
SS brake lines

wheel gap before on bilstein hd and unknown springs

[kyleconstantine]

the plan:
megasquirt and wheels with my tax return real soon. I wanna play around with MS while im NA and get some experience tuning.
Spec stage 3+ clutch light flywheel
akg head bolts
e46 steering rack
reread kamotors build thread a couple more times and steal all his hard work and ideas
Chalkboard paint...hate all you want being able to draw dicks all over my car sounds awesome to me
condor trans and diff mounts....to complete the set
3-400 hp goal
and clean my engine, ive got and inch of gunk all over the block

[kyleconstantine]

Yo

yoyo, are there many e30s around here? Ive seen about 5 since i found out what they were and havent really met anyone around here with one.

[kyleconstantine]

Rear subframe dropped. Not a complete bitch.

[Old city bimmer]

Yeah yo.


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[AWDBOB]

are there many e30s around here? .

I would say, yes there are. But if by "here" you mean North Philly, than I would have to change my answer. They should be coming out of hibernation soon.

Parts looking good so far. Good work on the subframe! Something I still have to tackle on my iX.

[kyleconstantine]

The subframe really wasnt so bad. The hardest part is getting the bushings out....after an hour of messing around with clamps and vices i went with fire.
pretty rewarding after they start pissing you off....The front was more difficult. every bolt seemed to be stuck...lots of hammering...the passanger ball joint broke off and left the stud in the frame. had to drop the exhaust down pipe and beat on it forever before it finally came out at. Took her for an alignment, said the word camber and caster 50 times, when i picked her up they handed me this. so they didnt touch the camber plates at all.....and they were about to close and i needed the car for work...so i have been driving it...im going back saturday to get it straigtened out and eventually ill have a picture of how she sits now.

[kyleconstantine]

oh and odnt be like me and let your rear subframe drop off the jack when youre getting rough with the mounts...i bent one of my brake dust covers into the rotor...it made just the right noise to make me think i really fucked something up when i first drove it.

[kyleconstantine]

well i got nothing to work on this weekend and im going crazy so i guess ill update this thread. SO, about a year ago I took this back for another unsuccessful alignment. On the way home from the shop the fuel pump crapped out on me. Triple A towed me to a friends house and i replaced it with a wallbro 255 that weekend. the car was still running weird and I had it sitting a little too long at my place in philly. last april someone smashed the back pass door to pieces to break in. the fucked up the entire window frame and I ended up having to replace the entire door.

[kyleconstantine]

Since I had another car to DD i decided to take this opportunity to install megasquirt. I chose to build my own from scratch and installed wasted spark with MSD coils. It was slow going and wasnt starting for a couple weeks till I found a wire I had spliced incorrectly. around last august I got her up and running but I found my fuel map had to be way too high to keep the car running. my injectors were at 100% duty cycle at 3000rpms. It ended up being low fuel pressure and I realized when I installed my fuel pump i used a low pressure hose to connect the top of the pump to the metal pipe in the tank. Once I had the sorted out I was up and running for 3 days before the pressure plate broke into several pieces on my way to work. I took that opportunity to install a spec stage 3+ clutch and have my flywheel resurfaced. I changed the starter and all the seals and gaskets while i was in there. when i put everything back together for some reason i had lost spark on 2 cylinders. I rebuilt my wasted spark set up about 5 times with different results each time. Sometimes i had spark on 2 or 4 cylinders sometimes i had none. I eventually changed out my coils for the IGN-6 coils from diyautotune and simultaneously found a bad connection in the megasquirt. So 2 weeks ago i was finally back to the point of just needing an allignment after a year of ups and downs.

[kyleconstantine]

So I started to chalkboard paint the car that weekend, I did the Hood first and the trunk last weekend. I was planning on doing a little at a time BUT, last wednesday, after 10 days of having the car back on the road with all these new parts, I was sitting at a red light in philly and a lady in a 2012 x3 rearended me at about 30mph....Insurance has the car now but its gonna be totalled. the rear diving board is all jammed up and the back doors dont open and close anymore.